Jubilation at graduation

May 20, 2019 By Fred Clark

Let’s start by saying that Robert F. Smith has done a beautiful thing: “Speaker stuns 2019 Morehouse grads, to pay off student debt.”

A billionaire technology investor stunned the entire graduating class at Morehouse College when he announced at their commencement Sunday that he would pay off their student loans — estimated at up to $40 million.

Robert F. Smith, this year’s commencement speaker, made the announcement while addressing nearly 400 graduating seniors of the all-male historically black college in Atlanta. Smith, who is black, is the Founder and CEO of Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm that invests in software, data, and technology-driven companies.

“On behalf of the eight generations of my family that have been in this country, we’re gonna put a little fuel in your bus,” the investor and philanthropist told graduates in his morning address. “This is my class, 2019. And my family is making a grant to eliminate their student loans.”

… Though college officials could not provide an estimate of the exact amount owed by the current graduating class, students graduate with an average debt of $30,000 to $40,000, said Terrance L. Dixon, vice president of enrollment management.

Jubilee is always a beautiful thing.

And that’s the first thing we should do in response to this story — we should celebrate the sheer joyous beauty of it. It was a Good Thing that will make possible other Good Things that might otherwise have been impossible.

Errin Haines Whack’s report captures what this means for just one student:

In the weeks before graduating from Morehouse on Sunday, 22-year-old finance major Aaron Mitchom drew up a spreadsheet to calculate how long it would take him to pay back his $200,000 in student loans — 25 years at half his monthly salary, per his calculations.

In an instant, that number vanished. Mitchom, sitting in the crowd, wept.

“I can delete that spreadsheet,” he said in an interview after the commencement. “I don’t have to live off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I was shocked. My heart dropped. We all cried. In the moment it was like a burden had been taken off.”

His mother, Tina Mitchom, was also shocked. Eight family members, including Mitchom’s 76-year-old grandmother, took turns over four years co-signing on the loans that got him across the finish line.

“It takes a village,” she said. “It now means he can start paying it forward and start closing this gap a lot sooner, giving back to the college and thinking about a succession plan” for his younger siblings.

No one would advise a 22-year-old to buy a house with a mortgage that would require half of their salary for the next 25 years. But it has become conventional wisdom to encourage young people to take on that kind of massive, life-defining debt to pay for a college education. This is madness.

Tina Mitchom’s language — “paying it forward” and “giving back” — literally points us in the direction of the larger questions we need to be asking and the unspoken assumptions at work here in this lovely story. That language reminds us of what Jubilee really means — not just the cancellation of debt, but the rejection of its legitimacy.

“Benevolent billionaire pays off students’ debt” is a framework that presumes several facts not in evidence. It presumes the legitimacy of that debt and the legitimacy of the category “benevolent billionaire.” And both of those presumptions are extremely presumptuous.

When we commend wealthy philanthropists for “giving back” we murkily acknowledge something we’ve been trying hard to forget. “Give it back” is not usually a phrase we apply to an action we see as supererogatory or generous. It is, rather, an expectation of what is due. To give something back is to return it to those from whom it was taken, whether directly or indirectly.

“Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none,” John the Baptist taught. The early Christians built on that to say that “your” second coat is not “yours” at all — it belongs, rightfully, to anyone who has none. Superfluity is theft. This is what all Christians taught and believed, for centuries, from the apostles up until and including Augustine.

Saint Ambrose put it this way: “You are not making a gift of what is yours to the poor person, but you are giving them back what is theirs. You have been appropriating things that are meant to be for the common use of everyone. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich.”

And this doctrine has not been abandoned or forgotten completely. The Catholic principle of the “universal destination of goods” has gotten a bit more … let’s say sophisticated, but the link there will take you to this section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church at the official Vatican website:

2403 The right to private property, acquired by work or received from others by inheritance or gift, does not do away with the original gift of the earth to the whole of mankind. The universal destination of goods remains primordial, even if the promotion of the common good requires respect for the right to private property and its exercise.

2404 “In his use of things man should regard the external goods he legitimately owns not merely as exclusive to himself but common to others also, in the sense that they can benefit others as well as himself.” The ownership of any property makes its holder a steward of Providence, with the task of making it fruitful and communicating its benefits to others, first of all his family.

2405 Goods of production – material or immaterial – such as land, factories, practical or artistic skills, oblige their possessors to employ them in ways that will benefit the greatest number. Those who hold goods for use and consumption should use them with moderation, reserving the better part for guests, for the sick and the poor.

That “first of all his family” bit is a reference to the principle of subsidiarity — something I think Robert F. Smith demonstrated for us in both choosing Morehouse as the location for his “giving back,” and in his admonishing the Class of 2019 to receive this as an obligation to “pay it forward.”

We can understand Smith’s act both as a generous gift and as the fulfilling of the obligation to “give back.” His act was generous in that it was uncoerced and uncompelled by anything outside of his own choice to do it, but it seems Smith himself recognized that he was obliged to act. That’s why he told the recipients of his generosity that they were, themselves, obliged to “pay it forward.” This obligation — “freely ye have received, freely give” — is more legitimate and more true than whatever obligation those students may have had to pay back their student loans multiple times over in fees and interest.

Since we quoted that bit from the Catholic catechism above, we shouldn’t neglect the paragraph that follows it:

2406 Political authority has the right and duty to regulate the legitimate exercise of the right to ownership for the sake of the common good.

