Ann Louise, you leave me speechless

Ann Louise Gittleman says that, "Good health is paved with good intestines."

An Unmarked Trail

Judge Harlington Wood, Jr. is simply one of the most extraordinary human beings I have ever met. I was privileged to have worked for him, first as a student intern after my first year of law school, later as a full-time law clerk the year after I graduated.

As a young woman who grew up in a blue-collar community and attended law school at a public university in the Midwest, I would have thought that I would have had absolutely no chance at a clerkship serving a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals. Yet there I was, a rather shy, timid woman, not so sure of her abilities, and, at the time, dealing with the last, painful days of my first marriage to an active alcoholic. Nevertheless, my thoughts and opinions counted with Judge Wood, and I, in turn, learned that no legal analysis or decision is worthwhile unless founded in fairness, common sense, and an appreciation of how ordinary human beings live and work.

The story of my time at the court is nothing of import, other than the great privilege of getting to know a man who was and is not only a great lawyer, jurist, and public servant, but also someone who is both a loyal, old-school Republican and a quiet but forceful defender of the rights and dignity of all human beings regardless of race, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation, someone who can rightfully claim as friends such diverse persons as Richard Kleindienst (former U.S. Attorney General), Russell Means (AIM activist during the 1973 Wounded Knee crisis), and Judge Richard Posner.

The story of Judge Wood's life is remarkable, spanning his days in the ROTC cavalry, trial lawyer in state court, U.S. attorney, U.S. district court judge, Assistant U.S. Attorney General during the Nixon administration (including time negotiating conflicts at Wounded Knee, Alcatraz, and D.C. anti-war demonstrations), and finally Circuit Judge at the U.S. Court of Appeals. The story is told in his memoirs, An Unmarked Trail: the Odyssey of a Federal Judge, now finally available in print at www.harlingtonwoodjr.com.

Some of the comments at the book's website include the following:

"My first solo jury trial in the United States District Court in Springfield, Illinois was before Judge Harlington Wood, Jr. No nervous young attorney could have drawn a better venue. He was fair and patient and softened the embarrassment of my rookie mistakes in his courtroom. Riding An Unmarked Trail with Judge Wood will take you from the ROTC horse cavalry at the University of Illinois to tense negotiations at Wounded Knee. From a law practice in Springfield, his life story takes us on far-flung adventures and reaches the highest levels of the Department of Justice in Washington. Long and lean with a sparkle in his eye and a wry grin, Harlington Wood has left his mark not just on this attorney, but on our nation. Abe Lincoln is his hero and Wood played him convincingly in local theatre. But his connection with that great Prairie lawyer is more than just a dramatic pose. Harlington Wood's public life brought that great Lincoln tradition to his courtrooms and to all who were fortunate to share his journey."

Richard J. Durbin
U.S. Senator from Illinois

"Harlington and I have been colleagues on the Seventh Circuit for many years, but until I read his fascinating memoir I had only a dim idea of his extraordinary life, including distinguished service in World War II and his decisive contribution on behalf of the Justice Department in resolving the Wounded Knee crisis in 1973. Nor had I realized what an extraordinary world traveler Harlington was-how intrepid, resilient and adventurous. His modesty is excessive, but cannot quite conceal his sterling character and a life of great public service seasoned with excitement."

Richard A. Posner
Circuit Judge
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit

"Harlington Wood, Jr., retired Senior Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, shows us how great men can live among us in quiet unassuming ways. Wood's appropriately named memoir An Unmarked Trail provides a remarkable first hand glimpse into some of the defining moments of modern history. His life is a true reflection of the American Dream-a Midwestern boy's own desire for adventure takes him around the world and back. On the journey we witness the Japanese surrender in the Philippines, take a final glimpse of Stalin preserved under glass in Red Square, get a front row seat to the anti-war demonstrations during the Nixon administration, attend the strained negotiations to end the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 and travel to post-Glasnost Russia in 1992. This personal book paints a portrait of a man whose life was lead by confidence tempered by humility. I am grateful he allows us all to share in his extraordinary journey."

Alison Davis Wood
Producer, WILL-TV (PBS)

Also available online is a video of a 1994 interview with Judge Wood on a local PBS station for the show Prairie Fire.

California Supreme Court decision

The California Supreme Court recently decided that a statutory scheme allowing marriage to only heterosexual or opposite gender couples was unconstitutional under the California state constitution. The majority's opinion in the case is marvelous in many ways, first and foremost because of the result, but also because of its reasoning. It focuses on the what the right to marry means to both the individuals involved and society as a whole. Refreshingly, and unlike most religious discussions, sex is not mentioned. Rather, partnerships and the families they engender (couples and extended family, not just children), are viewed as whole relationships, not just the sum of single, discrete economic, social, emotional, psychological, or physical components.

