Sex: Accept No Substitutes

I don't quite understand what the obsession with modifying the human creature is. It comes in various kinds, but particularly among those who spend much of their day sitting in front of a computer, the future is imagined to be one in which the old flesh and bones will be significantly improved. We'll upload our brains into vast cyber networks, or we'll have implanted computers that will allow us to google obsessively everything we see, or we'll reproduce only via in vitro fertilization and artificial wombs.

This last seems particularly confusing to me. I don't share the aspiration to literally play computer games 24/7, nor to google up the implications of my lunch companion's body language, but I suppose I can sort of understand why someone might want to do such a thing. I'm utterly confused, however, at the prediction that in the future we'll reproduce asexually -- at least when this prediction is made as something other than a distopian warning.

Yesterday, I had someone suggest to me that Aldus Huxley's Brave New World provided a good template for how we could soon be liberated from the tyranny of reproducing. He later followed up with, "So what's the problem with cloning or in vitro fertilization? Why is humanity condemned to reproducing itself the same way hamsters reproduce, even though we have the intellect and resulting technology to do it otherwise, if so desired?"

Condemned?

I don't want to claim that MrsDarwin and I are some sort of sexual superheroes, our experiences far beyond that of the common man, but I have to say that getting children the traditional way is not so bad. The hamster is a lowly creature, and I'm not sure to what extent he enjoys his little roll in the wood shavings, but the mere fact that as humans we have sex according to roughly the same mechanics as all other mammals doesn't strike me as being a reason to abandon the practice.

There's a strong Gnostic streak in modernity and futurism. It seems odd that in a culture which constantly attacks Christianity for having too dour a view of sexuality, sex itself is so often scorned -- even by its advocates. I was struck by this when, months ago, I was arguing with someone who described herself as "sex positive" and who insisted that sex wasn't the sort of thing it was possible to have moral rules about, because anything done by consenting adults was just a means to pleasure and fun.

One of the ways she expressed this, however, was, "I can't imagine that God cares what we do with our dangly bits."

Now, I've been around the block enough times to know that there's an element of absurdity in sexuality. The gap between how we think of ourselves and what we look like is doubtless large. But I think it's indicative that, in the attempt to make the case that all things are lawful when it comes to sex, the approach taken is to make it sounds like our sexual organs are some kind of deformity too trivial to have any moral implications.

Whatever the mild absurdities which come from the physicality of sex, it's actually an important and beautiful thing. It's a way that spouses express their love for each other. It's the way that new human beings are created. And human beings are pretty amazing things. Creating them is of no mean import.

Sure, we can imagine high tech and expensive ways of conceiving a child in a lab rather than through a man and a woman having sex. But think about the amount of work, money and sterility that's necessary in order to achieve the same effect that two teenagers in a meadow can without even thinking about it. Dystopian or utopian, reproducing via methods other than sex is always going to be a first world problem. The fact is: the human organism comes equipped to reproduce itself, and the process is not only very pleasurable in parts, it's fundamental to who we are.

So while futurists will continue to dream of not having to have sex in order to make babies, or getting rid of that pesky human experience of maternal attachment and love, these things are so natural and so basic to what we are, they will never go away. Nor should they.

Walking Among the Headstones

Our parish has an annual event called the Hallowed Hayride. It's held the weekend before All Saints Day, down at the parish cemetary -- 10 acres on the south side of town, which the parish has owned since the 1890s. Off in the empty, grassy area that serves as overflow parking for funerals, there's a bonfire and food. Along the central loop of the cemetery, different groups from the parish set up dramatic tableaux based on different saints. As the sun sets, horse drawn wagons take people around to see the tableaux, each about five minutes of action and narration, while a guide reads a script between stops which talks about the history of the cemetery and about Christian beliefs regarding burial and life after death.

This year the Knight of Columbus presented the conversion and martyrdom of St. Longinus, the seminarians from the nearby pontifical college did St. Lawrence on the grid iron, and the youth group did St. Julia. Kids from the parish school did three other stops with multiple saints each.

Our kids weren't actin in any of the tableaux, but they were supposed to help put out luminarias along the paths, so they were there early and there was time to spend before things got started. So I took the baby, who was restive, and went walking around.

I like cemeteries and I hadn't had a chance to wander this one much, even though we've lived here for four years now. It's been the parish cemetery 125 years, but the was an older cemetery on part of the land which the parish cemetery has since swallowed up. That old section has headstones engraved in cursive script dated from the 1830s through the 1850s.

One of the things I like about our town is that it hasn't outgrown its history. The downtown isn't much bigger than it was in 1910, though the outlying areas have grown a good bit. This cemetery is much different from the more modern ones I grew up with in California, with the land all flat and the headstones flush with the ground so that big riding mowers could move through the whole area easily. Here the grounds rolls in little depressions and rises and nearly all the stones are upright. This has the feel of a place which has quietly seen a lot of people come and go, not an open space that has been tamed for the purpose of conducting burials efficiently.

Walking the cemetery is also a good time to focus your perspective a bit. MrsDarwin found a woman who was born almost exactly a century before she was.

"I like to find people born a century before me and see what year they died," she told me.

"How'd it go?"

"1948."

"Well, thirty-four more years. That's not a bad run..."

I suppose sixty-nine counts as an early death these days, but nonetheless I'd feel a certain relief if I knew that I'd have at least thirty-four more years to be with my loved ones and to get things done.

Other sources of perspective are more sobering. We say a headstone from 1910 for a baby who died at 10 months and 19 days. Our youngest, who I was carrying with me, is 10 months and 3 days old. Momento mori. I wrapped him tighter in his blanket against the evening breeze.

Slate's Fix for the Pesky "Lost Productivity" of Maternal Love

Oh friends. Oh stupid, biologically-fettered friends. Let the brights at Slate show you the glorious path to the future: 

In affluent societies at least, paternity uncertainty is a thing of the past, thanks to genetic testing and the Maury Povich Show. And while men continue to dominate our economic and social lives, that dominance is being contested. Among younger cohorts, women are pulling ahead of men in educational attainment, a disparity that is already having powerful social and economic consequences. A large and growing number of women are raising children without men, for whom the drive to accumulate property to pass on to their heirs has attenuated, if not vanished entirely. Roles that had once been limited to men, by law and custom—it was not so long ago that female doctors, lawyers, engineers, and managers were vanishingly rare—are now open to women, and women are excelling in them. They are excelling in them to such an extent that the opportunity costs associated with motherhood (the foregone wages, the lost productivity) are becoming unacceptably high not just for individual mothers, but for their employers. 

These are new historical developments, and we’re still struggling to adapt to them. So, here’s a prediction: Instead of adapting our jobs to accommodate the demands of biology, we will adapt our biology to accommodate the demands of our jobs. The fact that only women can give the gift of life is an enviable distinction, yet it is also a burden that can make it harder for working mothers to reach the pinnacle of their professions. One way to ease this burden would be to move away from pregnancy as we know it and toward a reliance on artificial wombs. 

