The Economics of Morals

Yesterday Jay Anderson of Pro Ecclesia linked to a post by Vox Nova blogger Mornings Minion, by far the most left-wing of an already leftward leaning group, who when confronted with the ire of the bloggers at Feministe.us (who had singled Vox Nova out as an "anti-choice" site) responded by asking, "Is a truce possible on the Abortion Issue?"

After taking a few paragraphs to concede that it's unlikely that Catholics will stop calling abortion evil or that feminists will stop calling it a right, and firing off some of the tired old "they only care about children before they're born" rhetoric at the pro-life movement, Mornings Minion sketches out the following rather familiar line of thinking:

...[I]t is quite clear to me that abortion is related to poverty and prevailing social conditions. Declines in abortion in the US occurred most rapidly during times when poverty rates were falling– most notably under the Clinton administration.... Look at some of the statistics: 57% of women opting for abortion are economically disadvantage, and the abortion rate among women living below the federal poverty level ($9,570 for a single woman with no children) is more than four times that of women above 300% of the poverty level (44 vs. 10 abortions per 1,000 women). And when asked to give reasons for abortion, three-quarters of women say that cannot afford a child.

And yet, the political pro-life movement often ignores this aspect. Not only that, it often uses the abortion issue to cover some less savoury aspects of policy. Note that when supposed pro-life candidates are elected, we see little impact on abortion, but a major advance in economic policies that foster upward redistribution. And too often, the pro-life lobby contents itself with minor victories that have little direct impact on abortion, but do rally political support. Case in point: I am pretty certain that S-CHIP will do more to lower the abortion rate in the US than the partial-birth abortion ban, which everybody pretty much agrees will do almost nothing.

It is also the case that banning abortion often does not really impact on its incidence. Ireland has a robust abortion rate, even though there are no abortion providers in Ireland, because travel within the EU is so easy. I often wonder if a repeal of Roe v. Wade, when the issue gets pushed to the states, will have much impact on abortion? Personally, I doubt it, except for the very poor who cannot travel to states that allow it. And while I believe the repeal of Roe would be good, simply because I cannot accept abortion as a “right”, I believe a political strategy focused solely on this goal is fundamentally misplaced. We need to create the conditions that would encourage women not to have abortions in the first place.

None of this is new to those who are used to the "seamless garment of life" argument (a garment which is too often a rather brazen attempt to rename a turncoat), but since this piece of clothing gets trotted out every so often, perhaps it's still worth asking the obvious question:

Does the author really imagine that the only solution to sin is prosperity?

We live in the most wealthy country in the world, with one of the highest abortion rates in the world. Is our problem really that we're not wealthy enough?

Not only the average citizen of our country, but the poor of our country are far, far wealthier than they were 100 years ago. And yet, as we have become wealthier, the institution of the family has collapsed, illegitimacy has become a pandemic in the lower economic reaches of society, divorce has become commonplace, abortion is common -- used by some parts of society as a last resort, and by others almost as backup-birth control. (The stats I've seen on abortion repeat customers are pretty terrifying.)

And yet the problem, we are told, is that our country is still too poor to have a lower abortion rate? The claim is, quite frankly, so ludicrous that it's hard to believe the author even means it seriously. Sadly, though, I think he does. So far have some progressives gone down the determinist rabbit hole (without, in most cases, even realizing it) that I fear convinced Christians progressives like this author really do believe that economic redistribution is the shortest road to moral improvement.

Now, at the same time, it should be made clear: morality is also not built strictly by governmental fiat. If the "war on drugs" has shown anything, it is that making something illegal without a social consensus against it does not result in a vanishing of the behavior. (I'm not against illegal drugs remaining illegal, and indeed I suspect that drug use would go up in some very undesirable ways were it made legal, but it certainly underlines the point that making something illegal doesn't make it go away.)

However, in the case of abortion, I think there's a strong case to be made that its legality and status as "normal medical practice" is one of the things that causes it to be so widespread. While most people intuitively feel that lighting up a joint isn't going to directly affect many people beyond themselves, there is a fairly widespread feeling (which even forty years of pro-abortion rhetoric been unable to destroy) that abortion is not a nice and desirable thing. (Every so often, when dipping into the left-leaning blogsphere or media, one runs into frustration that abortion is so infrequently portrayed positively in movies or television.) The status as "legal" and "just a normal medical procedure" can be used to dull that innate moral sense, but the moral sense is still very much there. That is why I think we would indeed see a significant drop in abortion begin if abortion were removed from its supreme-court-imposed shrine in our judicial system.

While Americans do not have a universal respect for the law (think of how many people truly respect the speed limit or the drinking age), there is a very real way in which legality is used to define cultural moral norms. Going even to the limited sort of restrictions found in most of Europe would indeed make a difference in that.

The other element of change which is necessary to reduce abortion in our society is cultural, religious and moral. We will need to reach some sort of cultural conclusion as to what abortion is and whether it is wrong. The current churning of the "culture wars" is not only a sign that this is an undecided point, but also a sign of how unstable our culture is right now. In some senses the last century has suggested to many people that human nature is malleable, and that things may be right now which were not right before -- that humans may be something different than we thought before -- and that long held understandings about the human person and morality are simply "out of date". Where we go, as a culture, as a species, in the coming decades and centuries will start to make the answers to these questions clear.

And this really, is where Mornings Minion is farthest of the rails with his "economy first" approach to morality. If you look at the posts by the secular feminists who had come down like a sack of bricks on Vox Nova, and started this whole discussion, you can see that their understanding of the need for abortion springs from their view of the human being as homo economicus -- economic man (or since these are feminists, should I say "economic person"). Abortion must always be available, they argue, because without the combination of legal abortion and available birth control, a woman cannot control her body enough to compete equally with men in the economic world.

This presents a view of what the purpose of humanity is that is fundamentally incompatible both with traditional Christian beliefs and with the facts of our existence as a species. We are not, fundamentally, economic creatures who only reproduce when we find it profitable to do so. We are biological creatures who reproduce when we have sex. We are rational creatures who can think about the results of our actions. We are religious creatures who contemplate the question of where we go when we leave this mortal world, and what to teach our offspring about the meaning of life and death.

Until we sort out these questions and recognize ourselves for who we are, no amount of government redistribution of wealth will change the incidence of abortion.

Our Daily Bread

Once you get used to turning everything into a metric, it's sometimes hard to turn that part of your brain off. Thus, when you're sitting, watching a fountain in the evening with your wife, after a rare dinner out, you may find yourself inclined to calculate that it just took you an hour and a half to eat a meal that cost you the amount you would make in three hours. And then wonder how many other similar meals your server would have been serving simultaneously, and thus whether if the other couples being served tipped at the same rate the server could have managed to equal your per-hour rate of pay by means of tips.

If you're not a rather hopeless sort of fellow, you don't share these meditations at the time, but in this particular case I found myself wondering the following as well: How does the percentage of income spent on food by modern US citizens compare with most skilled workers throughout history?

