The gracious jealousy of God

You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? But he gives more grace. Therefore it says,
“God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

—James 4:4-6 (ESV)

Literally, James roars, “You adulteresses!” This is the language of Hosea, of Israel as God’s adulterous wife; it’s the same language Paul draws on when he calls the church the bride of Christ. It’s language that makes clear that God isn’t just after religious observance when he saves us and calls us to be his people—a point too many in Israel never understood. It’s not enough just to give God an hour or two a week, especially if we grudge him the last fifteen or twenty minutes; it’s not enough just to show up and go through the motions. What God wants from us is what he offers us: love, loyalty, commitment, faithfulness. He invites us, in Christ, to be not just his servants but his friends; what he wants is for us to respond accordingly.

That’s why James compares this to the highest form of friendship we know on Earth: the marriage relationship. If you’re married to someone, that person is supposed to be your first priority ahead of all other people and all other things. What God claims is that first place in our hearts and in our lives, ahead of all other people—even husbands and wives. If anyone or anything else draws our hearts away from him, that’s spiritual adultery; that’s idolatry, and it makes us an enemy of God.

This is why verse 5 reminds us of a common biblical theme: God is jealous for his people. He is the one who created us and breathed life into us; he is the one who made us spiritual beings, not merely animals, capable of consciously knowing and loving him and being his friends, not merely his adoring servants. He has given us every gift and every good thing we have, and created our capacity for joy and pleasure. He wants our absolute allegiance ahead of all others—he wants to be our unquestioned and unquestionable top priority—and he has every right to expect that from us.

The thing is, of course, we can’t meet his expectations on our own; our love, our loyalty, our faithfulness, our commitment, just aren’t up to that standard. That’s why James follows up by saying, “But he gives more grace.” God by his grace enables us to do in his power what we cannot do on our own. He gives us the faith we need to please him, and the wisdom to live out that faith day by day in the works that demonstrate and realize our faith and bring it to life; he gives us his love, that we may learn to love him, and to love each other, as he loves us. He frees us from slavery to our desires, from the bottomless hunger for more of things that cannot possibly satisfy, and gives us his peace by teaching us to find our satisfaction in him.

All that he asks is that we draw near to him and submit ourselves to him—that we accept his will for our lives and his way rather than insisting on our own. That’s why Proverbs 3 says, as James quotes, that God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Pride, at its core, is insisting on our own primacy, that we are first in our own lives and should be first in the lives of others; it is the attitude of active resistance to the claims of God in our lives. As such, it’s also the act of denying that we need his grace—for why would we need his grace to meet expectations which we refuse to accept? Pride tells us that we’re good enough already, and that anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about and has no right to say so. God opposes the proud because pride is, in its very essence, opposed to him—and unlike some politicians, he recognizes essential opposition when he sees it. He gives grace to the humble because the humble are those who are wise enough to know they need grace.

(Excerpted, edited, from “Choose Your Side”)

Sarah Palin, authentic feminist

There’s been a fair bit of commentary since Gov. Palin’s abrupt arrival on the national scene about whether or not she’s a feminist (or even, on the part of certain wack jobs, whether or not she really qualifies as a woman); she’s never been shy about saying she is, while of course folks on the Left have coronaries at the idea and denounce her as a traitor to her gender. Why? Well, abortion of course is the key issue, but more specifically, William Jacobson was right to point out that the nubbin of the Left's hatred of Gov. Palin comes down to four little words: Trig Paxson Van Palin.

If Sarah Palin had aborted Trig, the left would have been okay with it. If she hid Trig offstage and out of sight, all would be good. But treat the child as you would any other child, and that cannot be tolerated.

There is something about a Down syndrome child in plain view which has exposed the moral and emotional bankruptcy of the left-wing of the Democratic party. And they hate Sarah Palin because deep down, they hate themselves for being who they are.

The modern leftist-feminist orthodoxy is completely sold out to the abortion industry, and so cannot tolerate the suggestion that Sarah Palin, pro-life mother of a Down Syndrome baby, could possibly be considered a feminist; and so the discussion of her feminist views has raged on. Notably absent in the conversation has been much of a deep historical perspective on the meaning and essence of feminism.

Fortunately, that has now changed, courtesy of a young woman named Jedediah Bila, who is actually a scholar of feminism. In an essay published in six parts entitled “I’m a Feminist. Now What?” (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6), she writes on “Authentic Feminism: The Founders, The Distortions, and An Exemplary Modern Icon”—that modern icon being, quite rightly, Gov. Palin. Don't let the number of parts fool you, it’s really not all that long a piece; indeed, my only real complaint with it is that it’s broken up so many times without proper internal linkage. If you’re not an historian or a history buff, you’ll learn a lot from it—and even if you are, you’ll still learn a fair bit, because Bila is thoroughly steeped in her subject. I certainly did (though my area of knowledge is much more 17th-c. America than 19th-c.).

Of particular interest and importance is Bila’s point that the founders of feminism were united by, among other things, “their harmonious, fervent opposition to abortion.”

