By Michael Brendan Dougherty, on September 1st, 2010
David Brooks mentions that Iraq is making progress, that the structure of that nation are sound, and that the laws are impressive. Though of course he contradicts himself when he mentions that it is one of the most corrupt governments on earth. How do we know progress is coming to Iraq.
According to the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index, the authoritative compendium of data on this subject, 833,000 Iraqis had phones before the invasion. Now more than 1.3 million have landlines and some 20 million have cellphones. Before the invasion, 4,500 Iraqis had Internet service. Now, more than 1.7 million do.
Oh, how wonderful! Nearly half a million more cell phones than in 2003. Up about 30 percent. What does that have to do with our invasion? Cell phone usage is up everywhere in the world. In Africa under a shorter period of time, mobile phone usage went up 550 percent. My mother didn’t have a cell phone in 2003 and has one now. There’s a good chance Iraq cell phone usage would be up much more without our war. After all, average Iraqis perhaps wouldn’t have diverted so much of their excess income to rebuilding their homes, or buying mortars for the near-civil war we sparked.
Brooks is so clever. So how does he not understand how offensive the above paragraph is? Is this what we should talk about to our wounded soldiers, or the parents of those we lost? “Hey, Vodafone is doing brisk business in that unspeakably poorly managed nation, so be proud.”
By Michael Brendan Dougherty, on August 31st, 2010
Professor Alan J. Kuperman of the University of Texas has done some interesting work studying the effect of America’s interventionism and the “emerging norm” that outside nations have a “Responsibility to Protect” citizens from their own government when that state becomes abusive. Kuperman’s paper “Rethinking the Responsibility to Protect” for the Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations is quite good. I’ll let him explain:
As with many aspects of institutional liberalism, however, this noble principle has faltered in practice. Most obviously, as Darfur illustrates, the international community lacks the political will for the collective action necessary to protect vulnerable citizens. But even if the international community could muster the requisite political will, humanitarian intervention would remain bedeviled by two substantial obstaclesthe logistical requirements of effective intervention and the perverse unintended consequences that result from moral hazard. Based on recent experience, the Responsibility to Protect not only often fails to achieve its goal of protecting at-risk civilians, but it may also unintentionally put others in danger.
The moral hazard comes with the expectation that the United States or another international body will intervene.
The most counter-intuitive aspect of the Responsibility to Protect is that it sometimes contributes to the tragedies that it intends to prevent. The root of the problem is that genocide and ethnic cleansing often represent state retaliation against a sub-state group for rebellion, or armed secession, by some of its members. The emerging norm, by raising hopes of diplomatic and military intervention to protect these groups, unintentionally fosters rebellion by lowering its expected cost and raising its likelihood of success. Intervention does sometimes help rebels attain their political goals, but it is usually too late or inadequate to avert retaliation against civilians. Thus, the emerging norm resembles an imperfect insurance policy against genocidal violence. It creates a moral hazard that encourages the excessively risky behavior of rebellion by members of groups that are vulnerable to genocidal retaliation, but it cannot fully protect these groups against the backlash. The emerging norm thereby causes some genocidal violence that otherwise would not occur.
Kuperman also discusses the logistical problems. Mobilizing a high-tech military requires time and genocidal violence or ethnic cleansing is often conducted in advance of American intervention. The posse arrives too late for exiled civilians. Kuperman cites the example of Bosnia’s Muslim leaders who calculated (correctly) that if they could provoke a violent response from the Yugoslav government, the international community was likely to intervene on their side. But before the United States could arrive, tens of thousands of fighters and civilians were already dead.
Similarly Albanian Muslims who had pursued a mostly-peaceful resistance in Kosovo, believed that if Serbian forces launched an attack on civilians, an international force would guarantee their eventual liberation. Albanian Muslims began attacking Serbian police and civilians. Serbians retaliated by killing nearly 1000 albanians. NATO’s intervention produced more violence at the start as Serbian forces stepped up their counter-offensive to include ethnic-cleansing, displacing almost a million Albanians and killing another 10,000. “Notably, the rate of violent death in Kosovo was roughly thirty times higher during the NATO bombing campaign than it had been during the year of conflict prior to intervention,” Kuperman reminds us.