In the Pater Noster the only earthy petition mentioned is "give us this day our daily bread" (though as some have pointed out, this can be taken and primarily a Eucharistic reference, and thus not a strictly earthly need). Now, I suspect that for the average household in the modern US, our "daily bread" makes up no more than 10-20% of our household expenses. Why not "give us this day a roof over our heads" or "give us this day a mode of conveyance" or "give us this day affordable insurance"?

Well first of all, food is very basic. One can live without a fixed place of residence or a car (or camel), and it's been pointed out that food will get you through times without insurance better than insurance will get you through times without food.

But it strikes me that this is not just a "back to basics" petition. I'm suspecting that for a basic worker in the ancient world (indeed, perhaps in any primarily agricultural world), food was the largest regular expense. Your earnings might only very slightly exceed the price of obtaining or producing your food for the day.

What, after all, was the cost of clothing? Well, at a basic level, the cost of feeding someone during the period it time it took that person to make them.

The cost of a house? Feeding the workers it took to build a house. I suspect that in a fairly static, agricultural society, there was very little market for selling a house, so the value of a house would be pretty much equal to the materials and labor in building it.

Now clearly, there's more to it than that. People did more than just eat, but not necessarily huge amounts more (in terms of expense) at the lower levels of society -- which meant most of it. I should hunt around a bit and see if I can find some economics work on the question of food as a percentage of personal/family economy in agricultural societies. I could be wrong, but I'm suspecting that the distinction between "poor" and "well off" was very clearly linked to the amount of resources you controlled beyond that necessary just to feed yourself -- and that the values of things were fairly closely tied to the cost of providing food to the workers necessary to produce them.

Vanity of Vanities

Life is not perfect, and at every turn there are little reminders that this mortal coil is a vale of tears: an incontrollable urge to sneeze during that exquisite marriage proposal; uncomfortable theater seats at the show of a lifetime; the glorious sunset that enthralls you while the mosquitoes feast on your flesh. Pure bliss is not to be achieved in this life, and when circumstances seem most favorable, you can bet dollars to beignets that the wheel of fate will turn, and quick.

Last night I couldn't get to sleep. My pillow was hard, the bed refused to yield, and the cat (who had managed to get outside earlier) turned up like a bad penny and cried at the back door until I stumbled down and let him in. (I aimed a passing kick at him as he streaked past, but I missed.) I trudged up and climbed into bed again, and suddenly everything clicked. The mattress and pillow were gracious, the sheet was kind, the temperature was mild, and I nestled down with a sigh. Sleep held out her hands with a welcoming smile, and I was perfectly comfortable.

And the smoke detector emitted five ear-piercing bleats.

The rest of the night passed in undisturbed silence. The girls slept peacefully and the cat quietly meditated on his wrongs. But our ragged nerves allowed only fitful rest until the sky began to lighten and the birds took up their morning anthems, and at last we relaxed and drifted off.

And the alarm button glowed on the clock as the seconds slipped by...

Awarded are the Peace Makers

Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for this year.

Some might consider it odd for the award to be shared by a committee whose stated purpose is simply to assess trends and recommend solutions rather than to actually do anything. However, I think it's clear that the Nobel committee's purpose (as has been the case with several recent Nobel awards) is more to say "this is important -- listen to this person" than actually to acknowledge accomplishments. In making the award the Nobel committee said:

"He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted," said Ole Danbolt Mjoes, chairman of the Nobel committee.

In making the announcement, Mjoes said, "Through the scientific reports it has issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.

"Thousands of scientists and officials from over 100 countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming." (CNN story, source)

One wonders, however, whether the Nobel committee (whose wisdom has not exactly been unquestioned recently) is picking the best course here. Certainly, it's true that Gore is probably the most well known person associated with global warming advocacy. However being the best known if not necessarily the same as being the best.

If one wants concern over global warming to be taken seriously, and I would assume that the Nobel Committee falls in this category, you would think you would want to avoid being fully identified with someone who is seldom afraid to let the scientific facts get in the way of the message when it comes to global warming.

For instance, unable to resist co-opting a disaster in the news, Gore famously announced that the destruction of Hurricane Katrina was the result of global warming, and that unless we were able to put in place stricter environmental controls, we could expect more of the same. In fact, the connection between global warming and hurricane frequency and strength is fairly tenuous, if it exists at all. The issue with Hurricane Katrina is that hurricanes don't know whether they're hitting populated areas built below sea level, or unpopulated areas. When you have a form of natural disaster which only arrives in full force (a maximum strength hurricane) every decade or two, and only hits a heavily populated area one time out of several -- it's entirely reasonable to expect this kind of event to happen on a century or greater spacing. That doesn't necessarily mean that this particular occurrence is the result of the cause celebre of the moment. It just means the occurrence is rare. (Galviston was leveled by a massive hurricane back at the turn of the last century -- an event that was fairly clearly not caused by global warming.)

Two things really bother me about the global warming movement as we see it now:

First, many modern environmentalists seem to see the Earth as a steady-state system. They imagine that the "natural" course is for the climate to remain the same, species never to go extinct, and regional ecosystems to remain stable. This often seems to lead to an attitude that sees humanity as The Problem. (Queue the Matrix' Mr. Anderson: "Humanity is a virus.") If only we didn't have six billion people mucking the planet up, everything would remain peaceful and beautiful just the way it is.

Now the fact is, to the extent that we humans are products of this world, we are products of the earth. Like every other species (and if one doubts this, one doesn't know much about how animal populations behave) we desire to be fruitful and multiply. Given the resources, we eat what we find, have children, and spread. Like other creatures, if we can change our environment to our benefit (or simply survive the changes that our spread causes) we continue to spread -- even if that results in effects that are negative to some other creatures. (If you think we're unique in this, ask a Australian cane toad.)

I don't want to suggest that we should not take into account the results of our actions. Unlike other creatures, we have the capacity to reason (when we're not watching TV or reading political forums, at any rate) and are called to be good stewards of the earth. However, this is where the fact that the earth is not static comes in. The earth has, at times, been much warmer than it is now, for completely natural reasons. It has also been colder. There have been times when ice sheets came down as far as the modern mid-west US (which is probably easy to believe in Chicago around January). As recently as a thousand years ago things were warm enough that Greenland was readily habitable, and grape vines grew wild in Newfoundland. Around ten thousand years ago, it was the increasing drying of the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East that drove populations into the river valleys, where agriculture and civilization began.

So while it's true that human activity is probably at least in part responsible for the current warming trend -- the fact also remains that we cannot assume that the earth won't go through changes all on its own that will have a highly negative impact on us humans. The planet is going to survive global warming just fine. The issue should not be "save the planet" but "save the humans".

This works around to the second thing that bothers me about the global warming movement: While on the one hand frequently exaggerating the possible dangers (threatening larger and more frequent hurricanes; claiming sea levels will rise over 2-3 decades rather than the scientifically supported 2-3 centuries) the solutions suggested by the global warming movement don't come anywhere close to dealing with the problem. If it's correct that the warming that has been observed is indeed evidence of a long term trend, and if greenhouse gas emissions caused by industrialization are the primary causes of that warming trend, then unfortunately driving a Prius and supporting solar and wind power generation aren't going to solve the problem.

