Pseudogamy 106

     The brilliant Spengler (that's the pseudonym for the newest associate editor of First Things, Daniel Goldman) has written recently in appreciation of Pope Benedict's assertion that an economy not based on moral values will end by destroying itself.  Theologians, says the Pope, must pay heed to economic laws, but economists for their part must cease pretending that the "laws" they discover have the same force and uniformity as those of physics.  Economists and theologians must talk to one another.  Spengler notes that the most powerful evidence that the Pope is right is the imminent demographic collapse of many European nations.  The laws of supply and demand take new and unexpected forms when the next generation of suppliers does not show up to meet the exaggerated economic demands of their elders.  It is not, in other words, simply the case that economies exist in a Platonic world of mathematics, or in a Rawlsian world of rational choice.  They exist among people, with all their strengths and weaknesses, their intelligence and folly, their desires and their virtues and their vices.  It is not the economy always that determines the culture, but the culture, or the degradation of a culture, that drives or derails the economy.  This thesis is hardly new -- Edward Banfield wrote about it in The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, and of course its sunny form is the basis of the Whig view of history.  It is at least as old as Plato's cold analysis of the vices, both political and economic, attendant upon different forms of political government.

     I believe that a similar claim ought to be put forth about marriage.  Banfield had noted, long before Francis Fukuyama wrote Trust, that in economically backward countries you can trust your kin but not those beyond, certainly not "foreigners," meaning somebody from the town ten miles away.  One is admired for putting one over on a stranger, while not allowing the same to happen to oneself; just as a man who sleeps with his enemy's sister while keeping his own sister a virgin is some sort of a hero.  In such a place, the very idea of complex and long-lasting business relationships extending beyond kinship is smothered in the cradle.  Such countries (among them my beloved southern Italy) do not simply have bribe-taking and back-stabbing because they are poor.  They also are poor because their culture encourages the shifty taking of bribes and stabbing of backs.

     What about marriage?  Let's suppose you have a society that prizes duty.  Children are taught that they will never be happy if they pursue their happiness; they can only be happy if they do what is right and generously give what is due to others, in real and thriving charity.  They learn that the lowest creature on earth is one who breaks a promise just because he thinks he can get a better deal some place else; just as a soldier knows that you don't want to have to rely on someone whose sole object in battle is to save his skin, regardless of what happens to his buddies.  They grow up admiring examples of patience, and of the small daily kindnesses and sacrifices that are the stuff of duty.  They are told, with parables from Christ, or from Socrates, or from Confucius, that it is better to suffer injustice than to practice it.  Let's add that they have a Christian view of marriage: that it is holy, because in the beginning God made man and woman for one another; and they follow or they are encouraged to follow Saint Paul's teachings regarding obedience and love.

     Now such people will probably pass strict laws against divorce, but even supposing that a tyrant from abroad had conquered them and repealed their laws, they still would probably not divorce very often, and for an absurdly obvious reason.  There would be a lot fewer people worthy of being divorced.  The culture of bribe taking produces not only people who do take bribes, but people who would go on to take bribes no matter where you put them.  A culture of divorce, I'm suggesting, produces a lot of divorces, true, but mainly by producing a lot of people whom only a fool would trust.  It makes everyone worse, because it attacks at the root the principal means by which the common person can do something godlike in its freedom and nobility: to cast one's lot forever with another human being, loving not by seeking one's own pleasure, but instead seeing that the greatest delight is only to be found in that freedom-tossing and therefore liberating love.  It produces a culture of people who cannot be trusted with money, or with paper profits from supposed future investors, because they cannot even be trusted with rings; they are as good as their word when keeping their word profits them, or when breaking their word would cause them too much trouble.  But make the price right, in money or in pleasure or in those vanities called "my dreams," and they can be bought out.