In her publication The Revolution, Susan B. Anthony states: “. . . Yes. No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death…” In the very same publication, Elizabeth Cady Stanton affirms, “When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.” In Woodhull’s and Claflin’s Weekly, Victoria Woodhull asserts, “The rights of children as individuals begin while yet they remain the foetus.” Alice Paul’s assertion that “Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women” has long been echoed by modern pro-life activists, and our “mother of feminism,” Mary Wollstonecraft’s doctrine with respect to abortion is clearly reflected through her Vindication, leaving little open to interpretation: “Women becoming, consequently weaker in mind and body, than they ought to be . . . either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast it off when born. Nature in everything demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom violate them with impunity.” . . .

So ultimately, what do we have here? We have a founding movement in which women devoted their days and nights to the acquisition of women’s rights, systematically struggled for the application of Rousseau’s Enlightenment fundamentals to both genders, and maintained that a woman’s choice of abortion reflected a weakness she’d come to inhabit (thanks to exploitation, sexual objectification, and a society that repeatedly indoctrinates women with the notion that abortion is their ticket to liberty). Who, in our current political society—more specifically, what woman—most closely echoes the convictions of these very brave, never forgotten heroes of herstory?

With that question, as you can probably guess, Bila comes to Gov. Palin. She lays out the significance of Gov. Palin’s membership in Feminists for Life, giving a brief history of that organization, which was founded in fairly early resistance to the hijacking of the feminist movement by the population-control/eugenics movement. She then exposes (and nicely fisks) some of the irrational and unhinged vitriol that’s been spewed at Gov. Palin by many on the Left who consider themselves feminists. In so doing, she sets up a telling contrast between the founders of American feminism and those who claim to be carrying their banner now—a contrast that does not flatter Gov. Palin’s hysterical critics. And then, magnificently, Bila closes with this:

So what does all of this mean for women, for feminism, and for the future of our country? Upon revisiting Sarah Palin’s statement that, “I am a feminist, whatever that means,” I can’t help but wonder if I’d have said the same thing. After all, what does it mean these days? Does it mean that one must condone abortion? Has a movement whose birth was so profoundly inspirational, whose leaders possessed uplifting intellectual and moral fortitude, been reduced to a single-issue agenda? Does it mean that a pro-life woman will be labeled an anti-feminist simply by nature of her pro-life ideology, which happens to be directly in line with that of the founding feminists? . . .

I can only hope in the months and years to come that women of all walks of life, of all parties and families, of all economic and social classes, take a moment to revisit what so many courageous women risked their reputations, their comfort, and sometimes their lives, to fight for. I pray that they see to it that the authenticity of their purpose and selfless beauty of their vision remain unscathed by the countless revisionists determined to corrupt that pure, righteous movement to suit their party or personal platforms.

Sarah Palin, I stand by your belief in women. I stand by your faith in the magnanimous potential of all human life. And, most importantly, I stand by your Wollstonecraftian integrity and unapologetic homage to the foundations of one of the greatest movements to grace our country’s history.

Through her essay, Bila offers and substantiates a pointed assertion, one that will no doubt infuriate the Left: the true representatives of authentic feminism are not the likes of Gloria Steinem. Rather, they are Sarah Palin and those who stand with her. She is the true heir of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the one who carries their mantle. My thanks to Jedediah Bila for making the case, and for substantiating the fact that when Gov. Palin calls herself a feminist, she’s only telling the truth.

(Cross-posted from Conservatives4Palin)

Sarah Palin's second act

This is not something I would have expected to find in the Washington Post:

He was called a dumb actor—a mere mouthpiece for wealthy controllers on the right, who fed him lines and pointed him toward a lectern to deliver them. He communicated well and knew how to act the part, having trained in those arts. But he was really an empty suit.

Today, many rank that man—Ronald Reagan—among our greatest presidents.

That he was not the derogatory things he had been called was a matter of record. Well before running for the presidency he had wedded himself to the core ideas he espoused in that office—anticommunism, smaller government and lower taxes. For years, he had spoken and written about them. Yet, even some who served in Reagan's administration were surprised when, in his twilight years, the treasure trove of documents in his own hand emerged, demonstrating his long involvement with these issues.

Now, Sarah Palin faces a similar challenge. . . .

Supposedly, there are no second acts in American life. But history refutes that notion. Presidential candidates who have lost earlier races, including Reagan, have returned victorious. Americans love an underdog—especially one they suspect was treated unfairly.

Sarah Palin may fit that bill.

Palin's activities indicate that she intends to remain in public life. There are signs that her viability remains strong. That her new book is ranked among Amazon's bestsellers, even before its publication later this month, reflects that Palin still commands interest.

To strengthen her viability, Palin must seize this momentum and mobilize her supporters. Developing and espousing a small set of conservative values that become her "brand"—as did Reagan—will be critical. She has time.

The chap who wrote that, Darryl Jackson, is a former federal prosecutor and assistant secretary of commerce who's competing for a slot as a columnist with the Post. As such, I have to salute his courage here, because this isn't the sort of thing that newspaper's readers generally want to hear; it didn't impress the judges, either (though they had some valid criticisms of Jackson's writing style). Even so, he has a point: those who thought they'd buried Gov. Palin—and who are now whacking her with spades trying to get her to cooperate and stay dead—did so far too prematurely to be credible.

Fisking the DNC

Last week the DNC released a rather oddly-timed attack ad against Sarah Palin, going after statements she made some time ago about the Democrats' plans to take over our national health care system. Not being ones to let such things go unnecessarily unchallenged, Conservatives4Palin decided to fact-check the DNC. Here's what Sheya and the rest of my honored colleagues who took up that task discovered:

Great fun from xkcd

Click on the image to see it full-sized.