It's often pointed out that the minority of the world's population that lives in the developed world is responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions. This is true. However, when you look at greenhouse gas emission divided by gross national product, you find that the economies of the developed world are in fact the most efficient about avoiding greenhouse gas emissions in the world. In other words, the only reason why the undeveloped nations are currently emitting so few greenhouse gasses is that their economies are practically nonexistent. So even if the first world cut emissions by 50% (which is highly unlikely given current technology no matter how many Priuses people buy), if the third world gets anywhere close to modern first world standards, total greenhouse emissions would be up by a factor of 2-3.

So does that mean we should just throw up our hands an not do anything?

Well, no. Call me stingy, but I figure it's always one's duty not to use more resources than necessary. Conserving resources is good. However, ridiculing everyone who drives a fullsize pickup truck instead of a subcompact is not going to save the world. And unless one can somehow convince oneself that telling the third world to remain undeveloped (or coming up with some way to cut the Earth's human population in half) is anything other than wildly immoral -- we're going to have to face the likelihood that current levels of greenhouse gas emission aren't going down any time soon.

Given those things, I think the following are some of the more important things to think about:

-We'll have to wait and see how the evidence shapes up as far as whether this is a long term or short cycle warming trend that we have observed. A couple decades are next to nothing in the history of the planet, and our records on global climate cycles don't really go back accurately more than a couple hundred years. We also don't yet know how self-correct the climate is -- the Earth may well have its own ways of rebalancing the system.

-It certainly doesn't hurt us to try to be as efficient as possible and shift from fossil fuels to nuclear energy for power generation: there are a host of reasons that make that a good idea from oil politics to the mess involved in coal mining and burning. (And people who prefer solar and wind power need to recognize that these are not net positive enough in energy creation to be large scale successes.)

-We should put some serious research into CO2 reclamation possibilities. The most obvious solution to this is something many traditional environmentalists may not like: CO2 is consumed by plants. If you want to get rid of lots of CO2, you want to develop a plant that grows very, very quickly and ends up in some sort of fairly easily dealt with solid waste. (If plant material decomposes or decays, you get the CO2 back out again.) Perhaps there are other good methods of reclaiming CO2 as well. However, whatever they are, they may well involve genetically modified organisms and other things that many environmentalists don't like. They'll need to deal.

-And finally, we may simply have to deal with the fact that the earth is changing -- if it is. The history of humanity is one of migrations and changes. Goodness knows, it would be horrendously sad if 300 years from now Venice is thirty feet under water. And yet, if one thing has been constant throughout human history is has been that we have dealt with change. We've moved, we've built, we've moved again. We've found new ways to feed ourselves, new places and ways to live. It would be terribly sad if it turned out to be the case that the oceans reclaimed many old sea-side cities a couple hundred years from now: and yet the real treasures of humanity are the several billion souls that are living out their lives on this planet.

Polish "Rebel Nuns" Evicted

When you get known around the office as "the Catholic one" you occasionally get odd stories tossed your way. So this morning it was, "Do you know anything about those nuns who got evicted by the police on Poland?"

Well, no I didn't, but I guess now I do, at least a bit. MSNBC runs an AP story:

KAZIMIERZ DOLNY, Poland (AP) -- Police pushed their way into a Polish convent Wednesday and evicted about 65 rebellious ex-nuns -- arresting the mother superior and a monk who had occupied the complex with them illegally for two years.

The women had taken over the building in a rebellion against the Vatican, which had ordered the replacement of their mother superior, Jadwiga Ligocka.

"They were disobedient," said Mieczyslaw Puzewicz, a spokesman for the Lublin diocese of the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican formally expelled the women from their Sisters of Bethany order last year.

Police arrested Mother Jadwiga and a former Franciscan friar, Roman Komaryczko, who had been living with the nuns, and planned to question them, police spokesman Mariusz Sokolowski said. He would not say what the specific charges were.

A locksmith had opened the gate to the walled convent in the eastern Polish town of Kazimierz Dolny and police in riot gear pushed forward, encountering an onslaught of verbal aggression from some of the former nuns, Sokolowski said.

Several hours into the operation, the women, in black habits and each escorted by two policewomen, began filing out of the building. Some carried musical instruments -- guitars, a tambourine, a drum -- while others bore simple backpacks or carried large blue garbage bags apparently packed their with belongings.

The women walked calmly out of the convent, through a tree-dotted courtyard, and onto one of three buses, the last of which finally pulled away more than six and a half hours after the operation began.

Among the ex-nuns were five citizens of Russia and Belarus living in Poland illegally, Sokolowski said. They will likely be deported, he added.

The diocesan spokesman Puzewicz, who was at the convent site, said the ex-nuns were acting "as if they are being manipulated" psychologically.

He did not say who he thought was manipulating them, but he did say that the former friar, Komaryczko, had had a "negative influence" on Mother Jadwiga.

When the Vatican formally expelled the nuns in 2006, they refused to leave the building, cutting themselves off from the outside world.

The church eventually sought legal action to remove them, and a court in nearby Pulawy ordered the eviction -- a step they had previously resisted. The convent's electricity was cut off earlier this year, but local residents sympathized with the ex-nuns' plight and secretly funneled them food in the night.

Polish news media have reported that Mother Jadwiga was a charismatic figure who had had religious visions, and was attempting to transform the convent into a contemplative order.

The Lublin diocese hinted at that in a statement on its Web site, which said that "Mother Jadwiga's private revelations and the fact that she made it a guideline to stick by them caused unease to the Congregation."

I can't seem to find any coverage that isn't sourced off the AP story, so I'm not exactly clear what Mother Jadwiga's alleged private revelations were about -- but given that such things can never be made binding (which she according to the story was doing) that certainly sounds like the theological problem.

I was a pleasantly surprised, actually, that the AP appeared to get the point that the Vatican has control over things -- calling the sisters "ex-nuns" based on the fact that they'd been expelled from their order a year ago.

I was also amused that even though the "rebel nuns" wear traditional habits, they carry bongos. Some things must be universal.

If anyone knows of a more complete story, I'd be curious to hear of it.

Because it had to be done

Matthew Lickona and his commenter Ernesto have been engaged in a project of massive import: casting the African-American Lord of the Rings, complete with head shots. (Or you can just scroll down from the top of the blog.)

These boys win my nomination for the 2007 series of posts that rock the hardest. Gentlemen, I salute you.

The Numbers Game

Yesterday a friend emailed me a link to a post and its comments which strike me as somewhat endemic of a certain divide between "liberal" and "conservative" attitudes, and the moral difficulties that come with both. (Perhaps one of the few things that all of both persuasions agree on is that these terms are imprecise, yet they do evoke roughly what I'm looking for here, so I'll use them and consider all necessary provisos and qualifiers said.)

The topic is the S-CHIP legislation that made its way from congress to the president's desk, where it was vetoed. I'll admit, I haven't been following politics terribly closely the last month or two, but the basic purpose here is to federalize funding for a set of state programs to provide government paid healthcare to children in families up to twice the poverty line. You can read a pretty balanced (kudos to the NY Times) piece on the immediate debate that inspired this piece in this editorial. The thing that is causing so much controversy as of now is that the families the legislation is designed to help are decidedly middle class: Maryland has a household income cap of 55k/yr, and NY recently tried, but failed, to raise their cap to above 80k.

