Are We Sure We Want To Go There?

Many of my readers will no doubt be happy to know that this will most likely be my last post on Religion and Economics for a while. Others of you may be thinking, No! Give me more! I must have more! But you probably need to have your heads checked or something. No, I think after this one, my recent line of thoughts on the topic will be played out.

At least until someone else says something at Church that's worthy of a highly-raised eyebrow. Then, my dear Internets, you will be the first to hear about it. Or something.


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I mentioned in my last post about a couple of comments that were made in class last Sunday. My first reaction to these comments was to think, "I can't believe they said that! Do they even realize what they are saying?"

And then, I started following out the ramifications of what they were saying, following the white rabbit down the hole to see where it led. And, um... it really did lead to Wonderland; and I don't think the original commenter realized it.

Here's the context. We are discussing the concept of Stewardship. Now, when churches usually talk about Stewardship, it's nearly always a euphemism for handling money, and is often presented in the sense of, "You need to hand more of it over to Us." But this class is a little different; it regards stewardship of the other things--our health and our bodies, our families and relationships, the stewardship of the land, stewardship of our time. All these things are of course given to us by God, and we need to use all these things wisely.

(And incidentally, I do appreciate that when our church does talk about stewardship of money, it really does cover the discipline of money management comprehensively--it's not about making people feeling guilty for not giving more to the church.)

As part of our study, we've been going through the Mosaic Law to see how God commanded the ancient Israelites to handle these things. And there's a lot there: laws on cleanliness and hygiene, on public safety, on land use and land ownership, family law, inheritance law, laws on debt, and on and on. Most people find this stuff pretty dry. I do not. After all, God himself gave these laws to help turn a collection of former slaves into a prosperous, stable, secure, healthy nation. Isn't that a fascinating concept? Wouldn't you think the are things we can discover about the mind of God, and about our own human nature and how we fit in society, by looking at how God told the Israelites to order their affairs?

Well, we got to the concept of the Sabbath Year, which you can read about in Leviticus 25. Basically, every seventh year:

• All debts were to be forgiven.
• All fields were to lie fallow.
• No planting or systematic harvesting could be done. You could gather the food you needed from what grew by itself, but only as you needed it. And anyone else could gather it too as they needed.

And then, every fiftieth year--after the seventh Sabbath year, which came on year 49 in the cycle--you would have a Year of Jubilee:

• All the rules of the Sabbath year applied--so, basically, you had to go two years in a row with fallow fields. In addition:
• Any property (outside walled cities) that had been sold during the last 50 years, would return to its original owner (or his heirs). Thus, the land never permanently left its original family of origin.
• All (Israelite) bound servants were to be released as free people.

So anyway, we were looking at all the things in these passages, when someone started talking about what an economic stimulus it would be if we would just accept these laws today. Specifically, "Wouldn't it be nice if all the banks would just forgive all debts? Just drop them, wipe the slate clean? Wouldn't that cause a huge surge in economic activity, if people suddenly didn't have to worry about their mortgage payments, or car payments, or credit card payments? Here our government is preparing to spend trillions of dollars on economic stimulus; just think of the economic stimulus that widespread debt forgiveness would cause...."

Well, the hair on the back of my neck was standing up at hearing this, but there were several nods of assent and mutterings of general approval around the classroom.

Then one of the braver souls in the class raised his hand, and tried to explain briefly what some of the ramifications would be. Such an action would of course ruin the lenders and depositors, and this would itself hurt the economy. But the near-consensus response in the class came back: well, it might, but the economic surge caused by those people who didn't have to pay their debts anymore would more than compensate for the damage to the lenders....


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My first reaction was one of dumbfoundedness.

The way banks operate--the way they have always operated--is to take their depositors' money, and lend it out at interest. When the loan is paid back with interest, the bank passes some of that extra on to the depositors in the form of payments or banking services, and pockets the difference. The money you put in your bank account isn't currently in the bank; most of it went to some guy who used it to buy a car. In a sense, if you have any money in the bank at all, you are the lender. You have lent it to the bank. When you withdraw it, the bank is, in effect, paying off its debt to you.

So if we were to cancel all debts, that, um...

Includes your bank account.

After all, if the bank has lent out your money to some guy so he can buy his car, and then we declare that all debts are null and void, then the bank can't recover your money. So the bank owes you right? But if the bank owes you, then that's a debt, and it got cancelled with all the other debts.

Now, I suspect that many of us, if we were given that chance, would make the trade. Yeah, I'd give up my bank account, and my Fidelity account, and even my 401(k), if I got to burn my mortgage. After all, my mortgage is bigger than all of those things combined. If I made that trade, I'd be in a better financial state afterward than before. So for me to wish for across-the-board debt cancellation would be a little self-serving.

Now suppose I was instead one of those guys that stayed out of debt, kept my consumption to the bare minimum, and saved every penny I could get so that, say, I could provide something to my heirs. Then what? Well, debt cancellation would hit me hard--and would hit me hard precisely because I was responsible.

My wife was considering this point, and came up with an interesting connection: We get in the habit of thinking of God's Forgiveness as a light, easy thing. God has the power just to wish away our sins, right? But no: When a debt is canceled like this, that's not cheap to the one doing the canceling. Someone always has to eat the loss. For someone to forgive your debt, that someone has to be willing to shoulder the consequences of your responsibility, and eat the cost himself. Tonya's note is that this is exactly what Christ did on our behalf. So while we as Christians have the promise that our sins are forgiven, that knowledge isn't something to accept lightly and easily; we need to remember that in order for my sins to be forgiven, someone else had to eat that cost, and that cost was terrible.

Debt cancellation is a serious business. It represents the trumping of mercy over justice; the one who lent his money loses, and the one who spent the money--often irresponsibly--is permitted to get away without paying it back. This is not something to be taken lightly. And when it does happen, the one who is forgiven the debt should approach the event with an air of gravity and thankfulness; not with a sense of entitlement.


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Now, thinking on all this raised another difficult thought.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I'm a committed free-marketer. I happen to think that, for the long-term economic health of a nation--and for the long-term maintenance of the liberties of the people--a policy of government non-intervention in the economy is wise. A few exceptions may be made here or there when non-economic concerns (say, national security) are more important than the economic ones; but by and large, we are better off when people are allowed to make decisions among themselves about their economic activities, without third parties putting restrictions on them that they don't want themselves.

And yet, when I look at the Laws that God gave the Israelites, he did not give them a "free market". God's laws include all kinds of prohibitions, all kinds of restrictions, all kinds of mandates, and all kinds of conditions that don't fit a free market-model in any way. Consider:

• No land could be sold in perpetuity; it would always eventually revert to the family of the ancestral owners.
• All outstanding debts would be forgiven automatically in the Sabbatical year.
  
• They were repeatedly warned against lending to each other at interest (Ex. 22:25, Lev. 25:36-37, Deut. 23:19-20)
• There were all kinds of restrictions on what could be used as collateral (Ex. 22:25).
• There were restrictions on how efficiently you could harvest your crops; this was so the poor could glean the fields after you were done harvesting. (Lev. 19:9-10).
  
• If family members got in financial trouble and had to sell either their land or themselves to pay their debts, you had obligations to pay the money and do the redemption. (Lev. 25:25-28, Lev. 25:47-55)
  
• If your brother died, leaving his wife childless, you were required to marry her, and father children with her; these children would become the legal heirs of the deceased brother, and would acquire his property.(Deut. 25:6-6).
  

And so forth. No way you could describe that economy as a "free market".

Now, let's just take a couple of these: the ones having to do with debt. The people of Israel were forbidden to lend to each other at interest. They also couldn't lend for a longer period than the time until the next Sabbatical year. From a purely economic standpoint, what would this do?

Well, it would have a number of impacts. On the plus side, you wouldn't have people going into debt and staying in debt for decades and decades. Every few years, the slate would be wiped clean. But...

A banking establishment like what we have now couldn't exist under these rules. One effect the taking of interest has, is to entice more people actually to lend. If interest rates are pushed lower than what the market will bear, people stop lending money and look for other ways to invest it. And if all debts are automatically going to be canceled when the next Sabbath Year comes around, it means that the payoff term of the debt will be limited to 6 years--or less, if the next sabbath year is sooner than that.