The 2008 campaign as "reality TV"

Looking back through my archives for something else, I ran across this piece from Dr. Violet Socks that I'd intended to post some time ago. Apparently, I managed to forget about it, which even for me is a bit on the absent-minded side. It's a few months old now, but I think it's still worth posting as a feminist perspective on Sarah Palin. Dr. Socks is hard-left, strongly pro-abortion and strongly anti-Christian; she's also as fair-minded as you can reasonably expect anyone to be, and recognizes the horrible irony of those who call themselves feminists trying to destroy one of this country's leading female politicians. It's a great post, and I encourage you to go read it; Dr. Socks gets off some beautiful observations about Barack Obama and the media caricatures of the last campaign:

[Gov. Palin's] speech also delivered some welcome punctures to the national gasbag known as Obama. And that’s another thing: it has not escaped my attention that many of the things Palin is accused of, falsely, are actually true of Obama. This is a guy who, as a U.S. senator from Illinois, didn’t even know which Senate committees he was on or which states bordered his own. (And don’t even get me started on Joe “The Talking Donkey” Biden, who thinks FDR was president during the stock market crash and that people watched TV in those days.) I’m not saying Obama’s a moron, but he’s sure as hell no genius. People say Sarah Palin rambles; excuse me, but have you actually heard Obama speak extemporaneously? As for being a diva, surely we all remember the Possomus sign and the special embroidered pillow on the Obama campaign plane. The fact is, Obama is an intellectually mediocre narcissist with a thin resume who’s lost without a teleprompter and whose entire campaign had all the substance and gravity of a Pepsi commercial. Yet people say Sarah Palin is a fluffy bunny diva.

So: are we back to Obama after all? Is this a transference thing? Are people subconsciously frustrated by the fact that Obama is an empty suit, and are they transferring that rage to Palin? . . .

One other observation, and then I’ll quit: it is striking to me how much of the political discourse in 2008 revolved around people who don’t exist. The main players last year, if you recall, were Obama, the genius messiah whose perfection and purity would save the planet; Hillary, the evil racist lesbian who killed Vince Foster with her bare hands before plotting the Iraqi invasion and then attempting to have Obama assassinated; and Sarah Palin, a crazed dominionist who hates polar bears and personally arranges for Christian girls to be raped by their fathers just so she can charge them for their rape kits.

None of these characters are real, of course. Yet, weirdly, people were much more interested in these fictional beings than they were in the real individuals who were vying for political office last year. There were times in 2008 where I felt that the entire national discourse had become one of those scripted faux-reality shows, where nothing is real and the producers edit everybody into barking stereotypes. And the people at home just watch and point and snicker. We’re actually having an election here, I kept wanting to say. These are the people who want to run the country. Don’t you want to know who they really are?

We are all New Yorkers now

Writing in American Thinker, C. Edmund Wright makes a point about the NY-23 race that I hadn't considered:

That we all know—let alone care—about the goings-on in New York's 23rd Congressional District speaks volumes about how far away from our founding principles we have drifted. We should not know or care about NY 23 under our founding model, but make no mistake: we do know. We do care. We have drifted a long way.

His argument is essentially that the explosive growth of government over the past century and more has broken the practical and philosophical foundation and justification of that government.

The idea—quaint as it sounds now—is that any problem you might have with a tiny government could be solved by simply sitting down with some local citizen legislator and working it out. Think Mayberry, where you could hash anything out with Andy, Barney, and the mayor at Floyd's Barbershop.

If that didn't work, you could simply run for office in a fair fight in a couple years. The incumbent would probably have tired of government "service" by then anyway. What a process!

The Feds? Oh, they were just a few guys to handle the Barbary Pirates and such. The idea was that you could live your life and never have to see, let alone deal with, anyone from a strong centralized government if you chose not to. You sent them a few bucks to fund the military each year and everything was fine. Thus the once-true cliché: all politics are local.

Now, as he points out, that's no longer true:

Most of the key people who are pushing this health care legislation are extreme liberals from parts of the country that will never fail to reelect them. The vast majority of the people they will affect, however, have no say in whether or not they get reelected.

This allows them to stay in the halls of power for so long that they accumulate power over years and years of simply being in Washington. Thus, the longer they are isolated from reality, the more power they have to change reality. Gee, what could go wrong with that scenario?

And this is exactly what our Founding Fathers did not want. King George was 5,000 miles away geographically, and even farther apart experientially from the colonies. Our country was founded precisely because the British model was deemed so unworkable and evil that it demanded we spill blood and treasure to stop it. Among the war cries were "Don't Tread on Me" and "No Taxation Without Representation." . . .

Consider that Barney Frank and Charlie Rangel can heap oppressive taxation on hundreds of millions of us, yet we have no say in their "representation" status. In Rangel's case, he casually avoids living under those same tax rules. Now I consider this a slight violation of that "Don't Tread on Me" concept.

The logical consequence of that is that the old cliché is inverted, and now all politics is national; the race in New York's 23rd Congressional District will affect the whole country, and thus we all have a stake in it, far beyond the folks who can actually vote there. Which, I agree with Wright, is not the way this ought to work. Read the whole thing—he's on to something important here.