Or, in other words, “We the people” — the political authority here in the US — have the right and duty and opportunity to do for every college student in America what Robert F. Smith just did for one class at Morehouse. Morehouse’ president, David A. Thomas, gives a hint of how revolutionary and transformative that could be for everyone in this country:

“Many of my students are interested in going into teaching, for example, but leave with an amount of student debt that makes that untenable,” Thomas said in an interview. “In some ways, it was a liberation gift for these young men that just opened up their choices.”

That is, again, a beautiful thing. Jubilee means more choices, more freedom.

Perhaps that freedom will allow some newly debt-free young Morehouse graduate the opportunity to imagine and to bring about a world in which education doesn’t have to be a massively expensive, debt-incurring proposition sometimes mitigated by the arbitrary intervention of occasionally benevolent billionaires paying it off or helping some few escape it by endowing scholarships.

Thomas’ understanding of what this debt-cancellation will mean for the Class of 2019 is, I think, richer than what Dylan Matthews discusses in his Vox piece “Morehouse’s student loan forgiveness is an incredibly useful economics experiment.” He writes:

You would not expect there to be profound differences between the composition of the Morehouse graduating class of 2019 and that of the class of 2018 before them, or the class of 2020 after them. These are groups of students who applied to and chose to attend the same college, at roughly the same period in history. They’re not identical groups, but they’re extremely similar.

That enables economists … to conduct an analysis 10-15 years from now comparing the incomes, indebtedness, graduate attainment, etc. of members of the class of 2019 to those of the classes of 2018 and 2020. If incomes are markedly higher for 2019ers a decade after graduation than they are for 2018ers, that’s a strong indication that debt relief increases incomes later in life.

That’s fine. But “incomes later in life” may be the least interesting and least consequential measurement for the impact of this “experiment.” It doesn’t just afford these graduates the opportunity to pursue greater income, it affords them the opportunity not to do that. They are now free to become teachers — or artists, or scholars, or honest politicians, or any other noble pursuit that isn’t all about the money. They are now free to pursue some good other than making as much money as they can because their debt forbids them from ever doing anything else.

(That disagreement aside, the concluding section of Matthews’ piece is quite good and very important.)

Ignoring hateful extremists doesn’t make them go away

April 17, 2019 By Fred Clark

“Will the Real Evangelical Please Stand Up?” Adam Laats is writing there about court evangelicals versus the slightly less-Trumpy old-guard of “mainstream” white evangelicalism, but his conclusion is pertinent to our discussion here of popular evangelical anti-Semite Rick Wiles.

Laats writes:

The Taylor/Pence story hits the same ugly notes. I sympathize entirely with Amy Peterson and her friends and allies at Taylor University. I wish evangelical institutions would embrace the best traditions of evangelical religion. I hope — though I don’t pray — that large numbers of white evangelicals reject Trump’s toxic Americanism at the polls in 2020.

In the end, however, we all need to face realities. The faculty and some students at Taylor might reel in dismay at the university’s decision to honor Mike Pence. But in the end, as Peterson recounts, lots of Taylor students and faculty loved it. And the school’s administrators, as always desperate to reassure students and families that they represent “real” evangelical values, decided that Pence embodied those values. When pollsters explore beyond the faculty lounge, they find that white evangelicals prefer Pence to Peterson.

And many of those same white evangelicals are also being taught — by Trump and Pence, and by their many court prophets in the so-called “Christian” media — to prefer the hateful propaganda of people like Rick Wiles.

One popular response to hateful demagogues like Trump or Wiles is not to respond at all. Ignore them and maybe they’ll just go away. Criticizing them or challenging their lies, this argument holds, just gives them more attention and more oxygen. Maybe if we never mention the growing influence of CBN and Trinity and EWTN and Charisma and TruNews et. al. then all of those fear- and hate-inducing outlets will stop having influence.

Maybe if we stop paying any attention to them, no one else will pay any attention to them either.

I suppose that it’s possible that such a response has sometimes succeeded in the past. Examples of such successes wouldn’t easily spring to mind because, after all, every such example would be someone who was first ignored and then went away.

But many, many counter-examples do spring to mind — examples that show this non-responsive response often fails catastrophically, essentially amounting to an unconditional surrender.

Risking such catastrophic failure does not seem prudent. Nor does it seem prudent to accept an argument that positions itself as prudence but that counsels the same timid course of inaction that would result from simple cowardice.

In its most extreme form, this idea of “ignore them and let’s hope they just go away” twists itself into a time-traveling logic that reverses cause and effect, blaming critics of hateful demagogues for those demagogues’ very existence. One of the weirdest and wildest examples of this argument for retroactive causation was something we discussed here several years ago — when now-CEO and president of Christianity Today Tim Dalrymple explained that the rise of the religious right and its influence was the product of, well, me.

Recalling that strange episode led me to revisit a couple of posts from early 2013. Seeing as they’ve aged pretty well, and they’re relevant to our conversation of What To Do About Rick Wiles, I’m reposting them here:

– – – – – – – – – – –

‘Mainstream’ evangelicals criticize critics of the religious right

Well, I told you this was coming.

Last month I wrote about a modest bit of push-back from “mainstream” evangelicals against the appalling things said by several religious right leaders following the massacre in Newtown, Conn.

Mike Huckabee, James Dobson, Bryan Fischer and Franklin Graham disgraced themselves by blaming the shootings on the separation of church and state, same-sex marriage and legal abortion, prompting widespread criticism from a wide variety of Christian leaders and just about anyone else who heard what they said.

