"Power, And Those Too Weak to Seek It"

There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.--Professor Quirell, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Paperback, (Scholastic, 1997), pg. 291

John Zmirak is usually well worth reading, and this piece on "consent as the criterion of the good" is quite good.  Yes, Virginia, separation of Church and state is actually part of authentic Catholic tradition.  Excerpts.

...Although the Church became entangled with government early on – namely, with the conversion of Constantine – it has never seen its primary duty as giving directives to kings, or telling citizens how to vote. That is, at best, a tertiary role the Church is sometimes forced to serve when the conscience of a polity has become so degraded that natural reason cannot do its job, so faith has to step in and plug the gaps. Classic examples include St. Ambrose’s rebuke of Theodosius for the massacre of unruly citizens; the Church in 16th-century Spain insisting that Indians in the New World were fully human and should not be enslaved; German bishops condemning Nazi euthanasia; and Pope John Paul II denouncing both Communist tyranny and the Western “culture of death.”

But these acts of political prophecy on the part of bishops and popes stand out because they are not the norm. It is the duty of laymen – statesmen and citizens – to inform their consciences with sound moral principles in order to form public policy. Religious believers and leaders must make sure that those principles are sound, and call out the culture when they are either perverted or ignored. That is what abolitionist Christians did in the 19th century, and civil rights leaders in the 20th. Such a movement in Poland brought down the Soviet bloc, ended the Cold War, and may have saved our species from a global nuclear war. So maybe – just maybe – people of faith deserve a hearing...

And then an essential rebuke of those who would seek a simply libertarian state with strict free market capitalism without paying heed to what sort of culture is needed to render that humane:

...Indeed, the very name of the workers’ movement (Solidarity) that knocked down the first domino in Communist Europe was borrowed from Catholic social teaching’s term for the force that knits society together, that goads us to treat each other justly even when the government isn’t looking, that lubricates the highly efficient engine of the market economy with the oil of human kindness. Too often, especially in Europe (as Samuel Gregg documents), the word “solidarity” is cheapened into a synonym for socialism. It’s trotted out as a slogan every time the goldbricking workers of one country crave a subsidy from the thrifty taxpayers of another. But words like “justice,” “love,” and “freedom” are often perverted, too – that doesn’t mean we drown the baby in the bathwater.

The central principle of solidarity in practice is simple and timeless – the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This ethical maxim, which Jesus quoted from the Old Testament, exists in some form in every culture on earth – as C. S. Lewis documented in The Abolition of Man, where he called it the Tao. It is so ubiquitous that it’s easy for us to assume that it’s universally accepted – at least in theory – while far too rarely practiced...

In a strongly ethical culture, a humane culture of life in the context of a civilization of love, perhaps we could have far fewer laws--more conscience, fewer cops. Perhaps a free market system could work with minimal regulation in a highly principled population.  Absent the culture, though, libertarianism at its common extreme is one more example of the very modern/Enlightenment-era mistake of thinking that humans are innately good, merely corrupted by the structures binding them.  If only we would loosen the fetters of society, then humans would do the right thing and get along without coercion.  All would be well.  Marx's revolution; Rousseau's noble savage; Rand's superman--on and on it rolls, across all ideological divides in the modern era.

Oh, look!  Zmirak proceeds to make all those points in the rest of his article!

...We have another maxim, which crept into Western souls via “worldly philosophers” such as Machiavelli and Hobbes – the principle of the “consenting adult.” Any time someone uses this phrase, he is saying (under his breath) that none of us is the least bit responsible for each other. If folks make stupid choices, that’s not our problem. Even if we are the ones who tempted them to make such a choice – if we have exploited them personally, economically, or sexually – we are still scot-free: “She was a consenting adult;” “That schmuck should have known better,” we tell ourselves, and smirk.