In praise of humility

There's a fascinating piece up on Time's front page entitled, "The Case for Modesty, in an Age of Arrogance," by one Nancy Gibbs. Gibbs begins,

Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny. But some virtues go dormant for generations, as we've seen with thrift, making its comeback after 40 years in cold storage. I'm hoping for a sudden outbreak of modesty, a virtue whose time has surely come.

In truth, what she really wants to talk about is not modesty but humility (which, as she notes, can be practiced in many ways: "Try taking up golf. Or making your own bagels. Or raising a teenager"); but I don't have a problem with that, especially as she has good things to say about humility and its importance.

Modesty in private life is attractive, but in public life it is essential, especially now, when those who immodestly claimed to Know It All have Wiped Us Out. The problems we face are too fierce to accommodate arrogance. Humility leaves room for complexity, honors honest dissent, welcomes the outlandish idea that sweeps past ideology and feeds invention. We want to reimagine the health-care system, confront climate change, save our kids from a financial avalanche? The odds are much better if we come to the table assuming we don't already have all the answers. . . .

Humility and modesty need not be weakness or servility; they can be marks of strength, the courage to confront a challenge knowing that the outcome is in doubt. Ronald Reagan, for all his cold-warrior confidence, projected a personal modesty that served his political agenda well. I still don't know what President Obama's core principles are, but the fact that he even pays lip service to humility as one of them could give him the upper hand in the war for the souls of independents—a group that's larger now than at any time in the past 70 years. . . .

But I heed Jane Austen's warning that "nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast." If Obama appears proud of how humble and open-minded he is, if he demonizes opponents instead of debating them, if his actual choices are quietly ideological while his rhetoric flamboyantly inclusive, he will be missing a great opportunity—and have much to be modest about.

Interesting closing comment, that.

On this blog in history: April 29-30, 2008

Humble knowledge
It’s important to remember our limitations.

The relevance of liturgy
We tend to misdefine relevance.

The God who speaks
“God is always speaking to us, and all of life is the medium through which he speaks.”

Pretzelbyterianism
Or, how to tie yourself in a logical knot to avoid reaching a conclusion you don’t want to reach.

Happy Reformation Day!

Timothy George has an excellent piece on Reformation Day posted as the daily article on First Things—a juxtaposition which, I must confess, delights me no end. I particularly appreciate these paragraphs:

On this Reformation Day, it is good to remember that Martin Luther belongs to the entire Church, not only to Lutherans and Protestants, just as Thomas Aquinas is a treasury of Christian wisdom for faithful believers of all denominations, not simply for Dominicans and Catholics. This point was recognized several weeks ago by Franz-Josef Bode, the Catholic Bishop of Osnabrück in northern Germany, when he preached on Luther at an ecumenical service. “It’s fascinating,” he said, “just how radically Luther puts God at the center.” Luther’s teaching that every human being at every moment of life stands absolutely coram deo—before God, confronted face-to-face by God—led him to confront the major misunderstanding in the church of his day that grace and forgiveness of sins could be bought and sold like wares in the market. “The focus on Christ, the Bible and the authentic Word are things that we as the Catholic church today can only underline,” Bode said. The bishop’s views have been echoed by many other Catholic theologians since the Second Vatican Council as Luther’s teachings, especially his esteem for the Word of God, has come to be appreciated in a way that would have been unthinkable a century ago. . . .

Several years ago I was asked to endorse a book by my friend Mark Noll called Is the Reformation Over? I responded by saying that the Reformation is over only to the extent that it succeeded. In fact, in some measure, the Reformation has succeeded, and more within the Catholic Church than in certain sectors of the Protestant world. The triumph of grace in the theology of Luther was—and still is—in the service of the whole Body of Christ. Luther was not without his warts, and we can hardly imagine him canonized as a saint. (Remember: simul iustus et peccator!) But the question Karl Barth asked about him in 1933 is still worth pondering this Reformation Day: “What else was Luther than a teacher of the Christian church whom one can hardly celebrate in any other way but to listen to him?”

Right on.

Happy Hallowe’en!

Yeah, I’ve heard all the arguments about why Christians shouldn’t celebrate Hallowe’en; I used to be one of those making them. I don’t anymore, though I do still think that one should be very careful about how one celebrates it. (A couple pre-teens came by the house this evening dressed as, I think, the villain from the Saw movies; that is deeply not right.) Though I do not share her Catholic assumptions, I think Sally Thomas’ recent article on the First Things website, “The Drama of Hallowmas,” captures some important truths:

As a friend of mine observed recently, there is something medieval about Halloween. The masks, the running around in the dark, the flicker of candles in pumpkins, the smell of leaves and cold air—all of it feels ancient, even primal, somehow. Despite the now-inevitable preponderance of media-inspired costumes, Halloween seems, in execution, far closer to a Last Judgment scene above a medieval church door, or to a mystery play, than it does to Wal-Mart. To step outside on Halloween dressed as someone—or something—other than yourself is to step into a narrative that acknowledges that the membrane between our workaday, material world and the unseen realm of spirits is far thinner and more permeable than many of us like to think. . . .

The secular commercialization of Halloween bothers people far less than do its roots in the pagan Celtic festival of Samhain, which the Romans, after the conquest of Britain, eventually conflated with their own Feralia, a feast honoring the dead. When, in the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV instituted the feast of All Saints, to fall on the first of November, the eve of that solemnity coincided with the date of the ancient festival. The addition of the feast of All Souls in the eleventh century completed the three-day Hallowmas, dedicated to the memory of the Christian martyrs and honoring all the faithful departed.