But, as usual, mainstream evangelical leaders, magazines, bloggers and spokespeople were hesitant to condemn those remarks. Their constituency, after all, is the same white evangelical populace that watches Huckabee on Fox News, listens to Dobson and Fischer on the radio (on 7,000 and 200 stations, respectively), and that inexplicably regards Franklin Graham as the legitimate heir to his father’s legacy. They are thus, understandably, rather timid about criticizing those folks.

Yet a handful of “mainstream” evangelical types did clear their throats and respond to Huckabee and Dobson, including Out of Ur, which is the blog of Leadership Journal, the magazine for pastors put out by the folks at Christianity Today.

Out of Ur published a guest post by Michael Cheshire, an evangelical pastor from Colorado, who wrote, “They Think We’re a Hate Group, and They Might Be Right.” Cheshire compared the vocal and visible leaders of the evangelical religious right with a “crazy uncle”:

I feel like I’m with a crazy uncle who makes ignorant comments while you’re helping him shop. You have to stand behind him and mouth, “I’m so sorry. He’s old and bit crazy. He means well.” So to my gay friends, scientists, iPhone users, and others he blamed for the horrendous killing spree by that mentally ill young man, I stand here mouthing a few words of apology to you.

The rest of Cheshire’s piece was pretty forceful, so much so that I worried “… it might get him banished into the limbo of ‘controversial’ evangelical voices — Cizik-ed away to a seat beside folks like Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis, whose continued membership in the tribe is permitted mainly as a way of marking its boundary.”

And that didn’t take long. Less than two weeks later, Skye Jethani posted Out of Ur’s backpedaling semi-retraction of Cheshire’s comments: “No, We’re Not a Hate Group.”

Jethani explains that the religious right is not representative of the silent majority of American evangelicals. That’s a false impression, he says, created by sensationalistic journalists and, Jethani says — citing Timothy Dalrymple — created by wily progressive Christians. He links to Dalrymple’s unique explanation for the rise of the religious right. It’s due, he says, to:

… people like Fred Clark. I think Fred dramatically underestimates the extent to which he and his ilk shape the public and media perception of evangelicals when they shine a relentless light on every ridiculous and offensive thing an evangelical pastor or radio host does, and completely ignore the good and important work that the vast majority of evangelicals do on a regular basis.

Yes, it’s all true. I started this blog in 2002. At the time, James Dobson was an inconsequential figure broadcasting his radio message daily on a mere 7,000 stations (mostly AM). He’d only written a couple dozen books at that point, and only half of those had become national best-sellers. And only 500 or so of the thousands of newspapers and evangelical publications in America bothered to carry his weekly column.

But once I started shining my “relentless light on every ridiculous and offensive thing an evangelical pastor or radio host does,” that criticism — cleverly disguised as posts about the Iraq War, eschatology, Buffy, Niebuhr, subsidiarity and manufactured housing — catapulted James Dobson to national fame, leading Time magazine to dub him “the nation’s most influential evangelical leader.”

I’ve done the same thing for countless others — Franklin Graham, Rick Warren, Bryan Fischer, Tony Perkins and dozens of other such figures who I’ve managed to elevate without ever even mentioning them here.

My very first substantial post, on my original blogspot site, criticized Pat Robertson for selling “sentergistic” anti-aging milkshakes. The effect of that post was so powerful that it lifted Robertson to a second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses 14 years earlier.

My influence is vast, unstoppable and retroactive.

Or, alternatively, Dalrymple and Jethani might be talking out of their backsides. It’s one of those.

In any case, Jethani’s endorsement of Dalrymple’s weirdly anachronistic history of the religious right is not the biggest problem with his attempted rebuttal of Cheshire’s piece. The biggest problem with Jethani’s post is that it’s pastoral malpractice.

Skye Jethani gets one thing partly right in his push-back against the push-back against the appalling public theology of the religious right.

In his Out of Ur essay “No, We’re Not a Hate Group,” Jethani discusses the way the “sensationalism” of the spotlight-grabbing media stars of the religious right can make them seem disproportionately influential:

In the free market of the media it is not fair and accurate reporting that gets rewarded, but page views, clicks, and [Nielsen] ratings. With online and cable news outlets struggling for viewers (and revenue), there is constant pressure for these organization to not just report news but make it. Therefore, when a Christian leader is needed to comment on an event, they are more likely to invite a Crazy Uncle Christian known for shooting his mouth off and insulting minorities than the thoughtful, reflective Christian offering wisdom.

… If you’re behind the editorial desk at CNN and desperate for page views, which story are you going to publish: “Christian Leader Fasts and Prays for Victims of School Shooting” or “Christian Leader Blames Shooting on School Prayer Ban”[?]

Sadly, when sensationalism sells it’s going to be the crazy uncles in Christendom that get media attention.

Yes, “sensationalism sells.” But Jethani apparently didn’t watch CNN in the days and weeks following the Newtown shooting. The former story — “[Christians] … Pray for Victims” — was reported dozens of times covering numerous events. They reported — positively — on sermons at several area churches. They quoted from clergy who spoke at funerals. It wasn’t just CNN, either — one prayer vigil was broadcast on all the major networks — with NBC interrupting Sunday Night Football to show it live. Look through CNN’s Belief Blog over the past month and you’ll find many, many thoughtful, reflective, restrained and respectful articles commending the responsible reactions from numerous Christian leaders following the tragedy.

Sure, CNN also covered the statements by Huckabee, Dobson, Fischer and Graham, but they didn’t interrupt Sunday Night Football to do so. And they had to cover those statements because they are news.