The same logic of intervention helped to spur the Darfur rebellions in Sudan in 2003. The international community responded with humanitarian aid only, which naturally encouraged the rebels to create an even larger conflict in the hopes of achieving a larger intervention.
With “combat forces” withdrawing from Iraq, it seems that other ethnic or political minorities will make the same calculation that America’s ability to make peace gives them an assurance of victory in war, whatever it costs to the surrounding population.
By Michael Brendan Dougherty, on August 31st, 2010
Father Zuhlsdorf has made a pronouncement that Sancrosanctum Concilium, the famous Vatican II document on the Sacred Liturgy is wholly traditional, “wholly ours.”
Being a partisan of the old Latin Mass, I am glad that traditionally-minded Catholics are attempting to impose their meanings onto the document. But if we are to really reckon with what has happened to the Church in the last fifty years we should be clear. And I can’t read Sancrosanctum Concilium without believing that it authorized and most importantly it institutionalized the radical reform of the Roman liturgy we saw. And progressives to this day have a good case that the reforms we saw didn’t go far enough if the intention was to be faithful to the Council.
I would like Father Zuhlsdorf to justify his views at length. The first thing I notice about the document is the ambivalence. It is as if the document records the two sides of the debate while stacking the deck for the eventual winners. Article 36 says that the Latin language is to be preserved. But on the other hand it says that the use of the vernacular is to be expanded without mentioning any limitations on its use.
But in truth, the most important part of Article 36 is not just what it says, but what it institutionalizes. Namely “[I]t is for the competent territorial ecclesiastical authority mentioned . . . to decide whether, and to what extent, the vernacular language is to be used.”
Throughout Sancrosanctum Concilium we find that national “territorial ecclesiastical authorities” are empowered to alter the liturgy to fit whatever circumstances they deem exigent, and only later will these changes be confirmed by Holy See. I cannot come to any other conclusion but that Sacrosanctum Concilium created a vast decentralized (even democratic) liturgical bureaucracy.
It is desirable that the competent territorial ecclesiastical authority mentioned in Art. 22, 2, set up a liturgical commission, to be assisted by experts in liturgical science, sacred music, art and pastoral practice. So far as possible the commission should be aided by some kind of Institute for Pastoral Liturgy, consisting of persons who are eminent in these matters, and including laymen as circumstances suggest. Under the direction of the above-mentioned territorial ecclesiastical authority the commission is to regulate pastoral-liturgical action throughout the territory, and to promote studies and necessary experiments whenever there is question of adaptations to be proposed to the Apostolic See.
For the same reason every diocese is to have a commission on the sacred liturgy under the direction of the bishop, for promoting the liturgical apostolate.
Article 25 tells us “The liturgical books are to be revised as soon as possible; experts are to be employed on the task, and bishops are to be consulted, from various parts of the world.”
Exactly what experts are to be employed, and how great will their revisions be? We are not told. The only thing settled by the Council document itself is that the books will be revised by someone, norms will be governed by a new liturgical bureaucracy in every diocese, and after some time the bishops will ask for the Pope to ratify whatever the process has yielded.
These ecclesial and diocesan bodies were the mechanism by which the liturgical revolution was accomplished. And of course nearly all the changes were later approved by the Holy See, especially if these territorial authorities were persistent. The use of female altar servers, for instance.
From the text it seems that the mandate given by this document is practically limitless. Article 40.2 reads thus:
To ensure that adaptations may be made with all the circumspection which they demand, the Apostolic See will grant power to this same territorial ecclesiastical authority to permit and to direct, as the case requires, the necessary preliminary experiments over a determined period of time among certain groups suited for the purpose.
How can anyone come to the conclusion that Sancosanctum Concilium is conservative or traditional? The above text reduces Catholic worship and Catholic people to the status of a lab-animals. I don’t think Father Zuhlsdorf would ever countenance “experimentation” with the liturgy.