I'm going to include a long excerpt from the majority opinion below, but I would recommend reading more, as I hope to do in the near future. For now, however, let me remind everyone, as others have elsewhere, that the legal and political analysis required to understand what may yet happen in light of the November ballot initiative is rather complicated. (See Greenwald article in Salon- hat tip to Paul M. at Jake's place.)

What is at stake here is NOT an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution but rather the California state Constitution. Under the U.S. Constitution, there is no express right to privacy or "fundamental rights" as such -- notions which 20th c. case law only recently found implied in the Due Process clause of the 4th Amendment. In contrast, the California constitution not only has its own body of case law from its own courts interpreting it, it now has amendments that expressly provide for the right of privacy and other rights not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. They can be found here.

The big outstanding question is whether the November ballot initiative (assuming it is found to be legally qualified), which would amend the California state constitution to say that marriage is only between a man and a woman, could, if it is passed by the voters, in effect reverse the court's decision. Some speculate that it might not, given the court's finding that the right to marry is a fundamental right. Although I certainly would welcome that result in this instance, as a legal matter, I find the notion questionable. While I also do not think that any constitution should be amended by a majority vote of the electorate, given that the California constitution allows this, it seems both impractical and dangerous to suggest that a court's interpretation of a constitution could prevail over a constitutionally adopted amendment. As an institutional matter it makes no sense. I am sympathetic to the notion that Equal Protection cannot said to realistically exist with regard to marriage if the ballot initiative were to pass. Nevertheless, in the end I would not want four justices of the California Supreme Court to decide that their opinion cannot be altered by any means save appointment of new justices who would reverse them.

For now, however, I want to put aside those concerns, as important as they may be, and continue to celebrate the majority opinion, which reads in part as follows:

From In re Marriage Cases, S147999 (Cal. May 15, 2008):

Although our state Constitution does not contain any explicit reference to a “right to marry,” past California cases establish beyond question that the right to marry is a fundamental right whose protection is guaranteed to all persons by the California Constitution....

Although all parties in this proceeding agree that the right to marry constitutes a fundamental right protected by the state Constitution, there is considerable disagreement as to the scope and content of this fundamental state constitutional right. The Court of Appeal concluded that because marriage in California (and elsewhere) historically has been limited to opposite-sex couples, the constitutional right to marry under the California Constitution properly should be interpreted to afford only a right to marry a person of the opposite sex, and that the constitutional right that plaintiffs actually are asking the court to recognize is a constitutional “right to same-sex marriage.” In the absence of any historical or precedential support for such a right in this state, the Court of Appeal determined that plaintiffs’ claim of the denial of a fundamental right under the California Constitution must be rejected.

Plaintiffs challenge the Court of Appeal’s characterization of the constitutional right they seek to invoke as the right to same-sex marriage, and on this point we agree with plaintiffs’ position. In Perez v. Sharp, supra, 32 Cal.2d 711 — this court’s 1948 decision holding that the California statutory provisions prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional — the court did not characterize the constitutional right that the plaintiffs in that case sought to obtain as “a right to interracial marriage” and did not dismiss the plaintiffs’ constitutional challenge on the ground that such marriages never had been permitted in California.32 Instead, the Perez decision focused on the substance of the constitutional right at issue — that is, the importance to an individual of the freedom “to join in marriage with the person of one’s choice” — in determining whether the statute impinged upon the plaintiffs’ fundamental constitutional right. 32 Cal.2d at pp. 715, 717, italics added.) Similarly, in Valerie N., supra, 40 Cal.3d 143 — which involved a challenge to a statute limiting the reproductive freedom of a developmentally disabled woman — our court did not analyze the scope of the constitutional right at issue by examining whether developmentally disabled women historically had enjoyed a constitutional right of reproductive freedom, but rather considered the substance of that constitutional right in determining whether the right was one that properly should be interpreted as extending to a developmentally disabled woman. (40 Cal.3d at pp. 160-164.) And, in addressing a somewhat analogous point, the United States Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) 539 U.S. 558 concluded that its prior decision in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) 478 U.S. 186 had erred in narrowly characterizing the constitutional right sought to be invoked in that case as the right to engage in intimate homosexual conduct, determining instead that the constitutional right there at issue properly should be understood in a broader and more neutral fashion so as to focus upon the substance of the interests that the constitutional right is intended to protect. (539 U.S. at pp. 565-577.)

