Ross Douthat’s utopia exists, in Haiti

February 6, 2012 By Fred Clark 79 Comments

If only “the government” would get out of the way, then private charities could step in, step up, and fix all of our problems.

This is not a serious suggestion, but it’s a popular one, perennially put forward by people who insist we should take them seriously. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat offers a recent version of this in a recent column titled, tellingly, “Government and Its Rivals.”

“Rivals,” you see, because it’s a competition. If X helps a poor person, then no one else can. All responsibility is exclusive and competitive, etc.

The first and largest problem for Douthat and others arguing this is that the facts and numbers are easy to find and they all run counter to the theory. The scope of private charity is not adequate. Nor has it ever been.

Before Social Security, private charities worked hard to provide a small measure of economic security to a small percentage of America’s elderly poor. But the massive reduction in poverty among America’s elderly came about through Social Security, not through private charity. After the establishment of Social Security, of course, private charities have continued to assist the elderly and — contra Douthat — the existence of Social Security has leveraged their effectiveness, not diminished their efforts.

That’s the second problem for those calling for the total privatization of the public safety net — they are contradicted by the vast majority of those who are actually working in the very private charities they praise. From the top leadership to the foot soldiers in the trenches, the people who are doing the hard work of those private charities overwhelmingly wish to see more and more vigorous public support, not less, and certainly not none. They do not view themselves as “rivals” of the government.

This has also always been the case. (Of the many distortions in Marvin Olasky’s seminally dishonest The Tragedy of American Compassion, one of the worst was the way he surgically removed the voices of the 19th- and early-20th-century charitable workers he praises. For an antidote to Olasky’s influential revisionism, see Norris Magnuson’s Salvation in the Slums: Evangelical Social Work 1865-1920. Magnuson consults the same primary sources as Olasky, but actually quotes from them. The contrast is revealing.)

The third problem is more theoretical and abstract, resulting from a basic misunderstanding of subsidiarity that inverts and perverts its meaning. This is where Douthat goes off the rails, but, again, he is not the first or the only person to do so. Subsidiarity is based on solidarity and on the foundational idea of universal, mutual and complementary responsibility. The notion that public and private actors are, necessarily, “rivals” rejects the possibility of solidarity and mutual responsibility, twisting it into something competitive and exclusive. Helping the poor is not a zero-sum contest between public and private actors.

That distortion leads Douthat to confuse cause and effect. He imagines that “government” is usurping the role of civil society, when what is actually the case is that government, as the responsible agent of last resort, has been compelled to do more due to the abdication of responsibility on the part of a civil society increasingly shaped and weakened by a musical-chairs, Randian individualism that denies the universal responsibility of solidarity.

But my main point in response to Douthat’s confused talk of “rivalry” is to point out again the fourth problem for him and for everyone who embraces this theory that privatized charity would thrive and succeed if only it were freed from government interference and government “competition.”

We needn’t discuss that idea as a mere theory. It has been tried and implemented for decades in an experiment that is national in scope. The results are evident for all to see, to measure and to contemplate.

This is how Haiti works. If you wish to see a world in which thousands of vibrant private charities are hard at work with no government interference, support or competition, then just look at Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere.

The utopia that Ross Douthat dreams of has been made real in Haiti. The blueprint he sketches has been built there in a nation mostly ungoverned save by the work of NGOs. Look there and you will see what Ross Douthat wishes for America.

See also: Booman Tribune: “Romney’s Giant Blunder,” which takes a more cynical view of the idea of a “rivalry” between public and private assistance to the vulnerable.

Added: And also Natalie Burris on “Should Government Promote Family Values? Whose Family Values?“:

Many Republicans and Christians claim the church, rather than government, should be the one to help the poor. These folks argue that government should stay out of providing social services, and don’t want to see their tax dollars used for such purposes. But when it comes to “values,” many conservatives do not have a problem with government promoting a certain family model using millions of dollars in federal funds.

Which one is it? If you want government to stay out of the church’s role in caring for the poor, wouldn’t you also want government to step aside so the church can foster healthy relationships, including marriage and fatherhood?

