Hold on to the good

Last updated on: October 15, 2010 at 4:59 am By Fred Clark

This post is addressed to one person in particular and I'm afraid I don't know his name.

Your name.

Your aunt, unfortunately, didn't mention either your name or hers when she drunk-dialed me Thursday to let me know I was at the top of the list of Bad People she's praying against due to my supposedly contributing to your doubts about the inerrancy and infallibility of the footnotes in the Scofield Reference Bible.

Your aunt was too intoxicated — three sheets to the wind on self-righteous indignation — for me to make a great deal of sense of your situation or hers. She is, I think, your father's sister, and she used to live in California, but now has an area code that Google tells me is in the really lovely part of Washington State. She seems to really enjoy telling people that if they believe in evolution then they don't believe in the Bible. And by "the Bible" she's apparently referring to some set of scriptures that includes the Complete Works of Hal Lindsey.

She's kind of a piece of work, your aunt. Has this unfortunate habit of asking questions that turn out not to be questions, because when you start to answer them she cuts you off and answers them for you in the way she imagines you were going to, whether or not it's anything like what you would ever have said. And then she criticizes you for giving such ghastly answers.

I discovered that I can be wonderfully patient with this kind of hectoring monologue for about 17 minutes and only moderately impatient for the next 10 minutes or so. After that, however, I discovered I really can't tolerate that sort of thing at all.

And I'm afraid your aunt had me on the phone much longer than 27 minutes. So that last little bit didn't go very well.

Is this ringing any bells? Because even though I can't offer a very clear description of your aunt, I think you're more likely to recognize her from my description than you would be to recognize yourself from her description of you.

What she told me about you was that you had rejected Jesus Christ. (She was quite emphatic about that word "rejected" — used it over and over.) She also said that you have come to believe that you don't need to love your neighbor or to care about anybody other than yourself. Your decision to renounce Jesus and to become a nihilistic narcissist, according to your aunt, was largely due to the pernicious influence of this blog which, she told me, you've been reading for eight years now.

Let me pause a moment to say thank you for that.

Eight years is about as long as I've been doing this, and I thank you for sticking with me all this time, even when I seem to be repeating myself or when I veer off into long tangents in which I forget that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for Reinhold Niebuhr or subsidiarity or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So, again, thank you.

But I don't trust your aunt when she tells me that you've become a self-centered antichrist. That redundant term is my paraphrase. Your aunt wouldn't use the word "antichrist" in the biblical sense. What she said was that you didn't care for anybody but you.

I don't believe her. If you really believed that, if you were convinced that you don't need to love your neighbor and that you don't need to care about others then I can't imagine why you'd want to keep reading a blog that says otherwise. Plus I would really, really hope that this blog did not play a role in convincing anyone not to love their neighbor, since "love your neighbor" is supposed to be kind of a central theme here (even in the bits on Niebuhr, subsidiarity or Buffy — especially in those bits, actually).

Seriously, though, don't get this wrong. "Love your neighbor" is the one thing you can't afford to get wrong. Get everything else right but that wrong and you're still nothing and nowhere and no one. Get that right and you can get everything else wrong and still be OK.

And but so anyway, I don't know your name, but I'm hoping all of that will help you to recognize that it's you I'm talking to here, in particular. Because I very much want to tell you this one thing:

Test everything. Hold on to the good.

That's from the Apostle Paul, actually. It's a bona fide biblical commandment. Both parts of it. Test everything. Hold on to the good.

Note the difference between the first part and the second. "Test everything" is unconditional. What should we test? Everything. But the second part is conditional. We're not told to hold on to everything — only to "the good," only to that which withstands testing. Test everything and drop whatever can't pass the test. Let it go and don't look back.

But hold on to the good.

From the sound of what your aunt described, that's going to be the really tricky part for you, because she says you were always taught that everything must be accepted unconditionally — that it mustn't be tested and that it all, every bit of it, must be held on to forever. All of it or none of it.

I think you were probably taught some good things, but they seem to have been mixed in with a grab-dag of dubious claims and outright hokum. You learned about Jesus' boundless sacrificial love, but that came to you as part of a package deal tied up with 19th-century End-Times "prophecy" fever dreams and early-20th century young-earth creationism.

And, based on what I heard from your aunt, you were always told that the whole concoction was inseparable — an all-or-nothing, take-it-or-leave-it deal. Instead of being encouraged, or commanded, to test everything and hold on to the good, you were told that you must either hold on to everything or abandon it all. And you were told that these were your only possible choices.

