Obedience and anarchy
"Real freedom, concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy." --Roger Scruton, from his new book
Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life, quoted by Roger Kimball in the current issue of
National Review, and newly added to my list of books I will read when Lent has drawn to a close.
This echoes the Catholic principle that it is by disciplining ourselves (this includes Lenten sacrifices) that we take control of our appetites, so that we actually have the freedom to choose what we do, instead of being in thrall to our desires. In my own experience, since becoming Catholic, and learning about such things as fasts, abstinences, and "offering it up," I have noticed a dramatic strengthening of my ability to say no to this or that desire that I don't truly want to do--St Paul's complaint that what he wants to do, he does not do, and what he does, he does not want to do. Thus when we are obedient we are so because we are capable of choosing to be so, and don't obey out of fear or instinct.
Labels: discipline, obedience
Fundamentalism
Funnily, this story about the possible execution of Abdul Rahman for his conversion to Christianity, which in Afghanistan incurs the death penalty, refers to the former Taliban regime as "hard-line." Because Karzai's government, apparently, is not.
What makes me uncomfortable about this story is the following quote by cleric Abdul Raoulf:
"God's way is the right way, and this man whose name is Abdul Rahman is an apostate," [he said]. . . . Rahman had "committed the greatest sin" by converting to Christianity and deserved to be killed, cleric Abdul Raoulf said in his sermon at Herati Mosque.
This is an expression of fundamentalism, a way of looking at the world that expresses itself in many different religions (no, Virginia, it's not just big-haired Southern Baptists). What causes religious belief to congeal in this way, to turn revelation into a cause to threaten others? Is it the familiar and original sin of pride, to take divine truth and make it cause for dividing the world into the good and the bad, with yourself leading the charge of the righteous? And I don't think at all that believing in an absolute right and wrong necessitates this attitude. In fact, I think it's the result of feeling that you're on the losing side of things, a way to comfort oneself with the knowledge that maybe they can outshout you, but at least your enemies will spend eternity having their livers eaten by buzzards while you kick back in the clouds. I think that to the contrary, those who are secure in the knowledge of having won the battle have little reason to bluster that you'd better turn or burn, and I'm understanding that better and better the more I understand what it means to be Catholic--a group that doesn't exactly have a reputation for canvassing the neighborhood with pamphlets in hand.*
*Incidentally, the early modern witch trials, usually waved about as evidence that the Catholic Church suffers from Raoulf's attitude, were overwhelmingly conducted in areas where the Catholic Church was either weak--or the minority religion.
Read this article.
Labels: fundamentalism, islam
Letter of review about Crunchy Cons
Signed, sealed, and delivered this morning (ok, via email).
Letters to the Editor
National Review
Having given up recreational book-reading for my Lenten sacrifice, I've yet to enjoy Rod Dreher's long-awaited Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans . . . (Or at Least the Republican Party). I can't, therefore, speak to whether or why Dreher neglects to define an alternative to the capitalist society he critiques, but I note that in Brian C. Anderson's review of Dreher's book, he makes a common, but mistaken, assumption: that the alternative to the American economic system is a heavily-regulated economy, i.e., socialism. Not so!
In his classic 1937 work The Crisis of Civilization, the English historian and staunchly conservative Catholic Hilaire Belloc draws a prescient picture of the threat to freedom and the traditional community that an unhampered free market poses. Among other things, it leads to the growth of the big business which requires for its success the employment in drone-work positions great numbers of individuals whose job security, type of employment, and oftentimes location and availability to family remain at the discretion of the owners of the company. These people work not for their own dreams, but for another person's--they are, essentially, slaves, even if this fact is dressed up in talk about providing jobs which put food on the table. (And didn't many slaves imported from Africa at least get to hear the gospel, and learn to read?)
Belloc proposes the alternative that Anderson asks about: the traditional guild system in which each family is properly self-sufficient, seeing to his own needs out of his own resources (farming) and supporting his family by his own, well, small business. In a guild system, each guild, say, of carpentry, or of masonry, regulates its own rates--not a bureaucratic big government seeking to equalize. Further, in such a community-based system, it is socially unacceptable for one craftsman to seek to be the economic ruin of his fellow craftsmen via practices such as underselling (while, at the same time, not interfering with the failure of a craftsman who just isn't any darn good at his craft).
I would suspect that in part or in whole, such a system, and the philosophy behind it--that we must live as a community, not in the Darwinian race to survive that is the American capitalist system--is right in tune with Dreher's, and my, vision of crunchy conservatism.
Kate Blake
Labels: crunchy cons
Something annoying on Glenn Beck today
So, today on the
Glenn Beck Program (aaaaawwwww yeeaaahhh) the discussion turned to the Oscars and
Brokeback Mountain. A caller, one who had seen it, and who identified herself as a conservative Christian, reported that it would change your thinking on marriage, etc., etc. But then this came out. (Edited for brevity)
GLENN: You are on here telling me that you're a conservative, that you're a Christian--Amy, before you went, were you for gay marriage, or not?
AMY: I'm for it. . . . But I have a different view of marriage. I think you can look at marriage in several different ways. . . . My husband is Catholic.
GLENN: Yes.
AMY: I'm not. According to the Catholic Church, we are not married. And my son is illegitimate. But according to the laws of the state of Tennessee and the reciprocal relationship of the other 50 states, we've been married for almost fourteen years.
What century is she living in? Because she's wrong, as any idiot with a Catechism could tell her.
Difference of confession [one Catholic, one not] between the spouses does not constitute an insurmountable obstacle for marriage, when they succeed in placing in common what they have received from their respective communities, and learn from each other the way in which each lives in fidelity to Christ. (CCC 1634)
Granted, they could have been married in a civil ceremony, which wouldn't be legit, but from what I can gather, the reason she thinks the Church doesn't recognize the marriage is simply because she's not Catholic. Two questions: One, how uninformed is her husband not to know better? and two, if it bothers her so darn much, why doesn't she have a Catholic ceremony performed? (In which case she would have been told the original ceremony was licit anyway.)
I don't know what's worse--Protestants who are ignorant about Catholicism, or Catholics who are ignorant about Catholicism.
Labels: dogma, sacraments
