Getting to the Point: democracy

Showing posts with label democracy. Show all posts

Friday, May 20, 2016

From Sea to Shining Sea

Give the king your justice, O God,

and your righteousness to a king’s son.

May he judge your people with righteousness,

and your poor with justice.

May the mountains yield prosperity for the people,

and the hills, in righteousness.

May he defend the cause of the poor of the people,

give deliverance to the needy,

and crush the oppressor.

May he live while the sun endures,

and as long as the moon, throughout all generations.

May he be like rain that falls on the mown grass,

like showers that water the earth.

In his days may righteousness flourish

and peace abound, until the moon is no more.

May he have dominion from sea to sea,

and from the River to the ends of the earth…

For he delivers the needy when they call,

the poor and those who have no helper.

He has pity on the weak and the needy,

and saves the lives of the needy.

From oppression and violence he redeems their life;

and precious is their blood in his sight…

Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel,

who alone does wondrous things.

Blessed be his glorious name forever;

may his glory fill the whole earth.

Amen and Amen.

Psalm 72

Reflection – Well, this is not going to be an easy blog post to write. This psalm has a profound significance, both in its own right—it is one of the great messianic psalms heralding the king who will establish righteousness on the earth—and for me as a Canadian.

The official motto of Canada is ‘from sea to sea’, and Canada is formally known as the ‘Dominion’ of Canada, precisely quoting from this very psalm: ‘May he have dominion from sea to sea.’ Canada, my beloved home country, is in its historical formation a Christian nation—this is not a matter of opinion, nor is it a political statement about any issue before us today. It is a matter of plain fact.

And Psalm 72 is right at the heart of this Christian historical sensibility of Canada—pity on the weak and the needy, redemption from oppression and violence, care for the poor and those who have no helper.

I am ashamed of my country this week. The government of Canada, admittedly pressed to do so by the Supreme Court of Canada, is forcing through an aggressive law not simply allowing physician assisted death (assisted suicide, truly, or euthanasia), but forcing health care providers to provide it, even if in conscience they cannot.

The poor and the needy, the vulnerable, the suffering—all of these will be given not compassion and care and protection, but death. We can dress it all up in fine words about mercy and relief of suffering, but it is all a load of nonsense in the end—we are going to be killing people when they are at their most needy and vulnerable. As we have done to the unwanted unborn for decades now, so we will do to the unwanted elderly and disabled.

Oh, Canada, my home and native land… may God have mercy on us.

The process by which the bill was passed was ugly in itself. Our Prime Minister actually became physically violent at one point on the floor of the House of Commons and assaulted an opposition member. I wish I was exaggerating about that, but that is what happened, by any normal legal or moral standard or meaning of words. And… there was nothing, in terms of consequences or even widespread concern. Apparently, that is what democracy looks like, in Canada, in 2016.

I fear we are devolving into a thugocracy, led by the man with the great hair, the one-armed pushups, and the winning smile.

So my heart is a bit sore as I write this blog post about Psalm 72, our ‘national psalm’, if you will. The one thing I do know is that, in this year 2016 when so many nations are faced with leaders or prospective leaders (hello, my American readers and friends!) who appall us or frighten us, we are called to know that there is one Messiah alone who delivers justice and mercy to the poor and the weak, who establishes the world in right judgment and good order. And we know His Name, the name above all other names.

As all the other kings of the earth fail us, as they are failing us, pretty much without exception across the face of the globe, let’s put all our faith and hope in He who endures like the sun, falls from heaven like the rain. May His name be blessed forever and ever. Amen. Amen.

Sunday, March 22, 2015

Kill The Brain, Kill The Zombie

Once upon a time, in a village in Eastern Europe, there arose an unusual problem. A curious disease afflicted many of the townspeople. It was mostly fatal (though not always), and its onset was signalled by the victim’s lapsing into a deathlike coma… As a result, the townspeople feared that several of their relatives had already been buried alive and that a similar fate might await them. How to overcome that uncertainty was their dilemma.

One group of people thought that the coffins be well stocked with water and food and that a small air vent be drilled into them, just in case one of the dead happened to be alive. This was expensive to do but seemed more than worth the trouble. A second group, however, came up with a less expensive and more efficient idea. Each coffin would have a twelve-inch stake affixed to the inside of the coffin lid, exactly at the level of the heart. Then, when the coffin was closed, all uncertainty would cease…

What is important to note is that different solutions were generated by different questions. The first solution was an answer to the question ‘How can we make sure that we do not bury people who are sill alive?’ The second was an answer to the question, ‘How can we make sure that everyone we bury is dead?’

Neil Postman, Technopoly

Reflection – I am reading this quite wonderful book right now, on the inherent tendency of technology to not simply augment and assist but to dominate and control our lives. The above passage is from a chapter that treats language itself as a sort of technology, and shows how the ability to control the language allows the controllers—the linguistic technocrats—to control both what questions gets asked, how they are framed, and hence what the outcome will be.