The flaw in characterizing the constitutional right at issue as the right to same-sex marriage rather than the right to marry goes beyond mere semantics. It is important both analytically and from the standpoint of fairness to plaintiffs’ argument that we recognize they are not seeking to create a new constitutional right — the right to “same-sex marriage” — or to change, modify, or (as somehave suggested) “deinstitutionalize” the existing institution of marriage. Instead, plaintiffs contend that, properly interpreted, the state constitutional right to marry affords to same-sex couples the same rights and benefits — accompanied by the same mutual responsibilities and obligations — as this constitutional right affords
to opposite-sex couples. For this reason, in evaluating the constitutional issue before us, we consider it appropriate to direct our focus to the meaning and substance of the constitutional right to marry, and to avoid the potentially misleading implications inherent in analyzing the issue in terms of “same-sex marriage.”

Accordingly, in deciding whether the constitutional right to marry protected by the California Constitution applies to same-sex couples as well as to opposite sex couples and, further, whether the current California marriage and domestic partnership statutes deny same-sex couples this fundamental constitutional right,
we shall examine the nature and substance of the interests protected by the constitutional right to marry. In undertaking this inquiry, we put to the side or the moment the question whether the substantive rights embodied within the constitutional right to marry include the right to have the couple’s official relationship designated by the name “marriage” rather than by some other term, such as “domestic partnership.” The latter issue is addressed below. (See, post, pp. 80-82.)

In discussing the constitutional right to marry in Perez v. Sharp, supra, 32 Cal.2d 711 (Perez), then Justice Traynor in the lead opinion quoted the seminal passage from the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Meyer v. Nebraska, supra, 262 U.S. 390. There the high court, in describing the scope of the “liberty” protected by the due process clause of the federal Constitution, stated that “ ‘[w]ithout doubt, it denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint, but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of one’s own conscience, and, generally, to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.’ ” (Perez, supra, 32 Cal.2d at p. 714, italics added [“to marry” italicized by Perez], quoting Meyer, supra, 262 U.S. 390, 399.) The Perez decision continued: “Marriage is thus something more than a civil contract subject to regulation by the state; it is a fundamental right of free men.” (Perez, supra, 32 Cal.2d at p. 714, italics added.)

Like Perez, subsequent California decisions discussing the nature of marriage and the right to marry have recognized repeatedly the linkage between marriage, establishing a home, and raising children in identifying civil marriage as the means available to an individual to establish, with a loved one of his or her choice, an officially recognized family relationship. constitutional right to marry. In undertaking this inquiry, we put to the side for the moment the question whether the substantive rights embodied within the constitutional right to marry include the right to have the couple’s official relationship designated by the name “marriage” rather than by some other term, such as “domestic partnership.” The latter issue is addressed below. (See, post, pp. 80-82.)

* * * *

Although past California cases emphasize that marriage is an institution in which society as a whole has a vital interest, our decisions at the same time recognize that the legal right and opportunity to enter into such an officially recognized relationship also is of overriding importance to the individual and to the affected couple. As noted above, past California decisions have described marriage as “the most socially productive and individually fulfilling relationship that one can enjoy in the course of a lifetime.” (Marvin v. Marvin, supra, 18 Cal.3d 660, 684; accord, Maynard v. Hill, supra, 125 U.S. 190, 205 [describing marriage as “the most important relation in life”].) The ability of an individual to join in a committed, long-term, officially recognized family relationship with the person of his or her choice is often of crucial significance to the individual’s happiness and well-being. The legal commitment to long-term mutual emotional and economic support that is an integral part of an officially recognized marriage relationship provides an individual with the ability to invest in and rely upon a loving relationship with another adult in a way that may be crucial to the individual’s development as a person and achievement of his or her full potential.

Further, entry into a formal, officially recognized family relationship provides an individual with the opportunity to become a part of one’s partner’s family, providing a wider and often critical network of economic and emotional security. (Accord, e.g., Moore v. City of East Cleveland (1977) 431 U.S. 494, 504-505 [“Ours is by no means a tradition limited to respect for the bonds uniting the members of the nuclear family. . . . Out of choice, necessity, or a sense of family responsibility, it has been common for close relatives to draw together and participate in the duties and the satisfactions of a common home. . . . Especially in times of adversity . . . the broader family has tended to come together for mutual sustenance and to maintain or rebuild a secure home life”].) The opportunity of a couple to establish an officially recognized family of their own not only grants access to an extended family but also permits the couple to join the broader family social structure that is a significant feature of community life.39 Moreover, the opportunity to publicly and officially express one’s love for and long-term commitment to another person by establishing a family together with that person also is an important element of self-expression that can give special meaning to one’s life. Finally, of course, the ability to have children and raise them with a loved one who can share the joys and challenges of that endeavor is without doubt a most valuable component of one’s liberty and personal autonomy. Although persons can have children and raise them outside of marriage, the institution of civil marriage affords official governmental sanction and sanctuary to the family unit, granting a parent the ability to afford his or her children the substantial benefits that flow from a stable two-parent family environment, a ready and public means of establishing to others the legal basis of one’s parental relationship to one’s children (cf. Koebke, supra, 36 Cal.4th 824, 844-845; Elden v. Sheldon, supra, 46 Cal.3d 267, 275), and the additional security that comes from the knowledge that his or her parental relationship with a child will be afforded protection by the government against the adverse actions or claims of others. (Cf., e.g., Dawn D. v. Superior Court, supra, 17 Cal.4th 932 [when biological mother was married at the time of a child’s conception and birth, husband is the presumed father of the child, and another man who claims to be the child’s biological father has no constitutional right to bring an action to establish a legal relationship with the child].)

