Across the Great Divide

Josh Hamilton Walks with God.

It's true that I'm not a religious person, and I've been critical here about aspects of religiosity — especially the prosperity gospel and religious posturing by politicians and sports figures. But I've also communicated with followers of Kenneth Copeland and Mac Hammond, and I know they responded to the larger message, not just the money part.

So I don't usually ridicule religion or faith as it really plays out in most people's lives, because it works for them — often in situations where other interventions simply don't.

For a moment last night — after Josh Hamilton put on an amazing display of hitting in an otherwise meaningless pre-All Star Game Home Run Derby and then credited his savior — I was tempted to do a satirical news item about Obama calling for an end to players injecting God in baseball .

Want to know why I passed up on what could have been a funny bit? And it has nothing to do with this.

Yes, But Which Movie?

The tornado shook their house, and minutes later they emerged to see devastation everywhere.

"I've never seen anything like it," she said Sunday night outside Oneka Elementary School in Hugo, where evacuees were gathering. "It was surreal, like a movie."

— "After the storm, a scene of pandemonium, 'like a movie,'" Star Tribune

I would never wish a tornado on anyone — although some apparently do — but just once I'd like to see the media interview a victim who was a poet.

Reality happens and some witnesses compare it to fiction that imitates reality. Natural forces unfurl, the economy takes a tumble and others can only divine the hand of God.

Narcissism and the Commons.

Last week, Shankar Vedantam wrote a Washington Post column titled, "Clinton, Obama and the Narcissist's Tale." It appeared yesterday under a different Star Tribune headline, "Democrats face a classic 'tragedy of the commons.'" One emphasizes the self-absorption required of politicians; the other highlights its effects.

I'm more interested the commons metaphor and how it relates beyond the current presidential race because I think it helps define the great dividing line of our time. Parties and candidates have clustered at the poles of the real divisions among us — whether to value the big picture over the short run and place collective interest on at least a par with self-interest.

Vedantam invokes the tragedy of the commons to explain the dangerous trap of this "fault line" between individual and collective interest:

Individuals embroiled in similar dilemmas find them impossible to solve on their own, because they are confronted by a Hobson's Choice: Act selfishly and cause collective disaster, or act altruistically and aid someone else who is acting selfishly. Either way, selfishness wins.

"The way the system is set up, the more-selfish person has a higher probability of winning," social psychologist W. Keith Campbell said of the Democratic primary. "You end up with the more narcissistic, belligerent candidate."

He cites an experiment by Campbell in which volunteers were tasked as timber companies to manage a forest in perpetuity.

[Since] the volunteers did not know whether their kindness would be reciprocated by others or exploited by competitors, people raced to cut as much timber as they could and quickly razed the forests to the ground. Groups with volunteers more willing to think about the collective good preserved their forests longer. But selfish people within these groups had a field day exploiting the altruists — and the forests perished anyway.

Much of the conflict in the public domain mirrors this dynamic. Free market vs. government regulation. Energy development vs. conservation. The individual or family vs. the collective. The castle vs. the commons.

Government and other social institutions, especially religion, have developed to regulate or redirect behavior from the destructive effects of selfishness. But Reaganism has led an all-out assault on the notion of "the commons," associating it with failed socialist states instead of with managing, in Jedediah Purdy's* phrase,  "the things that we cannot avoid having in common and whose maintenance or neglect implicates us all." That is, the legal system, the economy, public health and the natural world to name a few.

The attack on the commons has been prosecuted against and through those very institutions charged with keeping it — school boards, churches, local governments and federal agencies — abetted by think tanks, pundits and pollsters who retail to the public simpleminded formulations of complex problems and then pretend to discover them as the will of the people.

Public opinion, Purdy says, "has become shorthand for uninformed attitudes dignified by statistical aggregation." And the "Public,"  he says, is increasingly defined in Libertarian terms to be whatever government provides to people who are too lazy or weak to get a share of the "Private."