It is also notable that whatever pretend limitations on innovation were placed at the beginning of the document, it is clear that the authors were prepared for a whole revision not only of the prayers of the Mass, but for every aspect of the liturgy. See Article 128:
Along with the revision of the liturgical books, as laid down in Art. 25, there is to be an early revision of the canons and ecclesiastical statutes which govern the provision of material things involved in sacred worship. These laws refer especially to the worthy and well planned construction of sacred buildings, the shape and construction of altars, the nobility, placing, and safety of the eucharistic tabernacle, the dignity and suitability of the baptistery, the proper ordering of sacred images, embellishments, and vestments. Laws which seem less suited to the reformed liturgy are to be brought into harmony with it, or else abolished; and any which are helpful are to be retained if already in use, or introduced where they are lacking.
Nearly everything – including the shape and construction of altars and the placement of the tabernacle was put up for grabs. And once again, these revisions (whatever they will be!) were institutionalized even before they were proposed.
According to the norm of Art. 22 of this Constitution, the territorial bodies of bishops are empowered to adapt such things to the needs and customs of their different regions; this applies especially to the materials and form of sacred furnishings and vestments.
The bureaucracies intended to make the liturgical revolution permanent are beginning to lose their vigor. Now liturgical reform is beginning again by the mandate of Pope Benedict XVI and by a new set of Catholic associations he is empowering to institutionalize the traditional liturgy. For that we can be thankful.
I applaud Father Zuhlsdorf for all his efforts at helping Catholics to recover their liturgy. But we must begin to look at Vatican II as history instead of a robe of authority we must snatch. We must look at these documents with the same dispassion (even disregard) that we give to The Council of Vienne’s mind-numbing case agains the Knights Templar. They contain no canons. They claim no mandate from heaven.
Perhaps I come from a different generation. I do not obsess over Vatican II nor do I want to discover its true meaning with a handy post-hoc hermeneutic. The documents are either unclear (Dignitatis Humane), utterly unintelligible and frankly embarrassing (Gaudiem et Spes) or they worked as the authors apparently intended (Sacrosanctum Concilium) to our great misfortune. The whole generation of seminarians who were indoctrinated in the “implement the Council” mentality have left the Church, ended up in prison, or will be dying any moment now. We have a Church to restore; there is no need to exonerate those who, whatever their intentions, set about its destruction.
I mean, Gaudiem et Spes is good for a laugh. But the idea that the Church must pretend in the future that it is in some way important to Catholicism makes me want to weep.
By Michael Brendan Dougherty, on August 30th, 2010
Some people who watched my recent diavlog with the Rev. Chuck Currie were asking for me to extend my remarks, or at least clarify them. So let’s try that.
Mass immigration mostly benefits the upper middle class.
Yes, my thinking on that is pretty influenced by George Borjas. Borjas’ essay may be 14 years musty at this point, but the nature of America’s immigration crisis hasn’t changed in that time, it has simply gotten bigger.
As we have seen, the net gains from current immigration are small, so it is unlikely that these gains can play a crucial role in the policy debate. Economic research teaches a very valuable lesson: the economic impact of immigration is essentially distributional. Current immigration redistributes wealth from unskilled workers, whose wages are lowered by immigrants, to skilled workers and owners of companies that buy immigrants’ services, and from taxpayers who bear the burden of paying for the social services used by immigrants to consumers who use the goods and services produced by immigrants.
Distributional issues drive the political debate over many social policies, and immigration policy is no exception. The debate over immigration policy is not a debate over whether the entire country is made better off by immigration — the gains from immigration seem much too small, and could even be outweighed by the costs of providing increased social services. Immigration changes how the economic pie is sliced up — and this fact goes a long way toward explaining why the debate over how many and what kinds of immigrants to admit is best viewed as a tug-of-war between those who gain from immigration and those who lose from it.
Yes, the Know Nothings Burned Down the Catholic parish I attend, but I’ll defend them
My point here is that, loathsome as they could be, those who opposed the mass immigration of Catholics from Ireland (and Italy) were basically right to be alarmed. Two things destroyed the early 19th century version of small-r republicanism. The first was Jacksonian democracy and the gradual extension of the franchise. The second was mass immigration. The two combined to create Tammany Hall and other political machines that obviously corrupted the American experiment.
Secondly, anti-Catholics often better understood Papal encyclicals better than the average Catholic. If Catholics are to give even moral authority to the Pope, and the Pope was inveighing against “Americanism”, democracy, private judgement in religion, and the separation of Church and state – well, it isn’t difficult to imagine that some people feared the mass immigration of Catholics and their subsequent children might make the nation much more Catholic in those ways.