There are, of course, many persons and couples who choose not to enter into such a relationship and who prefer to live their lives without the formal, officially recognized and sanctioned, long-term legal commitment to another person signified by marriage or an equivalent relationship. Nonetheless, our cases recognize that the opportunity to establish an officially recognized family with a loved one and to obtain the substantial benefits such a relationship may offer is of the deepest and utmost importance to any individual and couple who wish to make such a choice.

If civil marriage were an institution whose only role was to serve the interests of society, it reasonably could be asserted that the state should have full authority to decide whether to establish or abolish the institution of marriage (and any similar institution, such as domestic partnership). In recognizing, however, that the right to marry is a basic, constitutionally protected civil right — “a fundamental right of free men [and women]” (Perez, supra, 32 Cal.2d 711, 714) — the governing California cases establish that this right embodies fundamental interests of an individual that are protected from abrogation or elimination by the state.

Because our cases make clear that the right to marry is an integral component of an individual’s interest in personal autonomy protected by the privacy provision of article I, section 1, and of the liberty interest protected by the due process clause of article I, section 7, it is apparent under the California Constitution that the right to marry — like the right to establish a home and raise children — has independent substantive content, and cannot properly be understood as simply the right to enter into such a relationship if (but only if) the Legislature chooses to establish and retain it. (Accord, Poe v. Ullman (1961) 367 U.S. 497, 553 (dis. opn. of Harlan, J.) [“the intimacy of husband and wife is necessarily an essential and accepted feature of the institution of marriage, an institution which the State not only must allow, but which always and in every age it has fostered and protected.”

Slip opinion, p. 49-63.

Marx calls it offside

1972 Monty Python sketch, "The Philosophers' Football Match"

Late addition. My resident football player brought this to my attention. They showed it in school today, too late, however for Karl Marx Day.

Actually, I like the part about carding Nietzsche the best.

It may be old news for most people, especially the U.K. crowd, but it had me in stitches. Although not listed on the roster, I think that the inestimable Archbishop Rowan Williams might have been on the field somewhere.

Up in the air

I've never been very good at juggling more than one thing at a time, and now it's worse than usual. Some people can blog on the run -- I can't. It just makes my thoughts more disjointed than ever and the whole point, for me at least, is to try to make sense, even when I fall short.

Anyway, right now I'm in the midst of the latest health crisis with my mother, who is 84, and who lives alone in the Midwest in the house I grew up in. My brother and his family are in Seattle; I and my family are here in New York. We have been struggling with the difficulty of taking care of her long distance for a long time, worrying much about her and, at the same time, trying to respect her wishes, which have always been founded in a fierce determination to stay in the house, the only place she has lived since leaving her own parents' home when she married, something like 56 years ago. There is no family locally anymore and most of her friends are dead, too feeble to visit much or help at all, or moved away. She has a woman she pays to clean, take her to the doctor's, etc., and last year she managed to pass her driver's license road test to keep her license, and back then managed to drive herself to the bank and drugstore drive up windows from time to time (not a good idea, but no one could stop her). She hasn't even done that for a long time, however, and she will not take Meals on Wheels, so she forgets to eat or take her medications on time, gets mentally fuzzy and weak, and only goes out to see her doctor, who keeps saying there's nothing wrong with her but being old, as she struggles with incontinence and other issues, no longer able to work her computer and barely able to manage the telephone, unwilling to subscribe to cable t.v., so not doing much but read books when she can and talk to us on the phone.

A few weeks ago she passed out or nearly passed out or something and called the paramedics with her Lifeline. They came and found her with very low blood sugar. She revived enough that she refused to go to the hospital (fearing ending up in nursing home care), and then tried to make sure she got someone to bring her meals regularly and take her medications as prescribed. She sounded much better within a couple days, but a week or so ago she started having trouble keeping any food down and became dehydrated and mentally very confused. My brother and I called her several times, talked to some friends and neighbors who had seen her, talked to the doctor who kept insisting nothing was wrong or different, and finally, when one of her friends called me and reported that she still was not keeping any food down, even soup, I made some calls and got her taken to the hospital. They put her on i.v. feeding, drastically cut back on her medications, and she was sounding 5 years younger and sharper and overall much better with 24 hours, but they could not find out why she was not keeping food down. They finally concluded it was "gastritis" (o.k. stomach was irritated, but why?) and were about to discharge her, although she was still physically much weaker than she had been.