It’s the man-bites-dog principle. The old saying is that “Dog Bites Man” is not news — that’s what dogs sometimes do, and it’s just a routine occurrence. But “Man Bites Dog” is news — it’s something unusual, unexpected and noteworthy.

Similarly “Pastor Provides Pastoral Care” is not news. Nor is “Shock-jock Says Something Shocking” newsworthy. But if the “Morning Zoo Crew” on the local radio station dispenses with its usual crude antics in the wake of a tragedy, organizing a vigil and rallying community support for the victims, that would be news — a reversal of the usual roles, something surprising and unexpected.

By the same token, when a religious leader, of all people, responds to tragedy by making the sort of shocking statements one usually expects to hear from Zoo-Crew shock-jocks, that’s news too. One could, in a sense, regard the newsworthiness of Huckabee and Dobson’s comments as a kind of slantwise affirmation of American Christianity. Despite a decades-long pattern of white evangelical spokespeople saying appalling things in the aftermath of tragedies, those comments are still regarded as news — meaning they are still perceived as surprisingly out-of-character, as unexpected, Man-Bites-Dog incidents.

The larger problem with Jethani’s lament about CNN supposedly ignoring that story they didn’t ignore — “Christians Pray for Victims” — is that he seems to want media coverage of the church to be like one of those children’s events where everybody gets a trophy just for showing up. His fine whine reminds me of Chris Rock’s most notorious routine — the one in which he outlines the difference between black people in general and a small sub-set of the black population with whom he is sorely disappointed (I’m paraphrasing). Of this latter sub-set, Rock says:

[They] always want credit for some [stuff] they’re supposed to do. … [He] will brag about some [stuff] a normal man just does. [He] will say some [stuff] like “I take care of my kids.” You’re supposed to, you dumb $@%#. … What are you bragging about? What kind of ignorant [stuff] is that?

“I ain’t never been to jail.” What you want, a cookie? You’re not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having $@%#.

This seems to be the gist of Jethani’s complaint about Cheshire’s complaint, of his criticism of Cheshire’s criticism. He wants reporters to ignore religious leaders who behave badly. And when religious leaders do not behave badly — when they do [stuff] they’re simply supposed to do — he wants a cookie.

Cable news is certainly often guilty of “sensationalism.” CNN has an infamous tendency to go into histrionics over stories of missing white women. But the correction to that would be for CNN to cover such stories in a more restrained and proportionate manner. It would not be for CNN to ignore such stories completely while covering, instead, the stories of the many millions of white women who are not missing.

The news media may be suckers for sensational claims, and the Crazy Uncles of the religious right may be virtuosos at exploiting that weakness, but cable news did not create the religious right. Nor did the critics of the religious right create it.

The religious right arose from within white evangelical Christianity. And it continues to thrive and to be enormously popular within white evangelical Christianity. That’s not something that we can blame on CNN, or on me, or on Michael Cheshire.

‘Somebody else’s babies’

March 13, 2017 By Fred Clark

Our neighborhood lies between two major arterial highways in the county. And our street is the straightest route for anyone trying to cut through the neighborhood to get from one highway to the other — the shortest distance between two points.

It’s not a very efficient short-cut — a bit too winding, with a 25-mile-per-hour speed limit and stop signs at every corner. The area schools at the other end of the street make for long lines clogged with buses for an hour every morning and afternoon. And we have deer everywhere, which means that 25-mph speed limit effectively drops much lower around dusk every evening.*

But still every once in a while somebody in a hurry decides that cutting through our neighborhood and racing down our street might be a quicker way to get from Point A to Point B. This happens often enough that some worried parents on our street have put these signs out by the road.

SlowDown

That’s shorter and kinder than the signs I would make, which would say something like: “Slow Down, Jackass, Because When A Deer Crashes Through Your Windshield I’ll Feel Bad For The Deer.”

I like these signs. I appreciate the sentiment. Slow down — there are children here. Imagine those were your kids. Would you want somebody recklessly speeding down your street past where your kids are walking and playing?

That is, on the one hand, a laudable appeal to empathy — a useful bit of instruction in empathy. It resonates with the moral authority of the Golden Rule. It asks passing motorists to consider the children of this neighborhood with the same care and concern they have for their own children. And that’s good.

But, on the other hand, there’s also something terrifying about the message of this sign. It seems to acknowledge and recognize something about our culture that is, frankly, monstrous and horrifying. That unlovely admission suggests that these signs are unlikely to do much good. It suggests that their appeal to empathy and respect for the Golden Rule is misdirected.

Think about it. “Drive Like Your Kids Live Here,” the signs say, because it’s understood that “Drive Like Somebody Else’s Kids Live Here” wouldn’t be an effective slogan. Just those last three words ought to be sufficient: Kids Live Here. But, given that those kids are not “your” kids, it’s expected that “you” would have no reason to care about that. If it’s somebody else’s kids — kids you don’t know, personally, or kids who aren’t a part of your personal bloodline — then it’s presumed that you’ll continue to drive recklessly and without regard for their safety.

The only hope to possibly persuade you to demonstrate a bit more caution is by making an analogy between those kids and your own kids. Or maybe it’s less an empathy-creating analogy than it is a kind of Hobbesian détente — the Golden Rule as a kind of quid pro quo negotiation. If you agree to abstain from driving recklessly around our kids, then we will also agree not to drive recklessly around your kids.

Or maybe it’s even more stunted than that. More like the Golden Rule as implicit threat. If you drive like a maniac around our kids, we’ll come to your neighborhood and drive like a maniac around your kids. An eye for an eye.

