~ 25 June 2009 ~

Family destruction as spectacle

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, p. 1

In the past two weeks, America has seen no fewer than three highly public announcements of family failure. Last week, it was Senator John Ensign’s admission of an extra-marital affair. Earlier this week, the media circus that is Jon & Kate Gosselin announced their divorce in cliff-hanger fashion on their TLC reality show. And if one thought it couldn’t get any more bizarre, enter Wednesday’s weird, rambling press conference by South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who revealed that his Appalachian Trail hiking trip had taken a South American detour into unfaithful territory.

What to make of all this? Well, Tolstoy was correct in one sense — the Ensign, Gosselin, and Sanford families’ situations are each filled with their own complexities. However, the way in which each went public has a lot to say about the current state of our national sensibilities.

Of the three announcements, Senator Ensign’s was handled most deftly. It was brief, to the point, and details were kept to a minimum. By no means should he be given kudos. This was a preemptive strike to control the message. Classic, by-the-book PR tactics.

Message: “I screwed up, but I told you about it before the media could, so the public should still trust me.”

The Gosselin divorce announcement probably deserves its own essay-length treatment, but to do so would in some ways be playing into its own grand media plan. Rather than give up the show in which everyone gives stuff to their family, they’ll press on (how could they evict the children from the set?). No, the Gosselins, who deplore everyone peering into their business (those evil paparazzi!), keep — as their business — everyone peering into their business. You can find out all about their divorce on their show — every Monday at 9pm EST on TLC, and, by the way, you should also buy some Crooked Houses® and any other of the many fine products the Gosselin family gets for free.

Message: “We’re doing all this so our kids can see the videos and remember, as our family’s brains can only process events that happen on TV. Even if the marriage can’t, the show must go on.”

Finally, Gov. Sanford. Presidential hopeful, conservative stalwart in public if not so much in private. The staggering detail he gave at the presser, along with the fact that he accepted questions from the media shows that he is a fool in love (lust?) who threw caution to the Argentine wind long ago. Sanford knows that publicly, he is a dead man walking, and he doesn’t care.

Message: “I’m just gonna throw it all out there. Even if you don’t ask about it, I’ll tell you. My political career is toast, my wife kicked me out, so if I can make you all understand that it’s all about ‘that spark’ one gets with a dear, dear friend — maybe y’all won’t hate me so much.”

Spectacle like the above only fuels the fire of cynicism at the ebb and flow of our national conversation. Whence humility?

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~ 23 June 2009 ~

The great humanitarian scandal

The current financial crisis elicits explanations, excuses, and blame from the full breadth of the political spectrum. There are no shortages of would-be saviors to our pallid pocketbooks, and none loom as large as government–sponsored humanitarianism. It’s a view in which the gap between the rich and poor, widened by the abuse of power, must be eradicated by government’s strong hand. Well-meaning humanitarianism is fraught with many dangers, and Herbert Schlossberg’s description of what it really does to us still applies today:

It exalts categories of weakness, sickness, helplessness, and anguish into virtues while it debases the strong and prosperous. In the country of ontological victimhood, strength is an affront. Denying the possibility of strength for the weak keeps them weak. Being freed from dependence would bring the victim back into the human family, responsible for himself and others. How much better to remain a victim, shielded from trouble and responsibility by altruism. Imposing a load of false guilt on the strong, ressentiment elicits a countering resentment that blinds them to the need of repentance for their real sins. Both poor and rich need to be made whole, but nobody can be made whole with a humanitarian understanding of his life. Poor and rich need to be reconciled, but altruism accentuates the self-righteous hypocrisies of both.

(Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, p.70)

Times like ours are ripe for making weakness into a virtue. The problem with this, of course, is that if weaknesses are seen as virtues, they have little need to be overcome.

Weakness should be seen as something to dispense of in favor of growing stronger, but the humanitarian impulse thrives upon weakness and is out of a job without it. In light of so many Americans being out of jobs themselves, we would do well not to feed the humanitarian monster. Blessed are the poor, indeed. But if poverty was really virtuous, the poor wouldn’t need blessing, would they? Better to strengthen through struggle than to keep down through luxury.