Now, it's true that there are certain circumstances in which even a middle or upper middle class family can have trouble getting affordable health insurance. Some friends of ours own their own fairly successful small business -- but their youngest daughter has Down Syndrome and even small business insurance refuses to cover her. They have to use a state program by which they can pay a flat amount per month (I believe around 500 dollars -- we had to look at the same possibility in our pre-corporate days because one of our daughters has a heart murmur) and get subsidized insurance for her separately.

However, given that independent estimates say that the proposed S-CHIP legislation would probably cover 6 million children, of which 30% would be children already covered by private insurance who would transfer out onto the public dole -- there are I think legitimate questions as to whether this is a good use of resources. While some underline the necessity of helping middle class families with undue burdens, others (and I would tend to fall in this camp) would tend to think that under certain circumstances it behooves you to seek out a job working for the state or federal government or for a large corporation in order to make sure that you can get the kind of insurance your family requires.

The actual question of the wisdom of the legislation, however, is not what I want to address. It seems clear to me that there are many different conclusions that reasonable people could come to in this situation.

Rather, what stikes me is a particular mode of moral thinking that seems deeply problematic. The interchange is taken from the discussion on this post. The two people talking are the author of the post (Katerina) and a commenter (Blackadder):

Katerina:
Democrats = kill the babies in the womb
Republicans = kill the children by not given them healthcare!

Blackadder:
There are approximately 1.3 million abortions in this country every year. How many children die in this country because they don’t have healthcare?

Katerina:
So you’re reducing the value of human lives to mere numbers?
Wow. What an ethic of life you have there.

Blackadder:
No, I’m not reducing the value of human lives to mere numbers. But you didn’t answer my question. How many children die in this country each year because they don’t have healthcare?

Katerina:
...I repeat it again: I don’t reduce human lives to numbers: if Democrats kill more than the Republicans and all that nonsense discussion. Even if there is only one child who has passed away because of the lack of healthcare insurance is enough for me....

Now, the blog author is very young, and so try to overlook some of the more college-activist phrasing here. That's an easy target, but that's not what I think is interesting about this exchange.

What is interesting is the modification of a very sound moral principle into an open mandate for unlimited government action. It is an oft observed principle that one may not perform a lesser evil (but still a clear evil) in order to avoid a greater one. The classic (though unlikely in any practical terms) example of this is the "If you kill this once innocent person, some great world improvement (end of hunger, peace between nations, etc.) will be achieved" illustration. Performing a "smaller" objectively evil act in order to achieve a good of a great magnitude is falling into the error of proportionalism. This is the issue we have when people argue: Sure, cloning human embyos and then killing them for their stem cells may be wrong -- but surely it's okay in the context of all the great cures we might achieve as a result.

What Katrina is doing, however, is not simply avoiding proportionalism. She's engaging in a very key shift in analysis. When she says "I don’t reduce human lives to numbers: ... Even if there is only one child who has passed away because of the lack of healthcare insurance is enough for me." she is arguing that a specific remedial action (funding $35 billion in additional government-paid healthcare) is morally necessary so long as it saves at least one human life.

In a sense, this is very similar to the argument for gun control which I was arguing against a while back, which went essentially: "So long as it is clear that some number of gun deaths, however small, will be averted by additional gun control measures -- the moral necessity of avoiding death trumps any desire some people may have to possess dangerous objects."

And yet, if one thinks about it, almost any government funded service or increased level of regulation could be justified by the claim that it must save the life of at least one person. Can it be that we are morally required to turn over all money to government programs and institute all possible safety regulations (to the point of having every person wear a padded suit and banning all means of fast transportation other than emergency vehicles) simply because that would doubtless save some number of lives? Generally speaking, I am hesitant to claim that patently absurd precepts are necessitated by moral theology. That would be to assert either that theology itself is patently absurd, or that our faculties of reason are so terribly malformed that moral necessity looks like absurdity to us. A failure to "ring true" would seem to indicate a need to look deeper.

While I don't have a neat and clear solution to this problem, a couple of principles occur:

1) While at an individual level we have a duty to perform all reasonable acts to care for and protect those around us, trying to provide or regulate such things at the governmental level results in extreme inefficiency. So for instance, when it comes to gun safely, it is my clear duty to keep my guns in locked cases, keep ammunition out of reach and out of site, never shoot at an unknown target, and never use a weapon to threaten those around me. Following all of these rules carefully, and adapting them to the needs of changing situations, it is highly unlikely that my guns will ever be a threat to anyone. However, when the government tries to assure a similar level of safety across all gun owners and potential gun owners, we end up with a huge number of regulations, which still don't succeed in restricting people enough to avoid all crimes and accidents.

Similarly, if someone in your immediate circle desperately needs help paying for medical expenses, it's a clear and straightforward process for family and parish members to step forward and collect the needed money. However, when a government program attempts to insure that every such needy person is taken care of via government paid insurance, they end up paying all medical expenses (not only emergency, but routine and affordable) and also building a wasteful bureaucracy to do so.

2) While I don't for a moment think that fundamental moral principles change due to changes in technology, we currently have a lot to sort out in that medical care has moved, in the last 100 years or so, for a personal, corporate work of mercy, to a high technology and thus potentially high expense field. Once upon a time, the need to care for the sick was pretty much a need to devote as much time and patience as necessary to nursing. It's something that is often not fun, but is intensely doable. However, in this day and age, there are at times situations where the money required to perform some exotic operation (and honestly, that's what we need insurance for, not to pay for the $70 doctors visit and the $50 anti-biotic) can be tens of thousands, hundreds or thousands or even millions of dollars. What are we to make of the call to care for the sick, when providing the maximum of care for one person can, at times, take the financial resources that could feed thousands or tens of thousands of the world's poor?

3) Is there a fundamental difference between the level of charity which individuals may be morally required to provide to each others, and the level of government mandated "charity" which can or should be rightly exacted from society and given out to those determined to be "in need"? I suspect that, given government's lack of discernment and inefficiency, and the fact that such an act is not actually charity on anyone's part, the level of moral obligation government institutions have is different from that which individuals have -- but I'm not sure how to look deeper into the question.

I Will Build You A New Life...

(With apologies to Everclear -- goodness, the stuff that one listened to in college...)

I think it must be one of the effects of spending one's days in a cube, in front of a computer, doing things for which people are terribly grateful but which it's nearly impossible to explain to one's children over dinner, that one finds oneself every so often wanting to Build Something With Your Hands. And being as red-blooded an American male as the next fellow, when this urge comes upon me it is inevitably something Big that involves using Power Tools that I desire to make.

Last time this resulted in a 7 foot mahogany bookshelf. Now, I'm sure that the furniture making urge will come again, but right now there is still room for at least 100-200 more books before we totally run out of space again (and that's after the library book sale last weekend). Besides, I'm thinking something that doesn't involve quite so much fine finishing work. (Yes, 14+ hours of sanding gets old after a while.)