     I believe we are now lost in the mists of the play-acting and pretense that are but the opposite side of the supposedly hard utilitarian coin.  We say, "I will be with you until I die," but we hold tight instead to the chain of self-will, reserving to ourselves the right to leave, should market conditions dictate (meaning, should I find somebody else for my golden parachute).  That allows us to pretend at marrying; marrying becomes but a part of "my dream," that vanity with the miser's fist and heart to finance it.  We think we will paper-push our way out of our economic slough, while not seeing that an economy can finally only thrive if people work an honest day's work at producing something, and in the end a tangible thing, that other people need and want.  Our marriage betrayals and our economic betrayals are all manifestations of a culture of betrayal; and we lay the flattering unction to our soul, saying that people have always been exactly as shiftless as we are, only we are smart about it.

Comments

[Selfreferencing]

A few thoughts:

(1) I am stunned that the Pope has recommended paying attention to economists, when the Catholic Church under his tutelage has supported living wages, among other policies widely understood by economists to - at best - do little to help the economy and at worst harm it a great deal. In fact, the Catholic Church has been hostile to classical and neoclassical liberal political economy from its very inception. They even ignore their own Spanish Scholastics (with rare exception).

(2) "The laws of supply and demand take new and unexpected forms when the next generation of suppliers does not show up to meet the exaggerated economic demands of their elders." This is ridiculous. The laws don't take any new forms. Instead, supply doesn't meet demand, if he is right about this case. There's no new form; it's a straightforward implication of standard modeling.

(3) "It is not, in other words, simply the case that economies exist in a Platonic world of mathematics, or in a Rawlsian world of rational choice." Wow, a Rawlsian world of rational choice? A Theory of Justice advocates an incredibly extensive state to correct for market failures all over the place. Furthermore, the parties to the origin position are rational subject to the veil of ignorance, which models the idea of the reasonable, an intrinsically moral notion. Furthermore, if you read Part III of TJ (and no one ever does), it is quite clear that Rawls has a very detailed theory of the human person, which, I might add, he started to develop while he was still a Christian writing his undergraduate thesis.

See here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5931573.ece

And here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1352607

It is important to emphasize that contrary to the kind of conservative and communitarian critiques of Rawls, he died a Hegelian and was always - always - interested in reconciling modern individuality with community.

(4) Finally, I cannot believe that the Papacy can reliably be looked to in order to generate a social morality that promotes economic prosperity. Simply compare the economic prosperity of of the median Protestant country throughout history with the median Catholic county. Or better yet, just look around the world today. Catholic countries tend to have 'bell jar' capitalism, with capitalism benefitting only a few because property rights in these societies are not as widespread. They tend to be deeply hierarchical and class stratified. Furthermore, many of them are quite poor and all the Catholics in those countries do is advocate some watered down (and sometimes not so watered down) Marxism. The best economic work that the Catholic Church has produced since Suarez was Rerum Novarum. But Quadragesimo Anno undid that (to at least a significant degree) with its sympathies for the trade unionism common in authoritarian/mild fascist Catholic countries at the time. It is no surprise that the Catholic Church during the onset of socialism stood for a return to guild socialism; they were used to it for centuries. And developments past Quadragesimo have shown little prospect of improvement.

Outside of the Acton and Lugwig von Mises Institute, Lord Acton, Suarez and a handful of others, I have never, ever known Catholicism to be sympathetic to the classical liberal political economy that has been shown - in the long run - to consistently produce economic growth. As a Lutheran, I think Christians have an expertise in grace, with no special expertise in matters of justice (I think St. Paul has this view). And I think that generally speaking, the Papacy's foray into economic science has done the world more harm than good. I'm not even sure this is a hard case to make.

I want to be clear, though. I believe Benedict would probably be better on economics than the median secular intellectual, along with most of the more liberal intellectuals in my denomination.

[Kristor]

Um, OK, but Dr. Esolen is nevertheless correct: utility functions are themselves functions of the moral principles enculturated in the young. Morality is logically prior to economics, as it is to politics and law. For any people, the particular historical operations of their economics, politics and law are the outworkings of their morality. Thus if there be no coherent culture, no coherent moral framework, there can be no development of a widespread conviction of the basic reliability and trustworthiness of most of one's counterparties in any sort of transaction; and generalized distrust cripples trade, enterprise and organization. Because the Ottoman Empire was deficient in just exactly this respect, the admiral of the Turkish fleet at Lepanto had to bring his entire (vast) wealth with him on the expedition to the Sea of Corinth, where it went to the bottom with him.