 

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Rick Santorum vs. Pope Pius XI — one candidate, two encyclicals

January 10, 2012 By Fred Clark 93 Comments

I read two recent items about former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum that both turned out to be, oddly, about former Pope Pius XI.

First up is an excellent question from Mary at The Left Coaster, who notes that Republican presidential candidate Santorum opposes contraception, arguing that sex without the possibility of conception is “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Mary suggests a follow-up question for the candidate:

Perhaps someone should ask him whether he plans to be celibate after his wife passes through menopause.

That’s an interesting question. The answer I’ve usually heard to that question was that the story of Abraham and Sarah shows that even post-menopause, there remains the possibility of conception due to a miracle.

That’s pretty weak, and a transparent bit of retro-fitting — an excuse seized as a rationale for the teaching rather than a belief from which the teaching is derived. If the possibility of a divine miracle overcoming menopause is sufficient, then why isn’t the same true of the possibility of a divine miracle overcoming condom-use?*

For the official Catholic answer to Mary’s question, we need to turn to Pope Pius XI’s 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii, or “Of Chaste Wedlock” (or “A Celibate Virgin Talks About Sex”). Pius XI, like Rick Santorum, sought to rule out the use of contraception. The only substantial difference between their views is Santorum’s desire to make this teaching civil law here in America. (And, unlike Santorum, Pius XI never said he wanted to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut — although that’s probably on account of his dying some 26 years before it was decided.)

Santorum’s phrase — “counter to how things are supposed to be” — echoes the central thrust of the argument in Casti Connubii. That encyclical says that sex deliberately separated from procreation is regarded as “a grave sin” because it is against nature. How can we be sure that it is against nature? Because it is regarded as a sin.

That’s either a powerful double proof or else a silly bit of circular reasoning, I’ll let you decide which. But either way — whether you see this as a potent argument or merely an undefended assertion — the answer to Mary’s question lies in that word “deliberately.” Pius XI argues that infertility due to menopause isn’t deliberate and, therefore, he said that it isn’t “acting against nature” for a married couple to get all connubii even if due to “natural reasons either of time or of certain defects, new life cannot be brought forth.”

So there is an answer to Mary’s question, it’s just not terribly compelling in that it depends utterly on the underlying assertion. And it’s not at all compelling for those of us who are not Catholic and, therefore, are not compelled by the coercive threat of eternal damnation to accept it.

And that, of course, brings us to the next follow-up questions for Rick Santorum. “Why should everyone in America be compelled to follow Catholic doctrine?” And “Why should anyone in America be compelled to follow any doctrine?”

You can probably tell that I’m not overly impressed with the arguments Pius XI puts forward in Casti Connubii. I am, however, quite impressed with the arguments he affirmed in the encyclical he released a few months later, Quadragesimo Anno, or “In the 40th Year” (following 40 years after Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, which laid the foundation for later Catholic social teaching). It was there that Pius XI made official his church’s support for the principle of subsidiarity. That’s an idea I find enormously helpful for thinking about the world and our differentiated, complementary responsibilities within it. (It’s even more helpful once it’s shorn of the hierarchical medieval outlook that Pius XI preserves in his discussion of it, but let that pass for now.)

As it turns out, Rick Santorum has also been talking about subsidiarity, leading two conservative columnists — David Brooks and Michael Gerson — to hail the candidate as bringing about either “A New Social Agenda” or perhaps “The Return of Compassionate Conservatism.” But despite their attempts to ascribe to him some new and substantive intellectual approach, Santorum’s references to the principle lead me to agree with The Christian Century’s David Heim: “I doubt Santorum has thought much about subsidiarity.”

Vincent Miller, in the Catholic magazine America (via Bold Faith Type), goes further than Heim, discussing, “Rick Santorum and the Lobotomization of Subsidiarity“:

This debate is important not only for politics, but for Catholic social thought. Santorum and other so-called “conservative” uses of subsidiarity are deeply distorted and threaten to confuse believers and deprive the republic of the full force of this Catholic moral principle.