The absorption of pre-Christian cultic observance into the Christian calendar is not limited, of course, to holidays dealing with darkness and death. The Church settled on the date for Christmas by much the same process. Halloween’s emphasis on darkness makes many Christians squeamish, but, to my mind, what my friend observed about the medieval feel of Halloween is more on the money. There is a drama to be played out, like a mystery play in three scenes, and it makes sense only if you observe all three days of Hallowmas—not only Halloween but All Saints’ and All Souls’ days as well. In this context, the very secularity and even the roots-level paganism of Halloween become crucial elements in a larger Christian story.

I think she’s on to something there. As my wife writes, reflecting on this,

While I don’t think that God needed us—or wanted us—to sin in order to tell his story, the fact remains that we DID sin. The world in which we live has darkness and sin and death and shadow. It is what we know and understand and in order to tell ourselves the story of redemption—of rescue from the darkness—one must necessarily start with the darkness. Maybe Halloween, from a Christian point of view, isn't such a bad place to do that.

It seems to me that a lot of the Christian opposition to Hallowe’en is based on a desire not to start with the darkness, not to have to deal straight out with sin and evil and death. Which is understandable—but not, in the end, helpful. I think Thomas points to a better way. I can’t simply appropriate it, not being Catholic, since that means I don’t celebrate All Saints’ Day or relate to the saints who’ve gone before us in the same way as Catholics do; but I think she has the right idea:

Christian children need not, as some do, dress as saints for Halloween to “redeem” it. There is something right, I think, in acknowledging on Halloween that the day for the saints has not arrived yet. This is salvation history, after all. We are saved from something—even if only from the ordinary, secular world . . .

The cumulative iconography of being, first, a secular character confronting darkness, and then a saint in light, is imaginatively powerful and valuable.

That’s the conjunction we need; that, if you will, is the before-and-after of our lives. To really get it, though, we need to take the “before” seriously.

A note on fascism

In the latest Atlantic, in his review of Peter Hart’s book on the Battle of the Somme, Christopher Hitchens uncorks a remarkable anecdote about “the almost picturesquely reactionary Conservative politician Alan Clark”:

As I marched across Parliament Square, semiconsciously falling into step with the military pace of the right-wing half of this right-left collaboration, Clark said to me: “I suppose you have heard people say that I am a bit of a fascist?” We had a whole lunch ahead of us and I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot, but something told me he would despise me if I pretended otherwise, so I agreed that this was indeed a thumbnail summary in common use. “That’s all [expletive deleted],” he replied with complete equanimity. “I’m really much more of a Nazi.” This was what Bertie Wooster would have called “a bit of a facer”; I was groping for an apt response when Clark pressed on. “Your fascist is a little middle-class creep who worries about his dividends and rents. The true National Socialist feels that the ruling class has a debt and a tie to the working class. We sent the British workers off to die en masse in the trenches along the Somme, and then we rewarded them with a slump and mass unemployment, and then that led to another war that gutted them again.” For Clark, the lesson of this bloodletting was that a truly national, racial, and patriotic class collaboration was the main thing.

That’s a most interesting comment. It does, I think, capture the difference between Nazism and Communism, between national socialism and international socialism, as the latter is all about class unity and conflict between classes. I also have a sense it might have a certain contemporary application, but I’m not sure what. We do most definitely have a ruling class in this country, though it’s more fluid than it was/is in Great Britain; given that fluidity, they have to declare that they have “a debt and a tie to the working class,” but how many of them (in either party) really believe it?

Sarah Palin on safari: big-game hunter bags another RINO

Dede Scozzafava read the handwriting on the wall—or perhaps we might say, in the polls—and realized her campaign for Congress was dead as last month's fish. She might have stayed in and fought for every vote she could get, but the most she could have managed would have been to give the race to the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens; to give her credit, she responded to the situation in an honorable way, suspending her campaign and endorsing Doug Hoffman. Her formal announcement was completely classy, and leaves a much better impression than her campaign's earlier decision to call the cops on the Weekly Standard's John McCormack; clearly, they didn't handle that well, but the grace and character she showed in stepping out of the race more than cancels that out, I think.

(Update: Umm, no, she didn't; despite what she said about acting for the good of her party, she turned around and endorsed Owens, which is the main reason undecideds broke 3-1 for him in the last 72 hours and gave him the race over Hoffman. I hope she enjoys her revenge, and I have to give her points for execution. -10 for class, though.)

This is a major win for Sarah Palin, Fred Dalton Thompson, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Dick Armey, Rick Santorum, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, and the other Republicans who had the courage and the native wit to revolt against the GOP's revolting choice as its candidate in NY-23 and back the candidate who actually believes in what the Republican Party stands for. It's especially a major win for Gov. Palin, because her endorsement of Hoffman was clearly, by a large margin, the biggest single factor in his moving from third to first in the race. After endorsements from Levin, Thompson, Robert Stacy McCain, RedState, and others, Hoffman was gaining support and his fundraising was picking up, but he still hadn't raised all that much, and he didn't have a lot of volunteers on the ground to build support and get out the vote. With Gov. Palin's endorsement, that changed, especially as her endorsement drew other heavyweights like Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former New York Gov. George Pataki to do likewise.