That’s an ugly thought, imagining that the safety of children depends, ultimately, on a white-knuckled truce between hostile adults who maintain a fragile balance of power thanks only to the threat of mutually assured payback. But that seems to be why these signs can’t say “Drive Like Somebody Else’s Kids Live Here” or just “Drive Like Kids Live Here.” Or just simply “Kids Live Here.”

It’s why we have to say things like “Imagine it was your kids having to drink that water like in Flint, Michigan.” Or things like, “Imagine if it was your kids getting priced out of health insurance because of a pre-existing condition.” Or “What if that was your kids in that Yemeni village?” We don’t expect concern for somebody else’s children to be compelling. A contemptuous disregard for “somebody else’s babies” is so commonplace that we’ve almost come to regard it as reasonable, rather than as monstrous.

But while our neighborhood signs acknowledge the shadow of that underbelly of the Golden Rule, and while they make a concession to that monstrous unconcern for others, they also suggest the possibility of something more hopeful. They ask us to learn to do better.

What if we all learned to care about other people’s kids as much as we care about our own? More than that, what if we all learned that caring about other people’s kids is part of what it means to care about our own?

Because the problem here isn’t that we care too much about our own kids and kin. The problem is the notion that we should care about others less. And that’s just not how the world works.

Here, yet again, I’d point to the clarifying wisdom of subsidiarity and the “inescapable network of mutuality.” We are tied together in what the scripture calls “a single garment of destiny … Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Each of us has particular, differentiated responsibilities and priorities, but they’re all connected.

It may be my particular place and my particular priority to look after the safety of my own kids, but I need to do the same for your kids when I’m driving through your neighborhood. And vice versa. If we all take care of our indirect responsibilities, then our direct responsibilities will all become easier to meet. But if we all deny our indirect responsibilities, then we’ll all find our direct responsibilities impossible to meet.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter where you’re driving, or wherever it is that you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing. Kids Live There. Your kids, my kids, our kids — everybody’s kids. And also much cattle.

So be careful. Be full of care. For everyone.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* A nearby pond also means that one block of our street is often congested with Canada geese. Those birds, remarkably, seem to understand how roads and cars and traffic work, even while refusing to just fly over them. Canada geese tend to keep out of traffic and, when crossing a street, they usually look both ways before stepping out into the road. They often even designate a crossing guard who stands in the middle, craning their neck and scanning in all directions as the others waddle across. Of course, the geese also have a strong sense of entitlement. Once they feel they’ve established their right-of-way, they take their time, insisting the road is theirs until they’re all quite done with it.

The flock of Canada geese who live around our local mall are such a constant presence there that the county put up a geese-crossing sign warning human drivers to slow down by the intersection on Route 30. Human drivers tend to heed that sign but, amazingly, so do the geese. That spot is exactly where they usually choose to shuffle across the highway. I’m never quite sure whether this is due to excellent research and positioning on behalf of the humans at PennDOT or if it’s somehow the geese choosing to comply with posted traffic laws.

‘We must love one another or die’

September 22, 2016 By Fred Clark

After Kristallnacht — a violent anti-Jewish pogrom carried out with the blessing of the German government — the German policy of lethal ethnic cleansing could no longer be denied or ignored. Two months later, in January 1939, the Gallup organization’s American Institute of Public Opinion surveyed Americans about plans to provide refuge in this country for 10,000 Jewish children fleeing Germany.

Gallup

Children. Children fleeing actual Nazis after it had been revealed to the world what actual Nazis stood for and what they were trying to do. And two thirds of Americans said that they did not want their government to allow these children refuge here.

Damon Linker doesn’t see a problem with that. It is, he says, “nonsense” to view this as immoral behavior. It is simply the legitimate expression of “particularistic instincts that are not and should not be considered morally and politically beyond the pale.”

Actually, Linker argues for more than that. After asserting that these “particularistic instincts” are “natural to human beings and even coeval with political life as such,” he presents his larger thesis, which is that such instincts are, in fact, morally superior to “the universalistic cosmopolitanism of humanitarian liberalism” that tyrannically seeks to impose its will on the rest of the world, trampling “all particularistic forms of solidarity” under the heels of its cosmopolitan, humanitarian jackboots.

To be clear, Linker doesn’t specifically discuss those 10,000 rejected children in his odious essay. He’s too busy celebrating Brexit and crafting a flimsy “universalitic, cosmopolitan, humanitarian, liberal” strawman.

I really can’t tell if the either/or of Linker’s framework is the product of ignorance or dishonesty. Either way, it’s hogwash — a pretentiously written version of the same hogwash that religious-right hucksters sling when they say we must get rid of the separation of church and state before government thugs put all Bible-believing Christians in prison.

This either/or is so painfully dim that it feels awkward addressing it. But Linker is forcing us to.

So, OK then. No, Mr. Linker, “universal” solidarity is not in conflict or competition with “local” solidarity. No, the recognition of universal dignity, universal rights, and universal humanity is not in conflict or competition with “Love of one’s own.”

Recognition of the former does not require a rejection of the latter. Recognition of the former does not ask for that. No one is asking for that except the strawman “universalistic cosmopolitan humanitarian liberals” in your piece and in your imagination.

Linker writes that “It simply never occurred to liberals prior to the mid-20^th century that human beings might one day overcome particularistic forms of solidarity and attachment.” But they’re not the ones arguing that such particular forms of attachment are in conflict with universal rights and dignity. The person arguing that is Damon Linker — the imagined incompatibility of those things is the central thesis of his essay.