To make a very long story short, she is now in rehab at a local nursing home, and once again we've got to decide what happens next, with none of the realistic options being what she wants, some tension and life-long difficulty communicating between me and my brother, the problems of dealing with any of this long distance, and our own normally busy lives with our family, jobs, etc. There have been days like last Friday when I was finishing work articles and trying to keep in touch with my daughter, who was taking her big European History AP exam in the afternoon, going off to track meet far away from here, and my supposedly picking her up and taking her nearly 3 hours in the opposite direction for a weekend college showcase soccer tournament, while my brother had important business meetings and presentations to attend to, and I needed to be the one making the calls to the doctor, hospital, and nursing home. Then, just when I thought things were getting difficult for me, in the midst of a beautiful, sunny spring afternoon on the soccer fields, I heard the story of Mary Frances and her family ("When words fail" below), which made both heartsick for her, her husband, and their surviving daughter, and thankful that my own problems were pretty mundane in comparison.

Well, I never give the "short" version of anything, do I? Anyway, this is my way of saying that blogging is not on the top of the list of my priorities anytime soon. Just got home at 2:30 a.m. this morning after picking up my son from college last night, have much work to do, contemplating various travel plans to the Midwest, and have one more big soccer tournament gig out of state for Memorial Day weekend, not to mention more track meets and yes, there is church in the midst of it all.

So, I guess my long unfinished essay on "What does science have to do with it?" will remain in pieces for now. And I will not be able to figure out a way to talk about the most peculiar thing in Steven Pinker's article, "The Stupidity of Dignity," which I read earlier in The New Republic (now featured at The Lead). It was kind of snarky quote on his part, but it suggests to me some of the underlying pathology among some of the neo-Puritans (although in this case it was a neo-con Roman Catholic). Just in case someone misses it, it was this quote by Pinker from Leon Kass:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone -- a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street -- even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat -- displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

(Pinker, "The Stupidity of Dignity").

Always the worry that people will somehow enjoy themselves too much, never mind that health, life, and love are always on the brink of being lost. I'll never get what all the fuss is about.

Anyway, there will be little or no blog activity for awhile, while I get back to the muddle of my life and try to find some order if not peace in it. Prayers continuing for everyone else, my friends and acquaintances online and in RL, especially those struggling with the horrific losses and mounting challenges due to the tragic events in China and Myanmar.

What does science have to do with it? (Part 1)

[Originally written 5/04/08]

A week or so ago, discussion at Fr. Jake's produced the following question and response (among others). First, the question from Peter:

The issue ... is whether homosexuality is biologically or genetically determined or not. That's not a question to do with one's moral attitude towards those who have a homosexual orientation or who behave homosexually (not always the same people) but simply a question of scientific fact. . . . A large part of the TEC argument in their presentation to the 2005 AAC was that since homosexuality is a natural biological variation in humanity, it was a justice issue that a normal variation in humanity shouldn't be condemned. If however, the science shows this not to be the case, then what we have is in fact a deep-seated human behaviour, perhaps with genetic or biological predisposers but ultimately an environmentally produced phenomena, similar to other forms of human emotional response. This would then put it on the same category as things like kindness, anger, paedophilia, liking soft cheese, all human behaviours for which we recognise complicated patterns of formation. Without the clear scientific evidence of biological/genetic causation the justice argument falls apart

One response came from a scientist, IT:

...As a professional geneticist (although not one who studies homosexuality; my gig is cancer research), and a professor who teaches the subject, may I point out YET AGAIN that someone does not understand genetics.

Almost no complex traits can be traced to a single gene. Okay? NONE. Not even blue eyes/brown eyes, although they are pretty close. Certainly nothing as complex as behavior.

Even in fruitflies.

Nothing complex is solely nature or nurture, but both. You may have the genes to be 7 feet tall but if you aren 't eating a good diet you won't get there.

There are plenty of studies showing that human sexuality exists on a continuum, not a binary. It's extremely complex.

However, there are also plenty of studies showing a very strong genetic component to homosexuality; it may not be the single gene absolute concordance that the conservatives want (see preceding) but it is vastly, vastly higher than chance.

Go read Pubmed if you want the citations...The VAST majority of medical and psychiatric opinion is clear on the subject...