[Tony Esolen]

Thank you, Selfreferencing, for those thoughtful comments. I'd respond thus:

1. I'm happy that the Catholic Church has been at best chilly towards classical and neoclassical liberal economic theory. It deserves, not outright rejection, but an attitude of judgment against an order of values or moral laws or human ends. That is what Pope Leo was trying to do in Rerum Novarum: he accepted the right to own property as inherent in man's rational nature and as crucial for the establishment of communities that outlast the generation. He did not, however, accept the idea that the workman ought to be paid as little as the employer could get away with paying him, or, as the father in How Green Was My Valley put it, "The masters are men just as we are." He did in fact look back with sympathy towards the guild system of the Middle Ages. I'm not sure why that system should be called guild "socialism," when it spawned countless centers of economic and political independence; in its localism and its encouragement of good work and mutual care, it is the antithesis of the welfare state. A good analogy to that old guild system would be the insurance cooperatives established by certain fraternal organizations in the early part of the 20th century.
As for the current pope's support of a "living wage," I share your frustration, if in fact what the pope means is that everybody who has a job, irrespective of age or preparation or of the type of work done, should be paid enough to allow said person to support a family. Popes have a habit of couching their pronouncements in all kinds of qualifications.
I'd ask you to retreat a little and tell me what it means to "help the economy." People can be helped ... and they are not necessarily better off for having a certain amount of money at their disposal. Usually, maybe, but not necessarily. In evaluating an economy we have to use other standards than the economic, precisely because the "laws of the household" have as their end the good of the household, which means the good of the persons in the household. Or as Richard Sandel has put it -- I think it's his title -- we should practice economics as if people mattered. I don't think you and I disagree about this.

2. I wrote too hastily there. What I meant is simply that the manifestation of these laws will surprise us, when we fall into demographic decline.

3. My quarrel with Rawls is that he does not allow for a vigorous role for culture in determining our means for attaining human goods. He commits us to two things that I find unacceptable: an atomistic view of the individual, and an all-encompassing State, as you say, to adjust for the absurdities that will result as a consequence sometimes of individual choices. The whole middle drops out -- the middle, where the action is: families, fraternities, villages, guilds, and so forth -- the real manifestation of man's social nature. I cannot abstract myself from those without ceasing, insofar as I make the abstraction, to be fully human. In a sense which Rawls takes insufficient account of -- or so I think -- my membership in a family or a guild or a village is prior to my rational choices in an economy or a state; I choose not simply for my welfare as an individual, but for what I see as their welfare. And I choose not alone, but among my fellows -- for voting, alas, should also not be viewed as simply an individual's right, but as the duty and action of fraternal and other groups.

4. That was certainly not true of Catholic countries prior to the Renaissance. I wish we could analyze the history of various nations and their economies without resorting to the old charge that Catholic countries are simply going to be backward economically because they are Catholic. There are too many factors to count in -- not least among them, the survival in England of the medieval common law tradition.

[Tony Esolen]

OOPS: I meant above to put a period after "get away with paying him." The whole sentence is unclear. I meant that the masters would not want to pay as little as they could get away with -- or should not want to, being human just as their workers were.

[Rob G]

"Morality is logically prior to economics, as it is to politics and law."

The Founding Fathers were convinced that democracy would not work if the people were not moral. Seems to me that one can say the same thing about market economics. I once heard Fr. Reardon say that the modern idea of putting the market ahead of morality comes from too much reading of Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' while ignoring his 'Theory of Moral Sentiments.' In other words, the market is not the be-all and end-all that many fiscal conservatives make it out to be, but has a moral dimension that is too often ignored.

[Beth from TN]

Tony, are you planning to put this series together as a long article, or part of a book? It's excellent, and I'd love to have them gathered in one place in print, not just in my bookmark folder!