For now, artificial wombs are the stuff of science fiction. Those of you who read Brave New World in high school will recall its chilling portrayal of the “Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre,” where vast numbers of identical children spring from the same genetic soup. If ectogenesis, a fancy word for the use of artificial wombs, ever happens in the real world, it will be a more banal next step from the technologies that already keep premature babies alive. Ectogenesis will start out as a way to allow older women to have children or to abet pregnancy for women who would otherwise be unable to carry children. Eventually, it will be considered safer to have children via ectogenesis than the old-fashioned way, and the practice will spread far and wide.

Let's examine the terms of our discussion. Motherhood -- the bearing and rearing of the next generation, in the most practical, most desirable, most easily accomplished sense -- is "lost productivity". Carrying a child in your own womb: "lost productivity". Giving birth: "lost productivity". Keeping an infant alive, feeding it, responding to its cries, holding, nurturing, loving it: "lost productivity". Children, in short, are "lost productivity", little time sinks best outsourced to the world's indigent and uneducated, who have nothing better to do with their bodies or their lives but serve as incubators and nannies to those wealthy enough not only to buy a child, but a womb to put it in. Nothing is too good for our unborn children -- no drop of alcohol safe enough for a pregnant woman, no raw cheese healthy enough, no breath of second-hand smoke pure enough -- because the earliest intervention matters, the safety of the womb matters, unless someone really reeeeally has a good reason to buy a pregnancy, and then it's okay that some poor woman in India sell her body as a surrogate, because the person with the money just wants it so much, right?

I don’t doubt that we’ll see some of this, particularly if such shifts save employers money. Yet the most elite jobs are also the least susceptible to change. “There will always be 24/7 positions with on-call, all-the-time employees and managers, including many CEOs, trial lawyers, merger-and-acquisition bankers, surgeons, and the U.S. Secretary of State,” writes Goldin. Apple and Facebook are keen to retain female employees who can take on these 24/7 positions, which don’t lend themselves to the kind of flexibility that parenting demands. And that is why they’re taking egg freezing seriously.

Apparently the one 24/7 job that women shouldn't have to sacrifice for is that of bearing and raising a child. A job with Facebook! A job with Apple! These are positions that are so important that even a woman's biology must be molded to fit their demands. Nurturing life isn't nearly so vital as making sure that Facebook's servers don't crash. Connectivity before children! Let's remake nature in the image of Apple's corporate structure, because parenting is now an option, while the development of a new iPhone is a societal imperative.

And if we want to achieve gender equality by changing attitudes, it can’t just be male attitudes that change. Men will have to become more interested in spending time with their children, but women will also have to become less interested. If the miracle of childbirth is a central component of what bonds women to their offspring, and pregnancy envy is a force that drives men to accumulate wealth, outsourcing pregnancy might be the best solution.  

In August, Zoltan Istvan, author of The Transhumanist Wager, touted the potential benefits of artificial wombs for women, from the most obvious (“females would no longer have to solely bear responsibility for childbirth”) to the less obvious (“ectogenesis could unchain women from the home”). Even some of the criticisms of ectogenesis—that it will reduce the intimacy between mother and child—could be a good thing if your concern is that when it comes to raising children, the attitudes of women and men are too different. 

And there you have it: women must become less interested in spending time with their children. If pregnancy has the inconvenient side effect of bonding a woman to her child, pregnancy must be discarded. If the attitudes of men and woman toward raising children are too different, the solution must be that everyone must become more detached from children. Needy little beggars, children, so oblivious to money, so ungrateful for fancy nurseries and expensive nannies and celebrity strollers, so high-maintenance that they cry for their mothers. So biologically unadvanced that they bond with the woman who bears them in her womb, so pathetically, so impractically satisfied at her breast, as if they had some kind of claim on her body, that body which so inconveniently alters to give them life! Don't babies know that adults mean well by stowing them in artificial wombs? Shouldn't they be grateful for existing at all, summoned to life like Frankenstein's monster? Don't they realize how liberating it is to women not to want to love them? Don't they realize that their mothers have more important things to do than them?

Think I'm exaggerating the Slate author's opinions? Let's have his last words:

Yet, artificial wombs still seem inevitable. The powerful, feeling-filled bond between a mother and her child is a big part of what leads working mothers to take their child-rearing responsibilities more seriously than working fathers. If this essential difference is the problem, if it is the root of gender equality in the workplace, and if our highest priority is to eliminate gender inequality, then ectogenesis offers a way forward.

Nothing must stand in the way of gender equality. No woman must be allowed to take her child-rearing responsibilities more seriously than a man, and of course child-rearing responsibilities must look exactly the same for both sexes. "If our highest priority is to eliminate gender inequality": yes, inequality must be eliminated, even to the tamping down of any impudent maternal sentiment that might rear its medieval little head. This is what contempt for women looks like: the denigration of their very biology, the devaluing of a gift they alone can give, a role they alone can fill, so that they can become more useful cogs in the wheels of industry. Women are for work, and for sex, but certainly not for mothering. We wouldn't want to treat them like objects, for God's sake.

Imperial Japan and a Tragic Sense of History

I follow Michael Yon on Facebook, he's a freelance photographer who I discovered back during the Iraq War, when he wrote a number of interesting dispatches and took some amazing photographs while embedded with coalition troops in Iraq. He continues to write from various places around the world, but often he posts short pieces just on Facebook, not his blog. One of these the other day was about visiting the museum at the Yasukini Shrine in Tokyo:

...
Inside the museum at the Yasukini Shrine in Tokyo are letters to home from Soldiers, Sailors and Aviators. The letters are heartfelt and many are painful to read.

Often they knew they were going to die, and would end letters with words such as meet me under the cherry blossoms at Yasukini.

Many Japanese who come to read the letters break down in tears. This sight was saddening for me to witness. Japanese feel love as deeply as anyone, and they feel the loss in their own souls when a loved one goes away so young.

A section of the museum contains dolls. The dolls of young women represent wives brought by families for young troops who died without the opportunity to marry.

Perhaps the saddest part of the museum is that which remembers the widows. A Shinto Priest told me today, he seemed hurt in his heart as he said these things, that one widow came to the shrine for seventy years until she died.
...

At a basic human level, this is affecting stuff. While there's stuff here that's uniquely Japanese, there's also much that is universal.

I wrote a little while back about having a tragic sense of history. One of the problems people often run into, due to lacking such a sense, is that it becomes impossible for people to both recognize the evils of a particular side in a war, and also recognize their human suffering. Because we like to pick sides, we tend to either empathize or condemn, but seldom both. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan both, famously, singled out certain groups as sub-human and treated them with almost unimaginable savagery. Certainly, not every Japanese or German soldier supported or participated in such acts, but many did. And what's more important to understand is: It's not only the "good Germans" and "good Japanese" who were mourned by their families.

