The Decline of the Republic

Patronage Politics

The last decades of the old Roman Republic were replete with corruption, big money politics, intrigue, murder, and vaunted arrogant ambition.  Naturally, the Republic eventually broke down, to be replaced by the Empire.  (If you are a non-specialist, and want a ripping, riveting good read about the decrepit latter days of the Republic you can go no further than the historical novels by Robert Harris about the life and times of Cicero, Imperium and Lustrum.)

At times we get a sense that the Republic of the United States is echoing the decline and fall of the ancient Republic of  Rome. There are adumbrations of that failed Republic at almost every turn.

Breivik's Brethren

 The Spirit of Terror in the West

Notorious killer, George Zimmerman has been released on bail.  Thus far, his notoriety derives from the apoplectic narrative coursing through sections of the US media.  Zimmerman, a community crime watch patrol member, has been arrested for shooting a black late-teen.  Whilst the public does not know what happened that night, racial demagogues have insisted that the shooting was a racist, murderous act. Fools rush to judgment.

Zimmerman's release on bail has resulted in a rise of vigilante sentiment.

Salutary Leadership

 Evoking Thatcher


Judith Collins is an unusual politician.  There is a "no-nonsense" aura about her that is redolent of Margaret Thatcher in her prime.  We suspect that her instincts on issues are conservative and, more-often-than-not, right.  We still marvel at the progress she made as Minister of Police in, firstly, depoliticising the NZ Police force--an essential constitutional protection perverted by former Prime Minister, Helen Clark--and appointing real policemen and women to head the department--as opposed to the political lapdogs appointed by Clark.  She, like Thatcher, is a "lady not for turning".  Like Thatcher, she does not tolerate fools lightly. 

Recently it has been the Accident Compensation Scheme ("ACC") which has been feeling the crush of her embrace.

What is Unbelief?

Foolishness Indeed

This, from St. Hilary of Poitiers (c. AD 315-67):


All unbelief is foolishness, for
it takes such wisdom as its own finite perception can attain,
and measuring infinity by that petty scale,
concludes that what it cannot understand must be impossible.
Unbelief is the result of incapacity engaged in argument.”

—De Trinitate, III.24, cited in Douglas Kelly, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 19.

Chuck Colson

. . . Of Whom the World Was Not Worthy 

We have often reflected on the Apostle Paul's "former life" where he persecuted Christians, hauling them into prison, inflicting punishment, and killing them.  Then, for the rest of his life, after his conversion to Christ, he laid down his life many times over, serving the very people he once persecuted.  His entire post-conversion life became a trophy to God's mercy and glory.

In our day, Chuck Colson--who died after a brief illness over the weekend--showed the same pattern.  Once a hard-nosed criminal political enforcer, he was confronted by the risen Lord Jesus Christ.  Thereafter his life was lived serving the very people he once despised.  Paul's particular sphere of service was the Gentiles.  Colson's was to inmates, prisoners.  He, like Paul, has been a trophy of God's mercy and glory.  We thank God for Chuck Colson.

In this obituary, we present some brief comments from national political leaders in the United States, together with reflections from one of the most widely read columnists in the US.

Letter From America: Too Stupid to Survive?

What’s Your Plan?

The “Buffett Rule” is just another pathetic sleight of hand.

By Mark Steyn
April 14, 2012
National Review Online

In the end, free societies get the governments they deserve. So, if the American people wish to choose their chief executive on the basis of the “war on women,” the Republican theocrats’ confiscation of your contraceptives, or whatever other mangy and emaciated rabbit the Great Magician produces from his threadbare topper, they are free to do so, and they will live with the consequences. 

Flamboyant, Irresponsible Scientist

The Capricious Dr. Hansen

By Charles C. W. Cooke
April 16, 2012
www.nationalreview.com 

In 1988, the longtime head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) gave an explosive performance in front of the U.S. Congress’s Science, Space, and Technology Committee, during which he claimed that America and the world were on the brink of disaster. The earth’s surface temperature, Professor James Hansen contended, was rising in concert with carbon dioxide emissions, and the consequences would be increased drought, rising oceans, and an average rise in global temperature of ten degrees Fahrenheit by 2050. If the United States government did not act now, it would be sanctioning catastrophe, he warned. With this testimony, invited by the committee’s chair, Senator Al Gore, Hansen effectively started the modern climate-change movement.