There are no more thirty-year mortgages, that's for sure. If you can't pay off your house in six, you won't be getting a loan to buy your house.

Just gaming out the ramifications of this, it becomes pretty apparent that credit is much easier to come by in our society than it would be if we followed the rules that God gave the Israelites. We can finance much greater sums now. And if we are responsible in paying it back, this allows us a much greater standard of living--I can afford a much more expensive house with a thirty-year mortgage, than I could afford on a five-year mortgage, that's for sure.

What gives? Why didn't God give His people the freedom to make these decisions for themselves, knowing that this freedom--if responsibly handled--would make them more prosperous than they would otherwise have been?

And what does this say about free markets as an economic model? If God didn't give them to the ancient Israelites, is it because there's something inherently immoral about them?

Am I wrong to be a supporter of the free markets?

Tough questions, and I'm not sure I know the answers to them. But here are some further thoughts.


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First, it should be recognized that any liberty contains within it the potential for abuse. If you permit a large enough population to do some thing, there will almost inevitably be some people in that population who will use their liberty for destructive ends.

And there are plenty of destructive things that can happen in a free market, if the people choose to use their freedoms irresponsibly. I saw this article lately at TCS Daily, which describes Plato's thoughts on the way Republics destroy themselves:

Read along from an excerpt of Plato's Republic (Book VIII, 550d-566), and see if any of it sounds familiar. It's the tragic tale of a declining republic, a tale of war, money, and politics all gone wrong through a combination of bad judgment and disordered cravings. We begin with moneylenders who have a nasty habit of lending money to people they know will use it irresponsibly, especially to youths whom they encourage to fritter it away on useless luxuries. They prefer that their money be wasted on frivolities; the more of it is wasted today, the more they can charge in interest tomorrow.

But their clients are just as bad, if not worse. By spending others' money on frivolities, they fail to take responsibility for themselves. A group of people recklessly spending other people's money soon becomes a leech on society: a class of those who have ruined themselves burning through borrowed money.

The class of bitter, bankrupt borrowers finds it has a friend—or what looks and talks like a friend—in a group of politicians who promises them honey, served in a silver bowl at the expense of the moneylenders who got them into trouble in the first place. Their alliance only lasts until one of the honey-tongued politicians stirs up the bankrupted class, whips them into a frenzied mob, and makes war against the wealthy class, seizing their money by force. This politician emerges as a tyrant, and the old republic has died.

Say what you will about the purely economic wisdom of the Mosaic Law; but if followed, it would absolutely prevent this scenario. Those irresponsible lenders would quickly discover, every seven years, that they've lost their investments. Those irresponsible borrowers would soon thereafter discover that no one wants to lend to them anymore. And those irresponsible politicians would have to find some other issue to demagogue.

God knows human nature. He knows that we humans do dumb things. While wise, moral, upright people may be able to handle the freedom of a free market, it may be that He decided that there weren't enough wise, moral, upright people around among those former slaves from Egypt, to trust them with a free market.

So their society may well have been poorer, due to the economic effects of these laws, but it may also have been more stable.


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Second, I suspect the very concept of wealth worked very differently back then. After all, we moderns think of wealth in terms of money. But money only has value when you can exchange it for the stuff you want. In a semi-nomadic agrarian society living nearly 3500 years ago, there weren't many stores out there. They used precious metals as currency, but it wasn't yet in the form of coin; they measured it out by weight.

But the stuff of value was, well, the stuff.

You had a piece of land, that was in the family for generations. Even when you sold it, it would still eventually return to your family in the Year of Jubilee. This land would have houses on it, which would be built by one generation and handed down to the next. One generation would plant an orchard; the next would plant a vineyard; the next would dig a well, and so forth. Over time this family would come to be known as wealthy--not necessarily because they had amassed a large quantity of gold and silver, but because they had--through careful management of resources over generations--built up large flocks and herds, built several sturdy houses, planted orchards and vineyards, tilled and fertilized large fields for crops, slowly accumulated tools and machines needed for household work (looms, olive presses, etc.); and so forth. The wealth of these families was built up, over generations, by the work that the people did.

And it seems to me that the laws that God gave are designed to preserve this wealth, to prevent it from being lost through bad financial transactions. You can sell your land, but not forever; it will eventually return to your heirs. You had to redeem it if your relatives lost it somehow. You had to produce heirs for your deceased brother, so that his share would not be lost (and so that his wife/wives would have sons to support them in their old age).

Furthermore, the laws appear to be designed to give people who are destitute a fresh start. After all, if you were an Israelite, even if you were dirt-poor, you were descended from someone who was allotted a share of land back when Joshua divided up the conquered territory; so you had a share, somewhere, that you could lay legal claim to. And once you had that land, you could start over, working it from scratch, in the hope that you could one day pass it on to your children; who would improve it, and pass it on to theirs, and so on, with your descendants one day being wealthy and prosperous.


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Third, there are some differences between the Old and New Testament worlds. Certain laws that were given by God to the ancient Israelites don't appear to be mandated among the Gentile Christians.

For one example, there are the Kosher laws. When Paul writes to the Corinthians that they should eat whatever was sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience, I think that's pretty conclusive that some of the old laws about cleanliness in diet are not bound on the Gentile Christians. After all, the Jews were required to butcher their food animals very carefully--making sure to deliver the killing blow in a specific way, and making sure to drain the blood from the carcass completely. Meat not butchered in this way was unclean. But in Gentile meat markets, there was no guarantee that any of this meat was properly prepared; much of it had been used in Pagan sacrifices, and had been butchered any which way but how God had told the Israelites. So for Paul to tell them it was OK to eat without any issues of conscience, means that the Kosher laws did not apply directly to them.

Indeed, the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) dealt with exactly the question of how much of the Law was binding on Gentile Christians, and concluded that very little of it actually was. And following up with the letters of Paul, he treats the Law as a "Pedagogus"--a schoolmaster (close, but not perfect translation), designed to train children. When the child was fully grown and fully trained, though, he no longer needed the Pedagogus; Paul's argument appears to be that the role of the Law has been similarly fulfilled, thus we are not required to bind Gentile Christians to obey all the commands of the law.

And indeed, much of the Law appears to be intended specifically for that group of semi-nomadic agrarian ex-slaves who lived 3500 years ago.

Does this include the economic stuff? I mean, even Jesus made reference to the taking of interest, in a non-disparaging context: in the parable of the Talents, the Master of the three stewards berates the third for not providing him a return on his investment. He says that even if the steward hadn't felt confident investing it, he should at least have left it with the bankers and gotten some interest on it. I'd have a hard time imagining Jesus telling this parable like that, if he didn't consider at least some taking of interest acceptable.

So I think it's at least conceivable that the Mosaic Laws on economics can be counted among those laws that were specifically intended to apply to the ancient Israelites, as opposed to being among those that are intended to apply to all people for all time (like, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength").


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Where does this leave the Free Market?

Well, I still think it's the system that will produce the most widespread wealth in a society. It tends to be better than most systems at rewarding hard work, innovation, and responsible decision-making; and punishing sloth and irresponsibility. A nation that implements a free market will generally become much wealthier and more economically dynamic.

But like any system made up of humans, it won't be without problems. Given liberties, there will always be people out there who will misuse their liberties, and in the context of a free market, that will bring disaster on them--or on the people around them.

I think the fact that God gave the non-free-market rules he did to the ancient Israelites, should be taken by us as a set of warnings:

• The full blessings of a free market only accrue to the society made up of wise and compassionate people. Leave out either of those conditions, and the result can be unpleasant. A society can even destroy itself....
  
• There are other concerns out there than the purely economic. Sometimes we're better off poorer, at least in the short term, so long as we're keeping our culture strong.
• God cares about the poor so much, that he was willing to inflict an entire non-free market economy on His people to make sure that they were never left with nothing. So if we wish to enjoy the blessings of the free market, we need to accept some personal responsibility for the well-being of the poor--even if this only involves helping people identify and grab the opportunities that are already around them.
  

What does my readership think?

Follow Up Thoughts on Public Policy and Pulpits

Well, it seems that with my earlier post I either touched on a topic that everyone has strong feelings about, or what I wrote made everyone think, "I've got to set this guy straight." Hey, that's what the internet is for, right?