Instead of an ethic that rests on reciprocity, on admitting the unique value of every person because he’s a fellow human, we treasure a heartless, pragmatic ethos that shrugs at suffering and confusion, a Darwinian willingness to pounce on our neighbor’s mistakes. So “consenting adults” work in sweatshops overseas making our iPads, or sweat before cameras enacting our porn, or wake up alone in the bed where we’ve left them when we were finished with our desires. No individual rights were violated, no crime was committed or contract broken – so the modern secular conscience has nothing meaningful to say.

What we don’t dare to realize is that human trust, promise-keeping, and a basic sense of concern for our fellow man are the glue that holds a free society together. (So Adam Smith taught in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.) The anarchy which arises in its absence is just too awful for people to tolerate, so in self-defense, they will even embrace a tyranny.

So tyranny creeps in...any ideology that focuses on power relationships (rather than love and justice) is programmed to liquidate every human value in the end...

Heal the culture first.  Open the doors to God's grace to heal, illumine, and deify nature.  Then talk to me about libertarianism.

The Power and Problem of Occultism

Laid out by John Zmirak in this typically insightful piece. Excerpts follow.

...Too often, films like The Rite...feed into a nasty voyeurism of the sort that attracts us to evil. We see that the Enemy really does give tangible, spiritual power to some of his servants. As the author of nature's order, God is loath to disrupt it, so He grants miracles rarely and dispenses them typically after we're racked ourselves with prayer. Satan, who's merely a vandal, will gladly perform hat-tricks and grant instant gratification. Exorcists, in their memoirs, inform us that you really can learn things from Ouija boards, summon spirits who might do your bidding, or cast spells upon your enemies. If you're willing to play with plutonium, you can make little bombs to throw at people to vent your petty spite. But remember that you're an idiot mucking around inside the core of a nuclear reactor, with no idea how the thing works and not the slightest protection against its effects.

The best depiction I've seen of how occultism kills the soul, Robert Hugh Benson's novel The Necromancers, details what happens next: a slow, sick burn seeps into your brain. The colors of nature (which you've raped) all fade to a sickly, jaundiced yellow. Having glimpsed the dark underbelly of things, you become utterly cynical. Ordinary knowledge, earned through hard labor, loses all attraction compared to secrets, conspiracies, and gossip. You begin to see other people with that hideous spiritual hunger that demons feel all the time, as if they were healthy animals and you were a parasite, looking for somewhere to batten on them and drain their strength. Soon the glamour of evil fades, and once it's too late (by any human power) for you to escape, you feel deep in your bones the crassness, the foulness, the cheapness of what you have become.

I wish more films that treat the occult would emphasize this point. Evil is a privation, and it lives only by borrowing strength -- like a tapeworm, or a tick. We should certainly fear the devil, but he deserves no awe and should exert no fascination. We should not even pity him. What we need to feel is contempt...

Zmirak and Spirit of VII Creep

John Zmirak is almost always awesome. This piece is no exception:

Here's what we Trads have realized, that the merely orthodox haven’t: Inessential things have power, which is why we bother with them in the first place. In every revolution, the first thing you change is the flag. Once that has been replaced, in the public mind all bets are off -- which is why the Commies and Nazis filled every available space with their Satanic banners. Imagine, for a moment, that a newly elected president replaced the Stars and Stripes with the Confederate battle flag. Or that he replaced our 50 stars with the flag of Mexico. Let's say he got away with doing this, and wasn't carried off by the Secret Service to an "undisclosed location." What would that signify for his administration? If people accepted the change, what else would they be likely to accept?

...The perception that the Church was in a constant state of doctrinal flux was confirmed by the reality that her most central, sacred mystery was being monkeyed with -- almost every year. I remember being in grammar school when they told us, "The pope wants us to receive Communion in the hand now." (He didn't; it was an abuse that was forced on the Vatican through relentless disobedience until it became a local norm, but never mind.) Then, a few years later, "The pope wants us to stand for Communion." A few more grades, and we heard, "The pope wants us to go to Confession face to face." What had seemed a solid bulwark of formality and seriousness was suddenly shifting with every year's hemlines -- which is precisely what the heretics conspiring to change the Church's teaching had in mind. That is why they pushed for these futile, pastorally destructive changes of "inessentials" -- as a way of beating down resistance to changing essentials. And, in a worldly sense, they almost succeeded...