Professor Hansen came across as a scientifically minded Inspector Poirot, assembling the family in the library to explain how the murderer among them had hidden his crime. But within ten years, he had morphed into the hapless Inspector Clouseau.

Siren Songs of Populism and Easy Money

Becoming Serfs in Our Own Country

Economic xenophobes.  Welcome to the wonderful world of New Zealand populist politics.  Actually, it's a bit worse than that.  We are economic racist xenophobes. How cute to see the Green party revealing its anti-Chinese prejudice on the matter.  This from Kiwiblog:

When Bill English is over in Australia talking about how more and more Australian companies want to invest in New Zealand, and no politician says a word. But then you have a Chinese leader visit and promote investment from China, and the Greens rush out a press release. It is absolutely playing to xenophobia. Not all opposition is xenophobic, but much of it is – and politicians play to it.

But, there is an argument on the other side to be made.  The Prime Minister, John Key has said that he does not want a New Zealand where citizens are serfs in their own country.  That is a powerfully visceral line.  It raises a spectre that is not unrealistic at all.

Political Correctness In the Dock

Norway on Trial

Anders Breivik  is on trial in Norway for mass murder.  The court will decide his guilt--which is a pretty straightforward affair, since Breivik admits setting off the car bomb which killed eight people, and executing a massacre of young campers, murdering sixty-nine.  The trial is supposed to last ten weeks.  Since his guilt is straightforward, the only other question is his sanity.  Ten weeks to determine the sanity of Anders Breivik.  How bizarre.

What has led Norway into such a fix?  We suspect it has something to do with political correctness.

Christians and the Classics

Camus: Representative Modern Man

Leland Ryken
Professor of English at Wheaton College
(Hat Tip: Justin Taylor)

There is no more representative intellectual figure of the mid-20th century than Albert Camus. In addition to being an influential fiction writer, Camus was at the focal point of the intellectual crosscurrents that swirled about Europe and crossed over to the United States. The underlying principles of those movements remain pervasive in Western culture, and this is part of the relevance of Camus to us today.

Born in Algeria in 1913, Camus was a restless spirit who kept on the move and pursued many intellectual and professional paths. As a literary figure, Camus is considered a French author. He is as famous as a philosopher as a fiction writer, and in fact his novels are an embodiment of his philosophical viewpoints. Camus was killed instantly in a car crash in 1960 at the age of 46.

The many-sided nature of Camus's life makes it a veritable primer on modern secularism. Camus was a political activist, pacifist, and revolutionary. He was twice married but dismissive of marriage as an institution. He lived a sensual and disordered life. That chaotic life is itself instructive for Christians. If we want to see modern man "writ large," Camus can supply our representative figure.

Feeling the Pain, Part #2

That Bus Everybody Talks About

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, 12 April 2012

I like Jonah Goldberg a lot, and David Bahnsen here has done us a favor by pointing to this over there. Jonah argues his case well, and the best thing about it is that he really understands the problem a number of us have with Romney.

In addition, I know I live in Idaho, and I know that my refusal to cast a vote Romneyward will not affect Idaho's behavior in the Electoral College. I also know that if I lived in Florida I would have to sit down and ponder a bit longer.

David was very kind in his introduction to his disagreement with me and, like him, I have no desire to get into a fracas with any of those who understand the problems with Romney but who will be supporting him anyway.

Charter Schools Damned Before They Exist

Radical Utopians

Well, that's it then.  The educational establishment in New Zealand has resolved that charter schools don't work.  They fail.  We don't have any yet, but according to the Education Commentariat they will be useless from the get-go.  Worse, they will do real harm. 

Whenever this sort of thing goes down it is helpful to ask what world-view or framework the critics are arguing.  Here is one premise: if an educational policy does not produce uniform results across the entire nation, it is implicitly unjust.  Harmful.  Charter schools (being an alternative to government schools) only help some pupils, not all.  Therefore they have to be judged a failure before they begin.