All in all, while it was a collaborative effort, Gov. Palin is definitely one who gets major credit, perhaps the most credit, for taking down the Scozzafava campaign. Back in Alaska, she put a few trophies on the wall of her war room of "Republicans" who weren't upholding the ideals and positions of the Republican Party; now, with her endorsement of Doug Hoffman, she's added another, her first from the national scene. The national GOP establishment had best pay attention—and so had Blue Dog Democrats.

On the downside of the permanent campaign

One other thing in that Peggy Noonan column, "There Is No New Frontier," that struck me was this paragraph:

I'm not sure the White House can tell the difference between campaign mode and governing mode, but it is the difference between "us versus them" and "us." People sense the president does too much of the former, and this is reflected not only in words but decisions, such as the pursuit of a health-care agenda that was inevitably divisive. It has lost the public's enthusiastic backing, if it ever had it, but is gaining on Capitol Hill. People don't want whatever it is they're about to get, and they're about to get it. In that atmosphere everything grates, but most especially us-versus-them-ism.

I hadn't really thought about the difference between campaigning and governing in that way, but I think she's right. Given that governing has become increasingly partisan, increasingly "us versus them," in recent years, it's no wonder that popular fatigue and disgust with politics has been increasing.

That of course is why the Obama campaign was so powerful, because it found a way to overcome that fatigue and disgust and generate new enthusiasm and energy for Barack Obama; but while they seem to think they can keep that up forever, this would tend to suggest that in fact, if they keep up the campaign approach, they'll ultimately get a nasty case of elastic recoil back in their collective face. He can only keep it up so long before his admirers decide he's just another politician after all . . . and at that point, he's off the pedestal for good.

"A nation fully settled by government"

Peggy Noonan wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks ago called "There Is No New Frontier" that I've been mulling for a while now; the core of her argument is an analysis of the differing contexts of FDR's expansion of government in the 1930s and Barack Obama's efforts to do the same. It's more of an analogical analysis than a logical one, but I think it holds pretty well:

A big part of opposition to the health-care plan is a sense of historical context. People actually have a sense of the history they're living in and the history their country has recently lived through. They understand the moment we're in.

In the days of the New Deal, in the 1930s, government growth was virgin territory. It was like pushing west through a continent that seemed new and empty. There was plenty of room to move. The federal government was still small and relatively lean, the income tax was still new. America pushed on, creating what it created: federal programs, departments and initiatives, Social Security. In the mid-1960s, with the Great Society, more or less the same thing. Government hadn't claimed new territory in a generation, and it pushed on—creating Medicare, Medicaid, new domestic programs of all kinds, the expansion of welfare and the safety net.

Now the national terrain is thick with federal programs, and with state, county, city and town entities and programs, from coast to coast. It's not virgin territory anymore, it's crowded. We are a nation fully settled by government. We are well into the age of the welfare state, the age of government. We know its weight, heft and demands, know its costs both in terms of money and autonomy, even as we know it has made many of our lives more secure, and helped many to feel encouragement.

But we know the price now. This is the historical context. The White House often seems disappointed that the big center, the voters in the middle of the spectrum, aren't all that excited about following them on their bold new journey. But it's a world America has been to. It isn't new to us. And we don't have too many illusions about it.

Her argument rests less on propositions than on metaphor, on the image she invokes; but it's a powerful image, and if it's a valid one—which I believe it is—then I think her argument holds. The President and his administration think they have an opportunity to bring about another major expansion of government, and are determined not to let the crisis go to waste (to use Rahm Emanuel's language)—but the context isn't what they think it is, and the parallels they think they see with President Roosevelt don't actually apply, because the popular attitude toward government isn't the same now as it was then. They're failing to factor in the reality that those past interventions have had their own effects, and have changed the board in some important ways.

Americans of FDR's time could be persuaded that government could do a better job and fix all their problems, because it hadn't really been tried much before. Americans of our time know better. The New Deal has already been tried, and the Great Frontier, and pushed to the point that another president could stand up and declare, "Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem"; that bell cannot be unrung. While President Obama may well in the end get his government-bloating agenda through, for the powers of the Executive Branch are great, one thing he cannot be is another President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; that opportunity has passed, and ours is a different world.

Farewell to GeoCities

You probably noticed that Yahoo rather ignominiously killed off GeoCities this week; that probably didn't matter a whit to your life, though, which is as good an illustration as anything of why they did it. GeoCities has long since been rendered irrelevant by Blogger, Facebook, WordPress, MySpace, Twitter, Last.fm, and the whole world of what's commonly called Web 2.0. If you're like me, your primary mental picture of GeoCities is of acres and acres of ugly websites (which, unfortunately, spawned imitators such as SiteRightNow that are still around, helping people build GeoCities knockoffs).

As Slate points out, though, that undersells GeoCities. For all the disaster it became (especially for Yahoo), GeoCities had the right idea; in fact, it was ahead of its time. (That may have been the problem—it was too far ahead of its time for its founders to see the right way to implement its core idea; they did the right thing, but the wrong way to produce long-term success.)

GeoCities deserves much more credit than we give it, because it was the first big venture built on what is now hailed as the defining feature of the Web 2.0 boom—"user-generated content."