This struck me in an American context recently when I was reading a comments by an African-American writer about how he loathed songs, stories, etc. that dealt with the suffering of Southerners during and after the Civil War. That misses a basic human truth: However much one thinks that it was a good thing that the South lost the Civil War (and I do), and however much slavery and its evils were deeply entwined with some of what is thought about nostalgically as Southern Culture with its belles and courtly gentlemen and gracious plantations, it is absolutely true and unquestionable that people in the Confederacy suffered deeply during the war. People suffer when their sons and fathers and husbands go off to war. People suffer when they go hungry. People suffer when enemy armies maraud across their land, taking food and burning buildings. People suffer at the feeling of humiliation that goes with defeat. At a basic human level, this suffering does not differ based on whether the people we're talking about are on the right or wrong side of the war.

Yon doesn't seem to fully get this. In discussion down the thread he's at pains to suggest that perhaps Japanese atrocities during World War II were exaggerated and their fault for the war is overplayed. I don't know whether his sympathy for their human experience of the war or his idea that Imperial Japan is presented unfairly came first, but what is important to understand is that these two things need not be connected. We can understand at a human level the suffering of a defeated people, indeed of any people engaged in a war, and at the same time be clear eyed about the wrongs they commit. Indeed, if we are to maintain a human vision of history and how people experience it, we must.

Sixth Grade Catechist Confidential

I did not want to teach religion this year. I did not want to put my kids in the religion program. I did not want my Sundays eaten by afternoon classes, nor did I want to sacrifice my ability to leave town for a weekend for the course of the school year. And of course God had other plans. Never in my life have I received such a clear series of signs as I was constantly sent about being a catechist, to the extent that ignoring them would have moved past the level of spiritual culpability into spiritual blindness. Finally, I thought I would put the idea to the final test by running it past Darwin, who would also have to shoulder some of the burden of interrupted family time on Sundays, and who might be annoyed by my blocking out our weekend days, and who would have to watch the baby while I was gone.

"Oh yeah," he said mildly. "It sounds like they really need people."

Well.

So I went down to the office and volunteered, and I ended up in the middle school session with my two oldest. Our parish uses The EDGE program, and I am a small group discussion leader for 7-10 sixth graders (none of whom are my sixth grader) out of a group of perhaps 60 kids. The EDGE seems solid enough, and it's fairly scripted, so that I can look over the next week's lesson plan and have a good feel for how the class will run. We meet in the gym, a big impersonal space, but our small groups manage an almost intimate feel by tucking in next to a wall and sitting in a circle.

"These kids have so many questions," I was told in training. "Just listen, take their questions, and answer them as best you can, or look up the answers and get back to them. We want to make sure they know they can find answers to their questions here."

Hm. In my experience, sixth graders do not have a lot of questions. My group doesn't even know that they're supposed to have questions. They do not want to be put on the spot. It is a challenge to get anyone to speak, with one or two chatty exceptions. These kids desperately want to be told something. So I ask the prescribed discussion questions, and I get very short, very basic answers, and I redirect the child who has a breadth but not a depth of discussion, and I talk. The Socratic method isn't working much here. Here's what works: I tell them what I want them to know. And they listen, and -- what I did not expect going in -- they don't challenge me. They don't press me to explain myself. They soak it in, and they believe me. I feel daunted by this power, and I pray that I always say the right thing.

Our first class was on Revelation, and why we need it. After the "Proclaim" (the group teaching), we break into our discussion groups, and after a little introductory icebreaker, I start with the first question.

"Why did God give us the Scriptures?" I ask. My two chatty ones give answers that are serviceable enough (willingness to talk, I realize, is only an indicator of personality, not of greater knowledge), but then there is painful silence. Kids look at the ground, at their icebreaker papers, at their Bibles.

"Is anyone here an artist? Or a writer? Who likes creating things?" A few hands go up. "When you draw something, does it tell everything about you? When you look at a painting, or read a book, or watch a movie, do you learn everything about the person who created it? Are you suddenly an expert on that person's life?" Heads shake no. "When you read The Fault in our Stars," I said, turning to a girl whose icebreaker slip listed that as her favorite book, "do you know everything about John Green?" (Thank God for the WSJ profile of John Green several weeks ago.) "You can tell some things about him, can't you? By reading the book, you can discover some of his ideas about life? What sorts of ideas did he talk about in the book? The idea of life after death, and how the soul lives on?" (Oh please, WSJ profile, don't have led me wrong about the plot.)

My student seemed unused to having to draw ideas out of a text, but she was a fan of the book and articulated how the themes had resonated with her.

"So, in reading The Fault in our Stars, you can learn lots of important things about the author -- what he thinks about life, and death, and how we should face them. But does the book tell you everything about him? Can you learn everything there is to know about John Green by reading his book? Or does he have to reveal some things to you?"

The group thought that he might need to reveal some things.

"When we look at creation, we can see that it expresses a lot about God. But it can't tell us everything about him. No creation can tell everything about its creator. We need God to tell us some things directly, through revelation. And He does that two ways, through scripture and through the Tradition of the Church."

More silence, but at least heads were up now.

Next question: "How is God like our "secret admirer"? (This was an avenue of discussion I thought wasn't very fruitful, but since in the talk God had been called not just an admirer, but a "secret stalker", I better get a better message out there.)

A few quasi-answers. "Do you think God is like a stalker? Human stalkers are creepy, aren't they? But why isn't God creepy? Well, a human stalker doesn't truly know the person he's stalking -- or she! A human stalker creates an imaginary person out of a real person, and wants a real person to be just like the imaginary person in his or her head. But God knows everything about us, more than we know about ourselves -- we're the creation, remember? -- and so He doesn't stalk us, He constantly draws us to Himself through His love. And one way He does that is through His revelation to us in the Scriptures."

And so on. "What does it mean that God wants to be in relationship with us? Well, one thing it means is that God is a person. Who has a pet?" Several dogs, a guinea pig, a fish, some cats. "Do you love your pets? Sure. But can you have a relationship with your dog? Can he reveal his mind to you? You know him from the outside -- there's no way you can exchange ideas with him. Only a person can be in a relationship. And God is a person, and He can be known. He's not remote from us, or something we can never touch. He wants to be known -- that's why He reveals himself! That's why He came to us as one of us, as a human. That's why Jesus became incarnate. Where do we hear that word, incarnate? In the creed, right? Do you know what it means? It comes from the Latin word for meat. Anyone ever eat carnitas?" (This is Ohio, so of course not.) "It's just meat. God, a pure spirit, became meat, flesh, like us, because only a human can atone for human sins but only God can fully wipe out offenses against Himself."

This past week, I did have a question from someone, a "gotcha" question: "Is God male or female?"

"God is a spirit," I said. "He doesn't have a body."

"But you said, 'he'."

"Of course, because when God became human, He revealed Himself as a man."

"So God is a man?"

"He's a spirit. He contains everything within Himself. As a human, He's a man. But God is love. Is love male or female?"

Everyone shook their heads no.

"Is Justice male or female? Is Joy male or female? God IS love. He IS Joy. He's pure existence. He contains male and female within Himself because everything that exists exists in Him, through His will."