Run the logic on display here: by this definition of success, no non-government schools can succeed, ever.

Letter From America

Romney Ruminations: Feeling the Pain

Now that Mitt Romney has the Republican nomination effectively sewn up, conservatives in the US are trying to rationalise supporting him.  The rationalisations run from "he's fifty times better than Obama, so let's overlook the lacunae on his resume" to "he really is a conservative--don't worry too much about his past performances because he is a recent convert".

Jonah Goldberg offers his two cents worth:

Vapid Dogmatism

Spurious Claims of the Age of Reason

Materialism is not a fact of experience or a deduction of logic; it is a metaphysical prejudice, nothing more, and one that is arguably more irrational than almost any other.  In general, the unalterably convinced materialist is a kind of childishly complacent fundamentalist, so fervently, unreflectively, and rapturously committed to the materialist vision of reality that if he or she should encounter any problem--logical or experiential--that might call its premises into question, or even merely encounter a limit beyond which those premises lose their explanatory power, he or she is simply unable to recognize it.

Richard Dawkins is a perfect example: he does not hesitate, for instance, to claim that "natural selection is the ultimate explanation for our existence."  But this is a silly assertion and merely reveals that Dawkins does not understand the words he is using.

Reformed Heritage

Book of the Month/April 2012

Engaging the Culture - Book Review
Written by Douglas Wilson
Sunday, 01 April 2012 16:48

Reformer of Basel
Diane Poythress
Reformation Heritage Books

This might seem like an odd book to get excited about (at least to some), but I have wanted to see a book like this for years. In Reformer of Basel, Diane Poythress has given us a very fine introduction to the life and influence of John Oecolampadius, the great Reformer of Basel. It is available at Amazon here, but they don't seem to have a deep bench on this title, and so you can also obtain it here.

I call them the lost Reformers. Men like Luther and Calvin are the A team, and men like John Knox are right behind them. The B team would be men like Zwingli, Bucer, and Bullinger -- the names are generally known to those who know the period at all, but not a lot is known about them. And then . . . the lost Reformers.

Setting the Record Straight

Vague Talk of Medieval Science

There is a narrative coined by Enlightenment philosophes which presents the classical era of ancient Greece and Rome as the greatest golden period in human civilization.  The emergence of Christianity undermined this glory as a fifth column.  Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire largely blames Christianity and the Christian Church for Rome's rotting away.

In this fictional narrative the classical era was a profuse explosion of of science and mathematics, only to have it all snuffed out by the rank darkness of a benighted Europe labouring, in turn, under the superstitious ignorance of the Christian religion.  The Renaissance and the Enlightenment represents a throwing off of the cloak of religiously-enforced ignorance and an enlightened recovery of ancient scientific and technological knowledge.

It's a great story.  Imaginative fiction.  But profoundly ignorant of actual history.  But the story has one happening to give it the appearance of credence: the Western church's conflict with Galileo.  David Bentley Hart gives a more accurate and truthful account:

Expectations

What Happened Right After

Books in the Making - Chrestomathy
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 20 March 2012

"Virtually all the books of the New Testament have an expectant air about them. They are all waiting for something drastic that will happen soon, and not one of them even mentions the most cataclyismic event in Jewish history -- the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 -- as being past. That event was the destruction of the old Judaic order and its replacement by the Christian church, the new Israel" (Heaven Misplaced, p. 111).

Letter From America

Blacks Under Attack

The Murders That Don’t Count

By Rich Lowry

March 30, 2012

National Review Online

Delric Miller IV died in a hail of bullets a month ago. When someone fired 37 AK-47 rounds into his Detroit home at 4:30 a.m., he was mortally wounded while dozing on the couch. He was nine months old. No one made the multicolored teething ring he got for Christmas or his toy hammer into a national symbol of random violence.

Last year, Charinez Jefferson, 17, was shot and killed on a Chicago street. “She begged the shooter not to shoot her because she was pregnant,” a pastor explained.