I'm sorry you were taught that. It's wrong. It's factually wrong, biblically wrong and logically wrong. And teaching such a thing to a younger person is morally wrong. It's evil.

I'm afraid I may have used that word "evil" when speaking to your aunt, some time a bit after the 27-minute mark of her soliloquy. That was a bit harsher than I was trying to be, but it wasn't inaccurate. Or unearned. The all-or-nothing bill of goods she sold you when you were younger really is evil. It invites a crisis of its own making. It batters a child with a series of cruel non-sequiturs: If the earth is more than 6,000 years old, it says, then Jesus doesn't love you. If there weren't dinosaurs in Noah's flood, it says, then life is meaningless. If Isaiah was anything other than a carnival fortune-teller, whispering secrets to be decoded millennia later by the magic formula, then all hope is illusion.

This all-or-nothing mixture of sense and nonsense is a house built on sand. Eventually, it will be tested and it will fail the test. And it will fall with a great crash.

And that, your aunt says, is just what happened to the all-or-nothing house she helped to build for you. It fell with a great crash and she found that crash very upsetting. She had put a lot of work into that house, picking out just the right squishy spot on the sandbar, and now she's upset with you for letting it collapse and even more upset with me for cheering when it fell.

She doesn't yet realize what I think you've come to realize — that you couldn't live there. That rickety all-or-nothing edifice with its sandy foundation of fantastic heresies wasn't fit for human habitation. It couldn't withstand high tide, let alone hurricane season. It wasn't true. It wasn't good. It wasn't worth holding on to.

But the worst thing about that house wasn't just the obviously shoddy bits — the Lindseyian stubble or the young-earth creationist papier mache. The worst thing about that house was the all-or-nothing blueprint, the way the whole thing was built so that the sense would inevitably be dragged down with the nonsense, the truth dragged down with the lies, the beautiful with the ugly, the good with the bad.

The house is gone now. You don't need to stick with that all-or-nothing blueprint anymore. Pick through the rubble a bit and you'll find it's not all rubble. Some of it may be quite sturdy and useful. Some of it may be beautiful or valuable or necessary.

Sort through it all. Test everything. Hold on to the good.

Mission Trips & AmeriCorps

Last updated on: July 3, 2012 at 6:57 pm By Fred Clark

Matt Yglesias discusses Sen. Chris Dodd's national service plan, and in doing so touches on something that often arises in church regarding the practice of mission trips.

Here's Matt:

There's nothing wrong, generically, with such programs but they really need to be looked at one-by-one on the merits primarily through the lens of whether or not they're cost-effective methods of achieving the public purpose in question. Does appropriating more money to the Peace Corps make sense as a development strategy, or would it be better to boost funding for the Millenium Challenge Corporation or the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.

The question he raises is often asked of church mission trips. A local church youth group raises money for a weeklong trip to, say, Haiti, where they will be helping to build a school. This works OK. The school gets built. But it may not be the most cost-effective approach. A significant chunk of the funds raised winds up going to the group's travel expenses, all so a bunch of kids with little or no construction experience can travel thousands of miles to help out. If the goal is to get the school built, it would seem to make more sense to raise the money and let the folks down in Haiti use it to hire local skilled laborers — people who are already there, who know what they're doing and who may desperately need the paycheck.

But the point of these mission trips is not only to get the school built. That's part of it, but it's not the only goal. The mission trip is also designed to give the American youth group a tangible, visceral stake in the fate of the Haitian community. This is vital for the people in Haiti too. The problem with the calculus above is that it presumes that the total level of contribution is a constant. That assumption is probably not true. It's unlikely that the youth group, the church, or any other given community here would raise the same amount of money without the personal stake of the trip itself.

The purpose of the mission trip is not exclusively to change the Haitian community where the school is to be built. Part of the purpose of the trip is also to change the young Americans who are going there, and to change the community that sends them. Part of the reason for such trips is to nurture a sense of empathy, of solidarity, and an ethos of service — to create and maintain the capacity to care whether or not children in Haiti have a decent place to go to school, and to create and maintain the desire to help.

This should also be a part of what Matt refers to as the "public purpose" of any kind of national service program. This additional purpose is what separates things like the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps from other more professional and specialized development efforts. The service corps may not be as efficient as a more professionalized "development strategy," but they exist to promote and achieve additional goals that the development strategy does not address. They exist, in part, to ensure that our national character remains capable of supporting those other, more targeted and efficient, development efforts.