"Then why can't he make everyone be good? Why doesn't he show himself to people all the time instead of letting people do bad stuff if he loves us?"

"You mean," I said, "What if God came down to earth, and showed Himself to people in person, and they crucified Him? God gives us free will, and people are free to accept or reject Him even when they can see Him in person."

"Yeah, but...," said the student. "I mean, God could make us be good and keep bad things from happening."

"Well, if my husband gave me a love potion every morning, and then asked me to cook and sweep the stairs and give him a kiss, and I said, "Oh yes, dear!", would that really be love?"

"No!" said the group.

"God wants us to choose Him freely. He doesn't turn us into robots who are programmed to love and obey Him. But He does show himself to us. He did it today, in the Eucharist. He shows Himself to us in the Scriptures. He shows Himself to us through every act of love, because He IS love and all love participates in Him."

My same questioner wanted to know about how Jesus could be God if he was God's son and God created him.

"Ah," I said. "What do we say in the creed? Created by the Father? No, we say 'Begotten of the Father'. The Father generates the Son, but they've always existed. Think of fire and heat. What comes first, the fire or the heat?"

"The fire," said one.

"Both at the same time," said someone else.

"Yes, both at once, and yet the fire generates the heat, doesn't it? It doesn't create the heat, it generates it."

Then we discussed the Trinity. "Here," I said, drawing a triangle. "Here are three points on the triangle. They're all equal, right? But this point isn't that point, even though they're equal. And this point isn't either of those two. But the triangle is one. Having three points doesn't make it three separate triangles."

"But so, if you have the fire and the heat, then the fire definitely comes first and so the Son comes after the Father..."

"But you're thinking as humans think," I said. "Our minds are trapped in time, and we want to think in terms of before and after. But God is outside of time. He contains time within himself, just as He contains all things in Himself, but time has no power over him. Every time is now to God. So the Father generates the Son, but not in time."

"Wow, this is making my head hurt!" said one of the guys.

"Good!" I said. "It should make your head hurt. The greatest saints and the most intelligent people on earth have wrestled with these ideas. Welcome to the club."

My interlocutor was still chatty and wanted to carry the point about fire coming before heat.

"What came first, the chicken or the egg?" I demanded.

There was a moment of silence, and then a confused and circular explanation among several people. I turned to the girl next to me and said confidentially, "I did that on purpose." And she smiled, a real smile full of humor and understanding and the promise of adult engagement.

On Infallibility, He Errs

Kyle Cupp is stirring up a little Friday controversy with a post in which he has discovered The Loophole in papal infallibility. His basic argument is that the charism of infallibility comes into play when the pope intends to teach authoritatively on faith and morals -- but that this leaves open the possibility of "pretend infallibility" in which the pope teaches in a manner that appears to be authoritative teaching, but when he's intentionally teaching something he knows is untrue. Since there's no intention to teach authoritatively, he isn't protected from error. But, since we can never know for sure whether the pope is intending to teach authoritatively or is pranking the Church by only pretending to when he knows he isn't, we are left having to trust the Church authorities rather than knowing for sure that they are teaching truth.

To enjoy the charism of infallibility, the pope (or bishops in union with him) must intend to teach the faith authentically. Infallibility isn’t a magic power they can call upon when they want to teach; rather, it comes with the teaching. For example, if the pope intends to teach, by virtue of his office and to all the faithful, a doctrine of faith or morals to be definitively held, then he is protected from error by the Holy Spirit. So what’s the problem?

As presently formulated, the idea of infallibility assumes that the appearance of the intent to teach authentically means the intent is really there, but the formulation doesn’t entirely rule out the possibility of deception on the part of church leaders. The intent to teach, which is an interior disposition, can be made known by outward signs, but it could conceivably be faked by those outward signs. The means of expression a pope would use to indicate authentic teaching could be put to ill use: he could abuse his power, pretending to teach the truth when in fact he is not.

Kyle presents two possible solutions to this (the second of which is partially derived from my push-back to his earlier speculations on the matter) but I think his problems come in earlier in that he doesn't actually understand the doctrine of infallibility in the first place. Key to Kyle's argument is that the exercise of infallibility relies upon the pope's intention (or that of the bishops or a council in union with him) to teach the faith authentically. Essentially, he's seeing the doctrine as promising that the Church will not accidentally err when attempting to teach truly -- a sort of big fact checker in the sky. But what happens if the Church is acting in bad faith and doesn't even consult the fact checker?

The thing is, this is not how the doctrine is actually formulated. The doctrine of infallibility is not formulated in terms of intention. Here's the text from the original formulated in Vatican I:

[W]e teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA,
that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the church, irreformable.

The catechism fleshes this out a bit more, but the teaching itself is identical:

890 The mission of the Magisterium is linked to the definitive nature of the covenant established by God with his people in Christ. It is this Magisterium's task to preserve God's people from deviations and defections and to guarantee them the objective possibility of professing the true faith without error. Thus, the pastoral duty of the Magisterium is aimed at seeing to it that the People of God abides in the truth that liberates. To fulfill this service, Christ endowed the Church's shepherds with the charism of infallibility in matters of faith and morals. The exercise of this charism takes several forms:

891 "The Roman Pontiff, head of the college of bishops, enjoys this infallibility in virtue of his office, when, as supreme pastor and teacher of all the faithful - who confirms his brethren in the faith he proclaims by a definitive act a doctrine pertaining to faith or morals. . . . The infallibility promised to the Church is also present in the body of bishops when, together with Peter's successor, they exercise the supreme Magisterium," above all in an Ecumenical Council.418 When the Church through its supreme Magisterium proposes a doctrine "for belief as being divinely revealed,"419 and as the teaching of Christ, the definitions "must be adhered to with the obedience of faith."420 This infallibility extends as far as the deposit of divine Revelation itself.421

892 Divine assistance is also given to the successors of the apostles, teaching in communion with the successor of Peter, and, in a particular way, to the bishop of Rome, pastor of the whole Church, when, without arriving at an infallible definition and without pronouncing in a "definitive manner," they propose in the exercise of the ordinary Magisterium a teaching that leads to better understanding of Revelation in matters of faith and morals. To this ordinary teaching the faithful "are to adhere to it with religious assent"422 which, though distinct from the assent of faith, is nonetheless an extension of it.

What's absent here is any mention of intention. The doctrine is somewhat more audacious than that. Rather than promising a sort of divine fact checker which will prevent the pope from erring when he intends to teach truth, the doctrine more simply says that when the pope speaks solemnly on a matter of faith and morals, he will be protected from teaching error. It doesn't matter whether his intention is to teach truth or not.

There is precedent for this in several of the sacraments. Perhaps part of the background for Kyle's thinking in regards to intention relates to the sacrament of marriage, in which it is held that if the couple do not intend to enter into marriage as teh Church defines it, then they do not actual confer a valid marriage on themselves. In other words, if a couple has no intention of remaining faithful until death and being open to children, no marriage takes place, even if they stand in church before a priest and say all the right words.

