Lowest Common Denominator of What?

Reading Francisco's post, I'm struck by the notion of the lowest common denominator. It seems like the lowest common denominator of humanity is precisely that which applies to all human beings: our incompleteness and our desire. And properly understood, each desire we have is nothing less than a temporal manifestation of our ultimate desire for the infinite, for Christ. The very thing that makes Christ attractive is that He appeals to the lowest common denominator of humanity, our primal needs and desires.

The problem with Oprah's cult, sexy commercials, and nutrigrain is that each takes that desire and directs it towards an incomplete and unfulfilling end. The desire itself that each taps into, the desire for the infinite (manifest in spirituality, in sex, and feeling great) is fundamentally good. The reason each appeals to any kind of common denominator at all is because each appeals to our fundamental desire for the good. But they redirect us to an unfulfilling end, an end that won't fulfill those desires. Those things gives us a incomplete solution to the fundamental problem of our humanity, which is why each of them leaves us, in the end, feeling isolated and incomplete. But the problem is not that they appeal to the lowest common denominator, but its that they appeal to it without giving any real solution or fulfillment.

President and Pope, Together

Anyone interested can read the comments made by Pope Benedict and George Bush here.

A brief excerpt about freedom from the Pope's speech:

In a word, freedom is ever new. It is a challenge held out to each generation, and it must constantly be won over for the cause of good. Few have understood this as clearly as the late Pope John Paul II. In reflecting on the spiritual victory of freedom over totalitarianism in his native Poland and in Eastern Europe, he reminded us that history shows time and again that “in a world without truth, freedom loses its foundation,” and a democracy without values can lose its very soul. Those prophetic words in some sense echo the conviction of President Washington, expressed in his Farewell Address, that religion and morality represent “indispensable supports” of political prosperity.

The Church, for her part, wishes to contribute to building a world ever more worthy of the human person, created in the image and likeness of God. She is convinced that faith sheds new light on all things, and that the Gospel reveals the noble vocation and sublime destiny of every man and woman. Faith also gives us the strength to respond to our high calling and to hope that inspires us to work for an ever more just and fraternal society. Democracy can only flourish, as your founding fathers realized, when political leaders and those whom they represent are guided by truth and bring the wisdom born of firm moral principle to decisions affecting the life and future of the nation.

He mentions Washington's farewell address, which is worth a read for anyone interested in understanding Washington's fears and hopes for the new nation. Perhaps best known for Washington's clear repudiation of all wars over the interests of foreign nations, he also has some choice words about morality and religion:

Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Only Something Infinite Will Suffice

Last week, a panel of theologians and Catholic Thinkers in the US convened to discuss Pope Benedict's upcoming visit to the US. The talk was called "Only Something Infinite Will Suffice." Panelists included Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (editor of First Things), Archbishop Celestino Migliore (Vatican Observer to the UN), Carl Anderson (Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus), and Dr. David Schindler (Editor of Communio and director of the John Paul II Cultural Center). The panel provided an opportunity for the panelists to muse more broadly on on faith in the US and on the nuances of Benedict's papacy. The conversation is incredibly rich and rewarding, though at times difficult. You can view the whole transcript here.

An excerpt:

Benedict has appealed often in his pontificate to natural law, but it is a natural law that has recuperated its finality and center in God. He affirms and develops Aquinas‘s understanding of the natural moral precept to seek to know the truth about God and to live in community with others. Note that Benedict emphasizes the nature of law as a matter of desire and thus love, in contrast to the modern tendency, following Kant, to conceive law more basically as duty. As emphasized in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, what the human being desires (eros) is most basically to love God above all things and others for their own sake (agape). The point is thus that this desire to love God and others generously arises naturally. It is not merely a function of grace, although the desire is fully realized only in grace.

The task of Christians, then, is to awaken this desire and give witness to it: to show that the restlessness driving every act of human consciousness in its depths is–even in America–a restlessness for God and for love. This is what is meant by the pursuit of happiness, rightly conceived.

Seriously, check out the whole thing. Its very well done, and gives a great degree of insight into what to expect from Benedict this visit.

Eye of the Beholder?

Francisco makes some interesting points about beauty in his post here. While I too will gladly stand up for the use of folk music at masses (though not "Eagles Wings" - yuck), I think he goes a bit far, both by dismissing the important role beauty plays in our knowing the true and the good and by making beauty something totally relative.