[Hunter Baker]

Really fantastic stuff.

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

"In other words, the market is not the be-all and end-all that many fiscal conservatives make it out to be, but has a moral dimension that is too often ignored."

And thus the mocked-and-scoffed-at voices of the social conservatives (many of whom are derogatorily known as the Religious Right) are utterly essential.

[Kevin J Jones]

"the Catholic Church under his tutelage has supported living wages, among other policies widely understood by economists to - at best - do little to help the economy and at worst harm it a great deal."

The economy? Which economy? The business economy or the home economy?

Having read a lot of Allan Carlson this weekend, I've learned that "living wages," in the U.S. context, were focused upon helping a man support his family. Related laws discouraged and even banned married women from the workplace.

A classical liberal of today would denounce most historical economic restrictions and privileges based on sex and marital status.

But then, without noting the contradiction, he would insist that pre-feminist America was a classical liberal state.

Perhaps the "living wage" is especially burdensome in a fractured family culture with many singletons, divorcees, and single mothers.

It doesn't help that business economism, with the aid of the feminism its partisans funded, now forbids consideration for a man's family status and family size when weighing his paycheck.

This treats the family as irrelevant to business practice.

And this is why pro-family efforts in the GOP won't go anywhere and may indeed be counterproductive. That party has no capacity to incorporate the family into its driving ideologies advocating the free market, maximum efficiency, and consumer choice.

[Selfreferencing]

Tony, thanks for your replies. Two responses:

(1) You say about Rawls: "an atomistic view of the individual, and an all-encompassing State, as you say, to adjust for the absurdities that will result as a consequence sometimes of individual choices. The whole middle drops out -- the middle, where the action is: families, fraternities, villages, guilds, and so forth."

I think this is a mistaken view of Rawls. There's a really nice discussion of Rawls's theory of the person in Jerry Gaus's The Modern Liberal Theory of Man. Basically, he argues quite effectively that Rawls follows previous liberals like Hobhouse, Dewey, Green, Bosanquet and to a limited extent J.S. Mill in advocating a form of organicism about the human person. The whole charge that Rawls was an atomist could have been refuted by careful attention to Part III of TJ, and the moral psychology which Rawls appealed to.

Further, again, Rawls was deeply Hegelian, strongly rejecting contractarian views of justice which treated individuals as merely self-interested.

However, I will give you this: Hegelian philosophy typically has a detailed view about how state and civil society mesh - particularly with civil institutions, the church and the family. That's true of Hegel, some Marxists and the British Hegelians. It's also true of many American liberals and conservatives affected by Hegel (Dewey on the Left, a vast number on the right). And Rawls doesn't have much to say about those institutions. But, I don't think that's because he didn't have a few.

(2) "That was certainly not true of Catholic countries prior to the Renaissance. I wish we could analyze the history of various nations and their economies without resorting to the old charge that Catholic countries are simply going to be backward economically because they are Catholic. There are too many factors to count in -- not least among them, the survival in England of the medieval common law tradition."

I don't think using economic data from Catholic countries prior to the Renaissance can contradict my point because nothing like a modern capitalist economy could have existed for mere developmental and technological reasons. But I do think a version of the 'old' charge can be sustained. There is a deep connection in my mind between the Catholic Church venerating a life of voluntary poverty over riches, over its preferences for medieval forms of economic organization well-established in tradition, over its tendency to prefer denominational uniformity implicitly or explicitly imposed (which itself stagnates competition in ideas) and so on.

[Rob G]

"this is why pro-family efforts in the GOP won't go anywhere and may indeed be counterproductive. That party has no capacity to incorporate the family into its driving ideologies advocating the free market, maximum efficiency, and consumer choice"

Seems to me, Kevin, that quite a few social conservatives are coming to similar conclusions: Carlson, the late Paul Weyrich and William Lind in their new book 'The Next Conservatism'; Rod Dreher, etc., have all pointed this out. Likewise Mike Huckabee was lambasted by many fiscal conservatives for raising just such points. I heard quite a few talking heads dismiss him as not being a "real conservative," whereas if you read his campaign memoir it soon becomes evident that nothing's further from the truth.