Having said all of that, I'm not persuaded that a big federal program like Dodd's proposed "American Community Initiative" makes sense. What Matt calls Dodd's "conceptual confusions" could be clarified with a better understanding of subsidiarity* (or, for you Kuyperians out there, "sphere sovereignty"). Programs like the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps have symbolic importance. Among other things, they help to ensure that bully-pulpit praise for volunteerism isn't completely hollow.

But the heavy lifting here will not and cannot be done by the federal government. It will be done, rather, by those closer to the ground: by families, schools, churches (synagogues/mosques/temples/covens/Hitchens Book Clubs), civic organizations, business, labor and media (old and new).

If all of these other actors play their part, then service will be a vital part of our national character regardless of what the federal government does or does not do. If all of these other actors fail to play their part, then anything the federal government attempts will be as ineffective and dim as a thousand points of light.

I like the parts of Dodd's plan that focus on creating incentives for service, and even more so the parts that focus on removing disincentives. (Apart from his proposed massive expansion of AmeriCorps, however, he seems to offer little to address what may be the largest single disincentive — educational debt.)

I'm still not completely sure what to think about Dodd's idea of mandatory service as a requirement for high school graduation. I get the impulse — a self-absorbed little prick really shouldn't be handed a diploma and declared "educated" until someone has pointed out to him that he shouldn't be such a self-absorbed little prick. And the idea of mandatory service for high school students begins to look more attractive the more you listen to the whining of its most vocal opponents. Yet for all of that "mandatory service" still seems like an oxymoron. Berea College provides an inspiring model for service and education, but students can choose whether or not to attend there. High school students don't have a choice. I'd like to see high school students encouraged to serve. I'd like to see them empowered to serve without suffering any opportunity costs. And I'd like to see their service rewarded. But, unlike Dodd, I don't think I'd like to see their service required.

This is where I'd like to conclude with a paragraph tying together all the disparate half-thoughts above into some coherent whole, but for the life of me I can't figure out what such a paragraph would say.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* For a primer on subsidiarity, see "Who is you?."

Cut and run

Last updated on: May 10, 2007 at 9:13 pm By Fred Clark

A few months back I posted an excerpt from E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful so that I would be able to link back to it from time to time.

This is one of those times. That excerpt concludes:

… if it is taken for granted that education is a passport to privilege, then the content of education will not primarily be something to serve the people, but something to serve ourselves, the educated. The privileged minority will wish to be educated in a manner that sets them apart and will inevitably learn and teach the wrong things, that is to say, things that do set them apart. …

Bruce Shortt, of something called Exodus Mandate, believes that young Southern Baptists are not sufficiently set apart, so he's sponsoring a resolution urging all Southern Baptists to withdraw their children from public schools. Ethics Daily's Bob Allen has the story:

The call for an "exodus" from public schools continues to gain momentum in the Southern Baptist Convention, according to sponsors of a resolution being proposed at this summer's SBC annual meeting in San Antonio.

Bruce Shortt, a representative of Exodus Mandate, a Christian ministry that urges parents to remove their children from "government" schools and educate them either at home or in Christian schools, announced today plans for the fourth straight year to introduce a resolution encouraging the expansion of Christian alternatives to public education.

Shortt, an attorney from Houston, is co-sponsoring the resolution with Voddie Baucham, an African-American author and conference leader who worked together with Shortt in 2005 in convincing the convention to adopt a resolution on Christian education affirming that parents, and not the government, are primarily responsible for educating their children.

The 2007 resolution seeks to build momentum on a comment made by SBC president Frank Page shortly after his election last summer in Greensboro, N.C. Page, pastor of First Baptist Church in Taylors, S.C., told Agape Press he is disturbed that many teenagers leave the church after graduating from high school and he hoped that more churches would begin offering Christian schools.

Bauchum said Page's call for more Christian schools reflects "an expanding debate" among Christians over public education. Seminary president Albert Mohler has called on Baptist parents to develop an "exit strategy" for their children from public schools. …

This year's resolution says the majority of Southern Baptist children are being discipled by "an anti-Christian government school system," that undermines values taught in church and home.

The resolution also has the support of Wiley Drake who is the SBC's "second vice president" (and not, as his name would seem to suggest, a character in a Flannery O'Connor story). Drake said:

"Southern Baptists, and Christians generally, need to plan a Christian educational future for our children."

"First, Christian parents are obligated to provide their children with a Christ-centered education. … Anyone who thinks that a few hours of youth group and church will have more influence on a child's faith and worldview than 40 to 50 hours a week of public school classes, activities and homework is simply not being honest with himself.