Good comments, all. Going back over my little essay, I'm thinking there are a few points I want to clarify. Also, there was another little interesting exchange in one of our classes at church on Sunday that both illustrates what I was talking about, and provides fodder for more thought.


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So, as is usual in cases like this, I'd like to go back to first principles. One of the things that the apostles wrote a lot about was the need for unity in the Church. And--as is necessary to secure that unity--Paul warned us to avoid disputes on questionable matters. Where differences of opinion exist, we are to avoid giving offense wherever possible, and--so long as it's not on a matter that could threaten someone's salvation--to let things slide. Examples of this from scripture include Romans 14:1 through 15:6, 1 Corinthians 3 and 6:1-8, pretty much the whole book of 1 John; and there are a bunch of other places besides.

This is absolutely crucial, because the Church is designed to hold people who are radically different from each other, who wouldn't normally associate with each other if it weren't for their religious fellowship. Consider that Jesus himself had, in his own hand-picked group of apostles, one guy known as Simon the Zealot. Now, the Zealots were religious Jewish radicals who were actively working toward rebellion against Roman rule, including through violent means. But Jesus also had as one of his apostles Matthew, the tax collector. The Romans would recruit tax collectors from among their subjugated peoples, including the Jews. Tax collectors would collect money from their countrymen, making their pay by collecting taxes above and beyond the share Rome demanded and pocketing the difference. These guys were, often with justification, widely regarded as parasites and traitors by their countrymen. Zealots hated them.

So you've got Simon the Zealot, and Matthew the tax collector, rubbing elbows within Jesus' inner circle. The Bible doesn't mention any political conversations around the apostles' dinner table, but boy, I bet it got interesting....

But this is precisely the point about unity! The church must be big enough to handle people who, outside of the church, would be diametrically opposed to each other. Christ died for the Army colonel, and the banker in pinstripes, and the university professor, and the hippie chick; and His church must be able to accommodate all of them, at the same time!

And the only way to make the tent that big, is to eliminate any restrictions, any commandments, any expectations beyond what the Lord asks of us. If a church starts to advocate any position beyond the mission that Christ gave it, it will eventually--inevitably--become something that needlessly drives people away. People have a hard enough time just living righteous lives according to what the scriptures define as righteous; when we start expecting more from people than this, it will only serve to drive out someone or another lurking near the edges--precisely the kinds of people we're supposed to be hanging onto the hardest.

This is the main reason that I feel my shields start going up whenever I start to hear politics or economics from the pulpit. Fact is, elections are divisive things. There are a lot of people who were absolutely overjoyed about the latest presidential election, and there are a lot of people who think it's an absolute disaster for our nation. And these people have to share a church. That is, they have to share a church if they hope to obey the will of God.


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So, all that being said, here's why I dislike the term "Social Justice".

Within the Christian worldview as I understand it, Jesus expects me to take care of the sick, and the orphaned, and the widow, and the impoverished, and the imprisoned. And I see no evidence in scripture that Jesus is willing to let me off the hook by supporting any political program to take care of "the poor" for me. This isn't a task that I can delegate away; I am responsible for the people around me, and will be held accountable. It's a big task, and one that I don't particularly feel up to. Nevertheless, this is all a big part of the Christian mission.

Now, within the Marxist worldview, which has strongly influenced a big chunk of the pop political culture, all these problems that Jesus talked about--poverty, imprisonment, disease--are merely symptoms of underlying socioeconomic factors which are themselves driven by our fundamentally unjust economic and political systems. To the Marxist, the way to solve these problems is a wholesale reordering of our society; the elimination of private property in favor of collective ownership of the means of production; centralized government management of the economy, for the benefit of the people; elimination of gender roles; and the like. The Marxist tends to disdain charities, because they make the current unjust situation tolerable; it keeps the poor content enough to prevent them from rising up to overthrow the system, and it soothes the consciences of the wealthy and lets them think they're good people, when they're really the source of the problem in the first place.

Is there common ground between these two worldviews? Well, yes--a little. They both recognize the fact that there are needy people in the world, and they both demand that we do something about it. And when the Marxist claims that Jesus was in fact an early socialist, he points to these similarities, and says, "See! Jesus was for Social Justice. You Christians, if you really understood what Jesus was about, would be throwing your lot in with us."

The difference is that the action Jesus advocated was in no way a political program. Jesus explicitly said, "My kingdom is not of this world"; he didn't make any attempt to drive out the Romans, or to seize power; he never attempted to validate any other political group. His teachings were all about holy living, and our personal responsibility to one another.

I mentioned George Orwell's famous 1946 essay on politics and language in my post Sunday, and what Orwell was saying about catch-phrases and jargon applies very well here, too. The phrase "Social Justice" is exactly the kind of thing that Orwell was talking about. Fact is, no one knows quite what it means. Or, rather, it means different things to different people, depending on their political indoctrination. To some people, it includes Affirmative Action; to some people, it includes race reparations; to some people, it includes the abolition of private property; to some people, it means appointing judges of a certain activist bent. You might hear this term and think primarily of concern over poverty or lack of health care, and you might say, "Yes, I support Social Justice"; but the person listening to you may well hear something you absolutely did not intend to say.

Did Jesus support "Social Justice"? That depends entirely on what you mean by "Social Justice".

The trouble is that once people accept the term "Social Justice", this language itself tends to push us toward the political program of the Leftist. Once we have accepted that Jesus was all about Social Justice, then the Leftist starts saying things like, "Jesus told people to give money to the poor. Therefore, if you oppose wealth redistribution in our country, you're being un-Christlike," and "Jesus told us to take care of the sick. Therefore, if you oppose Socialized medicine, you're being un-Christlike," and "Jesus told us to take care of the orphans and the widows, so to be Christlike you must support these Welfare programs...." The sleight-of-hand here is of course that Jesus' commandment for us to take personal responsibility for the care of others, is being subverted to a political program. The very fact that we're using the term "Social Justice" to refer to both these things tends to obscure the difference between them in our minds.

As I suggested in Sunday's post, I think this has happened in many Protestant churches, and in many Catholic dioceses, to the point where the political mission has come to dominate all others. They've lost sight of their spiritual mission because they're so busy pursuing the political one.

And, as I said at the beginning of this essay, this is bad for Christian unity--not to mention, it's bad for the long-term health of the congregation. After all, there are people all across the political spectrum, with all kinds of views on economics; and Jesus died for all of them. When you have a church that has bought into the political "Social Justice" view of Jesus' teachings as I described above, it isn't going to be big enough to accomodate those whose political leanings lead them to reject the political advocacy. It will drive such people away--even when such people would be entirely receptive to Jesus actual teachings on personal responsibility for others.


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Man, I had no idea this column would go this direction. I still haven't gotten to that little exchange from Sunday. Well, on the bright side, I still have fodder for another column. :)

Eureka!!! Um, I Mean, Ewwwww...

Ok, I'll warn you right here at the beginning: we've been teaching our eldest daughter about the digestive system lately. And, um... teaching about the digestive system to six-year-olds leads to some serious bodily function humor. If you're squeamish about bodily function humor, you probably shouldn't read too much farther.

Of course, if you're squeamish about bodily function humor, you probably shouldn't be raising kids, either.


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One of my old math teachers had a phrase he used on occasion: When you have been trying to learn a new concept, but you just haven't been getting it; when you've been thinking about it until your brain hurts; when you've been working out problems and examples; sometimes, eventually, it suddenly all makes sense. One second, nothing; the next, the light comes on, the heavens open, the angels sing; and you suddenly understand how to factor polynomials. You get it. My math teacher described this kind of experience as the "Aha" experience. He said it was very like Archimedes' shouting "Eureka!", except that you don't usually jump out of the bathtub and run naked down the street immediately afterward.

Now, when you ask homeschooling parents why they homeschool, you get many answers; but one of the more common ones regards the "Aha" moments. There is tremendous joy in watching one's own kid, who's been struggling with some concept, suddenly get it. Not only is there tremendous joy, but (especially for new homeschooling parents) there's also a sense of affirmation, even a sense of relief: Yes, I'm actually able to do this! I now have evidence!

Well, the Pillowfight Fairy had an "Aha" experience the other day.