As to the first, the author of the article makes the point that beauty is the catalyst for our pursuit of goodness and truth. That is, "Without beauty, truth becomes legalism and goodness becomes moralism." Beauty is the thing that makes us, as humans, attracted to the true and the good. It awakens us to the desire. It is the thing that moves. A person can tell me something true, but without it being beautiful, I won't care. I can realize something is good, but without beauty, I won't do it. As a result, the Catholic Church's mission of teaching the true and the good can only occur in the context of the beautiful. It is what gives us ears to hear the truth. It is what gives us the will to do what is good.

And for the second, to say that beauty is pluralistic is not to say that it is relativistic. That is, the fact that some things move me more than Francisco, and vice-versa, does not imply that nothing is objectively beautiful. Honestly, I think it is kind of like Kraft's point about lay movements: there are several good lay movements, some which move me more than others. But there are also some movements that teach heresy. A great many might be objectively good, but there are still some that are objectively bad. And a great many things are beautiful, but there are also some things that are just plain ugly.

Perhaps more importantly to me personally is what this kind of a view of beauty does to art education. The entire idea behind art education is that something is objectively beautiful and that we can be taught to better appreciate it. But if there is nothing that is objectively beautiful at all, there is no point in being taught to appreciate one thing more than another. Preference reigns supreme. I think this strikes me so strongly because art, particularly music, is something I'm only now, as an adult, learning to appreciate.

Even after gaining an appreciation, the best art takes patience and attentiveness to get its beauty, while pop stuff is immediately catchy (though often superficial). For instance, when I was first given a copy of Sufjan Stevens' Illinois, I couldn't stand it. His eight minute "orchestral folk" songs seemed strange and noisy, and I longed to be back among my three minute, always catchy pop songs. Now, though, after roughly a thousand listens, the album stands among my favorites. And it is without question a beautiful work of art. I stuck with it because I had people who I trusted to have an eye/ear for beauty telling me it was beautiful, even when I didn't get why. But if I had accepted that beauty was in the eye of the beholder, I would have had no reason to wait, to educate my sense of beauty. And I do believe that I know God better as a result.

The Nation State and the Common Good

The lay movement Communion and Liberation has put out some points to consider regarding voting generally. The points give some insight, however incomplete, into the questions I was asking about the state and the common good:

We do not ask for salvation from politics. We cannot expect politics to do this either for us or for others.

The tradition of the Church has always indicated two ideal criteria for judging every civil authority and every political platform:

a) libertas Ecclesiae. A power that respects the freedom of a phenomenon so sui generis as the Church is for that very reason tolerant towards every other form of authentic human aggregation. The recognition of the role of faith, including its public role, and the contribution it can make to man’s journey is, therefore, a guarantee of freedom for all, not only for Christians.

b) the “common good.” A power that it is conceived as a service to the people has at heart the defense of those experiences in which the desire of man and his responsibility can grow as a function of the common good, through the construction of social and economic works, in keeping with the principle of subsidiarity, well knowing that no program will enable it to be fully realized because of the intrinsic limitations of all human effort.

For a bit more commentary on them, check out Rick Garnett's post over at Mirror of Justice.

Getting Past the "Nation State" Mantra

Anamaria's points about different ways to get past the mantra of "nation state above all else" are valid. I think her questions are necessary. And she's absolutely right about rethinking the ways we teach history and political science.

In addition, though, I'd like to ask this, of her and of anyone else who cares to answer. If we are to think in terms of what we, our small communities, can do about local and global problems, can we also think in terms of the nation state? Or does the one preclude the other?

This issue, or something like it, is one I've long struggled with no little or no avail. On the one hand, I buy Aquinas's argument that the law has an important teaching function, and that this teaching function is an important part of achieving the common good in a given society. At the same time, Cavanuagh's point that the nation state's purpose was never the common good and was always consolidation of power strikes me as fundamentally convincing. But if the nation state is not charged with the common good, if it structurally and conceptually should not be, then it seems that the laws it creates should focus less on instantiating any positive notion of the good than on simply giving people the space to create communities that can focus on such a good.

The obvious response, I think, is that, like it or not, the nation state is precisely what we have. And that despite the nation state's structural and conceptual problems, we as a citizenry have a duty to try to pass laws that serve the common good. This argument accepts the problems inherent in giving one central authority a monopoly on coercive force within a given geographic boundary as a given, but then argues that it is what we've been given so we might as well do what we can to use it as a tool for the common good.

In response to this argument, I turn to the economic theory of the second best. Second best theory relies on the assumption that if every one of a number of conditions are met, the economy will function perfectly. Its adherents argue, though, that if one of the conditions cannot be met, there is no reason to assume that fulfilling each of the other conditions will produce the best possible outcome. That is, an additional imperfection is as likely to offset the damage caused by the first as it is to compound it. As a practical example, assume that the perfect way to make a turn in my car is to slow to 20 mph and turn the wheel 20 degrees. If my brakes are out, and I can't slow to less than 45 mph, it would be ridiculous if I tried to turn the wheel 20 degrees to achieve the next best possible turn. I probably need to turn the wheel much more drastically in order to make the turn as well as possible given the condition of not being able to slow down.