And so while watching the monkeys tear around the back yard the other evening it struck me: What our young ladies need is a playhouse. When I mentioned this to them, they wanted to get started right away and build it out of sticks -- like the house at Pooh Corner, I suppose. But this is not the idea which catches Daddy's fancy. No, Daddy's imagination leans in the direction of lumber and plywood and nails and the circular saw. A while back I was fascinated to read about Matt and Amber's early building experiment with the workshop/shed on their property. So I think I'm picturing something built on a 6x9 foot base (conveniently the same size as a sheet of plywood), walls about 5.5 feet high, and a gravel foundation.

Sure it'll be hell to move someday, and the home owner's association would have a fit if they found out -- but for what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors, and play with lumber and power tools in the meantime.
I think I need to go pick up a pad of graph paper and a drafting pencil at lunchtime...

Liturgy of the Hours - The Basics

I forget if I'd mentioned before, but I'm helping to get a group together at our parish to say Vespers a few times a week. And since I'm one of those people who figures that every new project deserves a webpage, I set up a little information page for it via Blogger. So far there's only an article with a little basic information about the Liturgy of the Hours, but there should be a bit more coming over the next few days and weeks on the history of the Divine Office and such.

So if you're looking for the elevator pitch (or maybe the long walk down the corridor pitch) on what the Liturgy of the Hours are, take a look. And if you're local, do feel free to drop by once we've got a schedule up.

The Ontological Argument and the Alternative Minimum Tax

A reader emailed me a link to this Harvard economist's blog, reacting to this Harvard economist's editorial regarding the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT).

The original editorial by Edward L. Glaeser is a fairly straightforward piece underlining how the AMT penalizes upper-middle-class people for the wrong things: having children and paying local taxes. However, to support this argument, he makes an interesting statement:

When parents decide to have kids, they are creating a massive benefit for their children. As much as parents may love their children, they are unlikely to reap all the benefits those children will offer during their lives. Economists often think that it makes sense to subsidize behavior that generates big "external" benefits for others: parenting seems like a particularly natural example of such behavior.

Note, he's arguing that the parents create a benefit for their children, which the children seldom sufficiently repay, and thus suggesting that the parents' action be subsidized in order to encourage this altruistic behavior.

It's this argument which Greg Mankiw objects to his in his blog post:

The pragmatist in me recoils at this argument. Ed is implicitly comparing the utility of having been born with the utility of never having been born. But since we do not observe those people who were never born, how can we possibly know their utility? Any theory that relies on things that are intrinsically unobservable (such as the utility of potential people who were never even conceived) seems suspect as a basis for public policy.

What's odd about this reaction is that he seems to be trying to make some sort of reverse-ontological argument for the non-existence of children.

As some may recall, the Ontological Argument was formulated by St. Anselm and basically goes: "If God is the most perfect possible being, and if it is more perfect to exist than not to exist, then therefore God must exist."

Mankiw is instead saying: It is impossible to know if it is better to exist than not to exist because we can't look at how any non-existent beings feel about the matter, therefore it cannot be known that to give being to someone is to provide them with a benefit.

Unless you are a Shakespearean character soliloquizing on the possibility of suicide, the benefits of existing over not-existing will seem pretty obvious to most. However, the interesting thing is that (accounting that I believe some of these are rather tongue in cheek) a number of Prof. Mankiw's commenters seem reluctant to conclude that existence is necessarily a benefit:

Clearly, this is an instance of revealed preferences. Obviously everybody who has been born gets more (expected) utility from being born than not being born, since they decided to be born! But those who were never born must get more expected utility from not being born, or they wouldn't choose to not exist.

Or:

I think Ryan has a point: you can assume that nonexistent people have zero utility. But his other premise is wrong. Living people do not reveal a preference for being alive; they (most of them) merely reveal a preference for not attempting suicide. Suicide attempts are illegal, often painful, and almost always extremely risky. (You wouldn't say that someone who invests in low-return assets is revealing a preference for lower returns; suicide attempts are kind of like NASDAQ stocks or junk bonds.) Moreover, the utility of remaining alive is not necessarily the same as the utility of being alive in the first place, just as the utility of the next dose of heroin to an addict is not the same as the utility before he became an addict. Furthermore, even if you assume that life is non-addictive and that suicide is costless and non-risky, there are distribution issues to consider. Some people do commit suicide: maybe the disutility of their lives prior to suicide outweighs the utility for the others. We have no basis to compare them, except subjectivity.

My subjective belief, which takes into account all the arguments I made in the last paragraph, as well as the fact that people are irrational, is that the expected utility of being alive is negative, though the realized utility is often positive. So I would argue just the opposite of Ed Glaeser and say that we should tax procreation.

One hesitates to be the straight man at the party where everyone else is having a good time -- but I get the sense that perhaps when some economists try to philosophize, they get a little too clever for their own pants. It's all very well to talk about not being able to measure the negative impact of non existence, but since we are existent beings (and indeed, it seems rather mistaken to imagine that a non-existent person is something one could say anything about, much less examine the utility of), it seems rather odd to suggest that a non-existent person might be just as good or better than an existent one.

Nevertheless, I will grant that Glaeser is trying something difficult when he could try something easy. Regardless of whether it's a good idea to subsidize the benefit which a child receives by being born, it seems reasonable for society to both subsidize the benefit of receiving new members, and also reimburse some of the costs involved with rearing a family. Perhaps part of the problem is a mentality in which some think of a tax break as "subsidizing" or "giving money" when in fact it is simply allowing people to keep money. The basis, it seems to me, for having a tax break associated with the number of children you provide for is that the number of children you provide for will have a lot to do with the expenses of your household. A family making 150k (to pick a potential target for the AMT) which has eight children at home clearly has a different expense structure than a family with one child. And so if the purpose of income taxes is not simply to tax income but to attempt to tax surplus income or available income or income beyond certain basic expenses, then the child deduction makes perfect sense.

What the Hell, Dante?

Steven Riddle of Flos Carmelli is rereading Dante, and he provides some very good thoughts on the Inferno in a post from yesterday. The questions he seeks to answer are:

Reading The Inferno gives one pause at moments. Frequently in fact. It isn't so much the punishments described in Hell as it is a number of factors that stem from that. For example, did Jesus not teach us, "Judge not, lest ye be judged." And yet Dante, with impunity, assigns any number of people to any circle of Hell he chooses. Now, were these living people (at the time of his writing) one could say that this were a cautionary tale; however most of them are dead as of the writing of the work. What then do we adjudge from this seeming infraction of a commandment of love?

Next, we get from the Inferno a God of infernal intellect, delicating designing and manipulating Hell as to be of the most exquisite pain to the sinners assigned there. The lavish and ornate punishments that make up the bulk of hellish existence beggar the imagination. What then was Dante about?

Finally, we have an image of a God of such remarkable sternness, indeed of such profound violence that one is at a loss to figure out what Dante wanted us to understand of God from this.

The answers he gives are good. Go read them -- I thought it would be cheating to quote the whole post, though it deserves it.

Which reminds me that I really need to get back to Dante again some day... If not before, maybe I'll blog through the rest of Purgatorio for next Lent.