"Second, the open collaboration between homosexual activists and many school districts, together with the overall level of crime and violence in the public schools, make the public schools an unsafe place for our children."

Because, you know, crime and violence could never occur in a private Christian school.

I understand the idea here. Christians, St. Paul said, should not be "conformed to this world." Instead, St. Peter wrote, we are supposed to be "a peculiar people" and "a holy nation." That word "holy" means, literally, "set apart." But set apart for what? That's where Shortt, Baucham and Page, et. al., seem to lose the map. Their preoccupation with safety and purity and separateness-for-separateness' sake does not sound like the attitude of people who are called to be salt and light.

I also fear there's more to this agenda than its advocates are explicitly stating. I can't help but suspect that any group calling itself "Exodus Mandate" is planning to plunder the Egyptians. Step two of this plan, likely, would be for SBC families to argue that they are no longer obliged to pay school taxes, since their children are no longer in the public system. (And, despite Baucham's best Ward Connerly impression, I can't help but suspect that race is a massive, unspoken factor here.)

I would agree with the language of their preliminary resolution, stating that parents have the primary responsibility for the education of their children, except that I've seen these folks fumble the principle of subsidiarity too many times to trust them with its application here. Parents are responsible for their children's education. But so is the government and the rest of civil society. Turning this into an either/or is a dangerous kind of foolishness.

If their revolutionary zeal weren't so destructive, their confusion might be funny. For example:

"Christians and others find it increasingly difficult to avert their eyes from the metastasizing spiritual, moral and intellectual pathologies of the government school system," said Shortt, a homeschool father. "Southern Baptist churches and the SBC's institutions must get about the business of creating a new public school system — one that is 'public' in the sense that it is open to anyone, but controlled by parents and churches, not bureaucrats and politicians."

So instead of bureaucrats and politicians, parents will decide directly how these schools will be run. Well, maybe not directly — having a town-meeting every time you need to hire staff or purchase textbooks could be cumbersome and inefficient. But short of that they could ensure that parents had a say in such decisions by, say, electing representatives to a board that could oversee the schools. They could call it a "school board." This "school board" — accountable to the parents — could hire professionals to manage the day-to-day affairs of the schools. All of which would be so much better than the current system of politicians and bureaucrats.

I'll give the last word here to Robert Parham, executive director of the Baptist Center for Ethics:

"Rather than bearing false witness against public school teachers and the National Education Association, Christians need to speak up for the goal that great public schools ought to be a basic right for every child," Parham said. "We need to express gratitude for public school workers and to make sure that schools are fully funded."

"The anti-public education agenda fits nicely with the anti-women, anti-science, anti-Disney, anti-everything ideology within the SBC," Parham said. "That agenda runs counter to the best of the goodwill tradition within Baptist life that seeks the welfare of the public square."

Don’t warn the tadpoles

Last updated on: September 16, 2006 at 5:46 pm By Fred Clark

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If you're in the Philadelphia area during the next few weeks and you enjoy thought-provoking, charming romantic comedies about love and death, fantasy and responsibility, please come to the William Way Center (1315 Spruce St. — a block and a half from the Kimmel) and check out "Cakewalk."

An ensemble cast of eight talented actors and one blogger bring Tom Minter's delightful story to life. (I realize I'm biased here, but the cast really is terrific and this play and this cast deserve a bigger audience than they've been getting and so, well, I'm reduced to begging. Tickets are available through Smarttix.com.)

* * * * *

Call it "Dysnomia" if you must, to me it will always be "Gabrielle."

* * * * *

President Bush says he thinks America is in the midst of a "Third Awakening."

So what does Bush have against Dwight L. Moody?

The reference here is to the Great Awakenings — periods of Christian spiritual revival that have swept through America. Such things are obviously difficult to measure, but the agreed upon chronology is well settled and Bush has it wrong. The First Great Awakening was in the time of Jonathan Edwards in the early 1700s. The second was in the time of Charles Finney in the early 1800s. The Third Great Awakening came in the late 1800s, with the revivalism of Dwight L. Moody and the missionary movement. Some also regard the revivalism led by Billy Graham and the surge in Pentecostalism of the postwar years as a "Fourth Awakening," but by either count we should be on Awakening No. 4 or 5 by now.

Bush should know better. He hired Marvin Olasky as an advisor. Olasky's claim to fame is a book called "The Tragedy of American Compassion." It's probably the most dishonest, selective and deliberately misleading history of the Third Great Awakening ever published, but at least Olasky didn't claim that this period of revival never happened.