However, while in marriage the couple's intention is part of the matter and form which must be present for the sacrament, there are other sacraments that do not rely on intention. For example, the consecration of the Eucharist does not rely on the priest's intention. If a priest says the words of consecration over bread and wine, but that priest has actually lost his faith in God and does not believe that anything will happen as a result of his action, even if he's just going through the motions out of a cynical desire to keep his job, the Eucharist is still confected and becomes the body and blood of Christ. Similarly, in baptism, as long as water is poured on the person being baptized and the proper words are spoke, the graces of baptism are received. If Richard Dawkins would be prevailed upon to pour water and speak the words of baptism over a dying person who wanted baptism, the sacrament would still be conferred. Other sacraments do, however, require proper intent. In addition to marriage, one must actually repent of one's sins and have an intention of resisting sin in the future in order to receive absolution in confession. If you go to confession and provide a good appearance of repentance, but in fact explicitly intend to go right out and commit the same grave sin again, you aren't actually absolved. The priest will have no way of knowing that the graces were not given, but you as the recipient are a part of the sacramental act and if you don't intend to repent you aren't absolved of guilt.

If someone asked me why some sacraments do not require proper intent, I would say that it is essential to God's purpose in creating the Church that the faithful be able to know that certain sacraments (baptism, Eucharist, confirmation, holy orders, last rites) "work" if they appear to work, regardless of the intent of the person carrying out the action. In other cases (confession, marriage) it's essential for the graces to work that the person receiving/performing the sacrament have proper intent.

Papal infallibility is not, obviously, a sacrament. However, it is one of the means by which God fulfills his promise to his people that his saving word and sacraments will be available to us. So in addition to the fact that the actual doctrinal definitions of infallibility simply talk about the pope teaching ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals -- not whether he intends to teach truthfully -- I think it makes a lot of sense for papal infallibility to work this way. While Kyle's formulation might be of some comfort to the pope himself (If I mean to teach truthfully, God will inspire me not to err) it wouldn't actually be much help to the faithful, in that those who don't like a Church teaching could simply assume there was bad faith involved on the part of the hierarchy, and thus absolve themselves of any duty to listen to and obey the Church. There are people who's purposes that would satisfy, but I don't think that God is one of them.

Sin Is How We Hurt People

In a discussion of the Church's teaching on divorce (that leaving your spouse and attempting a second marriage is considered by the Church to be adultery) someone made the following comment:

I find it hard to believe people think God cares about this issue this much, given all the real sin in the world (ie social injustice and war) but anyway.

There's a certain tendency to see sin as "really bad things that happen out there", while things that ordinary people we identify with want to do (especially if they involve sex) are seen as things that "God doesn't care about". Some of this is simply that we often care much more about thinking well of ourselves than of other people. Things we do, and things our friends do, are no big deal. Things done by far away people, things of a scale that we don't normally encounter, those we can safely label as sins without disturbing our own comfort.

But let's be honest, most of us here and now have suffered more because of the "little" sins that we inflict upon each other than due to war or huge societal injustices. It's only possible to imagine that God doesn't care about sex and the many ways that we hurt each other with it and because of it if we narrow our frame of reference down to only the person we choose to care about, the person who wants to do something which is a sin.

Few of us have started wars, but many of us have started rumors. I don't have the ability to wipe away social injustice, myself, today. But I do have the ability not to commit some petty injustice that would hurt one or two people.

And let's be honest. Sex, marriage, and relationships are one of the main areas of conflict that we as humans encounter. Sex and relationships are important to us. Why is it that so many movies and stories involve sex and relationships? Because drama is built on conflict and one of the main areas in which we have personal conflict is around our relationships.

So unless we believe that God doesn't care if we treat people well, unless we believe that he doesn't care whether or not we suffer: Yes, God does care about sex and marriage. He cares about it because one of the main ways that you personally can either make others happy or make their lives miserable is your treatment of your family and loved ones.

Family Synod: Gradualism and Truth

There's a fair amount of buzz in the Catholic world at the moment about the Synod on the Family, which has released a summary document which outlines what the world's bishops are currently talking about in this first past of the synod proceedings. (They'll then reconvene in October of 2015, have further deliberations, and then the Vatican will at some indeterminate late date issue a document summarizing what they believe are the most important thoughts coming out of the synod. So don't expect any definitive headlines soon, whatever the noise machine may suggest.)

I have a morning open due to conference travel, so I had a chance to sit down and read through the whole document this morning (it's not long.)

The main thing that struck me is that this does not seem like a document much focused on theology or morality, it's focused on evangelization and conversion. In that sense, this seems like a very Pope Francis kind of document (with the strengths and weaknesses that implies.)

What rang out clearly in the Synod was the necessity for courageous pastoral choices. Reconfirming forcefully the fidelity to the Gospel of the family, the Synodal Fathers, felt the urgent need for new pastoral paths, that begin with the effective reality of familial fragilities, recognizing that they, more often than not, are more “endured” than freely chosen. These are situations that are diverse because of personal as well as cultural and socio-economic factors. It is not wise to think of unique solutions or those inspired by a logic of “all or nothing”. The dialog and meeting that took place in the Synod will have to continue in the local Churches, involving their various components, in such a way that the perspectives that have been drawn up might find their full maturation in the work of the next Ordinary General Assembly. The guidance of the Spirit, constantly invoked, will allow all God’s people to live the fidelity to the Gospel of the family as a merciful caring for all situations of fragility.

Each damaged family first of all should be listened to with respect and love, becoming companions on the journey as Christ did with the disciples of the road to Emmaus. In a particular way the words of Pope Francis apply in these situations: «The Church will have to initiate everyone – priests, religious and laity – into this “art of accompaniment”, which teaches us to remove our sandals before the sacred ground of the other (cf. Es 3,5). The pace of this accompaniment must be steady and reassuring, reflecting our closeness and our compassionate gaze which also heals, liberates and encourages growth in the Christian life» (Evangelii Gaudium, 169).

The idea here is, I think, solid and important: Everyone is in need of hearing Christ's saving message message and receiving His graces. Many people are, for reasons that are their fault to greater or lesser degrees, living in ways that put them at odds with Christ's message, and yet there's a necessity that the Church connect with these people and gradually reel them in, with the hope that at some point before death they will fully unite themselves with Christ's graces and thus attain salvation.

This is something that traditional Catholic cultures did fairly well, and it served as a scandal to the more respectable splinters of Christianity. Perhaps it's hard to follow from a modern perspective, but in Brideshead Revisited, one of the things which is surely meant to be a sign of how disreputable Catholicism could be to the more respectable Anglo world is that Lord Brideshead's mistress Cara, the separated wife of some Englishman named Hicks, is herself fairly religious. This kind of devout semi-laxity (people who planned to make a good end eventually but in the mean time understood they were excluded from the sacraments because of living in grave sin of one sort or another) was a scandal to respectable Protestantism, and was attractive to flamboyant converts such as Oscar Wilde.