As I earlier said, the Fairy has been learning about the human body lately. And we think that a lot of what she's been learning is actually sinking in and staying there: when she saw Grandpa yesterday, she remembered that he was on those crutches because he had broken his tibia, which is a bone in the lower leg. And she's started to use the word esophagus in regular conversation.

Yup, the esophagus. We've lately gotten to the Digestive System. And let me tell you, there's something a little funny about trying to explain the Digestive System to a kid.

Well, kid, first you take a bite of your food, and then you start to chew it, and it looks like this. ("Ewwww!") And then your saliva mixes with it, and starts to break it down, even as it goes around and around and around in your mouth and turns into this mushy stuff. ("Ewwww!") And then you swallow, and it goes past the epiglottis and down into the stomach, where it gets mixed with bile from the liver and it gets broken down further, and sent into the small intestine, where it goes back and forth and back and forth and back and forth... Oh, and did you know we use the small intestines of sheep and pigs to make sausage casings? ("Ewwww!") Oh, yeah, and wait till I tell you what they used to do with pigs' bladders....

Actually, the Fairy already knows that one. We just finished reading Little House in the Big Woods.

So Mommy picked up this book from the library, and the Pillowfight Fairy happily read through it last Friday.

The book, entitled What Happens to a Hamburger?, is all about what happens at the various stages in the digestive process. It has lots of diagrams, and even some photographs ("Ewwww!"), and it traces the process of digestion from even before you take that first bite, all the way until, ahem:

Your body cannot use all of the food you eat. The food it cannot use is stored in the large intestine. You get rid of the unused food when you go to the toilet.

And this text is of course on a page that shows the cartoonish hero of the book, the one whose digestion we have been contemplating, happily running to the restroom carrying a roll of TP.


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Now, all of that is just a set-up for the real point of this essay. I think we adults get squeamish at certain topics, so we tend to bury them in euphemism when we speak of them. I've already written about this phenomenon, regarding the illustrious literary genre of potty time-books. (By the way, ever write something, and then put it aside for a while, and then read it later after you've forgotten all about it? When I re-read this post of mine earlier tonight, I found myself thinking, Man, I wish I could write like that.)

The trouble is that you can't actually teach a topic when you're speaking in euphemisms. In that earlier essay of mine, I noted how we say "letting nature take its course" to refer to certain bodily functions that we don't actually want to talk about. But suppose you speak like that around a kid? The kid doesn't know that you're talking about, um... waste expulsion (there's another euphemism!). What does the kid think?

Oooh! I like nature. Waterfalls are part of nature. Deer and elk and bison are part of nature. Big pine trees are part of nature. I get to let all of this happen! How blissful.

Well, it turns out that even this book, What Happens to a Hamburger?, which is otherwise so well written, turns to euphemism when it comes to describing the, um... end stages of the digestive process. And Mommy developed a suspicion.

"[Fairy], do you know what that 'undigested food' is that the book keeps talking about?"

"Um... Soup?"

Ok, when she starts guessing like this, it's pretty apparent that she isn't getting it. And that was largely because the book didn't actually tell her! It was presumably trying to save the sensibilities of the parents by burying the ugly, stinky truth under an unoffensive euphemism that makes perfect sense to the parents, but means nothing to the kid.

So Tonya pointed out the oddly-shaped brown mass of "undigested food" in the picture, and tried to get the Fairy to guess what it was. No dice. So ultimately Tonya gave up, and just blurted out the answer:

"It's poop!"

Now, most of the time when a kid has an "Aha" experience, it's a joyful event that causes the spirit to soar and the heart to sing. But then, most of the time your "Aha" experiences don't involve learning where poop comes from.

"Eeeeeeeeeeewwwww! Ew! Ew! Ewewewew! Eww! Ewwwwww!" and so forth, et cetera, et cetera, for about the next two minutes.


...


So let's talk about George Orwell.

Good grief! You say. Where in the world did that come from?

Well, given the way my semi-coherent mind works, as my wife was describing to me the aforementioned set of events, and we were laughing ourselves silly, I was actually being reminded of a very important essay that Orwell wrote back in 1946.

You see, Orwell was very, very interested in our tendency to bury unpleasant concepts under impressive-sounding language. His concern was that, by using impressive-sounding official language filled with long, technical words, we hide the true meaning of what we're saying--sometimes even from ourselves.

Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

This is an excellent essay, and I strongly recommend that anyone--schoolteacher, or homeschooling parent--attempting to teach writing style to a student of junior-high age or older, should read through it. The essay concludes with a set of simple rules intended to foster clarity and quality in writing. I myself refer to this essay from time to time to evaluate my own writing style--and I usually come away cringing at how wordy and cliched my style actually is, compared to what it should be.

Of course, Orwell himself criticizes his own writing in the essay, so at least I have some good company there.

If you have the opportunity, go ahead and take the time to read the thing. If you take it to heart, it may well help you notice where your own writing is vague and imprecise, and where this vagueness and imprecision comes from obscurity in your own thought processes.

And that's especially important, should you ever decide to start writing potty-time books.

Ok, Now This Takes Some Audacity

Well, my father-in-law was passing around this video, and I thought I'd share it with all of you.

I had a big dopey grin on my face through the whole thing. It takes some serious audacity to play one's harmonica...

At Carnegie Hall.


Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Public Policy From the Pulpit

Ok, I'm going to talk about something here that makes me uncomfortable. In fact, I'm going to talk about it precisely because it makes me uncomfortable, since the the uncomfortability is itself an interesting phenomenon.

My church--which, don't get me wrong, is an excellent one, and is led by some people who take their roles as Shepherds of the Flock very seriously--is having a big push right now along the lines of what could be called "social justice". Now, I hate the term "social justice", because of the way it has been captured and utilized by the political Left to mean all of: A) Redistributive tax and spend policy, B) Lax law enforcement, C) Stigmatization of business and wealth-producing activities, and D) Lack of economic freedoms.

But the point that our preacher has been making, and it is a valid one, is this: when Jesus actually walked the earth, proclaiming the Good News about God's forgiveness and exhorting his followers to live holy lives, many, many of his commands had to do with taking care of the poor, the widows, the orphans, the sick, and the prisoners. The old cliche about Jesus attempting to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" is a true one, and comes through particularly strongly in the book of Luke, which we're now studying. The entire book is filled with teachings like:

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh...

But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep...

Throughout the book, poverty is associated with goodness, and wealth is associated with sinfulness. And this association, very explicit in the book of Luke, has become part of the worldview of Christianity ever since. Sure, there have been some very rich and powerful Christians, and the Church has for much of the last two thousand years been a very influential, powerful, and rich institution. (I've seen many of the great Cathedrals of Europe with my own eyes, including the Sistine Chapel with its magnificent ceiling. You don't build any of that stuff unless you have some buku bucks floating around.) And yet the association of poverty and weakness with virtue still remained. Priests, monks, and nuns still took vows of poverty; and even today, there's something unseemly about the very concept of a wealthy evangelist.

As a personal note, this aspect of Christianity shows up in my own name. The surname "Power" is an Irish name of Anglo-Norman origin, originally spelled "Poer" or "Paor", and actually means "poor"--as a mark of virtue, as in "poor in spirit".

And yet, there's still a tension within Christianity. There are many, many scriptures throughout the Bible, both Old Testament (book of Proverbs in particular) and New Testament (book of Luke) that talk about money, and talk about the work--the industriousness--that creates the wealth. If one makes a good-faith attempt to live one's life and manage one's affairs according to what the Bible teaches, one will become industrious, not a sluggard; one will attempt to redeem the time we have been given by God, by not wasting it, but using it for productive purposes; one will avoid debt; one will avoid schemes for dishonest gain; one will be slow to expend money on non-necessities, but generous when it comes to caring for the poor and donating to worthy causes. One will manage his finances with the idea that everything he has is actually God's, with him being a mere steward.

