Category: Public square

Christians have to recover their genius for showing that there are better ways to live and build a good society; ways which respect freedom, empower individuals, and transform communities. They also have to recover their self-confidence and courage. The secular and religious intolerance of our day needs to be confronted regularly and publicly. Believers need to call the bluff of is, even in most parts of Europe, a small minority with disproportionate influence on the media. This is one of the crucial tasks for Christians in the twenty-first century

Cardinal George Pell of Sydney Varieties of Intolerance, given in Oxford (with thanks to Fr Tim Finigan)

We are also generally aware of the ways that the culture we oppose – of mobility, deracination and placelessness – is also based upon widespread free-riding. The culture of liberalism – writ large – has always free-ridden on the health and vitality of a pre-liberal, even anti-liberal culture. Most basically it assumes the existence of, but does little to support or replenish, the culture of good families. It relies upon the virtues of children raised in those settings, even as it is suspicious of – even destructive of – what are necessarily â??paternalisticâ?? (or â??maternalisticâ??) features of those settings. It has sought to open every closed association and civil institution, ultimately emptying them of the capacity to elicit loyalty, memory and stability. It relies on the good will and sacrifice of citizens even as it assumes that we are fundamentally rational actors driven by self-interest. Tocqueville wrote of Americans that â??we do more honor to our philosophy than to ourselves,â?? meaning that although we explain all of our actions in terms of self-interest, we actually act out of a deeper wellspring of altruism and fellowship. Over time, he observed, our actions would begin to conform to our words, however, thus eviscerating the deepest and better sources of our behavior.

Similarly, over the past century and a half, liberalism has free-ridden on the millenia-long accumulation of â??resourcesâ?? that it has shown exceptional ability in accessing and utilizing, but very little capacity to spare or save. â??Drill baby drillâ?? is akin to the adolescent refrain of â??itâ??s MINE, itâ??s MINE,â?? uncognizant of the work and fortune that went into every inheritance that we may have come into. We have been free-riding on the back of mountaintops removed, all the while congratulating ourselves for our hard work and accomplishment.

Patrick Deneen Free Riding at the very promising Front Porch Republic

Here’s one close to home. Rod Dreher is asking what lessons we can draw from ‘St. Cyprian’s writings during an early age of martyrdom that Christians living in contemporary liberal democracies can use to determine when they are obligated to speak up… for their faith, and when they are permitted to keep silent without betraying their faith. He

asked a couple of smart Christian journalist friends who work in secular media why they never wrote about homosexuality, religion and public policy. I know that they’re both interested in cultural and religious matters, and both are conservative Christians. Both of them said to me that they have careers to protect, which is a big reason why they keep their views on that subject to themselves in their writing… One, a graduate student in theology at a Protestant university, told me that you’d have to be an idiot to defend traditional Church and Biblical teaching about homosexuality inside the university today. He said that’s a certain way to end your academic career before it gets started… a professor friend on faculty at a nominally church-affiliated university, who told of a Christian colleague who argued in public for privileging traditional marriage. The teacher had been warned not to do this, because it would end his teaching career at that school. But he felt he had a moral obligation to give his side of the argument. “Sure enough,” said my professor friend, “when the vote on his tenure application came up a few months later, they voted him down. He’s got a wife and small children to support.”

Rod Dreher When do you ‘martyr’ yourself?
Privileging traditional marriage, eh? The man deserves to die, and slowly. When we take his job away so he has no colleagues, no students, no access to libraries or conferences his intellectual contribution will disappear. With no income his self-respect will follow. Over the years he will become a burden to his friends, his family and himself. That ought to do it.
Christians, we have to name these sorts of anonymous processes as martyrdom, and celebrate it as such. And the Church has to teach its own people, not imagine that this can happen in universities, however ‘Christian’.