Although unregulated behavior can be modeled and the consequences predicted, before they will act, cultures of heightened self-interest demand proof, which practically means collapse of fisheries or financial systems. In Garrett Hardin's term, "intrinsic responsibility" can be clearly grasped when an act is straightforward and the consequences are immediate. But those who most loudly espouse personal responsibility and accountability for actions rarely see their own complicity in causing harm when the effects are indirect — through consumption, financial manipulation, disinvestment or discrimination.

We cannot and should not legislate away self-interest, but neither can we blithely continue to grow population, consume energy and amass wealth as if we were the planet's sole occupants — or, alternatively, as if we all have our own personal savior waiting in the wings.

Until we learn to see the systems we live within, we contribute to their ruin. And even then...

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* I could've sworn I'd written before about Jedediah Purdy's book, For Common Things, but apparently not. (Naturally, libertarians didn't like it; nor did  Caleb Crain. But here's another view that there are worse sins than being privileged, earnest and young.)

St. Thomas Law: Serving a Growth Industry.

When the University of St. Thomas started its law school a few years ago, it set out to distinguish itself by integrating faith and the law. But is this the way to build your reputation as a law school?

St. Thomas has denied a law student academic credit for an internship with Planned Parenthood. In so doing, it joins ranks with other Catholic law schools and Pat Robertson's prestigious Regent University. Not to mention institutions of sharia law.

The young woman enrolled at St. Thomas with a different view of the school's mission.

"I thought Catholic doctrine would be reflected in the faculty and the curriculum, and it would be a safe place to talk about those issues, but not enforce them."

The church opposes birth control and abortion, so it holds a dim view of offering volunteer service at the agency. Presumably, it still opposes murder, rape, robbery and bearing false witness, all matters that involve the legal profession. If the church is truly worried about students having their faith somehow compromised or contaminated by exposure to the legal activities  of Planned Parenthood, perhaps it should come up with ways to insulate them from being around actual criminals, too.

Or it could do what these other law schools seem designed for — funneling more tunnel-vision Christians into the service of subverting government and working around existing laws. After all, that's where the job growth has been lately.

Why Won't Godless Liberals Help the Poor?

Thursday's Why Do Conservative Christians Kill Their Kids? could've been an early April 1st post, but it was actually a bad reaction to an overdose of "liberals are [bad/unethical/unpatriotic/hypocrites/can't count to numerous] and here is my carefully selected fact to prove it."

This impulse welled up after spending far more time on John McCain's mouth than any non-member of the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry should, and then reading George Will's "Liberals speak of generosity; conservatives actually have it."

"The surprise is that liberals are markedly less charitable than conservatives," he intones, sounding not very surprised at all, while the headline writer follows right along.

Will picked this week to write about a book published 16 months ago that forwards a premise that liberals give financial lip service to their social values. You've probably heard this already, in a far less affected manner than Will manages:

While conservatives tend to regard giving as a personal rather than governmental responsibility, some liberals consider private charity a retrograde phenomenon — a poor palliative for an inadequate welfare state, and a distraction from achieving adequacy by force, by increasing taxes.

In other words, we substitute other people's taxes for our personal charity.

You'd think in honor of tax time Will would at least congratulate us Blue Staters for taking smaller deductions, thereby paying more to the government. Isn't that living your values?

Okay, seriously. My annoyance with Will's piece starts with how he slants the evidence even further to the right than what's in Arthur C. Brooks's Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism. Will says:

Although liberal families' incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).

Will notes the importance of religion as an underpinning of conservative values, but he neglects to mention that religious giving accounts for most of this disparity.

Brooks found religious donors gave about 3.5 times the amount secular donors did — on average $2,210 versus $642 — and most of that giving went to religious causes. That tracks with a recent report from the Minnesota Council on Foundations, which says individual religious giving in the state dwarfs all other categories at about 60% of charitable dollars.

But according to a review in Philanthropy, when Brooks measured only giving to non-religious causes, the difference between religious and secular givers fell to $88. He also found that religious conservatives gave slightly more than religious liberals, while secular liberals were more generous than their conservative counterparts.