The funny thing about this Biblical view of money management--and the source of the tension I mention above--is that this kind of lifestyle tends to improve the physical well-being of both the person who engages in it, and of everyone else around him. America is a wealthy nation for many reasons, but one big one is the fact that so many of our ancestors--especially the Puritans--brought with them what has been termed the Protestant Work Ethic, which includes the idea that all our labor is done for the Glory of God, and the idea that we must redeem all the time he gives us. An entire society of people who live like that do tend to become materially prosperous. Now, this isn't necessarily the intention of the Biblical concept of money management, and one can point to plenty of counterexamples--cases where acceptance of Christ led otherwise wealthy people into a life of poverty and persecution. I'm certainly no fan of the so-called "health and wealth" Gospel, the idea that God Wants Me To Be Wealthy. God may call me some day to suffer and die for the faith, as Christ did. And Christ was by no means wealthy himself. Still, this doesn't eliminate the fact that when ordinary people order their affairs along Judeo-Christian principles, they tend to start doing the kinds of things that build prosperity....

...Whereupon Christ tells us, "But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry."

So: if you do everything right, if work hard, if you limit your consumption and save what you make for the hard times ahead, if you avoid "get-rich-quick" schemes and invest wisely, as the first two stewards in the Parable of the Talents did, then... you become prosperous, and receive warnings that you have already received your reward, and will someday be hungry. Woe unto you.

Rather harsh, no? Of course, I think there's a reason Christ gives this warning. There are temptations that attack the pride of those of us who do everything right, precisely because we did everything right. Hey, I did everything right! I made the sacrifices, and did the work, and now I'm just enjoying the fruits of my labor. This stuff is mine, I tell you; I earned it.



...


But aside from the fact that I haven't quite squared this circle in my head yet (and if you have, please explain in the comments), there's something else that makes me a little uncomfortable about our church's current focus.

There are many temptations that can affect an entire church. One of these temptations, which seems to be pretty common in the modern Western world, is to start to focus so heavily on "social issues" that the spiritual teachings become neglected. It is certainly true that Christ had a tremendous care for the poor, and he intended us to do something about this.

But Christ--and later, the apostles--gave many other commands to us, as well. We are to be holy in our actions, in our thoughts and deeds. We are to carry ourselves as Children of God, and that involves keeping a close eye on our personal lives, and our personal ethics, and our relationships. We need to work to live upright, ethical, righteous lives.

Additionally, Christ gave us the mission to bring other people to Him. One of the hardest teachings in the Bible is summed in Christ's words, "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me." That puts a tremendous duty on us Christians.

Now, it's pretty obvious that these three aspects of the Christian mission--the concern for social issues and the poor, the concern for our own holiness, and the desire to lead others to Christ, are entirely compatible with each other, and indeed work best together. And yet--here's the source of my discomfort--in modern churches, for more than the last century and a half, there's been an increasing tendency to focus on the first of these missions, and to downplay or even ignore the other two.

Most of the so-called Mainstream Protestant denominations have gone down that road. They are increasingly all about caring for the poor, and cleaning up the neighborhoods, and Building a Better Society; but their focus on the other two missions--especially the outreach to "the lost"--has been waning. There's a sense that the mainstream Protestant denominations--the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, and even some of the Quaker congregations--have been moving this direction for some time. I've read on several Catholic blogs that there are tendencies like that in various Roman Catholic dioceses as well--which, generally, the bloggers in question aren't particularly happy about.

What you wind up with when this happens is a Church that has become little more than a social activist organization with a vaguely spiritual focus. And the key word there is "vaguely"; often times the doctrines of these churches start to atrophy; the idea seems to be that if you care for your neighbor enough, God is all right with you. The doctrine of sin, that we were doomed to hell without the salvation Christ provided, often weakens over time as a denomination goes down this road. The doctrine of Christ being The Way similarly weakens. Ethical teachings become watered down; the congregants are no longer taught to be holy because Christ is holy, or that they are to be dead to sin.

The funny thing about this is that churches that go this route eventually have this way of dying out. Once the doctrine is gone, once the teachings on sin and salvation and all that other religious stuff has been shunted aside as not relevant in the modern world, once the church becomes primarily an activist organization, well... its reason for existing has gone away, too. The church by this point has abandoned the only one task that it, and it alone, can do properly. There are plenty of other politically activist organizations out there that don't ask you to sit in the pews every Sunday while they preach at you; if all you're interested in is achieving Social Justice through the political process, then these other non-religious organizations are much more focused on-task.

And the so-called "Mainstream Protestant" denominations today are a fraction of the size that they were just a few decades ago. Meanwhile the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists--which have retained the doctrines of sin and salvation, and the idea that we have a personal duty to live holy lives in accordance with the will of God, have been growing by leaps and bounds.

So with all this said, when the preacher at my church stands up and says, "We need to begin focusing more on issues of Social Justice, like Jesus did..." well, I must confess that the alarm bells start to go off in my head. This is how it all begins, I say in my rather suspicious heart of hearts....

And to make it worse, our preacher--who is a very wise man, I should add, and who is a keen observer of our culture and of human nature--will occasionally say things about economics or politics that just stick in my craw. During this series of lessons on Luke for example, on numerous occasions he has thrown comments into his sermons on how our capitalist system is oppressing the poor, in ways that Jesus would immediately condemn if he were here. (Note, he throws these comments in tangentially--they aren't the core of his lessons, which tend to be very good).

Now, I have no doubt that Jesus would have harsh words for many of us were he to come walk among us again today; and he might even say that we are oppressing the poor through the way we act and the way we handle our money. But I doubt he would condemn the economic system we use; he would condemn what's in our hearts. The thing about the free market, is that--precisely because it is free--it does what we, through our free choice, cause it to do. If we behave wisely and compassionately, this fact will be reflected in market conditions. If we behave in greedy and untrustworthy ways, this fact will be reflected in market conditions as well. So when there are poor people living in a free market system, it is almost always because of the decisions that someone--they, or someone else--has freely made. And it is these decisions, that we freely make based on what's in our hearts, that Jesus would (if necessary) condemn.

And even when the economic system was oppressive--and remember, Jesus and the apostles lived under an empire that had widespread slavery--they didn't actually come out and denounce the system. The apostle Paul told the slaves to obey their masters as though they were obeying God. And he told the slave owners to treat their slaves fairly, not harshly, remembering that they have a heavenly Master to whom they must answer. In fact, one of Paul's letters, which became the New Testament book of Philemon, was a note to a Christian slave owner on how to treat one of his slaves who had run away, converted to Christianity, and then decided to return.

Note that there was no explicit denunciation of the economic system, even though pretty much everyone can agree that it was oppressive by any rational measure. Jesus and the apostles were interested in what went on in our hearts, and in the actions that flowed from them.

But when you declare that "the capitalist system is oppressing the poor", it suggests that the way to fix such a problem is to scrap the "capitalist system" and replace it with some other kind of system. The trouble here is that this does absolutely nothing about what's in our hearts; all it does, is it replaces one set of economic regulations with another, and puts a different set of people in charge. And there's absolutely no guarantee that the new system will be any better at fixing people's hearts and minds than the one you scrapped. That's not what economic systems are designed to do!

At least in a free market, if you want to be successful you have to meet other people's needs in some way, so that they freely decide to give you their business. Under a more socialistic system, all you have to do to be "successful" is to get the right regulator or legislator to like you enough, regardless of whether you're producing anything of value. There is nothing inherently more moral about the latter system than the former. Morality is something that stems from our hearts and our actions, not the kind of "system" we belong to.


...


So, I've been a little uncomfortable lately during sermon and class time at church. Some of this is because we are genuinely covering challenging material, and Jesus' words were intended to "afflict the comfortable". And part of it is that the subject matter is almost inevitably dipping into matters of politics and economics, and I'm not so sure that the political and economic prescriptions I'm hearing are actually good ones. Too many churches have gotten sidetracked by going down that road, to the point where they start debating what industries and countries they can and cannot invest their pension funds in--while their pews become progressively emptier and emptier.

Of course, I need to say outright that I know our preacher and our church leadership well enough to be confident they aren't trying to de-emphasize the other parts of our mission. They are definitely attempting to present the Social Justice part of the Gospel in the context of holy living before God, and in the context of our commission to reach out to those who aren't yet saved.

Still, I rather find myself wishing that our brief, occasional Sunday-morning forays into economics and politics weren't actually happening. With the way politics and the economy have been going lately, I would that our church was actually more of a sanctuary from politics and economics....

If Ye Love Me

Regular readers of this blog know that I have done a fair amount arranging music in my time. Either through foresight, or through good fortune, I decided when I was studying for my minor in college that I would take the hard-core music theory classes--the Comprehensive Musicianship classes that were required of the music majors. I could have gotten away with easier classes for my minor, but for some reason I decided I wanted a challenge. And I have never, never regretted taking those music theory courses.