This passage, and the rather amusing parable of the villagers’ two approaches to a knotty problem, sheds much light on our contemporary society and its discourse around difficult social issues. How are the questions of our times framed? Who is doing the framing? Can we step back from the actual raw experience that generates difficult social debates and look at how the outcomes of these debates are formed not only by the experiences themselves but by the choices made by those in power—the entertainment-media complex in particular—as to how to frame the terms of those discussions?

For example, is abortion about the right of a woman to self-determination and autonomy, or is it about the protection of a vulnerable human life? So much of the utter inability of the ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-life’ sides of this terrible issue to engage in meaningful conversation comes from the fact that they are in fact asking different questions and framing the issue in completely different ways.

Is ‘same-sex marriage’ about extending marriage rights and benefits to an hitherto excluded group or is it about changing the very definition of what marriage is? Completely different conversations emerge from how that question is framed. Physician assisted suicide—is it about how to relive suffering in a compassionate way, or is it about how to protect a vulnerable population (which eventually will include most of us) from being pressured to die?

Those who know me or have read this blog know where I take my stand on these issues, of course. I am Catholic, a loyal son of the Church, and I believe the Church’s teachings on these matters is from God, simply. But the question I raise here is not primarily about the issues themselves, but about the difficulty caused by how they are framed, and the lack of critical thinking that people bring to bear on this business of question-framing and parameter-setting.

Of course this leads to terrible problems in the very capacity of our society to discuss the issues themselves. People who are against abortion are framed as wanting to control women, people who are against ‘same sex marriage’ hate gay people, people who are opposed to physician assisted suicide lack compassion and want the sick and dying to suffer. All of those conclusions come, not from the issues themselves, not from the raw experience of the things themselves, but from the dominant narrative and how it has framed each of these issues.

I can hardly address all of these issues qua issues in a single blog post. Here, I simply wish to observe (without going into a full-bore ‘Wake up, sheeple!’ style rant) that we are being manipulated by the technocrats who control the language of our time, and that the framing of difficult and contentious issues is more often than not used, not so as to provide a careful and judicious exploration of the truth and falsehood of these matters, but to control the discussion, demonize and marginalize those on the ‘wrong side’ of the discussion, and cook the books to provide the outcome those technocrats have determined to be the right one.

And… is this really how a free, dignified, democratic and rational society should go about these things? Or is the twelve-inch stake being thrust, not so much in the mostly dead villager, but in the heart of our civil discourse and free society? Kill the brain, kill the zombie, you know--remove our ability to think clearly, and the undead remnants of Western Civilization will stop flailing around so annoyingly.

I'm just framing a question here, folks, just asking the question…

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

God and Human Freedom

Transferring to humanity the prerogatives which Christians acknowledge to be God’s, positivism, by that very fact, reverses in the social field the attitude of Christianity, whose heir it means to be.

Without rights vis a vis God, since he receives his whole being from God, the individual thought he had rights vis a vis society: however organically incorporated in it., however subject to its authority in all things temporal, however sincerely devoted to its welfare, he was aware of transcending it by his first beginnings and his latter end.

He knew that, by what lay deepest in himself, he formed part of a greater and vaster society and that, in the last analysis, everything rested with an authority that was not human…

But, if temporal society is an adequate manifestation of the only true deity, from whom the individual receives all that he is, how can he have any right as against society? That notion of right is essentially ‘theological-metaphysical’… the positive faith, everywhere substituting the relative for the absolute, substitutes ‘laws for causes and duties for rights.’

Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism

Reflection – Well, it’s been a while since we had a ‘difficult’ text on this blog, and it’s good for us (that is to say, me) to flex some intellectual muscle once in a while. All my fancy book-larnin’ has not been for nothing, after all.

De Lubac’s book is, I believe, still one of the most important books of the 20^th century. It has held up extraordinarily well in its analysis of the tragic dynamic of atheism, its false promise of liberation and human fulfillment, and its subsequent collapse into tyranny and human destruction. It’s a slender little book, and for the most part quite readable; I recommend it highly.

This quote is taking that discussion to the field of human rights and society. If you find it a bit convoluted, let me un-convulate it for you. Essentially, de Lubac is saying that human rights either come from God by virtue of His creation of man and the inherent structure, nature, and dignity of the human person, or human rights come from society and the social contract—a shared consensus of values among those living in the community.

But since ‘society’ is an abstraction and human rights are concrete, what this latter concept of right really means is that our rights are granted us by the state. And this is no true right, but a concession, a privilege, which can then be revoked by government fiat.

In other words, either our rights are from God and dwell within us ineradicably, or we exercise whatever freedom we have at the good pleasure of our social masters. It is either God or the president/prime minister/congress/parliament/courts.

There is a great irony here. De Lubac is quite right that, if our whole being is from God, then we have no rights vis a vis God—this would imply some higher power to which we could appeal against the One who is All in All. So humans would seem to be in a state of radical subjectivity and bondage towards God, which is the position of Sartre and Nietzsche.

But God is changeless, eternal, not subject to flux. Once we grasp that God’s creative will towards us is for our freedom and dignity, our capacity to genuinely act and move freely, then the whole notion of human rights becomes very secure.