I could further question the size and source of any giving gap, but what really got me was the divisive set up. Like asking "why do conservatives kill their kids?" Will's formulation of the research is presented in a way that incites argument rather than invites exploration by the "accused."

Instead, what if we approached Brooks's book in a spirit of discovery? What sorts of questions might we ask? And what might we learn about ourselves that would actually be useful?

For example:

• Am I more generous than other Americans? If not, is that something I want to change?
• Why do I give? To solve social ills or make myself feel good?
• Do my giving patterns show ideological or class biases? Does that matter?
• Is it better to give to the poor than to the arts or environment? How do I make those choices?
• Do my political opinions make it hard for me to see the actual social value in religious giving and faith-based initiatives? Do others discount the value of public investment for similar reasons?
• If we can agree on desired outcomes from fulfilling social needs, will it be easier for the community to agree on a variety of funding methods?

When readers are introduced to issues in a way that accentuates existing political notions — such as government wastes my money or wealth and morality are incompatible — it's very difficult to reach any kind of understanding, either of the other side's beliefs or the deeper complexities of the problem.

This article about fundamentalism expresses in another way the constructive potential of the tension between liberal and conservative thought.

Fundamentalism's conservative impulse wants stability in societies. Liberal impulses serve to give us not stability but civility: humanity. They do this by expanding the definitions of our inherited territorial categories. The essential job of liberals in human societies is to enlarge our understanding of who belongs in our in-group. This is the plot of virtually all liberal advances.

[...]

When liberal visions work, it's because they have kept one foot solidly in our deep territorial impulses with the other foot free to push the margin, to expand the definition of those who belong in “our” territory.

When liberal visions fail, it is often because they fail to achieve just this kind of balance between our conservative impulses and our liberal needs.         

The problem, of course, is that this notion of balance fits better with liberalism. The fundamentalists are less likely to budge.

End of the World as We Know It?

Raul Castro has lifted the Cuban ban on cell phone ownership for regular citizens. So, reportedly, is Korea's Kim Jong-Il. No word on whether they will also follow the U.S. example on monitoring phone traffic.

*****
How is the End of the World like Bill Clinton?

It never shows up on time.

So why go into a cave in November to await the  predicted May arrival of the end? Seems like July would be soon enough. Or better yet, why go into a cave at all and miss the fireworks?

*****
And you thought "price war" was a figure of speech. A Detroit gas station owner was killed in his yard by an unknown assailant.

[Hassan] Masbouth was facing open murder charges. He never denied shooting Jawad Bazzi, his 46-year-old business rival and owner of the BP gas station near Fort and Springwells.

Masbouth was accused of shooting Bazzi in November, after Bazzi and other men walked across the street to confront his competitor about lowering prices at his station. A fight broke out between the two men and Masbouth allegedly shot Bazzi to death.

The November killing was precipitated by a confrontation after Masbouth lowered his gas price by three cents to $2.93 per gallon. Masbouth claimed self defense in shooting Bazzi

[I]n the back of the head and abdomen after Masbouth was hit over the head with a pole used to change gas prices on signs at stations, according to the reports.

The two had been involved in an ongoing price war. And even the shooting did not stop the stations from continuing their fight. WXYZ's Bill Proctor reported at the time that that as soon as Bazzi's body was taken away, workers at his station changed the price-per-gallon of unleaded from $2.96 to $3.09.

 

*****
A new short film by a right-wing Dutch critic of Islam  Geert Wilders is provoking demonstrations in the Muslim world and raising questions about multiculturalism, free speech and conflicts between fundamentalism and Dutch liberalism.

A Pakistani diplomat said the film deeply offended the sentiments of Muslims all over the world and could result in expression of strong abhorrence and outrage. Given the assassinations of Pim Fortuyn and film director Theo Van Gogh, the Dutch have reason to be concerned about how strong those expressions might be.