The company's founding goal—to give everyone with Internet access a free place on the Web—sounds pretty mundane now. But GeoCities launched in 1995 (it was originally called Beverly Hills Internet), when there were just a few million people online. Back then, the idea that anyone would want to carve out his own space on this strange new medium—and that you could make money by letting people do so—bordered on crazy. (Two other free hosting companies—Tripod and Angelfire—started up at around the same time, but they proved far less popular than GeoCities.) In an early press release, David Bohnett, one of GeoCities' co-founders, hailed the idea this way: "This is the next wave of the net—not just information but habitation." Look past the tech-biz jargon, and his prediction is startlingly prescient. Today, few of us think of the Web as a simple source for information; it's also a place for dissemination, the place where we share life's most intimate details. In other words, it's for "habitation"—and GeoCities helped start that trend.

This is why one insider commented,

Had they done things right with GeoCities, there would be no Facebook, YouTube or MySpace.

Unfortunately for them, though, they didn't, because they only got half the picture; they missed what seems, in retrospect, to be the obvious corollary of their big idea.

The site came upon one of the chief ingredients of Web success—letting people put up their own stuff—but was missing what we've since learned is another key feature: a way to help people find an audience for their daily ramblings. The main difference between GeoCities and MySpace is the social network: Both sites let you indulge your creativity, but MySpace gave people a way to show off their pages to friends. On MySpace, your site was no longer shunted off to some little-traveled corner of the Web. Instead it was at the center of your friends' lives—and so there was some small reward to keep hacking away at it. At least, that was true when MySpace was hot, which is no longer the case—just like GeoCities, it lost cultural cachet to newer, better sites that came along after. In this way, too, GeoCities was a trailblazer, the first example of another reality of user-generated sites: They're extremely susceptible to faddism. You want a page on GeoCities or MySpace or whatever else only if other people are there too. As soon as the place becomes uncool . . . everyone leaves in droves.

The result is best summed up by T. S. Eliot:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

This is cool in more ways than I can count

HT: my wife

I think these folks are right to say, "the easiest way to change people's behaviour for the better is by making it fun to do"; but honestly, that only begins to bring out all the lessons from this one. Imagine the teaching opportunity of staircases like that, what they would do for people's understanding and appreciation of music . . . we could use many, many more of these.

Though Hap is right—our kids being who they are, if we had a staircase like that on our regular route, we'd never get anywhere on time.

Adventures in Greek

I wound up this evening, through a series of events, teaching the girls how to say "Thank you" in Greek—eucharistō in Koine, which has evolved to efcharistō in modern Greek. Their attempts to pronounce it were (of course) uneven, crowned by our youngest, who at one point came out with "used-car-isto"; I had to tell her no one would take that as a thank-you. The images that one generated were priceless.

God, game theory, and the inscrutability of providence

If you don't read Fangraphs (and if you're a serious baseball fan, you should), you missed an article recently that was astonishing in both the ambition of its task and the complexity of its argument. Mitchel Lichtman, known to many as MGL, wrote a lengthy post analyzing the Yankees' sacrifice bunts in the eighth inning of the deciding sixth game of this year's American League Championship Series and asking the question, "Were they good calls?" His answer was long, involved, complicated, and highly mathematical, and as such would probably be dismissed by many as arcane and pointless, especially since the Yankees (predictably) won regardless. Such a dismissal would be a mistake.

It would be a mistake because MGL answers that question not simply by calculating probabilities but by using game theory. I won't pretend to understand his article completely at the detail level, but I think I have the essential insight right: predictability is the greatest tactical and strategic sin. Therefore, to maximize one's chances of success, one must be unpredictable, which means not always going with the probabilities.

Look at it this way. One may calculate out all the probabilities as to whether a given move—such as, say, a sacrifice bunt attempt—is likely to help one's team win the game or not, but if you calculate them all out, put them in a table, and then rigidly follow that table, what's going to happen? The other team is going to know what's coming and respond accordingly, and then all your probabilities are knocked into a cocked hat. For the optimum move to remain the optimum move, one must sometimes do something else; failing that, others will adjust, and their adjustments will turn what had been the best move into a failing move.

Read the post if you want a fuller explanation than that and think you can follow it. For my purposes here, I have to admit that I don't really care if Joe Girardi made the right call on those bunts or not; I'm more interested in the underlying reality that sometimes the "best move" isn't the best move, and that sometimes you have to do something that would seem in isolation to be counterproductive in order to best advance your goals.

I'm particularly interested in this with regard to our understanding of God and the workings of his providence. Oftentimes we ask God to do a good thing—heal someone we care about, for instance, or deliver us from a sin that is just killing us—and we lay out all sorts of reasons why he ought to do it, and ask him in faith . . . and he doesn't. Why that is, I don't know, though I'm sure part of it is that there are literally billions of variables in each case that we don't know about. But I wonder—and I suppose this shows exactly the sort of geek I am that this was the first thought that occurred to me as I was reading MGL's piece (well, that and the fact that I read the whole thing)—whether some of the reason why God doesn't do things we ask him to do is because that would be counterproductive in the end.

After all, if God always gave us what we ask for—at least on those occasions when we ask for things that we have good reason to believe are his will—how many repetitions would it take for us to grow complacent? Worse, how many times would it take before we began to believe that we had made God act, and that he was somehow required to give us what we want? (Not many, I suspect, given that some people essentially believe that now.) How long would it be before the vile, poisonous weed of spiritual pride took firm root in our souls?