Now, most people might think to themselves, "How often do ordinary people, with no career in music, need to be able to arrange stuff?" And the answer is, you'd be really, really surprised. I've arranged music for a couple of weddings now, including my own. I've arranged music for my church's Christmas pageants. And when I started to learn to play Celtic Harp, I started arranging music for that too. After all, when you're dealing with non-standardized folk instruments, you often won't be able to find good, published sheet music for what you want to do with the instrument. So, you have to figure out how to write it yourself.

So I've done a fair amount of arranging. Alas, I haven't done much recently. I took a much-needed pass on last year's Christmas program. This was very good for my family's health and well-being, of course; I don't regret that decision. But it means that I haven't had much cause lately to be writing or arranging stuff.

Enter my little brother, Andy. Andy is a bit of a composer/arranger himself.

(It runs in the family, actually; my dad has done a fair amount; my older brother too; and in fact, we all inherited it from Dad's mom, who was a composer and musician; and she got it from her Dad, who was an accomplished Cornet player and bandmaster (and younger associate of John Philip Sousa). And my mom's side of the family isn't slouchy when it comes to music either. My Granny was, in her day, pretty good with the steel guitar; and Mom played the piano quite a bit while I was growing up).

Well, Andy has been giving some thought to overhauling the music service at his church--training the singers, introducing new (better, and more appropriate) arrangements of the music, unifying the songs with the rest of the service better, that sort of thing. He has been contemplating taking the song "Amazing Grace/My Chains Are Gone", from the soundtrack of the recent movie Amazing Grace--and which is currently fairy popular on Christian radio stations--and creating an A Capella arrangement that would be appropriate for congregational singing.

Now, when you create an arrangement for congregational singing, there are a number of very fine lines to walk. On the one hand, it's too easy for an ambitious hymnwriter or arranger to make an arrangement that's absolutely gorgeous, but is too complicated for the amateur singers of a typical church congregation to be able to handle. I've done this myself on more than one occasion. :-( On the other hand, if you make it simple enough for the congregation to sing, often you've taken the fire out of the song; you've taken out the life; the song winds up sounding boring, stilted, and bland. This is especially true of songs that originally included strong instrumental parts; often these songs are tricky to translate to an A Capella setting, since so much of the energy of the song was carried by the instruments. It can take a great deal of imagination and care, to create a beautiful song, one that inspires, while keeping it simple enough for church singing.

Andy emailed around his arrangement, and my older brother (Rick) and I both took a look at it. He did a really good job. My own opinion was that his first attempt leaned a bit toward the complicated side, but sounded really, really good. And then Rick took Andy's version, tweaked the bass line, and passed it back. Andy (with plenty of input from his wife) then came up with a new version that incorporated all the ideas we'd given him.

The song is sounding pretty good.

But all of this has gotten me itching. What have I been doing with my own music-writing skills lately? Partly this comes from a "parable of the talents" sense, where God expects us to use the abilities he gave us. And partly it comes from me remembering just how much fun it is to write music. Arranging music has the same intellectual stimulation and payoff that you get from solving an interesting physics problem or Sudoku puzzle--if you're into that sort of thing. But in addition, when you've figured out what all the notes should be, and how they should lead into each other to form something just right, you then get to play it. And you get to hear it. And then, if you're lucky, you get to teach it to other people, who then sing it back to you. Talk about satisfying!


...


So I've been in a contemplative mood lately. Part of me has been itching to start writing something that could be done to the Glory of God. But part of me has been holding back. You see, my musical tastes are very, very different from those of most people in our church. My tastes lead toward the polyphonic. I like the works of Bach--the only one of which we ever do in our church is O Sacred Head, and we haven't done that in a while. I like the works of Palestrina--which is entirely in Latin, and is based on Catholic liturgy anyway, so we don't do it. I like Orlando di Lasso and Anton Bruckner and Maurice Duruflé and...

You see where this is going, don't you? After having sung all of these guys in my college days, after having fallen absolutely in love with their music, after having worshipped with this music in concert, even though it was just our secular univerity's Concert Choir concerts; well, perhaps I've become spoiled, but it takes some work for me to get excited about most of the songs we sing. After you've sung the original Beethoven's 9th, final movement, the song "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee" seems like such a pale counterfeit in comparison. And much of what plays on Christian music stations seems so saccharine to me.

One solution, of course, is to start writing my own! I have arranged and written a fair amount that has been done by special seasonal programs or (much more rarely) the whole congregation. And typically, people grumble while learning it (because it's so haaaard!) and then they come to like it pretty well when they have it down. It's not the kind of stuff that they would listen to on their own, given their own choices; but they like it enough to appreciate it. (And I generally wouldn't listen to the stuff that's their first choice, either, so we're even).


...


So I was thinking about what kinds of stuff I would write were I (entirely hypothetically!) to start writing church music. And of course, the first thing that happened is I started thinking about that perfectly sublime motet, O Magnum Mysterium, that I posted about last Christmas. (Feel free to click on that link and listen to it right now. Go ahead. I'll still be here when you get back.)

That's the sort of music I like. Even the Alto part is interesting! :-)

Well, as I was thinking about how this kind of music is written, and how polyphony works, I started noticing all the other links at the bottom of the screen when O Magnum Mysterium finished playing. Turns out, I did most of them when I was in college; so I was able to sing along with them--in some cases by memory--when I clicked on them to play them. These songs were like old friends. They brought back some fond memories of hanging out with good people late at night, in one of their garages, with a bottle of red wine and a book of madrigals (which were sung progressively less precise as the night wore on...)

And then, I came upon the song that inspired this whole post. Remember, I've been thinking: how would I write a hymn that would inspire me? Something in four-part A Capella, perhaps based on the words of Jesus...

This was the song I came upon, and I just had to share it with you. I do hope you enjoy it. When I heard it, in the mood I was in, I was thunderstruck.

I'm under no illusions about teaching this to a congregation, but still... That's the way it's done. That's the kind of thing that inspires me.

Wow.

Just, wow. I think I need to brush up on my counterpoint and start writing something soon.

The 162nd Carnival of Homeschooling is Up!

Yes, it has now reached the noteworthy milestone of 162. That's a seriously important milestone.

What's that, you say? 162? What could possibly be special about that number? It's just a normal number, right? Nothing interesting there.

Ah, but there you're wrong. There's something interesting about every number (at least, every non-negative integer). I can prove it mathematically.

But first, the Carnival, which is almost as interesting as my proof. :-) It's being hosted over at Dewey's Treehouse this week. Alas, I didn't submit anything this week (although I did for the last two carnivals), but there are a number of good posts in there. Here are a few I liked.

Over at Mother by Nature there is a post in which a mother shares a spontaneous conversation she had with her son about money. The kid was doing a math problem (trying to figure out sales tax), and then... started asking the economic equivalent of existential questions. What is money? Where does it come from? Why does it have any value at all? Personally, I think this is good stuff. These are not necessarily easy questions at all. After all, the green stuff in your pocket is little more than ink on paper. Why do we value it so much? And I'm not asking this as some anti-materialist rhetorical question; I mean it. Can you explain where its value comes from? I think the mother in this post did a really good job, and I'm not sure I would have done as well under similar circumstances. Just like when I took Combinatorics in college and discovered that counting is one of the hardest things to do in math, sometimes these seemingly easy questions are the hardest, when you start to pull at all their little threads....

And then there's this fun post from The Reluctant Homeschooler, who happens to be married to a somewhat old-world Ukranian. More power to them! The thing is, though, when their kids get it into their heads that they'd like to raise livestock in their suburban backyard, Daddy agrees quite enthusiatically with them, and Mommy is left to ponder questions like, "but who's going to learn to skin and cook all the rabbits?" Right now, the kids are weighing the pros and cons (mostly the pros) of keeping a pair of goats around. Mommy is, somewhat amusedly, bracing herself....

Then over at the Five J's, we have this post in which the homeschooling mother has gone through all the Dr. Seuss (and similar) books in their personal library, and figured out which ones are good for teaching which first-grade grammar lessons. For example, if you want to learn about prepositions, Green Eggs and Ham is excellent. ("And I would eat them in the rain, and in the house, and on the train....) Likewise, for numbers you could use Bears on Wheels, and for (my favorite) Onomatopoeia, there's Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?