Dutch immigration expert Paul Scheffer thinks the conflict is "indicative of integration."  

The atmosphere of tolerance that was created in Holland during the 1960s and 1970s was not genuine, Scheffer explains, and should therefore not be mourned. In fact, he says, it encouraged "mutual cultural avoidance" on the part of immigrant and native communities alike. Integration, he argues, involves conflict and change. "When change does not occur, then it's a sign we have cultural avoidance."
 
The Netherlands, with its population of one million immigrants, can be seen as "a laboratory where many of the questions visible everywhere in Europe are debated," according to Scheffer. By contrast, Wilders says he sees the conflict as threatening the country's ability to survive as a free society.
 
"Wilders urges the Muslims to respect our constitution and the separation of state and church, but in the very same sentence he says he's against building more mosques, and advocates banning the Koran," Scheffer complains. "I think he should be publicly confronted about this internal confliction more often and more effectively."
 
One the explanations that the scholar offers for the Netherlands' immigrant problems sounds uncomfortably similar to Israel's relationship with its population of approximately 200,000 foreign workers and asylum-seekers.
 
"People who came in as 'guest workers' in the 1960s thought they would stay a while, earn some money and go back home," Scheffer said on his visit, which was arranged as a joint initiative by The Royal Dutch Embassy in Israel together with Tel Aviv University.
 
"They didn't think of about the possibility that their children could become Dutch. They lived in a state of suspension and they didn't even learn the language." Dutch society, Scheffer said, shared in this "mutual illusion" to find itself "enormously changed without ever preparing."

Why Do Religious Conservatives Kill Their Kids?

On June 20, 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children, who ranged in age from six months to seven years, in a bathtub in her home. Prior to this, she had manifested symptoms of depression with psychosis, which were exacerbated in her postpartum periods. She had been hospitalized four times and was catatonic and mute during one admission. In statements made following the crime, she indicated that she believed that she was a bad mother and that she had concerns that her children would not grow up properly secondary to her shortcomings. She noted that she killed them to save them from eternal damnation.
— Psychiatry MMC

Here's a topic for study by some enterprising PhD student: Do more religious conservatives than liberals murder their children?

(You can spare me the comments about abortion. I'm talking about filicide here — and even more, our stupid tendency to explain differences in complex behaviors based on a generalized political affiliation.)

I was thinking about this even before George Will's latest column about how conservatives are more generous than liberals, which I'll take up in a separate post.

In Wisconsin this week, the home schooled daughter of a fundamentalist family died because her diabetes was left untreated. The mother says they are not crazy, religious people who belong to any organized faith. She just writes for an end-of-days ministry website on the side and actively proselytizes other women. Her sister-in-law, who called the sheriff, seemed to think there was a problem.

The aunt: "My sister-in-law, she’s very religious, she believes in faith instead of doctors ... and she called my mother-in-law today ... and she explained to us that she believes her daughter’s in a coma now and she’s relying on faith. ..."

The dispatcher got more information from the caller and asked if an ambulance should be sent.

The aunt: "Please. I mean, she’s refusing. She’s gonna fight it so ... We’ve been trying to get her to take her to the hospital for a week, a few days now so."

In Iowa, an embezzling banker bludgeoned his wife and four kids to death before killing himself. In communications left behind, he indicated he believed his family was in heaven.

And, not to leave anyone out, a Muslim cab driver in Canada strangled his 16-year-old daughter because she refused to submit to his control and demands she wear traditional Muslim garb.

I've looked for a study that examines the role of political and religious beliefs of parents who murder their children. Haven't found one. But golly, the circumstantial evidence doesn't look good, does it? And it stands to reason, when you decide to kill your kids with a baseball bat, the idea you're sending them to heaven might lets you swing just a little more freely.

Anyone offended yet? No, I'm not calling all religious fundamentalists child murderers. But if there's a pattern of behavior that could lead to prevention, wouldn't it be good to understand it?