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~ 22 June 2009 ~

The changing meaning of hate

Swift on the heels of the new definition of tolerance, the meaning of hate is being slowly eroded by the tides of cultural abuse.

Take, for example, this recent report in the San Francisco Chronicle (emphasis mine):

In papers filed Thursday night in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s office argued that Proposition 8 was motivated by hatred of gays and lesbians and violates their constitutional right to be free of discrimination.

Although sponsors of the November ballot measure said they were trying to promote traditional marriage and protect children, “excluding same-sex couples from marriage does nothing to advance those goals,” Chief Deputy City Attorney Therese Stewart said in the 49-page brief.

Prop. 8’s “real aim (was) harming gays and lesbians and expressing moral disapproval of them,” Stewart said.

Clearly here “hatred” is equated with “moral disapproval.” Don’t get me wrong, moral disapproval can certainly be present alongside hatred. The problem is that hate and moral disapproval are mutually exclusive. Moral disapproval can exist without hate (I morally disapprove of people using “Jesus” as a curse word, and might even ask them to refrain, but that doesn’t mean I hate them). Likewise, hate can exist without moral disapproval (think of hatred caused by envy).

The irony created here by the abuse of the term is thick. While condemning Californians who supported Prop. 8 as acting out of hatred, the plaintiffs are expressing moral disapproval at their actions. A move which could — if their own advice be taken — be labeled as hatred. Go figure.

If hate is diluted to the point of simply meaning mere moral disapproval, the true, more dangerous nature of hatred is masked. Better the biblical take on hatred, which allows for moral disapproval while keeping hatred at bay:

You shall not hate your fellow countryman in your heart; you may surely reprove your neighbor, but shall not incur sin because of him. (Leviticus 19:17, NASB)

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~ 29 May 2009 ~

Fast food presidents: Obama is a Five Guys guy

President Obama’s visit today to Five Guys in D.C. (a favorite of my own, when I’m in an artery-clogging kind of mood) likely made some burger-flippers happy and some Secret Service officers nervous:

But I couldn’t help remembering this all-too-realistic portrayal of another fast-food president:

White House food must be really bad…

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~ 28 May 2009 ~

What’s next, Putin on Facebook?

Looks like President Obama should give some serious consideration to missile defense, because the cold war isn’t over — the Russians have now discovered the internet:

One of the Kremlin’s pet new media projects has been a site called liberty.ru. It’s been set up under the auspices of the Fund for Effective Politics, a think-tank headed by Gleb Pavlovsky, who has been instrumental in shaping the Russian ideology of the last decade. The official objective of liberty.ru — as articulated by Pavlovsky — has been to tap into the immense creativity of the Russian internet users and involve them in producing ideas that could make Kremlin’s increasingly unappealing ideological package relevant to the younger generations. Liberty.ru was meant to become something like Russia’s DailyKos or Talking Points Memo.

Move over Huffington Post, a new bastion of the political left is about to take charge…

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~ 22 May 2009 ~

Leon Kass’s grand tour of humanity

Last night’s 2009 National Endowment for the Humanities Lecture with Leon Kass was, unsurprisingly, superb. Kass, who among other things assembled the first President’s Council on Bioethics, is the epitome of a renaissance man due to his diverse background of study, gave a lecture entitled, “Searching for an Honest Man: Reflections of an Unlicensed Humanist.”

The lecture followed the motif of the Greek philosopher Diogenes, who walked the streets endlessly with a lantern “looking for an honest man.” Kass notes that what Diogenes is really looking for is better translated as a “true human being.” The search for the true human being — and just what it means to be a human being — made up the bulk of the lecture.

Like Harvey Mansfield’s Jefferson lecture two years before, Kass noted that modern science has — to its fault — abdicated the humanities. No longer does medicine look at health, but to emerging technologies. Modern science looks intricately at the parts, but often fails to observe the whole. It can describe what chemical processes take place in the eye for vision to occur, but it cannot explain “seeing.” The humanities are needed for such endeavors — and they are likewise needed when dealing with decisions that involve whole human beings.

Kass has found progress in his own search for the true human in sources such as the Aristotelian view of the soul, the Hebrew Bible, and through books and companions along the way. Kass, more so than many other public intellectuals, is on the right track in viewing humanity as the sum of its parts, a unified psyche and soma.