Jake reposted part of the question and response here as well as some resources on the "Nature and/or Nurture" debate. The discussion that followed was enlightening in many respects. However, it did not quite pin down what science has to do with the moral issues that raise these questions in the first place, although one person (Scott) commented:

The temptation presented to the Christian tradition by the scientific study of the genetics of human sexuality is either to use that study to "prove" that variations away from thorough heterosexuality are sinful, or that they are not. Such direct application of scientific analysis (in either direction) wholly ignores the theological richness of the questions of "relatedness" (love) and "separation" (sin).

I think most would agree that the scientific answers to the question of the nature and origins of human sexual orientation cannot resolve the moral issues. Yet people on both sides seem to think the science is relevant, even though at some point those who condemn homosexual behavior say they do not care how "good" or "natural" or biologically determined it may be because God has (supposedly) given the last word on the subject in the Bible.

When words fail

words fail
standing on the sidelines
hearing a friend
tell of a friend
whose mom died
and two weeks later
her daughter
killed herself at home
violently
turtleneck up to her chin
in the casket
prayers?
yes, I will write the words
but what comfort
can they give?
she, her husband
and their younger daughter,
the one we knew,
have survived and must go on
in such pain and grief
I cannot imagine
they say bad things
do happen
to good people,
but this should not be
not to them
not Mary Frances, especially,
whose warmth and smiles
have always cheered me so
when I was tired or distant.
I know - children are dying
mothers are mourning
everywhere,
but these I knew
words
fail

Perry Miller and the Puritans

Random thoughts sparked by The Lead and my long buried memories of reading Perry Miller:

Jim Naughton has pointed to the excellent article by Tim Townsend, "Love Thy Neighbor," in the recent edition of the Columbia Journalism Review. The closing section, detailing Townsend's run-in with the dark forces of the blogosphere is sobering, to say the least.

I noticed the following passage in the opening about New England Puritans, as described by Perry Miller, the famous historian of American intellectual history:

What Winthrop had in mind was a political system whose top priority would be, as the historian Perry Miller wrote, “the duty of suppressing heresy, of subduing or somehow getting rid of dissenters—of being, in short, deliberately, vigorously, and consistently intolerant.” The Puritans believed they, like the Israelites of the Hebrew scriptures, had a covenant with God. And they believed that fellow colonists like Roger Williams, who preached religious tolerance, could go straight to hell. Or barring that, Rhode Island.

("Love Thy Neighbor" p. 1).

Anyone who studied Perry Miller and the Puritans know that while this was, indeed, a part of the history, the New England Puritans were a complex and fascinating lot, with some brilliant minds and positive contributions to American culture along with the negative. The dark side, however, comes through even in this excerpt from a summary of Perry Miller's work:

By the late 1650s, the Puritan experiment in New England experienced significant challenges. Of the great founders only Richard Mather (father of Increase) remained. New England Puritans were increasingly an isolated Protestant sect, particularly in light of the relative religious toleration adopted in England. "New England had become, by remaining faithful to its radical dedication, a stronghold of reaction" (p. 9) Moreover, "New England was no longer a reformation, it was an administration. It was no longer battling that most of the populace should be left out of church-fellowship, but was striving to keep church-fellowship alive" (p. 11). .... During the second half of the seventeenth century, other factors emerged to further erode the original vision of the city upon a hill. Trade emerged as an end unto itself, not to serve God; younger generations in increasing numbers failed to meet the tests for church membership; old social hierarchies and orders were upset; social vices such as drunkenness and extramarital fornication became more prevalent, and the colonial status within the empire changed. Ministers responded to the perceived erosion of religious values and mission with the jeremiad, a new literary form that took aim at all the sin and strove to make sense of the changes in society. The jeremiad was a way of "making intelligible order out of the transition from European to American experience" (p. 31); it was, according to Miller, "purgation by incantation" (p. 34).

Ministers were increasingly on the defensive. Largely at their behest, the Half-Way Covenant was adopted as a means of assuring the perpetuation of church membership. They found, however, that the measures, though enacted, were bitterly divisive....

Donald A. Duhadaway, Jr, "Perry Miller and the Puritans."

Covenants formulated by the Puritans seem to have never been a good idea.

I smell a rat

The Lead tells us that The Telegraph is reporting:

The Vatican said last night that the time has come for the Anglican Church to choose between Protestantism and the ancient sacramental Churches of Rome and Orthodoxy. Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, told the Catholic Herald that the Anglican Communion must “clarify its identity” and stop hovering between the Catholic and Protestant traditions. He said: “Ultimately, it is a question of the identity of the Anglican Church. Where does it belong? Does it belong more to the Churches of the first millennium – Catholic and Orthodox – or does it belong more to the Protestant churches of the 16th century?

Add this bit of news to the following perspective from Alasdair MacIntyre. As you may recall, McIntyre was the author whose premise Archbishop Rowan Willliams addressed in his recent lecture on "Religious Faith and Human Rights" (excerpt here at "You can't make this stuff up"). McIntyre is a British philosopher, former Marxist, now Roman Catholic, who has taught at U.S. universities since 1969.