The full Catholic version of Subsidiarity is outlined in the Vatican Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. As a moral principle subsidiarity has both a positive and negative meaning. In its positive sense, “ all societies of a superior order must adopt attitudes of help (“subsidium”) — therefore of support, promotion, development — with respect to lower-order societies.” (#186) In its negative sense subsidiarity limits such intervention from usurping the power and agency of lower level governments, communities and institutions, including the family.

The distortions are not Santorum’s fault. Catholic neo-liberals (who generally call themselves conservatives) have worked tirelessly to reduce subsidiarity to its negative sense and establish this as the keystone of Catholic social thought. They do so by selective reading — and outright editing — of Papal teaching from Pius XI through John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

This careful lobotomization of subsidiarity renders Catholic social teaching a docile partner in the neo-liberal program of limiting government and subjecting social institutions (schools, healthcare) to market logic. (Witness Ayn Rand devotee Congressman Paul Ryan’s invocation of subsidiarity in his attempted apologia for his radical budget to Archbishop Dolan this summer).

… Families and communities are being profoundly disempowered in precisely the way subsidiarity cautions against, but not by government. Our lives are ruled by insurance companies, banks, media conglomerates and transnational corporations.

While Santorum is willing to take aim at big media, the rest of the epochal growth in corporate power is outside of his subsidiarity lens.

Subsidarity has much to contribute to our political thought. In order for it to do so, we must retrieve its full meaning, and develop it further to address the new challenges we face. Those wishing to do so (including Brooks and Gerson) would be better served by starting with the discussion of governance in Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate and the Pontificial Council on Justice and Peace’s document on Financial Reform. Pay particular attention to the parts that George Wiegel says should be ignored.

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* I posed that question to an acquaintance who is a Catholic theologian. Unfortunately, he answered my question with a question of his own: “So you believe that sex can occur primarily for pleasure?” My response — “Believe it? I’ve seen it with my own two eyes!” — prematurely ended our discussion.

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Do you want a big rock or a small rock?

January 3, 2012 By Fred Clark 32 Comments

Do you want a big rock or a small rock? You have to pick one or the other. A huge, heavy, substantial, unbreakable hunk of granite? Or a tiny, buoyant, crumbly piece of pumice?

Which one do you want?

I’m assuming you know what the rock is for. The question would be silly — utterly stupid and pointless — unless we all already agreed on what the rock is for. No point in asking about the proper size or weight of the rock unless we know that — unless we all share a comprehensive, proper and correct understanding of the purpose of said rock.

After all, that’s what determines the appropriate size, shape and weight of the thing, right? You wouldn’t want to be picking out a good flagstone only to find out later that what you really needed was a slingstone. If the rock is something you’ll be building on, that’s quite a different prospect than a rock you’ll be carrying. We all agree that the rocks we’re standing on and building on need to be solid and unshakable, while at the same time we all agree that any rocks we have to heft on our backs should be as small and light as possible. We all agree that we want tiny rocks on our shoulders that won’t burden us or weigh us down. And we all agree that we want massive, unmovable rocks beneath us, upholding our homes and businesses and keeping us from collapsing into a bottomless pit.

But there’s no need to clarify which sort of rock we’re talking about here. We can just assume that everyone already knows that.

That’s how professional pollsters like Michael Dimock, associate director of the Pew Research Center, approach such questions.

“We are in the midst of a fundamental debate” between big and small Dimock says of his poll findings. “It’s almost exactly down the middle … almost 50-50.”

Fascinating.

So which side of that fundamental debate are you on? Do you want a big rock or a small one?

You have to pick one or the other.

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Subsidiarity and the outline of your next novel

December 28, 2011 By Fred Clark 210 Comments

Noah Smith’s post, “The liberty of local bullies,” does a good job describing the inadequacy of contemporary libertarian ideology.