The rest of us have frameworks like subsidiarity or “an inescapable network of mutuality.” We know, as King wrote, that “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” But only Linker is arguing that direct and indirect affects are a binary either/or. Only he is suggesting that subsidiarity and solidarity are in conflict.

Linker also imagines that King’s term “inescapable” is prescriptive, rather than descriptive. This is what he sees as the cruel juggernaut of the tyrannical, imperial UCHL Borg — an inescapable steamroller that threatens to crush or to assimilate the entire world, flattening all local particularities until we are all the same.

That’s so very much not what inescapable means there. King’s statement is descriptive — he is saying this is how the world works, this is how the world is. Mutuality and interconnectedness is not an ideology being imposed top-down against the futile resistance of defiant local rebels, it’s just reality.

And, as King said, this mutuality is sometimes direct and sometimes indirect. Neither he nor any other supposed UCHL was proposing that all pre-existing direct ties must be abolished so that all previously indirect ties can be made direct. The vast global conspiracy of imperial cosmopolitan humanitarians that Linker imagines does not exist.

Moral obligation — love, solidarity — is boundless and universal. It is also, always, particular and differentiated. Those two things are not in conflict. Those two things have never been in conflict. Pretending that they are in conflict always leaves a trail of bodies.

Once one accepts Linker’s thesis that “love of one’s own” is in conflict with love of … well, anyone else, then things get really ugly, really fast. David Gushee discusses what Linker calls “particularistic instincts” and “local solidarity” in his study of The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust. Gushee uses a different term to describe such views. He calls it “boundaries of moral obligation.”

And “boundaries of moral obligation,” it turns out, are what enable previously decent-seeming people to act as bystanders to an atrocity. It’s what enables two-thirds of Americans, after Kristallnacht, to say, “Hey, those aren’t my kids.”

But in Damon Linker’s mind, pointing out that it’s deplorable to deny life-saving refuge to anyone’s children is some kind of an attack on the idea that we should love our own children. And it’s “nonsense,” he says, to condemn someone for not caring what happens to other people’s children.

Linker’s idea of an exclusive “love of one’s own” and his idea of exclusively “local solidarity” was something Auden once encountered in one of the dives on 52nd Street. His response to it epitomizes what Linker sneers at as “universalistic, cosmopolitan, humanitarian liberalism”: “We must love one another or die.”

That, again, is not an ideological edict being imposed on the world by a liberal conspiracy. It is a description of how the world works and how the world is. It is inescapable.

With these hands, with these hands

July 27, 2016 By Fred Clark

• An insightful grace note in First Lady Michelle Obama’s amazing speech Monday night at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia: “Because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters — and all our sons and daughters — now take for granted that a woman can be President of the United States.”

That taken-for-grantedness is weird and widespread. This is a country that, in 240 years, has never had a woman as its president. This is a country that, in 240 years, has never before had a woman nominated to be president by a major party. That changed last night, which is a huge, huge thing. This is a major milestone that will be recorded in history books and studied by schoolchildren generations from now.

BannedAtWalMart — This T-shirt was dropped by WalMart in 1995 because its message was considered politically offensive to some customers. 19. Ninety. 5. (Click pic for link to article.)

But in the actual moment, the unprecedented, history-making and history-breaking significance of it gets noted with an almost dismissive matter-of-factness. It has never happened before, but it seems to have been regarded as old news even before it occurred. And that’s largely because, as Michelle Obama noted, Hillary Clinton has spent years getting us used to the idea — so much so that something truly radical and revolutionary is met with a shrug and simply taken for granted.

Walter Hagen said great athletes “Make the hard ones look easy and the easy ones look hard.” You will never live long enough to read all the criticism written about Hillary Clinton’s capacity for sometimes making the easy ones look hard, but take a moment this week to acknowledge that she has just accomplished something incredibly hard — something no one, ever, has previously done — and she made it look so easy that we take it for granted.

It wasn’t easy. And the next big step won’t be easy either. No one has ever done it before. If that doesn’t make you stop and say “Wow,” then you’re not paying attention.

• Fox News Host Bill O’Reilly says that the enslaved persons who built the White House “were well fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government.”

First Lady Abigail Adams, describing the view from her window at the White House while its construction was still being completed by enslaved workers: “half fed, and destitute of cloathing.”

• RIP Garry Marshall. He made you laugh. At some point, pretty much whoever you are and whether you know it or not, you have smiled and laughed at jokes that man came up with.

The link there is to a terrific Fresh Air interview rebroadcast after Marshall’s death at 81. I couldn’t find the earlier Fresh Air appearance, which included the bit that resulted in me thinking of Garry Marshall at least once a week ever since.

Terry Gross asked him how he managed to be so prolific — hit or miss, the man was always writing. And Marshall talked about a workshop class at Northwestern Medill School of Journalism. Students would sit at typewriters, assigned the task of turning a list of facts into a basic, pyramid-style newspaper report, on deadline. The instructors played loud music and walked around, yelling and interrupting the students. And some of the typewriters had been sabotaged with sticking keys and broken ribbons. And so he learned to ignore everything going on around him, put his head down, and just write. Good advice, and not just for writing.

• Bruce Covert reminds us of “That Time Newt Gingrich Tried To Take Kids Away From Welfare Recipients And Put Them in Orphanages.” I’ll spare you another thousand words on how and why folks like Gingrich don’t understand subsidiarity, but you can write it yourself for extra credit.