In the big picture of conservatism this critique is nothing really new. It's just that it's a foreign idea to the current crop of conservatives who've been schooled largely by talk radio and Fox news. There is a certain measure of truth to the charge that the GOP is (and pretty much always has been) the party of big business. Weyrich and Lind put it this way: each party has its own representative deadly sin -- the Dems, lust, and the GOP, gluttony -- which the respective parties have managed somehow to portray as virtues.

[Kevin]

Is there a "Pseudogamy" book forthcoming that collects this series? I for one would buy it one were to appear... if not , this is a great addition to the blog, this extended musing on a particular topic.

[Tony Esolen]

Dear Selfreferencing:

And thanks too for your courteous reply.

I guess I'd still hold my ground in defense of medieval Catholic culture. Capitalism, for better or for worse, was alive and well in 13th century Europe; after all, it's when the first great European banking houses were established, much to the chagrin of one Dante. Systems of credit were invented for international trade; double-entry bookkeeping was invented; the term "bankrupt" was invented :); and specialization of labor was invented, so that wool from England would be sent to Flanders for fulling and weaving into cloth, then sent to Florence for dyeing, and shipped from Florence either overland to Constantinople for trading further east, or by sea. Florence was well-positioned to be a hub for trading routes, and hence became also a great banking center. But it was far from the only one. I'm not one of those guys who interprets Dante from an entirely secular light, but I'll have to concede that half of his invectives are reserved for what he sees as a new mercantile ethos replacing the old aristocratic one. In other words, I don't see a necessary connection between capitalism and the modern nation-state, and I don't think Leo did, either.

You'll have to pardon me a sad smile, though, in defense of my Church. Half the time we are accused of being too rich, and the other half of being too poor. The Church tried, with some success, to meet the challenge posed by a devout and rising middle class, that it had become too worldly and too rich (read that sentence over again; it's a fascinating phenomenon, the other-worldliness of the nouveau riche); that's what gave rise to the mendicant orders, after all. The Franciscans in particular were quick to uphold the dignity and the goodness of the physical world, and the licitness of private property, as against the Waldensians on the left; while upholding an ideal of poverty that was deeply Scriptural.

As for the stagnation of ideas, I'm smiling right broadly now. You cannot surely be talking about the swirling hotbeds of controversy that were the medieval universities? You can't be talking about the age that set the stage for modern science, and basically everything the Renaissance (wrongly) claims as its own wonderful (and sometimes not so wonderful) innovations?

It is true that the Catholic Church has a set of dogmas that all of us Catholics are supposed to accept. It isn't true, however, that that produces intellectual stagnation. First, the same charge can be laid, unfairly, at the feet of any Christian group. Second, the charge begs the question, assuming that the dogmas are not in fact true; for if they are true, acceptance opens up new vistas of investigation, while only closing off blind alleys. Third, those dogmas are relatively few. I mean, as a Catholic intellectual I think I'm about the freest bird in the forest. I don't have to believe in global warming, I don't have to believe that Heather should have two mommies, I don't have to believe in the sexual revolution, and on and on -- you see what I mean.

[Benighted Savage]

Luca Pacioli (1446/7–1517), author of "De Computis et Scripturis" and the Father of Modern Accounting, was a Franciscan friar.

[Kamilla]

"Mixed marriages are always a problem; bad enough that the sexes are mixed"

Oh golly, and here was me hoping to find someday that mixing the sexes in marriage would prove to be one of its delights.

sigh,

Kamilla

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

"I will not prove it to you, but I, a liberal, OC Christian, and convert from academic atheism, having examined and rejected RC membership, just celebrated a wedding anniversary"

Conservative Roman Catholics are rather sad that you rejected the RCC.

[Rob G]

"Conservative Roman Catholics are rather sad that you rejected the RCC"

As is this conservative Orthodox Christian. This is no slam against the RCC. I'd much rather see a person as a conservative Catholic than a liberal Orthodox, or liberal anything else for that matter.