Lastly, many people, even the liberalized descendants of Know Nothings, still fear the effect of Catholics on our politics and use the same language about Pope Benedict XVI as was aimed at Pope Leo XIII. But instead of protecting democracy from the Pontiff’s criticism, they protect abortion rights.
Now there are plenty of historical complications to this. The same democratic passions that drove Tammany Hall were in the Know Nothings as well. And America was going to become a mass democracy whether Catholics immigrated or not. But Know Nothings correctly perceived that mass Catholic immigration was a danger to their interests. It seems uncontroversial to credit them with that much.
Hipster Christians (and I) are not that interested in the last 200 years of Biblical scholarship
Well, I was putting too fine a point on this. I own the New Jerome Biblical Commentary, so I’m more interested than people who fancy themselves experts after reading one Adam Gopnik essay. Mainly, what I meant to say is that Hipster Christians (and I), believe that certain strains of Biblical scholarship have been discredited or were fundamentally flawed from the beginning. If you build your historical-critical method on the principle of “double disqualification”, you have failed in our eyes, because it is unreasonable to believe that anything first century Jews or Christians said could not have also been said by the historical Jesus.
Also much of the “high scholarship” being developed in Germany and elsewhere over the last two centuries was plainly bonkers and contradictory. Read through Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God and you get a sense of how this “scholarship” revealed that Christ was forerunner of democracy, only to later discover that he was an Aryan Superman, etc. Or look at this candid essay from a historical Jesus scholar.
We should also ask what kind of scholarship are we talking about? If you are a conservative Bible-carrying Christian and believe that Jesus performed miracles, you are going to reject scholarship that assumes all the miracle stories are made-up propaganda.
By Michael Brendan Dougherty, on August 28th, 2010
I was kindly asked to speak about immigration and faith on Bloggingheads.tv The format was a little unfamiliar at first, so get used to watching me look down. Longtime fans may recognize the artwork floating behind me.
By Michael Brendan Dougherty, on August 23rd, 2010
Brian Doherty points out that Robert Kaplan has (tentatively) advanced the idea that America should get comfortable with the possibility of engaging in a totally reasonable, eminently realistic, exactingly limited nuclear war with Iran.
Kaplan advances this argument by conjuring up the ghost of the still-living Henry Kissinger, and concludes:
The search for certainty, he goes on, reduces us to dealing with emergencies, not preventing them. But for a democracy that needs to mobilize an entire population through patient argument in order to deploy troops for war—and, therefore, requires a good-versus-evil cause to ensure public support—limited wars, with their nuanced objectives, are far more challenging than all-out ones.
We must be more willing, not only to accept the prospect of limited war but, as Kissinger does in his book of a half century ago, to accept the prospect of a limited nuclear war between states.
[snip]
Yet much as limited war has brought us to grief, our willingness to wage it may one day save us from revolutionary powers that have cleverly obscured their intentions—Iran not least among them.
I think Kaplan is the one who should be called out for “cleverly obscured intentions”. It is rather obvious that Iran’s nuclear-development accelerated (along with North Korea’s) right as the president of the United States warned America about an “axis of evil.” What is obscure about that?
In any case, the other errors in these paragraphs are legion. Let’s take them by phrases.
Through patient argument. -By this Kaplan must mean when executive branch officials claim that the smoking gun may be a mushroom cloud, when they chant weapons of mass destruction, or claim to set a fire in the minds of men, that sort of patient argument. Because Americans tend to take the decision to go to war seriously, they prefer that a war have something to do with their own security. U.N. Resolution 1441 to the contrary, Americans responded to the idea that Saddam threatened them in some way. Exactly how he was going to deliver his incredibly well-hidden arsenal of death to Brooklyn or Jacksonville … well, leave that aside. Stories of human shredders and righteous allies merely add a little “good-guys vs. bad guys” juice. There are plenty of nations that Americans will consider “bad” but not care to invade.
Nuanced objectives -Translation: If all this seems unclear it’s because you are too stupid to understand it. War isn’t about pouring death and destruction on those who would threaten you with real harm, it is just a tool of global management. We don’t have to think of other nations as “evil”, just as suitable candidates for bombing.