Monopolists All

Ah, Competition, Thou Art a Jewel

Milton Friedman once famously observed that enterprise owners want all their competitors to face open market competition, whilst they call for regulation of their own business.  Too true.  We have known more than our fair share of business owners spending a good deal of time lobbying government for regulations (to protect consumers, of course) in the attempt to get the "inside track" with officials, so they can secure their own financial market advantage.  Beware the business owner who speaks often about the "public interest".  More often than not the real motive is to put the squeeze on their competitors or prevent competitors coming into "their" patch. 

All business owners are natural monopolists, and should be regarded as such.

The Difference Between Faith and Fideism

God's Faithfulness

Junk Drawer - Previous Publications
Written by Douglas Wilson
Sunday, 01 April 2012


"If we are faithless, He will remain faithful, for He cannot disown Himself" (2 Tim. 2:13, NIV).

When we first catch a glimpse of the faithfulness of God, faith is the natural response. Faith is not the ladder which we climb in order to discover the faithfulness of God. It is the other way around. God is faithful, period. When we see that, faith is the natural response.

A misunderstanding concerning this shows up in many of our expressions. One that pertains to those in Christian work is the expression "living on faith." If that were strictly true, many of us would be in trouble. We do not "live on faith," we "live on faithfulness."

In Government We Trust

Puncture Wounds

Bureaucracies, it is universally believed, are costly, inefficient boondoggles.  Nevertheless, hope does spring eternal in the human breast.  Equally universal is the belief that a bureaucracy can be reformed, made better.  A tweak here, a personnel change there, a reform or two and hey presto, a new bright shiny efficient common-sense bureaucracy will emerge. 

We believe the idiocy of bureaucracy is an inevitable result when governments exceed the mandate given them by the Almighty.  Breaking divinely appointed bounds inevitably means that bad consequences will follow.  Costly, inefficient, stupid boondoggles are the consequence of expansionist government. 

New Zealand has a socialist accident compensation system.

Future Blessings Upon this Wonderful Planet

No Fool

[This post is re-published from Justin Taylor's blog]

The best-known line of martyred missionary Jim Elliot is, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”

In the archives at Wheaton College’s Billy Graham Center you can view Elliot’s journals (published here.) Below is a picture of the page from his journal. (As the Archives note, the underline and asterisk was likely added later after he died.)

The Coming of the Kingdom

Like a Mustard Seed

"My chief ambition in writing is to call attention to the peculiar and radical nature of the new faith in that setting (of the culture of late antiquity): how enormous a transformation of thought, sensibility, culture, morality and spiritual imagination Christianity constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred on the human person; its subversion of the cruelest aspects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of political power; its ability to create moral community when none had existed before; and its elevation of active charity above all other virtues.

Homosexual Marriage

Not a Human Right

Oh, dear.  This is going to be a bit of a set back to the Commentariat in the UK and here.  The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has ruled that homosexual marriage is not a human right.  Now, of course, this is a bit of a joke, because secular humanists only have gigantic sky hooks on which to hang their "human rights".  In secular humanist Western democracies human rights are whatever the majority of people want anyway.  Human rights in a secular state are nothing more than a wax nose to be twisted to the shape-shifting of the day.

But for what its worth, the European Court has ruled against homosexual marriage.  Regardless of the tenuous nature of the ruling, we are glad with the outcome.  This from the Daily Mail:

Adorning the Gospel of God

Charity and Its Fruits

David Bentley Hart writes on the Christian revolution that transformed the late classical world: Christian charity towards the needy made the Gospel radically different from the pagan cults.

Christian teaching, from the first, placed charity at the centre of the spiritual life as no pagan cult ever had, and raised the care of widows, orphans, the sick, the imprisoned, and the poor to the level of the highest religious obligations.  Thus, in the second century, Tertullian could justly boast that whereas money donated to the temples of the old gods was squandered on feasts and drink, with their momentary pleasures, the money given to the churches was used to care for the impoverished and the abandoned, to grant even the poorest decent burials, and to provide for the needs of the elderly.