Liberalism is incompatible with true Christianity, at very least because it posits a Rousseauian view of man that's at variance with universal Christian teaching.

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

Rob G.: "Liberalism is incompatible with true Christianity"

Rob, this might surprise you and other MC readers, but I totally agree with you!!!

Everybody, say it three times: Liberalism is incompatible with true Christianity, Liberalism is incompatible with true Christianity, Liberalism is incompatible with true Christianity.

And then tell all your liberal (professing) Christian friends and family.

[William Tighe]

What is "an OC Christian?" "Orthodox Christian Christian" seems ignorantly tautologous; "Orthodox Church Christian" merely barbarous. Do we know that Cyranorox is Orthodox (but not orthodox)?

As almost always, I find Cyranorox's comments largely incomprehensible, in that respect like so much of the jargon-laden cliche'd cant of so many of my fellow-academics. I find myself pleased, however, to be in agreement with both Rob and TUaD.

[Nick]

I'm with you, I'm not sure we can take her comment to mean that she is Eastern Orthodox. Heck, the usual abbreviation is EO not OC.

I'm also really uncomfortable with "mixed marriages". This is usually used in a racial context and I can't for the life of me understand how its being used here. "Bad enough that they are mixed sex", I mean really? What the blazes does that mean? God rolled dice, came up with a mixed pair, shrugged, and walked off set?

[Clifford Simon]

Comedy break: How odd would it be, if we reversed everybody's sex for a moment, and Tony and Selfreferencing were having this dialoge as women? :)

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

Tony Esolen: "Our marriage betrayals and our economic betrayals are all manifestations of a culture of betrayal; and we lay the flattering unction to our soul, saying that people have always been exactly as shiftless as we are, only we are smart about it."

Cyranorox: "[T]he liberalism ...a cloud of Patristic witnesses, who often bent the law to cover the sins of a brother and avert his punishment, and of moderns like Chesterton and George MacDonald is not only consistent with true Christianity, but inseparable from it."

Hmmmmmmm, I read from Tony Esolen that there is a culture of betrayal that's obviously begotten from people who betray each other, and yet on the other hand, according to CyranoRox, a cloud of Patristic witnesses and moderns like Chesterton and George MacDonald often did bend the law to cover the sins of a brother, and by doing so, Cyranorox asserts that this is a liberalism which is inseparable from true Christianity. I.e., a rationalization to argue that it's okay to emulate the cloud of Patristic witnesses and some notable Moderns (whom Cyranorox asserts bent the law) in covering for the sins of betrayal that are committed by others.

Yeeeeeesh. It's the crap sophistry like this which creates the culture of betrayal which then further infects our hearts, our families, our churches, and our society which Tony Esolen and myself, and many others lament and warn against.

[Beren]

CyranoRox, it seems you're trying to resurrect the word "liberal" to its pre-classical meaning... and it seems other commentators took "liberal" to mean its modern, political meaning.

The old sense of "liberal" is now so long gone that it might be better to call it "reactionary."

And Chesterton is hardly a modern -- he's about as far from a modern as you could get in the early 20th century ;)

As for how a culture of divorce made you worse, well, first we have to unpack the word "worse." Worse is a comparison word; something isn't "worse" in and of itself, something is worse in comparison to something else. So what has the culture of divorce made you worse compared to?

I'll wager Prof. Esolen would argue that the culture of divorce has made you worse off than you would be if there were no culture of divorce, if everyone who married stayed married and the marital act stayed within the bounds of marriage. I think we can both agree that relative to that happy outcome, the culture of divorce has indeed made everyone worse off.

Finally, I'm unclear what you mean by "The issue here is persistent; the great ideas are strapped down to a very meagre, self-interested view." -- What issue is _persistent_? I don't think there's a self-interested view so much as a phenomenologically personalistic one...

[Beren]

Selfreferencing, I'd be interested to read your take on Centesimus Annus, as you've mentioned both RN and QA... I'm hoping your statement about the "developments since QA ... have shown little prospect of improvement." doesn't apply to CA...