I recently picked up McIntyre's book Whose Justice, Which Rationality?, which addresses some of the questions that Archbishop Williams talks about in his lecture. Basically, both men agree that some kind of academic (well, they would call it "rational") formulation of morality and justice is necessary and that religion and philosophy should endeavor to do this. Rowan, however, speculates how some basic universal human rights might be formulated across cultures based on his notion of human "embodiment."

I am not interested now in the substance of their philosophy but rather the posture from which they begin to speculate. Take this from McIntyre, for example:

Private citizens are thus for the most part left to their own devices in these matters. Those of them who do not, very understandably, abandon any attempt to think through such issues systematically are generally able to discover only two major types of resource: those provided by the enquiries and discussions of modern academic philosophy and those provided by more or less organized communities of shared belief, such as churches or sects, religious and nonreligious, or certain kinds of political association.

* * * *
We thus inhabit a culture in which an inability to arrive at agreed rationally justifiable conclusions on the nature of justice and practical rationality coexists with appeals by contending social groups to sets of rival and conflicting convictions unsupported by rational justification. Neither the voices of academic philosophy, nor for that matter, any other academic discipline, nor those of the partisan subcultures, have been able to provide for ordinary citizens a way of uniting conviction on such matters with rational justification. Disputed questions concerning justice and practical rationality are thus treated in the public realm, not as a matter for rational enquiry, but rather for the assertion and counterassertion of alternative and incompatible sets of premises.

Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (U. Of Notre Dame Press: 2003) at p. 3 and p. 5-6.

Now I'm all for looking for ways people can better understand themselves and each other and to guide public policymaking and the law. Reason certainly has a role to play (and the absence of it is often a lamentable fact of public life -- as anyone in the U.S. surely knows after watching CNN and Fox News last night). But these gentlemen seem to really believe that top-down thinking is what is needed, and if they could only somehow reassemble and/or rework the historical (mostly religious, notwithstanding Rowan's foray into "embodied" states) bases of Western ethics and morality AND (this is key) have the results handed down and imposed by the ruling elites (church and/or state, both apparently informed by the academicians), to us poor "private" citizens who do not have the time and the talent to work it all out for ourselves, then, well, things would be much better. The suggestion from the Vatican that what is needed is an alliance and maybe someday a single hierarchy of the "orthodox" to fully articulate and impose such rules only adds further insult, but seems to be along the same line of thinking as that of McIntyre and Williams.

Aside from the high-on-the-distant-academic-hill posture both seem to take, there is something fundamentally at odds with what contemporary science (neuroscience, development psychology, anthropology, evolutionary psychology, etc. ) tells us about how most healthy human beings develop a sense of morality and act upon it. There is great controversy within and across these fields, but I suspect that today most everyone scientifically informed would agree that humans do not simply "learn" morality from a set of rules expressly given to them (at least not in terms of conventional moral instruction in the classroom or similar settings). In other words, the notion of a "tabla rasa" mind on which any rules can be written by those who choose to teach them is inaccurate, at best. However it is that we acquire some sense of morality, it seems to come very early in life, and is only later developed and expanded upon by experience and the social environment. Even then, what we learn as social conventions can be overridden by our deeper, perhaps unconscious notions and feelings about what is moral, what is right or wrong, which we have even when there are no specific rules to follow or some authority to strictly enforce them. Writing or rewriting social rules does not necessarily change our behavior, nor does making them more logical or consistent necessarily make them more attractive or persuasive.

While it still may be useful to rationally sort out and better articulate what we think we know is right and to consider, to the extent we can, altering our belief systems when our ideas, communications , or behaviors are illogical, it is doubtful that most people think or act based on the kind of reasoning supposed by McIntyre -- even those, like himself, who have the time and grey matter to ponder various questions. What I find particularly interesting are those studies among children that suggest that healthy children can distinguish between morality and social conventions (i.e. notions of what is right and wrong without any authority to back them up or enforce them as distinct from those that are authority-dependent), but children with psychopathic tendencies have great difficulty drawing the distinction. In other words,

[Psychopaths] identify both kinds of transgressions as transgressions, as infringements of the rules, but they are unable to say which are wrong only because of the rules. Because they cannot make this distinction, they seem to be missing the ability to make moral judgments at all. Hence their emotional deficit explains and underlies a deficit at moral cognition, and not merely moral action.

[From Moral Minds" by Neil Levy at Neuroethics]. Some have speculated that it has something to do with the lack of empathy among the latter group, and that empathy has something to do with the development of moral faculties. [All this from various sources, inspired by Dan's read of Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong by Marc Hauser, including the post " the article "Do the Right Thing" by Rebecca Saxe at the Boston Review, and an interview with Hauser, "Is Morality Innate and Universal?" at Discover magazine.]