Our modern world isn't so good at this, however. In modernity, we consider our own goodness as a given and judge God on His willingness to accept us. Thus, stating that some given mode of life is sinful (say, living in a sexual relationship with someone you are not married to) is taken as "rejection". Too often, such "rejection" in the modern mind doesn't suggest "maybe I better pull my life together" but rather "no point in listening to that person", and so the fear expressed by the synod is that many people simply are not hearing Christ's message because as soon as they hear that their sexual relationships are considered sinful they stop listening.

The proposed solution is "gradualism". This gradualism is NOT (as you will hear in some commentary) the idea that the Church will gradually change its teachings on divorce, contraception, same sex marriage, etc. Rather, gradualism refers to the idea that the Church understand that people are on a gradual path to moral improvement and recognize the progress they are making along that path -- in particular recognize that there are elements of goodness in their current actions and that their moral progress involves their gradual growth of those positives and reduction of evils. The synod documents touches on this a bit here, and the quote shows some of the difficulties of this approach:

In the same way the situation of the divorced who have remarried demands a careful discernment and an accompaniment full of respect, avoiding any language or behavior that might make them feel discriminated against. For the Christian community looking after them is not a weakening of its faith and its testimony to the indissolubility of marriage, but rather it expresses precisely its charity in its caring.

As regards the possibility of partaking of the sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist, some argued in favor of the present regulations because of their theological foundation, others were in favor of a greater opening on very precise conditions when dealing with situations that cannot be resolved without creating new injustices and suffering. For some, partaking of the sacraments might occur were it preceded by a penitential path – under the responsibility of the diocesan bishop –, and with a clear undertaking in favor of the children. This would not be a general possibility, but the fruit of a discernment applied on a case-by-case basis, according to a law of gradualness, that takes into consideration the distinction between state of sin, state of grace and the attenuating circumstances.

As a pastoral approach, there's certainly good to be found here. A person is not to be reduced to his current state of sin. So a confessor might indeed help someone grow in holiness by consistently working to help them become more virtuous from whatever point they are currently at -- so long as there is no denial of what actually is and is not sin.

However, the above also underlines the serious problems with getting too carried away with this gradual approach. It's possible to grow in virtue (or grow in vice) in any given state, but that doesn't change the fundamental nature of the state. For example, in Anna Karenina, during the course of the affair between Anna and Count Vronsky we see him change from an essentially predatory character who simply wants to have Anna because she seems beautiful and unattainable to a character who genuinely seeks to care for Anna despite her increasingly prickly and difficult-to-love behavior (inspired by the social censure which her affair with Vronsky has subjected her to.) However, although Anna and Vronsky can treat each other more or less virtuously in the context of their adulterous affair, the fact that the affair itself is wrong and a source of moral destruction is not going to change. Treating each other less viciously isn't going to gradually make them married. And this is the basic truth which a gradualist pastoral approach must not lose sight of (yet seems, given our modern world's moral tendencies, to constantly lean towards): The basic moral facts of the situation will not change. Adultery is wrong. Fornication is wrong. Using contraception is wrong. Homosexual relations are wrong.

Gradualism must be a gradualism towards something, towards abandoning sin. It cannot be allowed to mean simply accepting sin. Depending on the person and the situation, that abandoning of sin may take a long time. People may take the risk of waiting until their attachment to it attenuates for other reasons. There's a scene in Zola's Nana where the title character, a high class courtesan, sees one of the famous courtesans of the era before, who managed to save enough money to retire in luxury to a country house where she is now a respected landowner and support of the local church. Nana yearns for this kind of respectability in retirement (though she lacks the self discipline to save for it), and in the spiritual sense we see that in the prayer for "Lord, make me good, but not yet." And yet, there is a serious moral danger to getting too comfortable even with that kind of delay, though it at least recognizes the current evil even if it fails to reject it yet. While God will accept our conversion, no matter how late, in the interim that person is essentially saying, "I am more attached to the benefits I believe I get from sin than I am to God." That is, however conditional, a rejection of God. And rejection of God leads us to hell.

Given the tendencies of our modern moral culture, gradualism is a difficult approach to take successfully.

Requiring Consent

Liberals have been catching some flack lately as they have sought to come up with new methods of making sure that people only have sex with each other's consent. Various commentators on the Right have questioned this, suggesting either that this takes all the spontaneity out of campus sex and turns it into something drab and legalistic, or that the this would still leave accusations that consent was not given in the realm of he-said-she-said conflicts judged by university kangaroo courts.

However, I'd like to point out that back in the good old days, we conservatives knew that it was the administration's job to stomp all the fun and spontaneity out of campus sex -- sending what scatters remnants could not be utterly defeated off to hide in Model T Fords in the woods away from all sight. However, since liberals haven't had the experience being sexual spoil sports that we conservatives have, I'd like to suggest a couple of tweaks to their proposed standards for consent.

First off, this idea of verbal consent is a good start, but let me tell you that long centuries have shown that letting that consent happen in private leads to all sorts of misunderstandings. The solution is simple. We'll just require that the parties wishing to have sex present themselves before a civil official (or perhaps in more religious climes, before a priest, rabbi or minister) and sign a document expressing their mutual consent to have sex. This arrangement seems kind of formal, so perhaps we should have a name for it. Anyone who has suggestions, do please mention them in the comments.

Next up there's the matter of enforcement. Since we'll now have a public record of who has consented and who hasn't, we can stop this silliness of selective enforcement and university committees. Enlightened souls may not realize it, but in more conservative parts of the country there are actually already laws on the books to deal with this issue of having sex without clear consent. We just need to enforce those and pass more in other parts of the country.

Of course, social pressure is a help as well. Even with all these clear bright lines people might stray a little close to violating these norms, so I'd propose we consider a custom of friends and family watching out for each other and stepping in firmly to prevent any improprieties. Remember, the best way to avoid lack of consent is to step in before consent is needed. If that fails, dueling and horsewhipping are, of course, long-tested means of gentle correction.

Of Failure

In lieu of learning notes this week, here's this week's pivotal incident.

In February the two big girls started taking organ lessons. I'd been struggling with how to keep their interest in music after a difficult year with a piano teacher who was a bad fit with our family. A friend had been taking organ at a local academy and was doing very well, and my girls thought organ was intriguing and that they might like to try their hands at it. So we signed up.

There were warning signs at first. The teacher was used to pupils who were striving for excellence, and that has never been a hallmark of piano ambition at our house. After our first week, I had an email which laid out, gently but firmly, that if the girls didn't improve their practice habits, then our money would probably be best spent elsewhere. I sat on them for a week, setting timers, supervising every practice, correcting posture and wrist position, advising on Hanon and fingering and tempos and All The Stuff. The next week was better; the teacher sent another email praising their improvement, and we went on. They did well at the recital, and I breathed a sigh of relief at the summer break.

During the summer, the kids did play. They just never practiced their organ music. Eleanor and Julia both fooled around with pieces from a Sound of Music easy piano book. Isabel, not taking organ, was trying to learn Jingle Bells. They had fun without working too hard, but it was optional fun. They did it or not as they pleased.