[Rob G]

C-rox, are implying that liberalism as generosity of spirit, such as that found in the writers you mention, equates to political liberalism or 'progressivism,' as it sometimes calls itself nowadays, and/or to theological liberalism?

[Kamilla]

Cyranorox,

There you go contradicting yourself. First, you said, "Mixed marriages are always a problem; bad enough that the sexes are mixed" and then you said, "Of course mixed sexes is not a problem"

sigh again,

Kamilla

[Kamilla]

Naw, don't bother with me dear - just count me in with those like Dr. Tighe who find you incomprehensible.

Kamilla

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

Cyranorox: "the sentence, even as cut up, does not say that Chesterton and MacD bent any laws;"

Sure it does. I don't know where your comment went, but the main idea of what you wrote was this: "[T]he liberalism ... of a cloud of Patristic witnesses, who often bent the law to cover the sins of a brother and avert his punishment, and of moderns like Chesterton and George MacDonald is not only consistent with true Christianity, but inseparable from it."

Puhleeze. Have the humility to admit your mistake.

"I don't have a very developed view of theological liberalism, being a theological conservative."

Such hubris is best understood by referring back to your comment to Kamilla: "the first, dear, is a humorous reversal of the plain meaning".

Indeed.

[Rob G]

"I don't have a very developed view of theological liberalism, being a theological conservative"

How does one reconcile political liberalism with theological conservatism, given that the former holds a non-Christian, Enlightenment view of man that the latter rejects? Seems to me that the respective anthropologies are mutually exclusive.

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

Cyranorox: "I don't have a very developed view of theological liberalism, being a theological conservative."

Given your claim of being a theological conservative, what do you think of this theological conservative's exhortation to church-going Christians?

Let's also bear in mind your critique of Tony Esolen's "Psuedogamy 101" post: "Not bad, until we get to 'severe disapproval'.... How to apply the 'severe disapproval'? Another time to propose, not impose, Christ. Stern glances at erring neighbours, icy disdain in the grocery line, etc., simply render one ridiculous."

------------

Next, here's a challenge called "Name Three". You wrote: "[T]he liberalism ... of a cloud of Patristic witnesses, who often bent the law to cover the sins of a brother and avert his punishment".

Cyranorox, name three examples of Patristic witnesses who bent the law to cover the sins of a brother and avert his punishment. It should be easy for you since you said it happened often. Then we'll examine the examples that you offered up in support of your assertion.

As Rob G once said to Francesca, I'm calling you out.

[mcmoderator]

comment deleted -- ad hominem

[Rob G]

C-Rox, those are fine examples of personal conduct, and ones that I would be loath to gainsay, considering their source. How, though, do you translate this personal, spiritual generosity into political liberalism? As I said above, the latter is based on a fundamentally flawed anthropology, one which even the most charitable of the ascetic fathers wouldn't have accepted.

[Dn Nathan Thompson]

Cyranorox,

Please clarify what Church you belong to. I want to know if you are trying to represent the Canonical Orthodox Church or a different organization.

Thank you very much.

[Rob G]

"your assertion that liberalism is attached to a bad anthopology, more or less that of the French Revolution, if I understand you, looks wrong from here"

Liberalism, whether of the French Revolution type or not, is not so much 'attached' to a bad anthropology as it is rooted in one. All forms of liberalism that I've ever run across assert an anthropology that runs counter to that of Christianity, namely that we are not fallen. We are instead noble savages, or blank slates at birth, or what have you. As an Orthodox I reject
the Augustinian view of man as being too pessimistic; what the liberal view offers instead, however, is a modern form of Pelagianism, which is far worse, and is in fact a heresy.

It seems to me that by choosing your theology based on a previously-held anthropology you get it exactly backwards. Should not your theology, i.e., church teaching and doctrine, mold your anthropology? It strikes me as odd that you would hold up a certain view of man as an ideal, then search around for a theology that fits it.

It is no surprise, based on this, that liberalism is what you choose as your political viewpoint. It seems to me that what you have done is simply transferred certain Pelagian tendencies into the political realm.