The modern American libertarian ideology does not deal with the issue of local bullies. In the world envisioned by Nozick, Hayek, Rand, and other foundational thinkers of the movement, there are only two levels to society — the government (the “big bully”) and the individual. If your freedom is not being taken away by the biggest bully that exists, your freedom is not being taken away at all.

Smith recognizes that this ideology ignores the obvious reality of our world. It’s view of society is far too thin and constricted. There’s far more to society than just the individual and The State. Society also includes, for example: “… a large variety of intermediate powers like work bosses, neighborhood associations, self-organized ethnic movements, organized religions, tough violent men, or social conventions.”

All true. But Smith’s list is too short and is too much shaped by the other inadequacy of that libertarian ideology, which is its tendency to treat anything other than the individual almost exclusively in negative terms — as a “bully” limiting or restraining the freedom of individuals. (I don’t think this is what Smith means to argue, but his critique of libertarian ideology here  winds up adopting the shape of his subject.)

All of these intermediate “powers” — to use that oddly Pauline term — can be bullies, or can become bullies, but that is not their only or their proper or their primary function in our society or in our lives. We are not all and always Stephen Dedalus — the romantic, heroic individual struggling against kinships, institutions, traditions and all the other bonds that serve only to keep us in bondage. These powers and principalities do not function exclusively as “bullies.”

Just consider the first of Smith’s examples — “work bosses.” Like about 14 million other Americans at this point, I do not have a boss right now because I do not have a job. I do not regard this as a form of liberation, as a welcome enhancement of my individual liberty. To be unfettered from employment does not make me more free, but less so.

If we’re going to get anywhere addressing problems like the jobs crisis that has left millions of us unemployed, then our solutions have to be based on society as it actually is, rather than on some theoretical model that fails to account for the actual world. It won’t do to follow a model that is unable to acknowledge the existence of anything other than the individual and The State. Nor will it do to follow a model that is unable to conceive of institutions, relationships, associations and governments as anything other than “bullies.”

A better model of society is one that can recognize the existence of a vast and multilayered network of such institutions, relationships, agencies, associations and governments, identifying the complementary role each has to play and their mutual responsibilities.

Let’s first consider “the big bully” of The State, which isn’t really the massive, monolithic, centralized “The State” at all. Government encompasses a vast variety of actors large and small that we relate to and rely on in a multitude of ways. Each of us lives in a network of levels of government, with each level in turn differentiated with various agencies, services, bureaucracies, offices, officers, regulators, responders, police, courts, councils, legislatures, schools, libraries, etc. Treating them all as a single, undifferentiated entity takes away our ability to think about what each should or shouldn’t be doing. And determining beforehand that they are all just “bullies” or a single “big bully” begs the question — mistaking a presumption for a conclusion.

As vast and various as all those aspects of government are, put them all together and they’re still dwarfed by multitude of non-state, non-individual entities that make up our world: families, friendships, clubs, teams, bands, troupes, affinity groups, congregations, denominations, businesses, banks, exchanges, markets, unions, neighborhoods, theaters, leagues, societies, charities, associations, etc.

This is the point at which I usually begin to talk about “subsidiarity” or about the “inescapable network of mutuality” or, since I already mentioned the jobs crisis here, about “direct” and “indirect” employers.

But instead let’s just talk about stories. Let’s talk about the outline of your next novel.

Look again at that list of entities above — families, friendships, etc. Any one of those might, at some point, come to function as a “bully” in the life of an individual. In doing so, it would be betraying its intended purpose and function, but any single one of those entities so corrupted could turn a person’s life into a hell.

So instead of using that list above as the starting point for another lecture on subsidiarity, let’s instead think of it as a novel-generating machine. Pick one item from the list. Twist it into a bully. Voila! There’s your next novel.

If you like, you can pick more than one item from the list and turn several of these entities into bullies in the life of your protagonist. But don’t overdo it — don’t use all of them.

If you portray all of them as bullies then your readers will begin to suspect that the problem doesn’t lie with the rest of the world, but with your protagonist. Also, how would you resolve such a story? If, for example, the story is one in which the hero’s family has become a bully, then you can resolve the story by having her liberate herself from that bully. But you can’t have a hero who liberates himself from that entire list.