The Didascalia, a fascinating Christian document of the third century, describes the duties of a bishop as encompassing responsibility for the education of orphans, aid to poor widows, and the purchase of food and firewood for the destitute, as well as strict vigilance over the money flowing through the church, lest it issue from men guilty of injustice or of the abuse of slaves, or lest it find its way into the hands of persons not genuinely in need.  In 251 the church in Rome alone had more than fifteen hundred dependents on its rolls, and even small local churches kept storerooms of provisions for the poor, such as oil, wine, and clothing (especially, tellingly enough, women's clothing).  In this way the church, long before Constantine, had created a system of social assistance that no civic or religious office of the pagan state provided.  [David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 164.]

Letter From America

Not-So-Smooth Operator

Obama increasingly comes across as devious and dishonest.
Peggy Noonan
Wall Street Journal

Something's happening to President Obama's relationship with those who are inclined not to like his policies. They are now inclined not to like him. His supporters would say, "Nothing new there," but actually I think there is. I'm referring to the broad, stable, nonradical, non-birther right. Among them the level of dislike for the president has ratcheted up sharply the past few months.

It's not due to the election, and it's not because the Republican candidates are so compelling and making such brilliant cases against him. That, actually, isn't happening.

What is happening is that the president is coming across more and more as a trimmer, as an operator who's not operating in good faith.

Lenten Meditation

Dancing in the Aisles

On that Sabbath Morning particularly celebrating the Resurrection, Christians all over the world will assemble as part of the new world and will greet each other with the triumphant declaration, "Christ is risen!"  and the formal response will redound: "He is risen, indeed!".  It is probably our most triumphant "high five". 

Why is the Resurrection so significant, so central?  Is it such a "big deal"? Or is it Christians making much ado about very little? 

Letter From Australia (About China)

Raw Power and Brute Force

John Garnaut has written an insightful piece in the Sydney Morning Herald describing the power struggle taking place within the Communist Party in China.  The whole article is worth a careful reading.  We endeavour to summarise it below:

Seismic shift

March 31, 2012The battle between China's Maoist past and a more democratic future is laid bare in the 30-year-old family feud that has reshaped the nation's political landscape.

If Premier Wen Jiabao is ''China's greatest actor'', as his critics allege, he saved his finest performance for last. After three hours of eloquent and emotional answers in his final press conference at the National People's Congress earlier this month, Wen uttered his public political masterstroke, reopening debate on one of the most tumultuous events in the party's history and hammering the final nail in the coffin of his great rival, the now disgraced Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai. In doing so, Wen wreaked his revenge on a family that had opposed him . . .  countless times.

Responding to a gently phrased question about Chongqing - the municipality until this month headed by the charismatic Bo - Wen foreshadowed Bo's political execution, a seismic leadership rupture announced the following day that continues to convulse China's political landscape to an extent not seen since 1989. . . . When Bo failed to show humility or contrition to his colleagues in Beijing, it seems, his legion enemies took the opportunity to strike him down.

But the addendum that followed might be even more significant. Indirectly, but unmistakably, Wen went on to define Bo as the man who wanted to repudiate China's long effort to reform its economy, open to the world, and allow its citizens to experience modernity. He framed the struggle over Bo's legacy as a choice between urgent political reform and ''such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution'', bringing to a head a 30-year battle for two vastly different versions of China, of which Bo Xilai and Wen Jiabao are the ideological heirs.

Bo Xilai has wanted to turn China back to the highly centralised command-and-control past.   Wen Jiabao has tried to move China into a decentralised, less state-controlled direction.  Both have spent their careers deep within the belly of the Communist party, plotting their schemes and building their support base.  Bo has now been politically banished; the Wen faction appears in control.  It may, however, not last. 

The problem is that Communist China has only the apparatus of raw power.  It has no ideology of the rule of law, no constitution which limits the rule of government.  Wen Jiabao has little to work with, apart from the hunger for development and economic progress amidst the people. 