If we reject God and His dominion, we are indeed left with the highest power being the government. The changeable, fluid, political, malleable, intensely corruptible, say-whatever-will-get-us-elected next time government—and this is the guardian of human rights, freedom, and dignity?

What Caesar can give, Caesar can take away. If the state is the source, or even (since in our post-modernity frivolity and folly we are allergic to metaphysical statements and avoid them whenever possible) simply the final arbiter of human rights, our freedoms are very perilous indeed. We have to think about these things: atheism tends towards tyranny and arbitrary exercises of state power; religion tends towards rule of law, at least (the historical record at least bears this out), which itself is an absolutely necessary pre-condition for democracy.

De Lubac (and his good friend Joseph Ratzinger) have diagnosed this situation with great perspicacity and clarity. The phrase ‘the dictatorship of relativism’ is relevant here: if there is no God (or God is irrelevant) and hence no absolute truth (or none that we need to consult), then there is no such thing as a human right, only human arrangements that are suitable to those who exercise power at any given moment.

The only way to secure human freedom is to assert timeless and unchanging truths about man and his nature, and the only way to coherently assert those truths is to acknowledge the changeless and eternal nature of God and His laws. And without delving into a lot of controversial subjects that I have no time or energy to treat of right now, this is all rather relevant in our days, don’t you think?

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

What Will the Poor Do?

The thing that is really required for the proper working of democracy is not merely the democratic system, or even the democratic philosophy, but the democratic emotion. The democratic emotion, like most elementary and indispensable things, is a thing difficult to describe at any time.

But it is peculiarly difficult to describe it in our enlightened age, for the simple reason that it is peculiarly difficult to find it. It is a certain instinctive attitude which feels the things in which all men agree to be unspeakably important, and all the things in which they differ (such as mere brains) to be almost unspeakably unimportant.

The nearest approach to it in our ordinary life would be the promptitude with which we should consider mere humanity in any circumstance of shock or death. We should say, after a somewhat disturbing discovery, “There is a dead man under the sofa.” We should not be likely to “There is a dead man of considerable personal refinement under the sofa…”

But this emotion, which all of us have in connection with such things as birth and death, is to some people native and constant at all ordinary times and in all ordinary places. It was native to St. Francis of Assisi. It was native to Walt Whitman. In this strange and splendid degree it cannot be expected, perhaps, to pervade a whole commonwealth or a whole civilization… No community, perhaps, ever had it so little as ours…

It is a sufficient proof that we are not an essentially democratic state that we are always wondering what we shall do with the poor. If we were democrats, we should be wondering what the poor will do with us. With us the governing class is always saying to itself, ‘What laws shall we make?” In a purely democratic state, it would be always saying, “What laws can we obey?”..

But the modern laws are almost always laws made to affect the governed class, but not the governing. We have public-house licensing laws, but not sumptuary laws. That is to say, we have laws against the festivity and hospitality of the poor, but no laws against the festivity and hospitality of the rich…

GK Chesterton, Heretics

Reflection – I have to admit that, as I read this chapter of the book (and, for those of you who are wondering, we are almost through it), I wondered if it was as highly relevant to our modern scene as some of the other ones.

But these last two paragraphs cleared that up for me. Yes, indeed. In fact, the situation has gotten considerably more dire in the ensuing century. The very first thing that is done when some laborious, tiresome, burdensome, unlivable set of regulations is passed these days is that the governing class include an amendment, or slip in some paragraph somewhere else, declaring themselves and their families and cronies and donors exempt from it.

This has become so much the norm of political life in North America that nobody even blinks an eye at it. In Canada, for example, we are all in a single-payer health care system. I have no great quarrel with it, and frankly suspect it’s the best possible option of a lousy bunch of options. But it does mean that, barring a life and death emergency, when you have a health problem in Canada you go on a waiting list, and you stay on that waiting list until it’s your turn.

But a few years ago in Canada, a certain politician who was (as they all are) a passionate advocate of that system needed surgery… and promptly flew down to the States to get it immediately. Where the rest of us have to wait six months to two years for non-acute care, the governing class do not.

And it is the same in the States, where the first thing Congress did after passing the Affordable Care Act was excuse themselves from most of its provisions. And there have subsequently been many exemptions granted and waivers given to the various groups that financially support the political party that has passed this particular piece of legislation. And it goes on like this, and as I say, is the absolute norm of political conduct (all parties do it, to the extent they have power to do so) which nobody even gets worked up about, apparently.

Well, it may be many things—a corruption that cries to heaven for redress, or simply venal and unprincipled human beings acting as we would expect them to act—but the one thing it is not is democratic. And it does seem to me that, indeed, the question more and more that needs to be asked by the powerful, the elite, the governing, is the question posed by GKC in this passage. At the risk of sounding like a rabble rouser or a revolutionary (which is indeed a side of my personality that I usually don’t air too much), I will simply repeat it and sign off for the day.

When the day comes when people have had enough of this nonsense, what exactly do you think the poor will do to you?