I wonder if we can't apply this same reasoning to the nation state. If the nation state is a less than optimal tool for instantiating the common good, it might be that the best outcome for achieving the common good is to strip the nation state of all responsibility for it. We can accept that in the best possible society law would have a teaching function, and still we might be better off without it given the nation state's limitations.

Anybody have any thoughts? Can we give the nation state some responsibility for the common good? Or, given the obvious limitations of the nation state, must we seek the common good through local communities only?

Beauty, Conversion, and just plain Waking Up

John Murphy's got an interesting article over at Godspy about beauty, what it is, why we need it, and the startling lack of interest in it in our culture.

Two immediate thoughts strike me as particularly relevant to the discussion we're having here. The first is simply that without beauty, none of us could find the infinite, the mystery, attractive at all. It is all well and good to call the truth good, but there has to be something beautiful in it for me to find it attractive. The article quote John Paul II:

Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savor life and to dream of the future…It stirs that hidden nostalgia for God which a lover of beauty like St Augustine could express in incomparable terms: ‘Late have I loved you, O beauty ever ancient, ever new: late have I loved you!’

As such, it seems that any kind of cultural transformation has to have its roots in the beautiful. I need it to, because I'm too easily distracted by the frustrations of daily life. I need the beauty of it, the consistent and eternal newness, calling me back constantly to the true and the good.

My second thought is actually more of a question: what to do in a culture that teaches people to ignore the beauty around them and to stay focused on efficiency and production? Murphy cites a Washington Post experiment, where the Post convinced Joshua Bell, a world famous violinist, to play for an hour in the L'Enfant Plaza Metro stop during rush hour. Bell collected 30 bucks - far less than his typical $1000 hourly rate - and never had more than a couple of passersby watching at any point. However, every child who walked by tried to stop and watch. Something drew the kids to it, and something else convinced the adults to keep going.

Its seems that the starting point, then, in any sort of cultural or personal transformation has to be an awakening to the existence of the ever-present need for beauty. I have to understand that I need something else in order to seek it, and I have to understand that I need to be something else in order to become it. How do we do this, in ourselves and in the wider culture? How do I make sure that I (and those around me) are not so caught up in distractions that we miss the obviously beautiful around us?

At the end of John's Gospel, Peter and the others are out fishing when Jesus calls to them from the shore. Peter doesn't recognize Him, and keeps on fishing. But John sees who it is, telling his companions, "It is the Lord." Immediately upon hearing this, Peter dives in and swims to shore. He can't wait to be close to this source of truth, beauty, and goodness. But it takes someone else pointing out its presence to him for him to notice it at all. Is this part of the starting point? And how do we do this for each other?

Dostoevsky said, "Beauty will save the world." I believe that this is true. But in order for this to occur, we need to wake up and see it, and we need to help each other do so as well.

Pro-Life Doctors, Conscience, and the Wider Culture

First Things' On the Square blog has some analysis of the Committee on Ethics of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Opinion #385. The opinion places pro-life doctors, and doctors in general, in an untenable position regarding conscience, which is generally what the piece at OTS is about. An excerpt:

According to the ethics report, physicians objecting to abortion or contraception must refer patients desiring such services to other providers (recommendation # 4); may not argue or advocate their views on these matters though they are required to provide prior notice to their patients of their moral commitments (recommendation #3); and, in emergency cases or in situations that might negatively affect patient physical or mental health, they must actually provide contraception and/or perform abortions (recommendation #5, emphasis added).

In order to justify these recommendations, the committee appeals to an idiosyncratic conception of ethics and conscience. The ACOG guidelines implicitly view ethics as a matter of private emotion and sentiment, rather than as common rationality and shared practical wisdom. Against Kant’s unconditional command, Newman’s magisterial dictate, and Butler’s famous dictum (”were its might equal to its right, it would rule the world”), the ACOG committee makes conscience a mere prima facie guide. “Although respect for conscience is a value, it is only a prima facie value, which means it can and should be overridden in the interest of other moral obligations that outweigh it in a given circumstance.”

This peculiar account of conscience stands in no small tension with the view expressed by Antigone in Sophocles’ tragedy, Socrates in the Crito, and Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae. Traditionally, conscience is the supreme proximate norm for human action precisely because it represents the agent’s best ethical judgment all things considered.