Wen was speaking against a background where China is rising and challenging Western supremacy and yet beset by a crisis of identity, legitimacy and direction. The contest of ideas, politics and patronage is climaxing ahead of a wholesale leadership transition that will start to unfold at the party's five-yearly Congress in October. This transition is as globally consequential as the US elections that will immediately follow. But for the first time it is taking place without the guiding hand of the republic's founding fathers. And, unlike the world's established democracies, China has no constitutional bottom line, no elections and no independent judiciary.

His rival, Bo Xilai has built his power base in the city of  Chongqing.

Bo has deployed his prodigious charisma and political skills to attack the status quo in favour of a more powerful role for the state. He displayed an extraordinary capacity to mobilise political and financial resources during his 4½-year tenure as the head of the Yangtze River megalopolis of Chongqing.

He transfixed the nation by smashing the city's mafia - together with unco-operative officials, lawyers and entrepreneurs - and rebuilding a state-centred city economy while shamelessly draping himself in the symbolism of Mao Zedong. He sent out a wave of revolutionary nostalgia that led to Mao quotes sent as text messages, government workers corralled to sing ''red songs'' and old patriotic programming overwhelming Chongqing TV.

At the same time, China's netizens were amazed to learn that Bo's favourite son, Bo Guagua, drives a red Ferrari, and asked how the family could afford to educate him at Oxford and then Harvard.

It's all about power and control.  Evoking Communist ideology is a means to consolidate a power base.  One's personal wealth has nothing to do with it--or, so Communist elites always tell themselves.   Wen, in the meantime, has started publicly to raise criticism of the bloody and destructive Cultural Revolution:

By raising the spectre of the Cultural Revolution, Wen Jiabao has opened a crack in the vault of Communist Party history: that great black box that conceals the struggles, brutality, partial truths and outright fabrications upon which China has built its economic and social transformation. Beneath his carefully layered comments is a profound challenge to the uncompromising manner in which the Chinese Communist Party has always gone about its business.

It remains to be seen whether Wen Jiabao will succeed.  The fundamental irony he faces is that the purging of his enemies and pushing China to a more free society has to occur in a vacuum of law, ideology, tradition, or a doctrine of a limited state and personal freedom.  His only resource is the use of raw state power.  Mao used to say that (state) power grew out of the barrel of a gun.  It's hard to see how such raw power can destroy itself by withering away under the rule of law.  Modern China has never known any other way of operating apart from brute force.

Wen Jiabao sees Bo's downfall as a pivotal opportunity to pin his reformist colours high while the party is too divided to rein him in. He is reaching out to the Chinese public because the party is losing its monopoly on truth and internal roads to reform have long been blocked. Ironically, he is doing so by leading the public purging of a victim who has no hope of transparent justice, because the party to which he has devoted his life has never known any other way.

John Garnaut is writing a book on the princelings who are shaping China's future. A longer version of this story appears online in Foreign Policy magazine (foreignpolicy.com).

War of the Worlds

 Recovering Cosmic Christianity

Conversion and baptism were momentous events for early Christians.  Both involved a rejection of one earthly realm and an entering of another earthly realm that was now also a heavenly realm--the power of God and His Christ falling upon the earth, to establish His kingdom here.

Here is David Bentley Hart's description:

Letter From America (About the UK)

British Freedom of Speech Endangered

John Stuart Mill, where art thou?

By Charles C. W. Cooke
March 29, 2012
National Review Online

In Britain, the trend toward the curbing of free expression picked up speed on Monday, when British student Liam Stacey was sentenced to 56 days in prison for posting racist comments on Twitter. When Premier League footballer Fabrice Muamba had a heart attack during a soccer game and was rushed to hospital, a drunk Stacey took to the microblogging site and spewed a series of racially abhorrent tweets into the ether. Other Twitter users — including sports pundit and former top-flight footballer Stan Collymore — quickly noticed his words and reported Stacey to the police, who arrested him and charged him with incitement to racial hatred a few days later.

When Muamba collapsed, said the judge at Stacey’s trial, “not just the footballer’s family, not just the footballing world but the whole world were literally praying for his life. Your comments aggravated this situation.” In fact, it is hard to see how Stacey’s words aggravated anything much at all.