There are plenty of good selections this week, so check it out.


...


And now, for my assertion that there's some interesting fact about every non-negative integer. Yes, this assertion is provable mathematically.

Start by assuming the opposite. There is some non-empty set of uninteresting numbers, U. By construction, no interesting fact exists about any of the elements of U. Well, since these are all non-negative integers, we can say that one such number N, element of set U, has the lowest value of any member of set U. (That is, for all other members M of set U, N is less than M). Note that this is an interesting fact about N! N is the smallest number about which no interesting fact exists. That fact, in and of itself, is interesting.

But! We have just arrived at a contradiction. N, by construction, has no interesting facts about it; but we just gave precisely such an interesting fact.

Therefore, we must conclude that our initial assumption, that the set of uninteresting numbers is non-empty, is false; and the opposite of our initial assumption is true. Every non-negative number therefore has some interesting fact about it. Quod Erat Demonstratum.

Determining what's so interesting about the number 162 is left as an exercise to the reader. ;-)

A Little Bit About Social Conservatism

Ok, I mentioned a couple weeks back that I was stewing something over in my head about Social Conservatism--specifically what role it plays in our society, and indeed in any society.

Of course, these thoughts were spurred in part by the results of the recent presidential election. Frankly, the self-identified Social Conservatives didn't do so well this time around. Part of the problem, of course, is that this was not a good year for conservatives in general, of any stripe; and part of the problem is that the Republican party, which has been the political home of the SoCons since at least the Reagan administration, has become fractious lately.

This last point is a challenging one. The old Reagan coalition succeeded because it managed to find common political ground between several varieties of "conservative": there were the defense hawks, who were dismayed at the state of American power and influence in the late 1970's; there were the fiscal conservatives and the libertarians, who were dismayed at the levels of taxation, regulation, and spending; and there were the social conservatives, who were dismayed by the erosion of their values in the public square--from open denigration of America and its symbols, to breakdown of the family, to breakdown of public order, to abortion on demand, to marginalization of Judeo-Christian values in academia and intellectual life. Reagan presented a program that appealed to all of these constituencies simultaneously.

But now, it almost seems that these various factions are trying to kick each other out of the party. They don't say that, of course; what they actually say is that if we want to be a big tent, then we have to reach out to people outside the party who don't agree with that faction over there. Of course, this is equivalent to saying that the party shouldn't champion the causes that are dear to the hearts of that faction, which is to say that that faction's values aren't as important as mine....

The trouble that the social conservatives are having, is that there are so few others in society who find common ground with them. Back during the Reagan years it was easy for them to find common cause with, say... the libertarians. To pick one example among many, the libertarians and the fiscal conservatives tend to be opposed to funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, based on the argument that this is not what Congress was designed for, or that the Constitution doesn't authorize this. The social conservatives tend to be opposed to funding it for a different reason: because it supports garbage, and I don't want my tax dollars funding that. There were enough issues around during the Reagan years that were like this: the SoCons and the libertarians, even though they had totally different worldviews, were still on the same side of many political issues. But now the issues are different. Consider the question of whether the schools should support abstinence-based sex education. The SoCons are just about the only ones out there saying Yea, and nearly everyone else says Nay--especially the libertarians, who were allies with the SoCons on so many different issues in the 1980s.

Thus we had something of a spectacle in this last election. There were very, very few people in this country who were unenthused, one way or another, about the V.P. candidacy of Sarah Palin. Among the Social Conservatives, she was a phenomenon. She was much, much more exciting to this big chunk of the Republican base than was the presidential candidate, John McCain--and had McCain picked just about anyone else, I suspect that large numbers of the SoCons would have sat the election out, and Obama would have won in an absolute landslide. And yet, while Palin's support was very deep and intense, it didn't seem to me very wide--it didn't extend much outside the SoCon base. Indeed, many of those in other factions within the Republican party loathed her.

And I say this--full disclosure--as someone who was, in fact, more excited by Palin than I was by McCain. (Actually, in the Republican primaries, my candidate dropped out before I had a chance to vote. Yup, I was a Fredhead. Y'all should have listened to us....) But it seems to me that while Palin gave McCain a fighting chance at covering his base, her appeal outside that base was very limited.

The SoCons are a sizable group, no doubt, but they aren't a majority, and right now they don't seem to have enough fellow travelers so that they can put together a majority voting block. Now, I don't mind so much about the political losses--in any well-designed democracy every side eventually loses, and then eventually wins, and then eventually loses again. But social conservatism as a social (instead of a political) force, on the other hand, is very important, and I'm not so sanguine about the ways things are going on that front.

Why? What's the problem? They're just one more political faction looking to control policy, right? Who (aside from them) cares if they win or lose?

Well, to answer the so what, we have to take about four steps back and look at what exactly social conservatism is.

Here's a little pattern. See if you can trace it out.


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First item: there was a 14th century North African intellectual named Ibn Khaldun, who believed that there was a natural rhythm to history. It went like this: some nomad tribe, living out on the fringes of civilization, would rise to become a military and social force. The nomad tribe would come upon wealthy yet divided cities, and would beat them militarily and loot them. The tribe could do this because it was unified, and disciplined; the towns were full of soft, weak people who didn't know how to defend themselves and were disinclined to lay down their lives for their hated rulers. So, eventually the nomads would conquer the cities, and would become the rulers. They would continue as rulers for perhaps a few generations, becoming ever wealthier and more comfortable. Eventually science and the arts would flourish under their descendants. But then, they would one day become like their soft, weak predecessors; and then some other nomad tribe would rise up on the periphery of civilization. The now entrenched rulers find they no longer have the social cohesion or the discipline of their ancestors, and eventually they and their society become prey for the new nomads--just as their predecessors became prey for them.


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Second Item: In his famous work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, historian Edward Gibbon advanced his theory for why Rome fell. As summarized by Wikipedia,

According to Gibbon, the Roman Empire succumbed to barbarian invasions in large part due to the gradual loss of civic virtue among its citizens. They had become weak, outsourcing their duties to defend their Empire to barbarian mercenaries, who then became so numerous and ingrained that they were able to take over the Empire. Romans, he believed, had become effeminate, unwilling to live a tougher, "manly" military lifestyle. He further blames the degeneracy of the Roman army and the Praetorian guards. In addition, Gibbon argued that Christianity created a belief that a better life existed after death, which fostered an indifference to the present among Roman citizens, thus sapping their desire to sacrifice for the Empire. He also believed its comparative pacifism tended to hamper the traditional Roman martial spirit...

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Third item: In the Biblical book of Judges, you see a rhythm that is repeated numerous times. It goes like this. The people of Israel gain prosperity, victory, and security. Then, they become complacent and decadent, and fall into idol worship. Then, God sends the Philistines, or the Amalekites, or the Midianites, or some other miscellaneous Canaanite foes to subjugate them. They are destroyed and enslaved, until a "judge"--a religious reformer and military leader--turns them back to God, and drives out their foes. Then, they become prosperous and secure for another generation or two, before they become complacent and corrupt....


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You see the pattern, don't you?

Civilizations, and nations, have a life cycle. While no two stories are exactly the same, there are patterns that appear over and over again. Of course, no two historians agree on what exactly the cycles are. For example, I've seen Malthusian theories about how the driving forces of history are economic and resource-based, with the collapse mechanism having to do with the depletion of resources. Incidentally, I don't buy these theories; they don't, for example, explain the collapse of the Roman empire very well. I suspect that Gibbon and Ibn Khaldun are closer to the truth.

Here's the pattern that both of them (and to a degree, the Book of Judges) outline:
Starting at point 1, you have some tribe, or community, or city-state--one among many--which, for some reason or another, adopts some set of values--some virtues--that sets it apart. This tribe begins to grow in influence and power. It begins to subjugate its neighbors; it begins to take land, and exploit the resources that once belonged to its neighbors to become even more powerful.