In the end, of course, any essay into the question of why God does or does not do any given thing must be purely speculative, and I certainly don't claim to be doing anything else; but I thought it was an interesting idea to kick around, anyway.

Politics and the practical problem of evil

In his book A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, Eugene Peterson begins the chapter on Psalm 124 with this story:

I was at a Red Cross bloodmobile to donate my annual pint, and being asked a series of questions by a nurse to see if there was any reason for disqualification. The final question on the list was, “Do you engage in hazardous work?” I said, “Yes.” She was interrupted from her routine and looked up, a little surprised, for I was wearing a clerical collar by which she could identify me as a pastor. Her hesitation was only momentary; she smiled, ignored my answer and marked the no on her questionnaire, saying, “I don’t mean that kind of hazardous.”

Eugene didn’t pursue that discussion, as there was a line of people behind him, but he notes later in that chapter that the nurse missed his point. It’s not the particular work of a pastor but the life of discipleship in general which is hazardous; and one reason for that is the power of evil in this world.

When we hear the word “evil,” I suspect most of us think of the extreme cases—genocidal dictators like Hitler, for instance, psychotic mass murderers, psychopathic serial killers, and people of that sort—the cases where, you might say, we find it straight up in a shotglass, 120 proof. The problem is, we usually meet it mixed in, hidden behind a bunch of other colors and flavors to sweeten it and make it look pretty, so that people who aren’t paying attention will swallow it whole. A friend of mine first encountered Long Island Iced Tea at the age of 12 at a party his family was attending; he’d had a couple before he or anyone else realized that he wasn’t drinking regular iced tea, in part because the alcohol took a while to hit his system. I guess when it did, he went from zero to blitzed in three seconds flat. A lot of times, we’re like that with the evil in the world—we swallow it without realizing it, and by the time the consequences show up, it’s too late.

The basic problem is that because there’s evil in every one of us, because we’re all tainted, everything we create, even the best we ever do, is also tainted; and that includes every human system—every family, every government, every charity, every association, and yes, every church. They’re all imperfect, because we’re all imperfect. I don’t care whether you vote Republican or Democrat, whether you supported Barack Obama or John McCain, whether you were ecstatic last November 4 or despondent: the Obama administration is deeply flawed, and so would a McCain administration have been, and you could say the same thing about Clinton, Reagan, Kennedy, Roosevelt (either one), Lincoln, Washington, or any other president you might care to name. They were all possessed of considerable virtues, but each was also compromised by evil in ways both obvious and subtle. That’s just the way of it in this fallen world of ours.

What that means is that, if you try to live the Christian life for all your worth—if you really open yourself up to the Spirit for God to lead however he will—you’ll find that in trying to be on God’s side, you’ll wind up on nobody else’s (not completely, anyway). Those who are born of the Spirit are like the wind, Jesus tells us—independent of any human control (or prediction, really). It’s impossible to sign on with any given political program, whether Democrat or Republican, and reflexively support it, because the Spirit will be constantly prompting you to recognize the evil in that program, and in those who’re pushing it, and to remember that they, too, are human and therefore wrong a significant percentage of the time. (Along with that, of course, the Spirit will also be constantly prompting you to recognize the same things about yourself; there lies the beginning of humility.) As Jesus said, no one can serve two masters, so if you’re going to follow him, you can’t follow anyone or anything else; which means that sooner or later, following him is going to put you crossways of the powers that be.

Of course, that truth is clearer and sharper some times and places than others. One of the reasons we give thanks for our political system is that it was designed by people with a clear awareness of human sinfulness; and if the checks and balances they built in as a result, in an effort to neutralize our vices and give virtue the best possible chance to triumph, sometimes make our government resemble one of Rube Goldberg’s ludicrous contraptions, well, it’s a small price to pay, given the alternatives.

Even so, if the temptation to back down, to compromise our faith, to go along to get along rather than standing up and resisting evil when we meet it in our government or our culture, is less obvious and clear-cut now than it has been at other times in human history, that doesn’t make it any less of a threat. We might be better able to fool ourselves into thinking we’re obeying God when we choose to compromise with evil, but that only makes the temptation more insidious, and more dangerous.

As Christians, we need to face the fact that we are always in opposition to the powers that be, at least to some degree. There are governments that do many things we can support, on a qualified basis, but even there, we must always hold ourselves apart from them and be calling them to account for the things they do wrong. We must be careful not to make the mistake (which far too many Christians, of whatever political persuasion, have in recent years) of identifying the work of the kingdom of God with the agenda of any given political party, or of mistaking supporting a political platform for advancing the work of God on Earth. We cannot with integrity sit that comfortably or identify ourselves that closely with any political organization, because we and they fundamentally are not about the same thing.

Rather, we need to recognize that if our primary commitment is to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ, we will make enemies. We will tend to be thorns in the side of those who hold power, digging out the things they want hidden and challenging them to be better than they are (or, maybe, than they want to be); we will also be an irritant in our culture, challenging people in their comfortable assumption that they’re doing just fine, calling them to set aside some of their desires and follow a more difficult path. But if we will hold fast to God, the psalmist declares boldly that God will keep us secure, both against the temptations of evil and against its assaults.