Bonus: Maha notes that the spiritual "awakening" Bush identifies seems to be Zoroastrian (via).

* * * * *

If you are in the Philly area, then you probably already know about WXPN — the public radio station from U. Penn. that plays great music, commercial free. Thanks to the worldwide Web, you no longer need to be in the Philly area to enjoy XPN — you can listen online at XPoNential Music or check out the daily free picks from My Morning Download.

* * * * *

"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your counterrevolution."

Tucker Carlson balked, opting to stay seated for much of his half-hearted performance on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars."

I don't like Carlson much — he has that combination of condescending-while-wrong that I find insufferable, and I pretty much agree with Jon Stewart's assessment of him. But I'll give credit where it's due: It took some guts for him to appear on the show, and he was a much better sport there than he ever was on Crossfire.

* * * * *

For a better history of the "social gospel" movement and the Third Great Awakening, see Norris Magnuson's Salvation in the Slums.

Fascinating in its own right, Magnuson's book is even more interesting read alongside Olasky's. Both authors cite many of the same sources, but Magnuson includes the parts Olasky didn't like and therefore had to omit from his polemic twistory. The 19th-century founders of the Salvation Army, the YMCA, and the urban gospel missions didn't actually share Olasky's either/or notion of social responsibility or his confusion of subsidiarity and socialism.

* * * * *

"Cakewalk" runs through Oct. 8. on Thurs., Fri. and Sat. nights with Sat. and Sun. matinees. And unlike the play I was in last year, this one has a happy, life-affirming ending (unless you're one of those religious right types, in which case you'll find this happy ending terrifying and rage-inducing — and come to think of it, the opportunity to annoy those religious right types is another reason to come see the show).

Binary Code

Last updated on: May 1, 2006 at 6:31 pm By Fred Clark

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Either/or. This or that. Only this or only that. Government or individuals — and only government (Leviathan) or only individuals. Laws or markets — and only laws or only markets. Anarchy or tyranny.

What a weird, unreal and inhuman way of looking at the world.

Yet strangely popular.

I just don't get it. The real world, of course, doesn't look anything like this. Yet when adherents of this strange binary outlook encounter the real world, they never consider adapting their theory. Instead, they set about to change the world to make it more compatible with their theoretical construct.

So they get up in the morning and take their kids to school and there it is, this thing called a "school," and it must be regarded as either a thing of the market or a thing of the state. It is a "public" school, and "public" is a troublesome word for these folks. All that is not private belongs to the Leviathan and threatens all that is private. And so this "public school" is a creature of the state, a threat. It's got to go.

And they drive from the school to work, paying no heed to the public infrastructure that makes such a trip possible. They get off work at 5:00 without being forced to stay longer or to work unpaid hours, while simultaneously viewing the laws that guarantee such protections to be the corrupt, market-hobbling, freedom-limiting tools of the Leviathan.

And then they go to pick up their kids — and God forbid they should ever begin to consider that obligation through the either/or prism of their inhuman theory.

In an earlier post — "Who is you?" — I criticized this either/or outlook for failing to recognize the existence of multiple actors and agencies, with differentiated responsibilities, in society:

These differing responsibilities are complementary. They are not — despite the popular American confusion — exclusive.

In Christian thought, we talk about these different roles and responsibilities in terms of the principles of "subsidiarity" or "sphere sovereignty." These principles help us to avoid the either/or foolishness of thinking that one actor's particular responsibility precludes any responsibility on the part of other agents or agencies.

Regarding the state, this helps us to avoid bizarre and irrelevant arguments about the size of government by keeping our focus on the actual question — what is the proper role of government?

(Is it wrong to suggest you go read the whole thing when it's something I wrote?)

A primary role and responsibility of government, of course, is to secure and protect the rights of individuals. It seems counterproductive, then, to insist in the name of freedom that government be whittled down to something too "small" to be able to fulfill this role.

Stephen Colbert had a great crack about this view during this weekend's White House Correspondents Dinner:

I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.

Springtime in Rodney Square

Last updated on: May 11, 2013 at 10:41 am By Fred Clark

54 Comments

Here's a cookie for Scott: "The war on drugs has created more problems than it has solved."

It's an op-ed by George Jurgensen, chairman of the Libertarian Party of Delaware. It's also part of an ongoing series in the paper, a "public discussion of policy regarding illegal drugs" on the op-ed page that was prompted by a former "tough-on-crime' state prosecutor announcing, on his retirement, that "the war on drugs has failed." (See earlier, "Two cheers.")