Limited war -This has actually been a chimera in American foreign policy debates for a long time. Smart bombs, and advanced air-war tactics as used on behalf of the K.L.A. by the United States in 1999 were synonymous with the idea of a “limited” or “surgical” use of military forces.
Limited nuclear war -Somehow I doubt the destruction of buildings and infrastructure anywhere near the blast will be limited – after all, what’s the point then? And the radiation sickness for the people? Well, that isn’t really limited either. Is there any conceivable scenario in which this *limited nuclear war? would claim less than 8,000 innocent lives. In other words would it kill fewer people than the VRS did at Srebrenica, the massacre that made the Serbian militants into genocidaires?
Save us from revolutionary powers -How exactly does Iran threaten the United States? Apparently this doesn’t have to be argued.
By Michael Brendan Dougherty, on August 16th, 2010
In American Catholic parishes, the tension between the pews and the pulpit on immigration has been intense. Catholic bishops have argued for Comprehensive Reform with a generous amnesty or path to citizenship. But overwhelming majorities of Catholics have negative views of immigrants themselves and the immigration process. In a piece for the decidedly progressive (but independent-minded) Religion Dispatches, I tried to reconcile the two sides in the debate and suggest a way forward.
The status quo is untenable. The merciful position is not to treat illegal immigration with benign neglect. In this case neglect empowers those employers who would circumvent labor protection and employment laws by exploiting illegal immigrants. That same neglect empowers unscrupulous drug runners and coyotes across the border. It also disempowers those all over the world who would immigrate to America legally. Legal quoatas are unlikely to rise if immigration itself is associated with such disorder.
The orderly and just position is not denying family reunification to keep the numbers more manageable. When Pope Benedict visited the United States in 2008, he cautioned that the separation of families “is truly dangerous for the social, moral and human fabric.” Working male immigrants who live with almost no prospects for marriage or separated from their family are much more likely to fall into alchoholism and crime. And family life is the engine of assimilation over generations. Children of immigrants master the language, adopt the habits, acquire the historical memory and eventually inter-marry as they assimilate.
If we want Americans to be welcoming to immigrants, we have to work towards a fairer immigration system, one that isn’t the product of crime, exploitation, and neglect.
By Michael Brendan Dougherty, on August 16th, 2010
Ross Douthat has a smart column this week on how Islam is treated by red and blue America. The tensions were exposed by the nationwide scandal over the building of an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan, the supposed “Ground Zero Mosque.”
As Douthat explains it:
There’s an America where it doesn’t matter what language you speak, what god you worship, or how deep your New World roots run. An America where allegiance to the Constitution trumps ethnic differences, language barriers and religious divides. An America where the newest arrival to our shores is no less American than the ever-so-great granddaughter of the Pilgrims.
But there’s another America as well, one that understands itself as a distinctive culture, rather than just a set of political propositions. This America speaks English, not Spanish or Chinese or Arabic. It looks back to a particular religious heritage: Protestantism originally, and then a Judeo-Christian consensus that accommodated Jews and Catholics as well. It draws its social norms from the mores of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora — and it expects new arrivals to assimilate themselves to these norms, and quickly.
Douthat holds up these two approaches to new immigrants in dialectical tension, showing that in our history one side has made room for new arrivals, while the other has helped the new arrivals Americanize.
That’s all fine as far as it goes. But I think Douthat’s analysis misses something. During the Great Wave of Immigration, and until the 1965 Immigration Act, that second “cultural America” had plenty of elite representation and practical political power.
President Teddy Roosevelt denounced the habits of “hyphenated Americans”. The business community largely supported efforts of organized “Americanization.” And school boards resorted to techniques that would be laughed out of court today. They taught Catholic public school students from Protestant Bibles, for instance.
Today the engines of assimilation are pop-culture and public schools – but only in the form of peer-pressure. Islam has plenty of tools for resistance to these if Muslims wish to deploy them. All the assimilators have accomplished so far is creating media frenzy about the “Ground Zero Mosque”, one that increasingly makes them look paranoid. There are already mosques within a short distance of the Twin Towers site. The overwhelmingly Christian and conservative denizens who fear Muslim immigration and growth have few options for exerting strong influence over Muslims without inadvertently creating the legal and social tools that can be used to exert pressure on churches on issues like gay marriage and abortion. Muslim groups are often scrutinized for their funding and investments. But how many Christian Zionists would like their co-religionists audited if the tables were turned?