If your story ends with your hero saying, “I am not bound by and do not care about my family, my friends, or any clubs, teams, bands, troupes, affinity groups, congregations, denominations, banks, businesses, exchanges, markets, unions, neighborhoods, theaters, leagues, societies, charities or associations,” then your hero won’t turn out to be much of a hero at all.

He’ll just be a libertarian and, well, kind of a jerk.

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“The moral rights corresponding to this obligation”

November 9, 2011 By Fred Clark 16 Comments

For a less snarky, clearer, and more compelling discussion of the rights that correspond — necessarily — from the obligation to work, see John Paul II’s encyclical Laborem Exercens, or “On Human Labor.”

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a big fan of this encyclical, due mainly to the forceful logic of its secular argument. But I’ll also confess that I enjoy citing this sometimes because I like watching right-wing Catholics squirm.

Here’s one pertinent part of John Paul II’s argument (all italics original):

IV. RIGHTS OF WORKERS

16. Within the Broad Context of Human Rights

While work, in all its many senses, is an obligation, that is to say a duty, it is also a source of rights on the part of the worker. These rights must be examined in the broad context of human rights as a whole, which are connatural with man, and many of which are proclaimed by various international organizations and increasingly guaranteed by the individual States for their citizens. … The human rights that flow from work are part of the broader context of those fundamental rights of the person.

However, within this context they have a specific character corresponding to the specific nature of human work as outlined above. It is in keeping with this character that we must view them. Work is, as has been said, an obligation, that is to say, a duty, on the part of man. This is true in all the many meanings of the word. Man must work, both because the Creator has commanded it and because of his own humanity, which requires work in order to be maintained and developed. Man must work out of regard for others, especially his own family, but also for the society he belongs to, the country of which he is a child, and the whole human family of which he is a member, since he is the heir to the work of generations and at the same time a sharer in building the future of those who will come after him in the succession of history. All this constitutes the moral obligation of work, understood in its wide sense. When we have to consider the moral rights, corresponding to this obligation, of every person with regard to work, we must always keep before our eyes the whole vast range of points of reference in which the labour of every working subject is manifested.

For when we speak of the obligation of work and of the rights of the worker that correspond to this obligation, we think in the first place of the relationship between the employer, direct or indirect, and the worker.

The distinction between the direct and the indirect employer is seen to be very important when one considers both the way in which labour is actually organized and the possibility of the formation of just or unjust relationships in the field of labour.

Since the direct employer is the person or institution with whom the worker enters directly into a work contract in accordance with definite conditions, we must understand as the indirect employer many different factors, other than the direct employer, that exercise a determining influence on the shaping both of the work contract and, consequently, of just or unjust relationships in the field of human labour.

John Paul’s “indirect employer” encompasses “many different factors,” and many different actors — individual, corporate and institutional. This reflects a fully realized picture of civil society as including multiple layers of actors, agencies and relationships, all mutually interdependent. Catholics like JP2 discuss this in terms of “subsidiarity.” I also like the language of my fellow Baptist, Martin Luther King Jr., who called this an “inescapable network of mutuality.”

That idea of mutuality can be seen in the encyclical. John Paul II was keenly aware that to speak of obligations and their corresponding rights is necessarily to speak of relationships.

Those relationships, and the relationships between those relationships, are complicated because the world is complicated. It’s always tempting to pretend the world isn’t complicated. To pretend, for example, that instead of an inescapable network of mutuality, we live in a simplistic world of binary, exclusive responsibilities. That view tends to correspond to a model of reality consisting only of two actors — rugged individuals and a monolithic, leviathan state.