At this point in my discussion of the gravest theological issues that threatened the faith of Catholics in this country, I wish to call your attention to a stupid YouTube video, which gave this essay its willfully illiterate title: "All Your Base Are Belong to Us." For those of you too young to have experienced the incessant assault upon the sacred that was the liturgical "reform," or grateful converts who don't understand all the fuss, I beg of you: Please watch this video. In fact, stop reading and watch the video first, then come back to finish this essay. I can wait...

That is how it felt to be young and Catholic in the 1970s. Every sacred thing had to be changed, every old thing replaced with a new one, every complicated beauty plastered over by the cheap and the easy. The message was almost subliminal, but by that means all the more powerful: All Your Church Are Belong to Us. And by changing back the flag, by taking back our Mass, we are saying: Go back to Hell. Our Church belongs to Christ.

Benedict: Charity Depends on Justice

Mark Shea excerpts from the new papal encyclical Caritas in Veritate:

Charity goes beyond justice, because to love is to give, to offer what is “mine” to the other; but it never lacks justice, which prompts us to give the other what is “his”, what is due to him by reason of his being or his acting. I cannot “give” what is mine to the other, without first giving him what pertains to him in justice. If we love others with charity, then first of all we are just towards them. Not only is justice not extraneous to charity, not only is it not an alternative or parallel path to charity: justice is inseparable from charity[1], and intrinsic to it. Justice is the primary way of charity or, in Paul VI's words, “the minimum measure” of it[2], an integral part of the love “in deed and in truth” (1 Jn 3:18), to which Saint John exhorts us. On the one hand, charity demands justice: recognition and respect for the legitimate rights of individuals and peoples. It strives to build the earthly city according to law and justice. On the other hand, charity transcends justice and completes it in the logic of giving and forgiving[3]. The earthly city is promoted not merely by relationships of rights and duties, but to an even greater and more fundamental extent by relationships of gratuitousness, mercy and communion. Charity always manifests God's love in human relationships as well, it gives theological and salvific value to all commitment for justice in the world.

The fascinating thing about this passage is that he captures perfectly the promise and the problem of Ayn Rand's philosophy. The reason why her work is so attractive to so many is her clear eyed perception of the tendency towards injustice in the modern world to the great and the good. We live in an age characterized by the instinct described by Screwtape of the dictator flicking the tops off of grass which stands above the rest, discouraging genius and greatness in the name of central planning. She was in full rebellion against the Communist move to falsely level the playing field, to prevent any man from becoming rich in the name of justice, when wealth can be the just reward for skill and labor.

But she sought merely justice, strict justice, justice absent charity or mercy. She failed to make the leap to the second half of the equation, or to understand, as John Zmirak pointed out in his piece commenting on the encyclical, that all human beings inherit vast quantities of gratuitous, unearned social capital such as language, technical knowledge, and so forth. She remains a powerfully attractive force by means of those truths she saw so clearly and articulated so forcefully in a time which mirrors much of the decay she described in Atlas Shrugged, but she failed to understand man. She didn't know mercy, or care for the weaker and less fortunate--though her characters are usually better than her philosophy, and her philosophy better than its practitioners. She had half the insight of the Pope. She knew the necessity of justice, but failed to see that it acts as the foundation of charity.

Once the great and the good of society are granted the basic, elemental charity of just pay for excellent, superlative work, then due to the life, skill, and the cultural riches transmitted from ages past which come as gift, the excellent of society have an obligation to "give back" a little in return for what they have received. Scripture even suggests that such a gift ought to be proportional when it states that "Those to whom much is given, much will be expected."

The next step is not looting in the name of altruism, but rather a recognition of the fundamental dignity of all human beings deriving from their common humanity. That dignity lays obligations upon others to respect human rights and freedoms, to love their neighbor as themself. Further, we are all part of a common human family, and so stand in a relationship of love and care to the rest of humankind. When we fail to recognize this relationship, we sin.