There was a time, just before September 11, 2001, that conservative Christian intellectuals viewed Muslims as potential allies in an “Ecumenical Jihad” against secularism. Those days are long gone now. I just don’t think that red America is able to play the historical role that Douthat believes is assigned to them. In fact, conservative Christians may be the least well-situated cohort to Americanize Muslims immigrants. They have little cultural power beyond getting guests on Fox News, they have even less influence in the schools. Any legal means they might use are either repugnant to them or to judges. Should we even bring up foreign policy?
By Michael Brendan Dougherty, on August 6th, 2010
I am in transit to my Jersey Shore vacation, but thought I’d leave the world with a provocation at The Awl.
Mel Gibson is a pretty bad guy it seems, but there’s no reason to let his faults ruin everything he did. And so, after many have come out to try and re-anathematize The Passion of the Christ, I try to salvage it. And I discover that Gibson is not the worst Catholic artist to have lived, and not the only one to let his demons into a portrait of Christ’s execution. There is Caravaggio, who put himself in The Taking of Christ. From the piece:
I don’t mean to suggest that Gibson’s artistic talents are equivalent. The Passion of the Christ fails artistically in several respects where The Taking excels. Gibson’s slow motion scenes fail to invoke the iconography they aspire to become, the piercing of Christ’s side looks cartoonish and the whole thing occasionally feels like a revenge film with the ending cut short. Gibson’s peculiar obsessions are evident in The Passion—his fascination with physical brutality and punishment, his stereotyping.
Still, from Gibson’s faults come many of the film’s merits. Its brutal violence provides a corrective to sappy “My Boyfriend, Jesus” Evangelicalism, while its horrifying and lightning-fast transformation of Palm Sunday’s worshipful crowd into a bloodthirsty mob is an indictment of mass enthusiasms and by extension mega-church piety. Its manly Christ and angry deity speak to God’s justice in a world that presumes on cheap mercy. Roger Ebert praised it for doing away with prayer-card sentimentality.
Read the whole thing.
By Michael Brendan Dougherty, on August 2nd, 2010
Roger Berkowitz has a very smart piece in the latest issue of Democracy on how Americans have given up on judging others and in turn given up on justice itself. He begins with the reluctance of media outlets to call torture what it is, but moves on to talk about how Bush was justified in calling Saddam Hussein an evil man, how the Robert’s Court gives up its responsibility, and even to address Clinton’s impeachment.
At the root of our problem with judgment is the undeniable victory of relativism over truth. Judgment requires, above all, what Kant called disinterestedness and what Arendt called enlarged mentality, seeing the question from another’s point of view. While it is singular, judgment is not mere personal taste or preference. To judge is to speak the truth, a truth that must always appeal to a common sense beyond one’s own prejudices. At a time when tolerance trumps truth, judgment’s claim to the truth leaves it vulnerable to mockery and derision.
[snip]
Finally, the retreat from judgment is a corollary of the overwhelming belief in equality that marks the modern era. Judgment, as thinkers like Arendt and Friedrich Nietzsche remind us, presupposes pride, or what once was called the dignity of man. Only one who believes oneself right can judge another; thus judgment presupposes a certain authority and superiority. The judge must possess a feeling of distinction, what Nietzsche called a “pathos of difference,” in order to arrogate to himself or herself the right to judge. Proffering reasons for one’s judgment—the mark of rational judgment in modern times—is a sure sign of weakness, an admission that one suffers from a feeling that he or she lacks the right to judge another. Since Justice Louis Brandeis first introduced social science evidence into legal opinions, judges have sought to buttress their judgments with rationalizations and empirical support intended to lend objective and scientific authority to particular judgments. But only one who is unsure of his or her right to judge feels the need to offer statistics, studies, and rationalizations to justify that judgment. It is precisely this arrogance of the judge that is increasingly absent in our age.
Read the whole thing. One could quibble with some of what he ays about the Robert’s Court. But his point that “agreements” have come to replace judgements in so many of the most important cases is extremely well-made.