Pepys Show

Pepys is never above seeing a bad play, though he always regrets it afterwards. Yesterday (Oct. 4th, 1664) he wrote:

Thence after dinner to a play, to see “The Generall;” which is so dull and so ill-acted, that I think it is the worst. I ever saw or heard in all my days. I happened to sit near; to Sir Charles Sidly; who I find a very witty man, and he did at every line take notice of the dullness of the poet and badness of the action, that most pertinently; which I was mightily taken with; and among others where by Altemire’s command Clarimont, the Generall, is commanded to rescue his Rivall, whom she loved, Lucidor, he, after a great deal of demurre, broke out; “Well, I’le save my Rivall and make her confess, that I deserve, while he do but possesse.” “Why, what, pox,” says Sir Charles Sydly, “would he have him have more, or what is there more to be had of a woman than the possessing her?” Thence-setting all them at home, I home with my wife and Mercer, vexed at my losing my time and above 20s. in money, and neglecting my business to see so bad a play. To-morrow they told us should be acted, or the day after, a new play, called “The Parson’s Dreame,” acted all by women. So to my office, and there did business; and so home to supper and to bed.

So the question is: Will he venture out again to see "The Parson's Deame" and is this the Restoration equivalent of a female prison movie? Seems about Pepys' speed, goat that he is. Speaking of which, on the previous day he noted:

But meeting Bagwell’s wife at the office before I went home I took her into the office and there kissed her only. She rebuked me for doing it, saying that did I do so much to many bodies else it would be a stain to me. But I do not see but she takes it well enough, though in the main I believe she is very honest.

Now, now, Sammy-boy. You wouldn't want Mr. Bagwell taking such liberties with Bess, would you?

Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark

And so, for your Friday enjoyment, we present a little culture. Hamlet:

What to do with The Youth

The Liturgy of the Hours group, which I mentioned earlier, got approved at the parish council meeting last night, so things should be moving along again soon on that front. However, I found myself also drawn into an area of responsibility that I feel less sure on.

Being the youngest member of the council by almost ten years (and this even as the parish council has got much younger in the last few years) I got assigned to help our with the "youth and family ministries" committee, and what should the topic of discussion be but the efforts to form a new youth group.

Our parish is very heavy on families with school age children, so a good youth group seems like a need. However, the last few attempts have always fizzled for one reason or another. Now we've got a brand new youth leader, 70 teens showed up to her first meeting, and everyone's hoping things will work out.

So I'm young, do I have any advice? Well frankly, I never liked youth groups. The plague of the church youth group is that it seeks to be both formation and recreation. The trap is always that it is either not that much fun, or not very good formation, or worst of all: neither fun nor formative. My experiences with youth groups as a youth fell in this last and worst category.

One of the other difficulties with such things is that a group of teenagers whose main point of similarity is that their families are all in the same parish will oftentimes be at radically different levels of formation, and have rather different ideas of fun. Being "youth" is not necessarily that much of a point of similarity.

MrsDarwin had a somewhat happier experience of youth groups than I did. The format she dealt with was a 1.5-2hr meeting which had 60min or so of religious content: prayer followed by a bible study or a short talk (I believe the term in certain circles is "witness", but I'm terribly squeamish about such things) and then fun activities afterwards. This seems like a basically sound idea, though it still leaves open the rather tricky point of what level to do your prayer/bible study/talks at.

The fact is, we are often rather less likable versions of ourselves as youth. And if I seem elitist and intolerant now, that's nothing to what I was as a youth. Since my own ideas of what constituted an interesting discussion of prayer life at the time were rather heavy on theory and abstraction (or else argumentation, which is always fun for the young) I have a feeling that thinking, "What would I have enjoyed?" is simply not a very good way of figuring these things out now. Looking back, it must be acknowledged: I was simply not a fun teen.

If anyone has details on successful teen church group formats they've enjoyed, I'd be glad to hear about them.

The mote in her eye

The girls were tussling in the back yard on Saturday and Julia came inside fussing that Eleanor had poked her in eye. Sure enough, there was some odd speck next to her iris. We guessed that the eye had bled and had scabbed up, though it seemed rather quick for that, and Julia wasn't screaming the way you'd expect from a four-year-old who'd been jabbed in eye.

The scab didn't wear off and the eye was getting more bloodshot, so yesterday at her checkup I had the doctor look at it. He thought it was a foreign body , though he couldn't dislodge it with a quick swipe with a swab. (And apparently eyes don't really scab up, though as I've never encountered an eye injury I was unaware of this.) Julia shows no discomfort at all, but the doctor was concerned about this thing being in her eye for so long. We were sent off to the referrals desk with instructions to have the receptionist get us an appointment with an opthamalolgist either immediately or the next day.

So this afternoon Julia's going to the ophthalmologist. And suddenly it occurs to me that I might want to look for some babysitting for the other girls. Normally we all go along to appointments, but a visit that contains the potential for watching your sister be strapped down screaming while the doctor excavates in her eye is probably not one for the whole family. This is where it would be convenient to live near family. Asking for last-minute babysitting is never a popular proposition.

If you would, say a prayer for Julia's eye, that whatever is stuck there would come out with a minimum of effort.

UPDATE: Thanks for your prayers and concern -- the ophthalmologist had a very good bedside manner and was able to remove the speck in fairly short order. Julia didn't love the eye drops and the swab and required a bit of restraint, but I thought that she took it about as well as a four-year-old could.

Real Tips for the Enviro-brats

The Wall Street Journal ran an article this past Saturday on kids who nag their wealthy parents to go green and do environmental stuff like buy a Prius or install solar panels on the roof. The kids are egged on in the pursuit of noxiousness by their teachers who feel that they're combating global warming one whine at a time.

Jim and Robyn Dahlin knew replacing the roof of their home in Greenbrae, Calif., would be expensive. But they hadn't planned to spend an extra $15,000 on solar panels. For that, they have their 8-year-old son, Luke, to thank.

After Luke acted in a school play about global warming, he went on a campaign to get his parents to install the panels. He routinely lectured his dad from the backseat of the minivan about how reducing their energy consumption could help save the planet....

This year's global-warming documentary "Arctic Tale," for instance, closes with a child actor telling kids, "If your mom and dad buy a hybrid car, you'll make it easier for polar bears to get around." Kids on field trips to the Garbage Museum in Stratford, Conn., are sent home with instructions to recycle cans, bottles, newspaper and junk mail. The museum hosted 388 schools visits last year, 42 more than the year before. At one California elementary school, kids are given environmental activities to do with their families -- including one where parents have to yank out the refrigerator and clean the coils to make it more energy efficient....

Nicole Thomas thought her 4-year-old son's interest in the environment was cute -- until he told her she needed to quit drinking coffee. Ailer said he's worried that coffee growers in Central America are cutting down forests to grow their crops. "Going to a coffee shop with a kid who's saying, 'Mommy, you can't have a cup of coffee' isn't very pleasurable," says the 35-year-old mom from Boulder, Colo.