• Kudos to The New York Times for getting an apt adjective into this headline: “Tim LaHaye Dies at 90; Fundamentalist Leader’s Grisly Novels Sold Millions.” From the obit:

Some critics said that the books, with potboiler plots, characters in conflict and plenty of violence, elevated the sermonizing of old-fashioned Christian fiction into the realms of modern page-turning thrillers by John Grisham, Tom Clancy or Stephen King. Others called them tedious, fatuous, preposterous and exploitative.

• Sometimes you stumble across something on YouTube and see that it’s been there for almost a year and only has 60 views and you think that’s just wrong because there have to be more than 59 other people who got to enjoy that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37_LJBOL330

First responders and guns (cont’d.)

July 13, 2016 By Fred Clark

In the previous post, we noted that in their role as “first responders” to emergencies unrelated to law enforcement, the guns that police officers carry are neither necessary nor helpful. The presence of those guns — the introduction of those guns — increases the danger present, rather than reducing or helping to resolve it safely.

When people with guns are summoned in an emergency, they sometimes respond as people with guns — whether or not guns are capable of addressing the emergency in question. This makes things worse.

This is particularly — and often tragically — the case when police are called on to be the “first responders” in an emergency involving someone suffering from mental illness, emotional distress, or psychosis. Too often, those stories end like this awful encounter a few months ago, “Parents called 911 to help suicidal daughter — and ‘police ended up putting a bullet in her.’”

Melissa Boarts is one of at least 262 people who have been fatally shot by police so far in 2016 [as of April 6], according to a Washington Post database. At least 41 of those killed by police were carrying a knife or other blade, and about a quarter of all police shooting victims were mentally ill or experiencing an emotional crisis.

People with untreated mental illness are 16 times as likely to be killed during a police encounter as other civilians approached or stopped by law enforcement, according to a study from the Treatment Advocacy Center.

… Since January 2015, the Post has tracked more than 1,100 fatal shootings by on-duty police officers, with one in four involving someone who was either in the midst of a mental health crisis or was explicitly suicidal. A Post analysis has found that in half of those cases, the officers involved were not properly trained to deal with the mentally ill — and in many cases, officers responded with tactics that quickly made a volatile situation even more dangerous.

When people are suicidal, we send “first responders” with guns. When a mental health crisis or emotional crisis becomes an emergency, our standard operating procedure is to add guns to the equation. This is a terrible idea with all too predictable results.

Stories like the one above are frighteningly common (warning: autoplay video at link), and law enforcement officials themselves are among the loudest of those calling for a change in this “first response” approach:

“If you talk to most police officers, the most volatile situations are the ones with mental illness,” said Tom Dart, sheriff of Cook County, Ill., who has worked to raise awareness about the large number of people with mental illness in jails and prisons and to improve their treatment. …

… Some police departments have formed crisis intervention teams, whose members have special training in dealing with people with mental illness. Training focuses on ways to calm people in the midst of a breakdown, rather than using force.

In Miami-Dade County, about 4,600 officers have been trained in crisis intervention, said Steven Leifman, an associate administrative judge in Florida’s Miami-Dade County Court. Before the program began, police were involved in the shooting of someone with mental illness about once a month. In the five years since the training began, there have been only four or five such shootings, he said.

Once a month. In a single county.

No one has ever called the police saying, “My relative is having a mental health crisis, I want you to come here and shoot them dead.” Anyone making such a call might themselves be arrested. Police would likely respond to such a request by — correctly — insisting that it’s not their job to come to your home to shoot and kill your relative who’s having a mental health crisis. And yet many people have made the opposite of that phone call, telling police “My relative is having a mental health crisis, but I don’t want you to come here and shoot them dead” — only to have that happen anyway, despite their pleas.

That can leave families of people with serious mental illness with nowhere to turn.

“I am terrified to call the police when it involves my son,” said Candie Dalton, of Englewood, Colo., whose 20-year-old son has schizophrenia.

Dalton said her son’s interactions with police have left him terrified of law enforcement. Once, he was the victim of a home invasion robbery. When he was unable to articulate what had happened, police accused him of selling his possessions for drug money. Officers then arrested him because of an unpaid speeding ticket.

On another occasion, Dalton called police because her son threatened her with a kitchen knife. Police responded with overwhelming force.

“There were multiple cops aiming their guns at my son until he got on the ground,” Dalton said. “One of the officers later told me that my son was close to having a hole in him so big they could drive a Mack truck through it.”

According to that article, the crisis intervention training in Miami-Dade is working, but such efforts and results are the exception, not the rule. Barring such training, when police are summoned to deal with a mental health crisis, they are summoned as first responders with guns. They are the people with guns who arrive as people with guns. And, unsurprisingly, those guns often get used.

“The traditional police response to people with mental illness has often been ineffective,” a Department of Justice guide says, “and sometimes tragic.”

Intensive training for police may help them to better serve as first responders in emergencies arising from mental health or emotional crises. If we’re going to continue to rely on police as the first responders in such situations, then we need to establish — and fund — far better and more comprehensive training for that response.

And part of that training, I’d argue, should be to leave the damn gun in the car.

The larger problem with police responses to crises of mental health or emotional distress is that it shouldn’t be their job. We’re asking police to do something that doesn’t have anything to do with their role as law enforcement professionals.

This is one of many, many ways in which we’re asking the police to be something other than, and far more than, police.

This is a major theme in that USAToday article linked above:

Many law enforcement groups are concerned about the demands placed upon them.

“Police are being forced to be mental health counselors without training,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police, the largest police organization in the country. “It underscores a real tragedy: the total collapse of the mental health system in the United States. People who should be wards of the hospital are wards of the street.”