In addition to the issues of conscience, though, I think this issue raises questions that confront directly what I said yesterday. If a society actually forces citizens in certain professions to perform morally reprehensible acts, then the development of an alternative subculture seems almost inevitable.

However, I think the two can stand together. It is true that as a society forces people of faith to the margins in certain areas, a kind of alternative culture in those areas will develop. I would certainly hope that if pro-life doctors were forced out of the mainstream that they would continue to practice under a different umbrella. And I would give them my patronage. But that does not absolve us of our duty to seek out and embrace the good and the true in the wider culture, wherever and whatever it is.

The Nation State and the Common Good

Killing for the Telephone Company, a paper by William Cavanaugh questioning the nation state's status in protecting the common good. Many of the same themes run through his outstanding book, Theopolitical Imagination, and through Alasdair MacIntyre's essay Natural Law as Subversive, contained in the collection Ethics and Politics Vol. 2.

Here's a brief excerpt (though I recommend reading the whole thing):

Christian ethicists will commonly recognize that, in a sinful world, particular states always fall short of the ideal. Nevertheless, the ideal is presented not merely as a standard for Christian political practice but as a statement of fact: the state in its essential form simply is that agency of society whose purpose it is to protect and promote the common good, even if particular states do not always live up to that responsibility. This conclusion is based on a series of assumptions of fact: that the state is natural and primordial, that society gives rise to the state and not vice-versa, and that the state is one limited part of society. These assumptions of fact, however, are often made without any attempt to present historical evidence on their behalf.

This may be because such evidence is lacking. In this essay I will examine the origins of the state and the state-society relationship according to those who study the historical record. I will argue that the above assumptions of fact are untenable in the face of the evidence. I will examine these three assumptions in order. First, unless one equivocates on the meaning of “state”, the state is not natural, but a rather recent and artificial innovation in human political order. Second, the state gives rise to society, and not vice-versa. Third, the state is not one limited part of society, but has in fact expanded and become fused with society.

Thoughts?

Cultural Transformation

In response to Francisco's post, I think that it is important to remember that no culture is so far gone as to be unsalvageable. While I agree with his point about establishing small, intense communities as a basis for the faith to flourish, I also believe that it is important not to set ourselves in mortal combat with the culture in which we live. In fact, the result of these intense communities should not be a sort of insularity, but an openness to everything the culture gives us It is from the community that we gain the strength to test everything, retaining what is good (1. Thess 5:21). I'll come back to this point in a minute, but first I want to make a distinction.

H. Richard Neibuhr, in his book Christ and Culture, sets up several different models by which it is possible to conceive the relationship between his two subjects, three of which I think are particularly helpful: (1) Christ against culture; (2) Christ of culture; and (3) Christ transforming culture. The first is the mistake of seeing Christ in total opposition to culture. It leads to a sort of isolationism, a "Holy Huddle," in which Christians turn our back on everything the world gives us and create a sort of alternative subculture. The second sees the culture as Christ's manifestation of himself in the world, and, as a result, too quickly acquiesces to whatever interpretation of goodness the culture puts forward. But the third sees Christ seeking to remake the culture, to seize on what is good in the culture and multiply it, while decreasing what is evil. This third one, I think, is the most challenging to us as Christians - we get neither the pleasure of total rebellion nor the comforts of acquiescence - but it is also the most authentic response to Christ's presence in our lives.

It is from this basis that I think we Christians have a obligation to genuinely engage the culture, and seek instances of goodness. And again, this cannot occur outside of the context of some kind of true community; without community we'll have neither the strength nor the wisdom to properly engage it. But from these communities, we have to reach out to the culture and seek its transformation, rather than simply live apart from it. We take our model from Christ, who came into the world in order to make it whole.

This plays itself out in all kinds of ways, but I'm now going to try to make this concrete by focusing on the example the arts. Many Christians seem to believe that the relative worth of a work (a film, a song, a book, a painting, anything) is inversely related to the amount of sexual, profane, or violent content it contains. However, I think the gift of community enables us (and the calling of Christ draws us) to seek what is good in a film that may contain a foul language or a sexually explicit scene (of course, I understand that this calling is tempered by the extent to which is causes any one of us to sin). And it may be that it says something true, about longing, desire, love, forgiveness, humanity, or even faith incredibly powerfully. And yet a "Christ against culture" mentality asks us to reject the piece wholesale, rather than embracing the beautiful invocation of truth rendered by the artist.

Our faith is in He who makes all things new. I think that these small communities provide a necessary component to being able to live as though that fact is true. But we have to remember that He can (and in important ways, does) transform the broader culture.