Now, it is certainly true that natural resources are very unevenly distributed over the face of the Earth's surface, so some peoples have an advantage right out of the gate. And this has been advanced as a possible reason for why some societies advance and others do not. But while that may be a factor, it is also true that there have been resource-poor nations which have grown into mighty empires and defeated much more resource-rich ones. The classic (no pun intended) example of this, of course, was how resource-poor Greece triumphed over the mighty Persian empire--both when the Persians invaded Greece under Xerxes, and then when Alexander and his (numerically inferior) army destroyed the Persian empire under Darius III.

I think the key here is culture. Not in the sense of music and art, but in the sense of worldview, and social roles, and social values. The fact is, the way you, individually, think about money and about work and about sex and about religion and about power and about responsibility, has a huge impact on where you go in your own life. But if it affects your own life that much, think about how it can affect an entire society! When an entire society thinks that work is a gift from God, to use one example, and when that society teaches the same to its children, you tend to get a productive society--much more so than one in which people are taught that work is a sucker's game, and you should get out of it whenever you can. Likewise, when you have a society where everyone believes that raising the next generation, and instilling our values, is the most important mission in life, that society is going to wind up with children raised completely differently than a society where everyone believes that children are not as important as career and self-actualization.

Well, to go back to the model above, let's say you get a civilization with some set of values that allows them to succeed, thrive, and expand. What does this civilization look like? Well, when you look at most of the great empires and nations throughout history, at the time when they were rising, you see a lot of similar social structures, and a lot of similar traits. These include, in no particular order:

• Societal honor of the warrior, and of the martial ethic;
• Highly defined gender roles, with Manly Men and Womenly Women;
• An austere sense of justice, with antisocial types executed or exiled frequently;
• Great reverence to the concepts of duty, honor, loyalty;
• Strong social cohesion, to the point that many (even most) would proudly die for their tribes or countries;
• Willingness to endure a struggle for the common good;
  
• Strong societal institutions for instilling all these values in the young.

Did Hellenic Greece have these? Check. Rome? Check. India? Check. Pre-1950's Great Britain? Check.

18th-20th Century America? Check.

Ok, continuing: eventually the civilization's influence and power spreads abroad, into a great empire. All enemies are defeated or held at bay; commerce, art, and science flourish; peace and prosperity reign. What then?

Well, we're about at point 2 on the graph--in the middle of what often are referred to as Golden Ages. The trouble with Golden Ages, is that the societies start to slip when it comes to passing the virtues and traits from the above list on to its progeny. After all, when it's been a couple of generations since anyone had to worry about dying in war, when you've got the family business running well, when everyone's fat and happy, it's a whole lot harder to teach the young about "sacrifice" and "duty". As the Wikipedia quote on Gibbon said, describing the later Romans, "They had become weak, outsourcing their duties to defend their Empire to barbarian mercenaries.... Romans, he believed, had become effeminate, unwilling to live a tougher, 'manly' military lifestyle."

One more point here: this period of decadence, which Gibbon and Khaldun and Judges all mentioned, most definitely includes decadence of the sexual variety. I don't want to get too deep into the topic here, but I will briefly touch on it: rising societies tend to have strict, austere gender roles on sexuality, often with severe penalties for those who deviate. Sexuality in the rising societies is primarily for childbearing, and for the strengthening of the marriage, which these societies generally deem crucial for the proper raising and training of children. Societies which enter their Golden Ages tend to become much, much more lax about sexual mores. Sex becomes primarily about pleasure, and only secondarily about procreation. This change is accompanied by the relaxation of societal penalties against "deviant" sex. Not surprisingly, starting during a society's Golden Age, the birthrate starts to plummet. This was true well before the invention in modern times of reliable birth control, I might add; this phenomenon was noticed and commented upon by the Romans, among others.

What happens next? Well, eventually the virtues and values that helped propel the society to its power and prosperity get rejected by the population. Now, this doesn't all happen at once. Interestingly, the decay generally starts at the upper levels in society. The rulers, and those in positions of power, usually become corrupt and decadent before the general population does. And at the beginning the rulers have to hide their behavior for fear of causing a scandal. They become nihilistic and cynical about their society's values first, while the people are still dutifully training their children to grow up to be Real Men (and Real Women). But eventually the cynicism and nihilism of the ruling classes becomes more and more public, and more and more accepted. The old values become a thing of mockery, as they become associated more and more with the lower classes and the non-urban "provincials". Eventually, even the lower classes start to reject them--with the rural farmers often the last to give up.

What do you have then? At that point, you have a society of people who have rejected, and who actively discourage, all the values they held to earlier:

• They dishonor the warrior who defends them, and instead celebrate those who keep them entertained;
• They obliterate all gender roles, and become what C.S. Lewis termed (in The Abolition of Man) "men without chests".
  
• Justice is thwarted, with the criminal often celebrated, and the law abiding citizen the subject of abuse and mockery;
  
• Open mockery of the concepts of duty, honor, loyalty;
• No social cohesion, to the point that many side against their country or empire;
  
• Little or no willingness to endure a struggle for the common good, especially since no one agrees on what the common good is anymore;
  
• Systematic destruction or subversion of those societal institutions that used to instill the former values in the young.

Now, when the society reaches this point (Point 3 on the above graph), it is in decline. Eventually, even its wealth and power and influence will not save it. Its government will increasingly have trouble paying its bills; the people are increasingly unwilling or unable to restrict their appetites or behave in responsible manners; and eventually poverty and oppression close in. Former allies fall away, former enemies (and new enemies) rise up again and threaten the waning empire; but this time, the empire doesn't have the stomach, or the resources, or the military needed for the struggle.

Eventually pieces of the empire start to be lost. Sometimes the final collapse comes suddenly and violently; other times the empire declines into a slow, degraded senescence. But either way, those nations that have had their day in the sun rarely get a second chance. I doubt Italy will have the world trembling under her pointed, heeled boot again, for a very, very long time....


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So do you start to see what Social Conservatism is, and what role it plays in a society?

Go back and take a look at the graph again. Let's pretend for the moment we're at point 2 on the graph. Now think to yourself: what role are the Social Conservatives trying to play here? What are they trying to do?

The answer: more than anyone else, they're the ones trying to keep those virtues alive that got us here. Take a look at that list again; is it not the Social Conservative, more than anyone else, who champions each one of those virtues?

• Societal honor of the warrior, and of the martial ethic;
• Highly defined gender roles, rejection of the modern "gender is a social construct" mantra, and pushback against sexual libertinism;
• An austere sense of justice, with stiff penalties for lawbreakers;
• Great reverence to the concepts of duty, honor, loyalty;
• Strong social cohesion, to the point that many, even today, would proudly give their lives for their country (even though they don't like where it appears to be headed);
• Willingness to make sacrifices, of time and money for what they believe to be good causes;
  
• Strong support for churches and schools--so long as the schools aren't attempting to undermine their values. If they feel they are, they leave and establish their own schools, or they homeschool--because passing on their values to the next generation is one of the highest priorities of the Social Conservative. It's the mission on which all the values on this list hang.

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Note that I haven't gone much into a discussion of religion here in this post, even though Faith is very, very important for the American Social Conservative. My point here is that even if one doesn't accept the faith of the SoCon, one should still be able to see that the SoCon is playing a very, very important role here. That role, if I may quote the words of Jesus, is to be the "Salt of the Earth"--in the sense that Jesus most likely originally intended it: SoCons are the preservative that keeps the rest of society from going bad. SoCons are the Inheritors and Guarantors of the traditions, for better or worse, that caused this country to become as wealthy, as strong, and as free as it is.

And the most important thing to understand about SoCons is that they do not primarily operate on a political level. Their Social Conservatism can be a political force, but that's not what it's primarily there to do. The SoCons are much more interested in making the next generation and passing on their values to in, and doing so in a way that the lesson sticks. They're more interested in what goes on in their homes, and in their churches, and on the streets of their towns; and if many of them (Huckabee types excluded) had their way, Washington would get out of the way and mind its own business. Much of their political involvement, in fact, comes about precisely because they fear that the intellectual classes are attempting to use governmental power to undermine and thwart the values they hold so dearly.


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So when Thomas Frank writes the question, What's the Matter With Kansas? lamenting that somehow the extreme right wing is using cultural wedge issues to distract the working class from their true economic interests, he really, really doesn't understand the phenomenon he's up against. What he calls cultural wedge issues are rightly seen by SoCons as matters--literally--of life and death, both for our next generation, and for our entire society.