All this makes me wonder at those who truly believe that a well-articulated and detailed set of moral rules -- especially those supposedly immutably set in scripture, or even those crafted by a Magisterium and/or academic philosophers and theologicans -- is necessary for the purpose of teaching people so that they will simply follow what they are told (as if we were all psychopaths and had no internal sense of right or wrong and thus needed the rules laid out in front of us at all times). I can understand why reflection, consideration, and discussion of moral issues, the history and rationale behind our rules and principles, may be both good and helpful for some purposes, but the implication that "private citizens" will not and cannot ever be "moral" in any but incoherent (and, therefore, presumably undesirable) ways by simply living in and growing up in human society, rather than "learning" morality from a closed, entirely logically consistent philosophical system, seems rather astonishing to me.

It at least gives me pause reading about Marc Hauser's research. which suggests that one's religious beliefs (different religions or lack of any) make no difference in how one makes moral judgments. While these results are not unassailable, one wonders if some kind of innate moral sense (or at least one developed very early in life) works together with what parents and others in the social environment model in their behaviors to make us "moral." While the rules of social convention and later the rationalization of both one's moral sense and the rules may enforce certain moral values, I wonder if they are not more after-the-fact understandings of what we already think we know and feel. That does not mean that they are immutable for a lifetime, but the notion that if everyone only understood and agreed to abide by and strictly enforce certain rules (even assuming God's grace is factored in for the Christians), and that if we had REALLY smart and wise people articulating the rules (whether from their own systems of thought and/or based on how they interpret holy texts), we'd all be better off seems to lose sight of the complexity of human thought, emotions, and behaviors, and the physical bodies in which they originate and act.

At a later date, I want to work through some of this and consider what I think, as a layperson, that science can tell us about the contexts in which we both act and try to rationalize moral sensibility, ethical principles, and the laws and social conventions that may be formulated based, at least in part, on reason. The whole "Nature and/or Nurture Debate" at Jake's the other week has got me thinking about these matters a great deal. But for now all I can suggest is that the McIntyre/Williams approach from academic philosophy needs to be compared to various ideas from both social and physical sciences (and all the cross-disciplinary thinking going on in and beyond the margins), and all of it needs considerable scrutiny in the light of commonsense and experience.

[P.S. I apologize for my repetition, dense language, and tortured sentences. This did not help my blog-readability score -- or attract readers -- I'm sure. But it's the best I can do for now. ]

The private drama of salvation

Thanks to a recommendation from Mystical Seeker and link from Adrian Worsfield (Pluralist Speaks), I've been reading Bruce Sanguin's, Darwin, Divinity, and the Dance of the Cosmos: An Ecological Christianity. This part leaped off the page at me:

Take salvation. The word itself means to make whole, or to heal. For at least the last 300 years, the church has regarded the planet as a kind of background stage upon which the drama of private salvation has been played out. Most of Christianity continues to be involved in what Thomas Berry calls a "redemption mystique." We are obsessed with our sinfulness and whether we're "saved." The purpose of Jesus' death, according to this fall/redemption model, was to redeem us from our innate depravity, thus saving our souls for eternal life, in a heavenly realm, somewhere beyond this universe. The vast majority of Christians are so focused on their own "salvation," or on saving others, that they are blind the deterioration of the very ecosystems that sustain their private dramas. Even in those denominations, like my own, that have moved beyond thinking that God is primarily concerned with the salvation of private souls, we still focus almost exclusively on the human realm of creation. It's time we place the salvation (healing) of the planet in the foreground of our mission concerns.

Darwin, Divinity, and the Dance of the Cosmos (Wood Lakes Publishing, 2007) at pp.29-30.

The ecological crisis is something that has increasingly drawn the attention of some Christian evangelicals, as reported in the press here in the U.S. for the last year or so. But the point is still a valid one, that a great many people who profess to be Christians are almost exclusively focused on the "private drama" of their own salvation. Even Martin Luther might be surprised at the extent to which people today preach, talk, and blog about our individual relationships with God.

It's something we might all keep in mind, but quite frankly, this struck me most in terms of where, I think, the neo-Calvinists get off track with their focus on sin and damnation. It should go without saying that we all sin, individually and collectively, and that we dare not be complacent when we fall short. But it seems bizarrely self-centered and anthrocentric to act as if the fate of all Creation turns on our individual struggles and efforts to "save" ourselves and other individual human beings. Yes, God loves each and every one of us and each is as valuable as the next, as well as our companion creatures, elements, and energy in Creation. But our private dramas are not the be and end all, and what good we can do, with God's grace, is not for us, not for getting us into heaven (what or wherever), but for the whole shebang.