Those clinging to such a simplistic model will likely be bewildered by JP2′s ensuing discussion of the various and varying mutual responsibilities of the “many different factors” that constitute the “indirect employer” he deems responsible for ensuring the right to work. The bewilderment induced by this simplistic model tends to express itself through the attempt to force every discussion into one of two binary categories: unfettered laissez-faire capitalism or socialism. Since what John Paul II describes as the duty of the indirect employer clearly is not the former, the bewildered simplifiers will likely jump to the conclusion that he is advocating the latter. That’s wrong, but it wouldn’t be the first time these folks have inaccurately assumed that someone is a socialist. That seems to be a hobby of theirs.

Anyway, a bit more on the role — and the duty — of indirect employers:

18. The Employment Issue

When we consider the rights of workers in relation to the “indirect employer”, that is to say, all the agents at the national and international level that are responsible for the whole orientation of labour policy, we must first direct our attention to a fundamental issue: the question of finding work, or, in other words, the issue of suitable employment for all who are capable of it. The opposite of a just and right situation in this field is unemployment, that is to say the lack of work for those who are capable of it. It can be a question of general unemployment or of unemployment in certain sectors of work. The role of the agents included under the title of indirect employer is to act against unemployment, which in all cases is an evil, and which, when it reaches a certain level, can become a real social disaster. It is particularly painful when it especially affects young people, who after appropriate cultural, technical and professional preparation fail to find work, and see their sincere wish to work and their readiness to take on their own responsibility for the economic and social development of the community sadly frustrated. The obligation to provide unemployment benefits, that is to say, the duty to make suitable grants indispensable for the subsistence of unemployed workers and their families, is a duty springing from the fundamental principle of the moral order in this sphere, namely the principle of the common use of goods or, to put it in another and still simpler way, the right to life and subsistence.

In order to meet the danger of unemployment and to ensure employment for all, the agents defined here as “indirect employer” must make provision for overall planning with regard to the different kinds of work by which not only the economic life but also the cultural life of a given society is shaped; they must also give attention to organizing that work in a correct and rational way. In the final analysis this overall concern weighs on the shoulders of the State, but it cannot mean onesided centralization by the public authorities. Instead, what is in question is a just and rational coordination, within the framework of which the initiative of individuals, free groups and local work centres and complexes must be safeguarded, keeping in mind what has been said above with regard to the subject character of human labour.

 

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On the road to Weehawken

August 8, 2011 By Fred Clark 57 Comments

Or consider the role and duty of a ferry boat captain. Her job is to pilot a ferry boat from Point A to Point B and back again according to schedule while ensuring the safety of her passengers. That is her primary responsibility. It’s what she was hired to do and what she is paid to do.

That duty and responsibility means that she must not stray from her assigned route. Any such deviation will put her ferry and its passengers off schedule. It could also expose her passengers to added risk, endangering their safety and thus betraying her duty as ferry boat captain.

But one day not too long ago, several ferry boat captains did exactly that. With little thought for their unchanging daily duty, they turned their boats around and, instead of taking their passengers safely to shore in a timely manner, they carried them to the middle of the river.

They did this because Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot of US Airways Flight 1549, had just landed his Airbus 320 right there, on the surface of the Hudson River.

Ferry boat Capt. Brittany Catanzaro was not hired to rescue airline passengers from the river. That was not her job. She wasn’t hired to do that and she wasn’t being paid to do that. She was responsible for the passengers aboard the NY Waterways ferry Thomas H. Kean, and not for the passengers of US Airways Flight 1549. Those passengers were US Airways’ responsibility. And water rescue is the job of the Coast Guard or of the FDNY or NYPD.

I’m not sure exactly where in the Hudson Capt. Sully touched down, actually. He may have been closer to the Weehawken side of the river, in which case the stranded passengers perched on the slowly sinking airplane would have fallen under the jurisdiction of New Jersey’s rescue personnel.

None of those responders, however, hesitated for even a second that day to consider such jurisdictional niceties. They all sprang into action without any thought as to who might bear specific or exclusive responsibility for the people stranded in the river.

The very idea of “exclusive responsibility,” in fact, would have seemed horrifying.