Now, music lessons aren't optional at my house. Whether they like it or not, they're going to have to take something, just as they have to go to religion classes or do their math. So as it came closer and closer to the new year of organ, I exhorted them to practice. They did, halfheartedly. And it turns out they took their halfhearted attitude right into lessons.

After their first lesson this week, I received another email from the teacher. This one was even more firmly worded, though still exceedingly polite. Usually students starting a new year of organ come back with some enthusiasm, some readiness to play. She'd not seen any of that in the girls. The one with the stronger work ethic had powered through her lesson, but there was no joy or eagerness there. The one with the lesser work ethic (my formulation, not the teacher's) was inattentive, vague, nonchalant, and, when sent to the piano to practice while her sister had a turn at the organ console, had spent the whole time folding origami rather than playing. When asked if she was still interested in having lessons, she responded that maybe she would take it this year and then try something else. The teacher was not cashing my check. She wanted me to think about whether organ was right for our family, or, again, whether our money would be better spent on something the girls would enjoy more.

Perhaps it was my daylong sinus headache, or perhaps I'm in the October funk, but I cried over this email. Not little sniffles, not a tear trickling down my cheek, but big wrenching ugly sobs that required a litter of tissues. When Darwin returned home, having picked up the girls from dance class on the way home from work, I said I needed to speak to Daddy in the library and shut the door in the children's faces. I wept big sobs against his chest as the door kept opening and a concerned four-year-old head popped around the corner to ask several times, "Why is Mommy crying?" Why was I crying? Not because I was embarrassed for myself, though I was. Not because dreams of organ weren't panning out, although they weren't. Not even because of a girl acting her age -- I was that age once; I remember how strange it seemed that people thought I was being disrespectful when I thought that I was paying perfect attention, etc. Because, perhaps of failures -- a failure of manners, of real courtesy on the part of the girls; a failure of scholastic endeavor; a failure of household culture, perhaps, that gave my children the impression that they could blow through lessons as carelessly as they blow through their work at home, and that no one would call them on it. I questioned my entire homeschooling project now that I'd seen it tried and found wanting in public -- every homeschooling parent's fear.

After dinner we called the girls in separately and spoke with them. The lesser offender was given a choice about lessons, which she wasn't ready to make right then. After a weekend of thinking about it, I think I'm going to invoke parental privilege and override the choice with my decision -- no more organ lessons, in the best interest of the family. The greater offender was read the teacher's email and told that she had lost the privilege of studying organ, but that didn't mean that she was going to get out of taking music altogether, and that her parents were disappointed in her for choosing to waste the teacher's time and hers by disobeying the instruction to practice, and by being rude, whether intentionally or not, in the way she responded.

She wept. She had not meant to be rude. She wanted to play the drums.

"Honey, any teacher will tell you that piano is the best foundation for percussion because you learn harmony and rhythm," I said.

The tears continued to flow. "I feel about organ the way I feel about the cats," she sobbed.

My lips twitched. I looked at Darwin and saw his lips twitching. I looked away. I bit my tongue sternly. I made the mistake of looking back at Darwin, and we both broke down howling with laughter. And so the evening ended well-ish, although I still continued to tear up at intervals, and my eyes stung the way they do when you've been crying, and I started to wonder if I needed glasses.

And it's Monday morning, and I'm going to write to the teacher and tell her that we're not going to continue with organ and apologize again for the girls' behavior, and we're still homeschooling, and I'm going to research a new piano teacher, and the kids are alternately cutting up the newspaper article about Gone With the Wind to combine the stills into new movie projects while I try to write this out while yelling, "Just give me half an hour to write!" every time someone barges in to show me their story line. And life goes on, I guess.

An Economy of Relationships

Yesterday's post on profit and risk ended up generating a long Twitter conversation with Matt Bruenig, whose post I had linked to. It suffered from all the problems of Twitter: the short length of post seems to result in chronic incomplete explanations and a tendency towards cuteness rather than explanation to which I am as subject as any.

Conversations in which the participating talk past each other have an odd pull to me -- I always have the idea that somehow I can get the other person to understand the way I'm looking at things, but in this case our differences seem fairly irreconcilable. As best I can figure out, Bruenig's issue is that he thinks proponents of capitalism need to come up with some sort of unified philosophical principle which explains why capitalism should exist (investors should be allowed to invest in companies and achieve profits in return, etc.) However, he holds a very abstract view of what's going on in an investment relationship. The question he kept coming back to was basically the same one which I'd quoted on him on in his discussion of risk in the post. Here he is via Twitter:

@Brendan_m_Hodge How can two people do exactly the same things take exactly the same risks and wind up VASTLY unequal from it?
— Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) October 3, 2014

To my mind, the problem here is that he's seeing the action as "taking a risk" rather than "investing in Company XYZ".

Taking a risk, clearly, is not itself going to result in a result. If risks were guaranteed returns, they wouldn't be risky. Risk is simply a way of describing that the thing which the investor is actually doing (investing in a venture) has only a certain probability of working out.

This seems like an example of how trying to work in a totally abstract fashion when looking at an activity which takes place in the concrete world can lead you into certain confusions. Bruenig wants to look at the question as if "taking a risk" or "making an investment" is something which is done in an abstract sense, rather than being a relationship between the investor and some form of venture. Sometimes, admittedly, people are pretty abstract in their investing choices. For instance, my in 401k I have a lot of my money invested in an S&P 500 Index Fund. What funds do is simply invest money in the stock of companies listed on the S&P 500 Stock Index, thus mirroring the growth of the index as a whole. Clearly, in that situation, I haven't done a lot of thinking about the individual companies involved. However, I do still have a relationship, though a couple steps removed, in that I have given money to a fund, whose managers have committed to buying shares of stock in the various companies and balancing those holdings to reflect the return of the index as a whole. In other cases, decisions to make an investment are much more personal. I wrote a while back about the one "brilliant" investment I made in my life -- buying Apple stock back in 1996 because I had a deep belief in the quality of the company's products. (The fact that I put very little money in at the time and pulled a lot of it out later means I'm not rich by any stretch, though checking to write this post I see there's been a nice stock split since I wrote the post in 2011.) Again, though, it's significant that I invested in a specific company, I didn't merely "take risk". (Another time I invested money in a company I was fascinated by which built rocket boosters and it promptly went out of business. That's about when I realized that Apple aside I wasn't much of a stock picker.)

I'd tend to say that trying to come up with a unifying principle of what people should be rewarded for and then inventing an economic system that will reward that is itself a somewhat doomed endeavor. I have no real faith in invented economic systems. Indeed, I question where there is an economic "system" as opposed to a set of cultural institutions and expectations guided by applications of moral reasoning to various types of situation. One of the things that I think is good about "capitalism" is that it's a system which emerged gradually as people did this work of applying moral reasoning to different types of market transaction. If Malcolm invests in Jerome's venture and Jerome agrees to split any profits with him, then Malcolm profits if Jerome succeeds because Jerome, in justice, owes Malcolm the promised share of the return. You can't look at Malcolm's action of "taking a risk" and try to come up with a justification for why that should be rewarded in the abstract, because it's through Jerome's relationship with Malcolm and his just action in relation to him that the profit emerges.