Ailer's obsession with the rain forest started when a neighbor gave him a copy of the book "The Umbrella" about a boy who walks into the Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica and discovers exotic animals like the kinkajou and toucan. His mother was soon raiding the library to find more books, like Jane Goodall's "The Chimpanzees I Love: Saving Their World and Ours."

Ailer often tells his mom about the wonders of composting and runs around the supermarket parking lot picking up trash. He has pestered her, his grandmother and a Safeway cashier to get rid of plastic bags and use reusable cloth ones instead. In response to his complaint, the cashier fired back that eating fast-food hamburgers is worse than using plastic, referring to the environmental impact of beef production. Now Ailer is bugging his mom to stop buying hamburgers.

In honor of the "Spoonful of Sugar" principle, I offer some suggestions for kids who are truly interested in conserving energy. And since they involve the kid actually taking responsibility and feeling the consequences of his actions instead of trying to ram change down Mom or Dad's throat, they should serve to impress the parent instead of making him want to tell Junior to shut up.

• Offer to wash the dishes by hand. If you rinse the dishes beforehand, use cold water (most of the energy consumed by a dishwasher is used to heat the water). Make sure you leave the water off while you're washing, then rinse in hot water.
• Do the laundry and wash in cold water. (Your clothes will also fade less, allowing for longer wearing without replacement.) Take the clothes out of the dryer the first time it buzzes. You only get points for this if you then fold the clothes and put them away.
• Take a cold shower. (Hey, heating water takes a lot of energy.) You'll not only save energy, but time, because the temptation to linger in the shower will be gone.
• Turn off the TV. Turn off the computer. Turn off the video games. The website for An Inconvenient Truth tells us to "Turn off electronic devices you’re not using.
  Simply turning off your television, DVD player, stereo, and computer when you’re not using them will save you thousands of pounds of carbon dioxide a year." Imagine how much more carbon dioxide you'd save if you didn't turn these things on in the first place! And that same site also reminds us to:
• "Use a clothesline instead of a dryer whenever possible. You can save 700 pounds of carbon dioxide when you air dry your clothes for 6 months out of the year." Check with your parents first on this one, kids: some home owners' associations don't really care about the environment and will give your parents crap about having a clothesline:
  

  The clothesline was once a ubiquitous part of the residential landscape. But as postwar Americans embraced labor-saving appliances, clotheslines came to be associated with people who couldn't afford a dryer. Now they are a rarity, purged from the suburban landscape by legally enforceable development restrictions.
  
  Nationwide, about 60 million people now live in about 300,000 "association governed" communities, most of which restrict outdoor laundry hanging, says Frank Rathbun, spokesman for the Community Associations Institute, an Alexandria, Va., group that lobbies on behalf of homeowners associations.
  
  But the rules are costly to the environment -- and to consumers -- clothesline advocates argue. Clothes dryers account for 6% of total electricity consumed by U.S. households, third behind refrigerators and lighting, according to the Residential Energy Consumption Survey by the federal Energy Information Administration. It costs the typical household $80 a year to run a standard electric dryer, according to a calculation by E Source Cos., in Boulder, Colo., which advises businesses on reducing energy consumption.

• Take up a musical instrument. Turn off your iPod and your CD player.
• Quit sports, theater, and other activities to which your parents must chauffeur you. Your family will save money on gas, and your parents will probably be grateful for the time you've saved them, and perhaps even increase your allowance. You can build a clubhouse in the back yard or join a local yuppie gang instead.
  
• Pay for recycling out of your increased allowance, and sort it yourself. (In some states, you can even get money for turning bottles and cans in.)
  
• Plant a garden. You'll have fresh organic produce, and it won't have the carbon footprint of produce grown elsewhere and shipped to the grocery store. Plus when you were ignoring science class, they mentioned that plants consume CO2 and produce oxygen -- this almost turned the Earth into an iceball a billion years ago, but that's not much of a danger at the moment. We'll let you know when that changes.
  
• Eat the hamburger. The methane produced by cows "generates more global warming greenhouse gases, as measured in CO2 equivalent, than transportation", according to the U.N. That's right: eat a cow, save the earth.
  
• You don't want to drive your parents nuts, but your teachers are all gung-ho for decreasing global warming. Why don't you suggest that the school turn off the air conditioner? Think of the money they'll save on energy bills (maybe you won't have to do that stupid candy drive this year) and that way your teacher can practice what he or she preaches! Of course you'll be uncomfortable, but you'll be combating global warming in a major way! This will also allow you to find out if your teacher uses enough deodorant -- a product of highly polluting manufacturing industries.
  

And remember, boys and girls: you will be more likely to get your parents to take up the energy-conservation cause if you leave them their coffee. Parents like that stuff.

The non-Read Catholics

I've always been knowledge hungry and book crazy, so topics that I get into something (whether it's history or guns or brewing or Catholicism) I invariably read a lot of books. Indeed, if anything, I'm sometimes in danger of knowing more about a field than I actually practice it. (My ratio of Go books to Go games is pretty scary -- and I'm still not that strong a player, doubtless for that very reason.)

Some years back, when we lived in California, MrsDarwin and I were on the RCIA team for our parish. We helped out there for two years -- and in the process made a couple of very good friends. However, I tended to instinctively sort people into two groups, the very small group of converts who were reading their way into the Church (and thus reading many of the same books that I also found so fascinating) and the much larger group of "others".

It was only after a while that it penetrated my categorization system (or perhaps more precisely my intellectual pride) that while some of these "others" were entering the Church "for family reasons" -- a sort of ecclesiastical marriage of convenience which nonetheless can blossom, over time, into a love match -- other were doing so for deeply felt reasons. Some of these converts had found Catholicism through admiration of some particular friend or relatives devotion -- others had been seeking something, and had recognized what they were looking for when they found the Church. But because of the differences between us it took me a while to catch on that you could love for itself without reading about it all the time.

That old lady kneeling over in the side chapel might not spend her spare time reading up on Benedict/Ratzinger's corpus of the last thirty years. She might now know about the filioque controversy or have an opinion on the derivation of the various Eucharistic Prayers. She may well just believe -- finding God in at least as deep, indeed perhaps a far deeper way, through simply praying.

Something I occasionally need to step back and remind myself when I get a little too in among the trees with regards to liturgy debates or parish politics or what have you.

Saving Peeps

CatholicBibliophagist links to the funniest thing I've seen in a long time: A daring medical operation to separate conjoined peep quintuplets.

I saw this in hour ten of eleven that I spent in the office yesterday, which would explain why my coworkers approached my cube (hearing sounds of gasping and choking) and asked, "Darwin, are you alright?"

Further investigation reveals, you should also not check out the study on the dangers to peeps involved in drinking and smoking:

Liturgy of the Hours Talking Points

A couple weeks ago a couple other members of our parish invited me in as an "interested lay person" to help get a group started to pray the Liturgy of the Hours as a group a couple times a week at the church.

As far as finding interested people and getting one of our priests to agree to help those of us who've only ever said the office un-officially or silently learn the proper way to saying it as a group, things have been going swimmingly. However, we've been advised we need to have the head of the "liturgy and spirituality commission" present the idea to the parish council for approval -- a bottleneck designed to keep overly small groups from hogging constantly over-booked rooms around the parish.