Capt. Catanzaro and Vincent Lombardo, captain of another NY Waterways ferry, arrived at the plane within just a few minutes of its touching down in the river, followed soon after by Circle Line ferries and FDNY marine units. They all responded so quickly because they all knew — by training, or by instinct, or by virtue of just being human — that it’s foolish to debate over jurisdiction, or to imagine that the responsibility to act belonged only to one agency and not to any other.

The passengers on that slowing sinking plane were headed to Charlotte and then, from there, to Seattle and to whatever business awaited them in those places. They had no previous relationship to the ferry boat captains or to the passengers on those ferries before Capt. Sully expertly splashed his plane down onto the river on which they were floating. And after that crazily beautiful landing, the only relationship they all shared was that of the crudest most basic kind — a shared humanity and physical proximity.

But that basic relationship was enough for the people on those ferries to recognize, instantly, that it made them responsible. It was enough, even, for them to put every other responsibility they had on hold. No one boarded those ferries expecting to spend the rest of their afternoon plucking strangers out of the water. That wasn’t their job. Like the Samaritan in Jesus’ story, those people had places to be and jobs to do. They were just trying to get to Manhattan or to Weehawken so that they could get on with whatever those other duties and responsibilities were.

But then their circumstances changed and thus their responsibilities changed, because they knew that’s how it works.

It would have been wrong for those commuter ferries and sight-seeing boats to “pass by on the other side.” It would have been wrong to tell themselves that those soaked and sinking strangers were the exclusive responsibility of someone else — the Coast Guard, the FDNY or US Airways — and not their responsibility too. Because (go ahead, say it with me) responsibility is never exclusive, binary and competitive. It’s always mutual and complementary.

We all know this in extraordinary situations, but somehow we tend to forget it in our ordinary lives. Sometimes we choose to forget it because, after all, we have places to be and our own jobs to do, and we imagine that our own lives will be easier if we could somehow exclude ourselves from mutuality.

But mutuality makes our lives easier, not harder. Mutuality isn’t a burden. “Bear one another’s burdens,” the apostle Paul wrote. But some selfish, reptilian part of our brains recoils at the idea — I’m having enough trouble bearing my own burdens, thankyouverymuch. The last thing I need is to get saddled with everyone else’s too. I’m just trying to get to Jerusalem or to Weehawken. I’ve got enough on my plate as it is.

And thus we avoid helping and we avoid being helped. And then we construct ridiculous intellectual justifications for this rejection of mutuality. “Either/Or!” we declare. “Never Both/And.”

Extraordinary circumstances can break through our protective shell and remind us that we know better, and that we can be better and act better and live together better in a better world.

I just wish it didn’t take an Airbus 320 splashing down out of the sky to remind us of that.

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Subsidiarity and Saddleback

August 8, 2011 By Fred Clark 145 Comments

My frustration was showing a couple of weeks ago in a post titled: “Responsibility is differentiated, mutual and complementary, not exclusive, binary and competitive.”

That post consisted almost entirely of the sentence “Responsibility is differentiated, mutual and complementary; responsibility is not exclusive, binary and competitive,” repeated 10 times with each repetition linking to a different longer and deeper discussion of subsidiarity, “sphere sovereignty” or some other framework explaining and exploring the nature of moral responsibility as unavoidably differentiated, mutual and complementary.

My frustration was compounded shortly thereafter by a parade of posters visiting here from Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, most repeating some variation of their pastor’s belief that moral responsibility is exclusive and binary — an either/or, competitive framework rather than a multi-layered, mutual framework of supporting, cooperative and complementary roles.

The members of that congregation believe — rightly! — that “the church” is responsible to meet the needs of the needy, to empower the powerless and to care for the poor, the widow, the orphan and the least of these.

Unfortunately, due to an ethical and biblical confusion that seems pervasive in that congregation, they therefore conclude that this means that only “the church” bears any such responsibility, and that it is somehow improper or wrong for other actors and agencies, especially governments, to regard themselves as also responsible.

That’s reprehensible theology and, if they really believed a word of it, would reflect an appalling biblical ignorance or illiteracy.

But fortunately they don’t fully believe what they’re saying.

[Read more...]

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