When one system collapses, another system is forced to bear the weight — putting an undue burden and undue strain on that other system.

What we’re talking about here, then, is a failure of subsidiarity.

It’s not hypocrisy, it’s a contemptuous distrust

February 17, 2015 By Fred Clark

I mentioned this yesterday as a one-liner, but it’s worth exploring a bit more.

“The choice to not have children is selfish,” Pope Francis said last week, without any apparent recognition of the irony. After all, Pope Francis himself is someone who has made “the choice not to have children,” and yet he does not seem to regard his own making this choice as selfish.

That might seem like hypocrisy — Francis is stating a rule that he refuses to apply to himself. But I don’t think he is being hypocritical — I think he’s doing something far worse than that. This isn’t hypocrisy from the childless pope — it’s a contemptuous distrust of others.

Francis’ own choice “to not have children” is a choice he sees as legitimate, sacred and virtuous. He does not believe that he is behaving selfishly by making that choice. Thus he clearly cannot believe his own categorical statement. He doesn’t really believe that “the choice to not have children” is always selfish. What he means, rather, is that such a choice may be selfish.

And that’s true! It is certainly possible to make “the choice to not have children” for selfish reasons. Such a choice may, in some cases, be a form of inhospitality. It may be, in some cases, motivated by a reluctance to share one’s time, life, home, money and other resources. It may be, in some cases, that people are making this choice for ignoble reasons.

But it is also certainly possible to make “the choice to not have children” for selfless reasons. That same choice can also be a form of hospitality. It can be motivated by a desire to share one’s time, life, home, money, etc., more widely. It may be a choice that people make for noble, praiseworthy reasons. That’s certainly what Pope Francis seems to think of his own choice not to have children — and of the same choice as made by every cardinal, bishop, priest, brother and sister in his church’s celibate clergy.

So here we have a choice that — according to the pope himself — can be made for either good or bad reasons. As a spiritual leader, then, the pope has a choice to make about this choice. One possibility would be for him to teach and encourage his followers to make good choices for good reasons. Another possibility would be for him to preclude the possibility of his followers making bad choices by arrogating to himself the right to make this choice on behalf of everyone else.

And he chose the second one.

That’s appalling and immoral of him. It shows a palpable disdain for the moral competence of his followers. Francis does not trust them. He does not believe they can be trusted. He does not believe they are capable of being trusted. He does not believe they are capable of the kind of responsible choices that he believes he is capable of making. And so he presumes that he is better equipped than they are to make this choice for themselves.

That is staggeringly arrogant. The choice to not have children, or the choice to have children, is an incredibly personal, intimate choice. No one else could possibly be as well equipped or as well informed about that choice as the individuals directly affected are. Those closest to this choice are most capable and most competent of choosing well. To usurp their responsibility and replace it with a bishop’s one-size-fits-all decree seems to make a mockery of the Catholic principle of subsidiarity. It is unjust.

“The choice not to have children,” the pope imagines, is an acceptable choice when he makes it, because he thinks he is capable of choosing correctly. But he does not believe that others are as capable as he is, so he will not permit others the freedom and the responsibility he permits himself.

Again, simple hypocrisy or duplicity would be preferable to this. But he’s not being hypocritical or duplicitous. He’s not saying this is a rule that applies to everyone and then turning around and breaking that rule himself. He is, rather, saying that there are two kinds of people — those like himself who are capable of making moral choices, and the larger group of little people who he says are not capable of making moral choices.

That’s not pastoral concern, that’s contempt. And it’s contemptible.

And just when I’d grown colder

September 30, 2014 By Fred Clark

• “… then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

• “It also raises the question of how daft an employee and/or manager must be to post that sign without realizing what it was advertising. Unless of course this was a deliberate bird-flip to Sainsbury’s management by a disgruntled worker. In which case, well done.”

• The late Paul Crouch was a pioneer in televangelism and a proponent of the perverse “prosperity gospel,” so I always suspected he was a grifter with several walk-in closets full of skeletons, contempt for his audience, and a team of fixers and attorneys who kept his secrets secret. But I still don’t know what to make of the allegations about Crouch in his recently unearthed FBI file. I know Crouch was a crook who couldn’t be trusted, but I also know that J. Edgar Hoover’s agency has a history of compiling dubious dossiers on public figures.

That Paul Crouch was laundering money seems very plausible. But gun-running seems out of character — too risky and labor-intensive for such a self-indulgent con man.

But if I’m not sure that I can believe all the allegations in Crouch’s FBI file, I am sure that I would love the screenplay and the movie based on everything in that FBI file being true. Harry Dean Stanton would’ve been perfect as Paul Crouch 30 years ago, but who would we cast today? Casting suggestions for both Paul and Jan Crouch, please, in comments below.

• Brian Pellot: “If Christians are uncomfortable with devout or flippant non-Christian faiths seeping into the public square, they’d be wise to remember that many people are uncomfortable when Jesus, God and the Bible appear in government-sponsored spaces. They’d also be wise to remember the Establishment Clause.”

Related: If Christian football players can Tebow, then so can Muslim football players. Especially after they pick off Tom Brady.

• “8 Thoughts on Receiving Charity in the Form of a Convertible” — wisdom, insight, honesty, self-scrutiny and gratitude from Jennifer Ellison.

• Congratulations to Rob Tisinai!

• Dana Bolger on the promise, and the limitations, of the “It’s On Us” campaign against domestic violence. Bolger is talking about the differentiated, overlapping, mutual responsibilities we all have in our individually and corporately varied contexts, roles and relationships. This is what subsidiarity looks like.