The only thing that I might add (if I dare!) to Kass’s grand tour of true humanity is to note the Christian view of true humanity’s culmination — namely the True Human Being: Jesus of Nazareth. Fully God, Jesus was the true human being — the only human who was and is fully human.

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~ 25 April 2009 ~

Six years at the blog

Wow. My calendar tells me that today marks the sixth year of this blog’s existence. Postings are hard to come by these days, but none are more fun to write than ones like the post that preceded this one.

Six years ago I began blogging as an experiment. Almost nobody I knew had the faintest idea what a “blog” was (some speculated that it was something that came out of your nose, but no one could be sure…). It was over a year before I ever met another blogger in person. Nowadays, it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t have a blog.

The lights aren’t always on here around TruePravda, but believe it or not, someone is still home (the archives are full of rusty treasures). Who knows? Perhaps I’ll come up from the basement and visit a little more in the near future…

In the meantime, thanks for reading.

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~ 13 April 2009 ~

Welcome to the world…

Lucy J Bridges

Lucy J. Bridges made her entrance this morning weighing in at 6lbs., 9oz. and 19 3/4″ long. I’m in love once again.

Praises to God for his handiwork.

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~ 16 March 2009 ~

History, principle, and the now

D.A. Carson on the value of Christians continually appealing to the notion that America was founded on Christian principles:

In the long haul, Christians have to appeal farther back than to the middle of the eighteenth century — to the Scriptures themselves, and the events to which they attest — and think through to where we are today and will be tomorrow.  To learn from history is one thing; to make constant appeal to yesteryear is to support rather too much of the nostalgic and rather too little of the prophetic.  [Christ and Culture Revisited, p. 210]

The danger, of course, to appeals like this, is that at some point the opposition says, “So what? We’re changing things now.”  When a people refuses to care about history, what our founding fathers may or may not have believed matters little.

Every position should stand on its own merits now.  History should inform us — as it’s always difficult to judge the now as it happens — but it should never be the central plank in our efforts to speak for a better society.

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~ 11 March 2009 ~

Sanity, sin and evil

The Alabama shooting, like the Virginia Tech massacre before it, is sure to unleash a wave of speculation about what drove the troubled young Michael McLendon to do what he did.  Even this morning on my commute, I overheard a discussion of the killing spree in which one fellow conceded, “Since he killed that many people, it just can’t be evil — he must have been insane.”

That insanity can and should be a legal defense I do not dispute.  It is, of course, too often misapplied and abused to let murderers off the hook, but the insanity defense should not be discarded.  A person lacking control of his sense of reality should not be held to the same legal culpability as someone who possesses his full mental faculties.  The problem with my fellow commuter’s view is that while sanity may have much to do with a legal defense, it has little to do with whether or not an act is evil.

Evil is often irrespective of its object.  The Hebrews knew this concept well. The predominant Hebrew term for evil in the Old Testament (raa) has a range of meaning from everything to natural disasters and calamity, to human acts of violence.  The word is introduced in Genesis 2:9 with respect to the tree from which the man and the woman were not to eat. In Genesis 39:9, Joseph speaks of adultery with Potiphar’s wife as a “great evil.” The narrator of Job even tells us that Yahweh himself had brought evil upon Job [Job 42:11], and 1 Samuel 16:14 speaks of an “evil spirit” sent from Yahweh.  God is of course not himself evil, but in these instances he providentially wields evil for his purposes.

It follows that evil does not equal sin, but it does, however, have a strong relationship with sin.  Sin is always an evil action, but all evil forces, though always unpleasant, are not necessarily sinful.  Evil existed on the tree and with the serpent before Adam and Eve premiered the first sin. Sin lives, thrives, and is born where evil meets humanity.

Whether or not Michael McLendon was legally insane, we may never know.  What we do know is that insane or not, his actions were indeed evil, and evil is at work in the world.  The Apostle John reminded us long ago that “whole world lies in the power of the evil one“  — a fact that should make us all tremble, since we are all just as prone to be caught up and turned by evil.

Thankfully John also reminds us that if we are born of God, we have a Protector who can keep us from evil.  Without Him, nothing stands between us and evil.  God help us all.

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