Don’t warn the tadpoles

September 16, 2006 By Fred Clark

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.)

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

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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).

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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.

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"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.

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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.

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"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

May 1, 2006 By Fred Clark

61 Comments

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

April 27, 2006 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.")

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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?

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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?

April 16, 2004 By Fred Clark

2 Comments

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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