…this is not a business cycle, but a life-cycle malfunction. Your problem is that nervous retirees are making most of the decisions, rather than young families. The trouble is that America is getting grayer. People with young children are spenders rather than savers. Young people take risks, and old people buy insurance. Your country needs more children. Demographic dearth is the root cause of the economic crisis. Too many aging people tried to accumulate too many assets, and created the biggest asset bubble of all time. Lower home prices make it easier for people to start families. The housing price crash transfers wealth from old people to young people. That’s exactly what you want to happen. Rather than spend a trillion dollars to keep overpaid construction union members busy in infrastructure projects, offer enormous tax cuts and subsidies to young families. Increase the per-child deduction to $20,000, and let low-income taxpayers deduct it against payroll taxes. Subsidize mortgages for families with children.
And if you really want to send a message to America, propose a constitutional amendment to reverse Roe versus Wade. Making sex a contact sport rather than a part of life that includes marriage and babies was the beginning of the problem. It’s not enough to tinker with tax incentives, although that surely will help. Americans need to change their own outlook about life. A pro-life Democratic president with a family friendly economic recovery plan would be unbeatable.
The unbeatable Spengler

I disagree with the assumption that law is what holds our society together. In his work on the decline and corruption of a culture, C.E.M. Joad correctly notes that decadence is the identification of means with ends. Or as Mr. Wilson puts it ‘When our masters have destroyed the schools.’ When wealth becomes the end, for instance, there exists economic decadence. Or as Mr Wilson would have it, when ‘Our masters have seen to it that middle and working class families need two incomes to survive…’ When power becomes the end, you have political decadence; When pleasure becomes the end, you have moral decadence; and when emotions become the end, you have psychological decadence.
We must always remember that politics is more important than economics, that culture is more important than politics, and theology is more important than culture. In this way we can see that divorce was initiated when we lost the theology of marriage, it accelerated when sexual pleasure became the end of marriage (instead of the procreation and education of children) This assertion that we are a nation of laws and not of men is misleading. We have become a nation of lawless men (culturally), who elect people to lead us (politically) who believe ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’
If we passed a law tomorrow in America that prevented divorce before the yougest child born of the marriage was 18 years of age, the pleasure seeking people we have become, would prefer to ressurect the old whore house rather than the old homestead. The collapse is upon us, Humpty Dumty has fallen. The question is where and who will carry the elderly and household Gods out of the burning city. My thinking is it will be folks like burdened Aneas or men like St. Benedict living in the woods, where some old crow will bring them bread from time to time.
Robert Reavis

Many people are wondering how the current problems came about:

3. No-one, other than the British Government, believes that the rate of inflation has ever been less than 7% over the last decade and today it is clearly more than 15%.
7. The ‘growth’ in the profits of most western companies since 2000 are really due to understated inflation figures.
8. The governments of the Western Nations have depended upon their people borrowing more and more as their manufacturing capability has been lost.
10. Low interest rates that do not reflect the real level of inflation will always encourage people to borrow and spend but the consequence is that saving is pointless.
11. It does not benefit the pensions industry, the banks or the Government to admit that any young person that saves for their old age is wasting their time.
20. Although it has not been spelt out to them most young people know that they have no real future and that many of the opportunities that their parents had will be denied to them.

How it ends – Quotations

Profoundly unpalatable decisions are going to have to be taken for the sake of our survival and the possibility of future prosperity. It is not enough to say that confidence must return. Instead, great truths will have to be spoken: we are going to have to start being honest with each other about our predicament. Britain has spent and borrowed too much, saved too little and produces not enough of what the world wants. The banking crisis needs breaking down into two parts. First, there is what should be done immediately to end a cycle of despair. Second is what a future government should do to rebuild capitalism. The situation is that serious.
Iain Martin
Britain is not alone in its current distress, although the fall in sterling speaks for itself. The sovereign debt of Russia, Ukraine, Greece, Italy, Belgium, Austria, The Netherlands, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Korea is all being tested by the markets. The core of countries deemed safe is shrinking by the day to a half dozen. Sadly, Britain is no longer one of them.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Dutch court has ordered prosecutors to put a right-wing politician on trial for making anti-Islamic statements. Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders made a controversial film last year equating Islam with violence and has likened the Koran to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. “In a democratic system, hate speech is considered so serious that it is in the general interest to… draw a clear line,” the court in Amsterdam said. Mr Wilders said the judgement was an “attack on the freedom of expression”. “Participation in the public debate has become a dangerous activity. If you give your opinion, you risk being prosecuted,” he said. Not only he, but all Dutch citizens opposed to the “Islamisation” of their country would be on trial, Mr Wilders warned.
“Who will stand up for our culture if I am silenced?” he added.
BBC
Cranmer responds