While Berkowitz singles out liberals, I would point out that many conservatives, even religious conservatives have let their moral judgement atrophy as well. They have given up the concept of commandments, penance, and expiation in exchange for “values”. The replacement of moral duties with personal values creates a kind of buffer zone through which exacting judgements cannot pass from one human to the next. Every judgement related to these values becomes internal and therapeutic. Instead of failing to meet a moral standard outside of ourselves, we cease “to live up to our own values.” This thinking may also have a grotesque psychological effect on those who do wrong. A person may cheat on their wife, but their guilt is evidence of really having family values. In this view,you don’t owe fidelity to your spouse, you owe it to yourself. “Values” make us moral solipsists. Wrongdoing becomes the journey through which we find our inner (and we assume, true) goodness.
In any case, Berkowitz concludes:
Judgment offers the example of justice. In the act of judging, one does justice. Instead of moving on, negotiating a settlement, playing by the rules, or balancing interests, judgments enact justice in a way that is irreducible to rules or norms. The act of judgment, in other words, offers itself as an act of justice.
I would like to see Berkowitz extend his remarks beyond just judgement to punishment, which I believe is one source of the problem. If we lack the confidence to judge others, how much more would we shrink from inflicting punishment?
By Michael Brendan Dougherty, on July 29th, 2010
My friend Conor Friedersdorf comes dangerously close to violating the Dougherty Doctrine. You see, Mr. Friedersdorf is an unfailingly polite, open-minded, sympathetic, empathetic, irenic, well-mannered guy. An utterly non-self-aggrandizing, calming, unflappable, gentle man. And over at The Atlantic he notices how unpleasant are those partisans that lack his virtues.
But if you spend time talking politics with people who identify as hard core progressives or movement conservatives, you’ll find that a significant percentage believe their ideology would prevail more often if only their partisans were more angry, their attacks more pointed, their operatives more ruthless. This is most often expressed via the use of metaphors that draw on the language of war and fighting. Usually it doesn’t make any sense. In war, the victor kills as many folks as possible on the opposing side. Political winners persuade more people to join their coalition.
Mr. Friedersdorf goes on to produce examples of negative campaigning that failed or proved ineffective, as part of his argument that irenic persuasion of the sort Friedersdorf (and I) prefer is a winner politically.
Unfortunately, he’s wrong. Politics may not be about killing your opponents (at least here it isn’t), but it certainly isn’t about gently persuading them. Politics is often about humiliating, discrediting, and shaming people and their ideas. Only rarely or at the elite margins is this done with argument. The reason words like “fascist”, “bigot”, and “racist” are an everyday feature of our discourse is because they are powerful weapons for marginalizing and shaming people.
Continue reading The People Love to Hate
By Michael Brendan Dougherty, on July 29th, 2010
Lindsey Graham is probably one of the most loathsome men in the Senate. (Of course he has been recently hailed as a “New Maverick”) Anyway, Graham is making news today with his suddenly harsh ideas about illegal immigrants. From the Politico:
“I may introduce a constitutional amendment that changes the rules if you have a child here,” Graham said during an interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren. “Birthright citizenship I think is a mistake … We should change our Constitution and say if you come here illegally and you have a child, that child’s automatically not a citizen.”
Asked how intent Graham is on introducing the amendment, the South Carolina Republican responded: “I got to.”
“People come here to have babies,” he said. “They come here to drop a child. It’s called “drop and leave.” To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child’s automatically an American citizen. That shouldn’t be the case. That attracts people here for all the wrong reasons.”
Graham has come a long way in three years ago when he was one of the most vocal supporters of Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Back then he was winning awards from La Raza and grandly speechifying that “We’re going to tell the bigots to shut-up”. Now he is worrying about “baby dropping.”
Of course announcing your intention to draw up a high octane constitutional amendment is akin to announcing that you think voters are morons who enjoy passion-stirring gestures that effect nothing in real life. In this assumption, Graham is probably accurate. And of course it reveals the deep consistency between Graham’s 2007 and 2010 positions – Graham is a demagogue. But he talks slowly in his affected “aw-shucks your greens are the finest” patois, so he passes as a Maverick.
|
|