I'm on the council, as is one of the other people involved in putting the group together, so I don't really imagine we'll have any trouble, but I went ahead and wrote up a "one sheet" (as we call such things in marketing-speak) to be handed out to everyone in order to try to minimize problems and do a little education.

Lest anyone should find such a brief summary useful, it follows below.

We're planning on having people get the Shorter Christian Prayer, basically because it's easy, contains Lauds and Vespers (which are the only one's we're likely to be doing in parish at the moment) and most importantly: cheap.

---

Proposal:

Begin a lay-run group which says the Liturgy of the Hours one or more days per week, probably Vespers said in the evening just after the end of the workday.

Purpose:

• Provide an opportunity for lay-led liturgical prayer.


• Familiarize parishioners with the ancient prayer of the Church which Vatican II has especially commended to the laity as well as priests and religious.


• Raise up to the Lord the intentions of the parish.

Background:

• The Liturgy of the Hours is the official prayer of the Church, said daily by all priests, deacons and religious. It is focused around praying the 150 psalms (on a four-week cycle).


• The origins of the LotH are very ancient: praying the psalms was an essential element of temple worship at the time of Jesus and the Apostles, and accounts as early as the 3rd Century AD describe both priests and laity pausing when getting up, at mid-day, and in the evening to pray the psalms.


• Vatican II significantly shortened and simplified the LotH, and specifically encouraged parishes and the laity to make it a part of their regular prayer life.


• Vespers (Evening Prayer) consists of two psalms, a short reading, a Canticle from the New Testament, and Intercessions/Prayers of the Faithful with the option of also including a hymn. It takes 10-15 minutes to say.

What the Church Says:

From the General Instruction on the Liturgy of the Hours:

“This liturgy of the hours or divine office, enriched by readings, is principally a prayer of praise and petition. Indeed, it is the prayer of the Church with Christ and to Christ.” (GILH, 1:2)

“Wherever possible, other groups of the faithful should celebrate the liturgy of the hours communally in church. This especially applies to parishes.” (GILH, 1:21)

“Lay groups gathering for prayer, apostolic work, or any other reason are encouraged to fulfill the Church's duty, by celebrating part of the liturgy of the hours. The laity must learn above all how in the liturgy they are adoring God the Father in spirit and in truth; they should bear in mind that through public worship and prayer they reach all humanity and can contribute significantly to the salvation of the whole world.” (GILH, 2:27)

"Motu Proprio" is not Translated: "Abandon Ship"

I generally try not to write a lot of posts that follow the form, "Here's what I think about this development over on this other blog," mostly because it seems that that kind of commentary could get very insular very quickly. I suppose the division between this and commenting on the ideas presented by another blogger (always a good and fertile source of posts) is rather fuzzy, but I think it's a matter of discussing the editorial stance rather than any of the individual posts. Of course, as is so often the case, I state this general rule with the express intention of breaking it in this case.

As perhaps has been clear, we've become increasingly interested in liturgy over the last year or so, and in the course of that time one of the blogs I've found particularly useful has often been The New Liturgical Movement. Their music discussion and links have been of great use to MrsDarwin, and I've been put onto several good books on the liturgy by them. One of the things that I've really enjoyed about NLM is that while they have a very traditional approach to liturgy (perhaps at times verging on historicism -- but then that's a danger that has a certain appeal to me, so even our weaknesses are similar) they have generally had both coverage of the old and new missals. I appreciated this, because I'm interested in tradition and history, and in regards to the mass when you deal with history going back more than 40 years, you're talking about the old form of the missal (last codified in the '62 typical edition) rather than the new (first issued in 1970). And yet, in my experience, far too many of the blogs which discuss the old missal (in a positive light) do so with the assumption that it was enshrined, unchanging, not in need of any sort of post-conciliar reform, and indeed either the only valid form of the mass in the West, or the only desirable one.

As an ordinary Catholic going to an ordinary parish, who wants to work towards parish worship that is rooted in the tradition of the Church without insisting on a permanent enshrinement of the way the mass was celebrated in the US circa 1930 or so, I find the attitude of many '62 missal fans unhelpful.

It has, thus, been with disappointment that I have watched NLM gradually shift its focus (mainly since the announcement of the motu proprio Summorum Pontificorum) almost entirely to the old missal. Saturday Shawn Tribe ran a post which essentially answered the question of "Whence the Reform of the Reform?" with: Right now the increased celebration of the old missal is the most important thing for the reform of the reform.

Another regular contributor to NLM, Michael E. Lawrence, added in the comments, "In short, it seems to me that if the reform of the reform seeks to go in the direction of tradition, then the Traditional Latin Mass is where it is at. For my part, I have decided to focus much more of my effort on the Extraordinary Form. The spread of the dignified celebration of the older form of Mass is the best way to return to tradition."

Various commenters who are not contributors at NLM went much farther (as is often the case when people get started on the virtues of the old missal over the new) with comments such as "A real reform of the reform would obviously entail an improvement for the Novus Ordo but also its slow death." or "Reform of the reform so far has been feel good rhetoric for conciliar dreamers like Fr. Fessio. If it meant the restoration of the traditional mass in its substance if not every detail, I'd be down for that." or "Question: does 'reform of the reform' mean dressing up the Bugninian Ordo with chant and incense, or modifications of the Novus Ordo to bring it closer somehow to the classical rite?"

Perhaps the reason that I find all this so personally frustrating (and if you go look at the comments you'll see some indignant fuming of my own -- which I cannot necessarily claim is much more temperate than that of the '62 missal fans) is that it was in many ways the muto proprio which served as the stimulus to us to get more actively involved in our parish. Not because we wanted to request that the mass be celebrated according to the old missal at our parish, but because that was the thing that made us think, "You know, if we want things different we need to get up out of our pews and start stirring the pot."

Since then MrsDarwin has been instrumental in getting a small schola started, I got myself appointed to the pastoral council, and I'm currently working at getting a group off the ground to say Vespers as a group a couple nights a week. Yes, progress is slow and sometimes one bumps one's head up against parish bureaucracy, but progress is happening, and we're no longer sitting around being passive.

While doing all that slow work, it's nice to be able to read other people's experiences and advise, and as such I'll be very disappointed if NLM becomes strictly a wateringhole for people who are or wish they are in groups surrounding the use of the old missal. For the forseeable future (outside the imaginations of the more excited traditionalists) 95%+ of US Catholics will be attending masses celebrated according to the current missal, and as such it's helpful to have resources out there focused on doing so in a matter rooted in the traditions of the Church.

I hardly think that what Pope Benedict XVI intended, in issuing the motu proprio, was to suck all of the more traditionally minded people out of normal parish life and into self-contained "TLM" communities.

UPDATE: Two different authors on New Liturgical Movement have responded to this post (directly or indirectly) Jeffrey Tucker here and Shawn Tribe here. Todd of Catholic Sensibility has one here. Darcy of Gregorian Chant Blog has one here. I'm going to leave the topic alone for a little while, not out of lack of interest, but because I'm concerned that over-focus on this kind of thing can result in a certain near-sighted-ness.