Of Risk and Profit

I seem to keep running into discussions of risk and profit lately, so I thought it might be interesting to spend a few minutes on the topic. What got me started was a post by Matt Bruenig entitled "Capitalism does not reward risk" wherein he says:

Capitalism does not reward risk-taking. This is easily shown. Suppose Noah and I each invest in ways that are identical in all regards with respect to risk. If capitalism rewarded risk-taking, then each of us would get an identical return. But we don’t necessarily. Suppose Noah’s investment leads to him receiving a large return, while mine leads to me receiving nothing and even losing what I put in. In that possible scenario, even though we behaved in a relevantly identical fashion, capitalism distributed us different amounts. Noah was rewarded for risk-taking. I was punished.

This is true as far as it goes. Risk taking, in the abstract, is not rewarded by capitalism. What I would argue that capitalism does do is allow you to achieve rewards by taking calculated risks, if those risks work out. Let's think this out via a couple of examples.

Jerome is a carpenter. He thinks that he's come up with a clever idea that will allow him to build a mechanical lathe and make beautiful table legs, bedposts and banisters very quickly, much more quickly than his hand lathe. However, it's going to take an investment of $200,000 dollars in equipment and several months of experimenting for Jerome to get it to work. He talks to various rich men in town and finds an investor who provides him with $250,000 so that he can but his materials and take half a year off work to get it all right.

At this point, the world splits in half.

In world A) Jerome's invention works out. He can produce beautiful woodwork in minutes instead of hours. He sells it for just a little less than a hand carved piece, but because they take so much less time he makes much, much more money. Last year Jerome made $100,000 but this year he makes $750,000. According to their agreement, Jerome gives half the profits to his investor, and keeps the other half for himself. He expands his shop and makes even more money the next year, but not another shop is building a similar set of machinery and soon he has more competition, the prices begin to fall, and he has to work hard and come up with more innovations or else see his profits fall.

In world B) Jerome's invention fails to pan out, his investor loses everything, and he has to go back to spinning wood on his hand lathe.

In both worlds Jerome takes a large risk. In one, he realizes large gains, in another he loses everything.

He was able to find an investor willing to provide him with that money because there was the possibility of large gains. Perhaps the investor thought there was a 1 in 4 chance the investment would work out. He loaned money in return for a share in the profits. In the world where this worked, he got all his money back in the first year and started making profits too. In the world where it didn't work out, he lost everything. If he had ten or twenty investment projects going at a time, some fail and some work, and the end result is that if he picks good risks he makes a profit by helping these aspiring business men.

Now how is it that we say that capitalism rewards risks? Well, the idea that Jerome's investor can invest in Jerome's business, and that they can form a contract whereby they will spit the profits that result, is a capitalistic idea. The money produced by the venture they have put money and work into belongs to them. If they didn't get to keep the profits produced, there would be no reason for them to take the risk in the first place. The investor would have no reason to lend money if there weren't a way to get a return on his money, and Jerome would not be able to secure the capital he needed to do his project if he weren't able to promise a return on that capital. Further, the fact that they can enter into a joint ownership agreement where the investor's capital entitles him to a return on the profits allows both of them to engage profitably in risks that would not make sense in terms of a loan. If the a capital investment was not possible, and Jerome instead had to get a loan, he would need to promise to pay 300%+ interest to compensate his investor for a risk of 1 in 4. Jerome would probably not want to take on a debt of $250,000 at 300% interest if there was a 3 in 4 chance that his invention wouldn't work out and he'd end up owing massive amounts of money with no way to pay it off. So the structure of investment and return makes Jerome's innovation possible.

Another key element that allows this investment and innovation is the concept of profits based on market pricing. Jerome makes his money back because he can charge only slightly less than a hand lathe carpenter and win lots of business at huge profits. But what if we don't accept the idea that Jerome can charge based on what people expect his product to cost?

This piece lays out an alternative concept of profit which it argues is the true Catholic understanding:

For modern man - that is, for post-Enlightenment, laissez-faire, neo-liberal capitalist man - profit is the difference between gross revenue and expenses. It is the result of a simple equation; simply subtract expenses from revenue and the difference is your profit. Thus, in order to maximize profit, the difference between revenue and expenses must be made as great as possible, and he is the most savvy, most astute businessman who can figure out how to enlarge that gap. For modern man, Profit = Revenue - Expenses.

But for pre-modern man - that is, for the man living under Christendom and working within the traditional understanding of economic relationships - profit is defined as a just recompense for some particular work. The amount of the recompense is relative to the work done.

We see in the traditional understanding, labor and profit are linked - the fact of the profit and its amount are related directly to the work performed. This is why my friend had a guilty conscience about taking 90% profit. He knew that, relative to the quick, inexpensive work performed, there is no way 90% profit could be considered "just recompense" for the work performed. There is a moral linkage between the work done and the recompense for that labor.

Notice, however, that in the modern definition, this linkage is not there. If profit is simply revenue minus expense, there is really no moral or logical connection between the work done and the amount of profit gathered. This is why those who subscribe to the modern definition have no moral scruples about pocketing 90% profit, for they see no necessary connection between the profit and the work done. Profit is simply whatever the businessman is able to pocket - though no doubt they would feel quite ripped off had they found someone took 90% profit at their expense. The pre-modern medieval definition, on the other hand, maintains a moral and logical connection between work and recompense, ensuring that financial actions remain situated on a spectrum of justice (another example of the superiority of the harmonious medieval mind over the fractured worldview of the moderns).

(For the record, let me just note that I really don't care what the profit margins of someone I buy from are, so long as I get what I want for a price I'm okay with -- unless that seller has made some false representation to me about his costs in order to justify the price he's charging. But I digress.)

Now, Jerome lived in a world with this other conception of profit and price, he might be in trouble. If the price he's allowed to charge for his woodwork is based only on the amount of work that he does, and not in the perceived value to the customer, then if he can produce a piece of woodwork in ten minutes that takes another carpenter two hours, he can only charge 1/12th the price -- a price based on the amount of time that he spent. Now, maybe he'd make some up on volume (while putting lots of other carpenters out of business) but unless he's going to get into the business of shipping woodwork all over the world there's not going to be enough demand for him to make back his investment if he has to sell his woodwork at 1/12th the going price. So one of the things that rewards the risk-taking of Jerome and his investor is an understanding of market pricing in which they are allowed to charge basically the same as the process they are replacing. This means that inventions that vastly increase productivity will have a large potential return, and so it's worth taking risks to see if you can invent such a thing. If you're not allowed to charge based on perceived value rather than time invested, then people like Jerome won't be able to afford to invest the time to develop productivity increasing inventions.