* * * *

It's April in Delaware, so it's still Homecoming season for corporate America. More than half of America's publicly traded corporations in the U.S. are incorporated in Delaware, including a majority of the Fortune 500. In exchange for a small ~~kickback to the state~~ franchise tax, these businesses receive the protection of some of the most corporate-friendly laws in the world, as well as access to Delaware's "Chancery Court" system, which is not technically a court of law but is, the state proudly proclaims, the most business-friendly court system in the country. (Most states would be offended at the suggestion that their courts were inherently biased, Delaware brags about it.)

Only a tiny percentage of the businesses incorporated in Delaware are actually headquartered there. Many don't employ a single resident of the state. (This is another First State distinctive: Most states suck up to corporations in the name of "jobs," but in Delaware it's all about the franchise tax.) But like college kids at Thanksgiving, they all return to their nominal home for their corporate annual meetings. March-May is "tourism" season in Wilmington — which I suppose does create some jobs, at least for parking valets at the Hotel DuPont.

Back when I worked as a corporate gadfly, I spent all of April in that hotel's "Gold Ballroom" — which really has to be seen to be believed. The decor puts the "gilded" back in the Gilded Age. It's like a pagan temple to Old Money, the walls festooned with garish, pseudo-Greek murals of "Prosperity" and "Fortune." In terms of restraint and class, it is to ballrooms what Mr. T's neck is to jewelry.

Whenever possible, I try to follow Oscar Wilde's advice to "Think with the liberals; eat with the Tories." Annual meeting season was always a good chance to eat with the Tories. But because I also think with the liberals, there will always be those among the Tories who will accuse me of "the politics of envy." We have all this, they say, sweeping one bejeweled hand about the Gold Ballroom. And you don't so you're just jealous. Well, no. A hungry man may envy a man who is well-fed, but a morbidly obese man crippled by his own corpulence isn't envied by anybody. ("Still sounds like sour grapes to me," says the fat man. "Mmmmm, grapes.")

Anyway, annual meeting season still draws not only shareholders, but crowds of protesters to Wilmington every year. I suppose that's good for the local economy too. After all, the dude with the giant inflatable rat has to eat lunch somewhere, right?

* * * *

A corporation, of course, is not an individual. Nor is it a part of the State.

Yes, yes, I know. This is obvious and elementary, and I don't want to belabor the point, but I do have some libertarian readers, so let me repeat that.

A corporation is not an individual. A corporation is not the government.

But it does exist.

See, there are actors and entities in the world which are neither individuals nor states. Like corporations, small businesses, unions, churches, families, schools, civic organizations and, well, Libertarian Parties.

I was once having a long discussion with my friend the Lt. Col., who was upset that I seemed overly fond of the Catholic principle of subsidiarity. The Reformed framework of sphere sovereignty, he argued, was more elegant and avoided all the hierarchical, medieval baggage of "higher" and "lower" implied in subsidiarity. Just then we were interrupted by another friend who happened to be a libertarian and I remember being, in a way, envious of him for not having to worry about such things. If you can reduce the world into a simple system of two and only two categories of actors, it's probably a much easier place to think about.

At least until a corporation moves in upstream.

Who is you?

Last updated on: January 7, 2012 at 6:53 pm By Fred Clark

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The previous post tells the story of three ordinary people who acted as citizens and neighbors when confronted with a drowning man.

Their actions were heroic, yet this is very much a textbook case. This was an ethics professor's hypothetical in real life. (Ethics profs love hypthetical drowning victims almost as much as they love hypothetical Nazis. They even like to confront their students with hypothetical drowning Nazis.)

The problem with many of the hypothetical predicaments posed by ethics profs is that they also involve a hypothetical, abstract and undifferentiated "you."

Consider the following all-too-real hypothetical: You see an old man sleeping in the doorway of a church. His blanket is thin and the night is cold. What do you do?

The answer depends on who "you" are. You may be a local beat cop. You may be the pastor or a parishioner of that church. You may be a professional social worker. You may be a volunteer at the local homeless shelter. You may be a member of the city council. You may be the old man's daughter or niece or his long-ago college roommate or Army buddy. You may be a stranger who lives across the street from the church. You may be a despised Samaritan just passing through. You may be an airman first class who made a wrong turn on his way to the county clerk.

Regardless of who "you" are, you are responsible. But the nature of your responsibility — particularly in the longer term — differs according to the differentiated responsibilities of the various examples above. These differing responsibilities are complementary. They are not — despite the popular American confusion — exclusive.

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