Psychiatric researchers may not see much merit in testing my only half-serious hypothesis. The research already indicates that filicide is a multidimensional crime, and like most human behavior, is not likely to reduce down to red state/blue state simplification.

But it's hard to shake that whenever I see news of a suicide bomber or a murderous parent, God shows up pretty frequently in the story. John Kerry bumper stickers, not so much.

Weekend in Two Time Zones.

Shouldn't suffer jet lag after flying just one time zone over, but I forgot to post a few weekend bulletins.

*****

Why are the people who think the Founding Fathers' wisdom should prevail over the country today so often the same people who want to amend the Constitution?

*****

Neighbors Pam Stranz, left, and Dorothy Bode have teamed up in their northeast Minneapolis neighborhood to keep a watch over vacant homes, many of which have been foreclosed on and boarded up, like this one on N.E. Pierce Street. Stranz has 11 children and Bode nine, and together they are trying to keep the area safe. Stranz said that when her family moved into the neighborhood it was “considered the safest spot in northeast Minneapolis.”

– "City Asks People to Adopt Vacant Houses," Strib

Hello? Are those neighbors watching over the vacant houses or planning to move in?

How did the paper find two women with 20 children between them to pose for an adoption story?

*****
Jeff Strickler writes that donations to local churches are not down with the economy. In fact, they may be slightly up. But Mac Hammond is practically standing at Boone and 694 with a cardboard sign this week saying: "Will Bless for Commitments."

Which is it?

*****

Less than 10 miles away from my house Ken Copeland was preaching through the week, helping Mac Hammond raise 17 million commitments. Until I left town Saturday morning, I thought I'd go to church and see for myself.

But I guess I was feeling charitable — just not in a prosperity gospel kind of way. The man is down, and I didn't feel like picking on him.

I've been after Hammond for some time, as regular readers know, and new ones can find out. I find the message of earthly rewards for faithfully sending money to a televangelist repugnant. Copeland and Hammond are businessmen engaged in a ponzi scheme, using religion and religious credulity to advance their personal material wealth.

That they may also be men of faith peddling promises to people of faith doesn't make it okay in my book.

If Hammond pulled up short of the God-wants-you-to-be-rich-and-me-to-be-very-rich message, I'd see some good in what he preaches. Humility, patience, self-knowledge, being active and positive in your outlook, letting yourself have some fun in life. You don't need Bible verses to make a pretty good pitch out of those materials.

But neither do you need a 70% markup just to cover marketing expenses.

European Market is Hot Now: Satan Postpones U.S. Expansion.

The demand for exorcisms is up in Europe, where typical cases:

include people who turn away from the church and embrace New Age therapies, alternative religions or the occult. Internet addicts and yoga devotees are also at risk, he said.

I suggest you step away from the computer for awhile.

Spotting people beset by evil is apparently easy if you are a priest involved in family counseling.

Jankowski cited the case of a woman who asked for a divorce days after renewing her wedding vows as part of a marriage counseling program. What was suspicious, he said, was how the wife suddenly developed a passionate hatred for her husband.

"According to what I could perceive, the devil was present and acting in an obvious way," he said. "How else can you explain how a wife, in the space of a couple of weeks, could come to hate her own husband, a man who is a good person?"

Oh, I don't know. It couldn't have been she was pressured into reconciliation by some controlling asshole. Must've been the yoga.

But I'm sure the exorcism has things all straightened out.

Revenge of the Nerds.

The words "rule of law" — like "activist judges" and "original intent" — speak to me not just of constitutional principles, but of a world view that kind of creeps me out.

If I may typecast for a moment, the "rule of law" advocates seem to be overly represented by men angry that the cool world fails to recognize their brilliance and that life is not fair for smart, nerdy, white guys who went to law school instead of starting software companies.

And instead of fighting for the poor and the downtrodden or against institutions that take advantage of them, the rule of law-yers argue over issues that don't make life better for anyone that I can see.

A typical such suit was the one resulting in a 2002 Supreme Court ruling that struck down Minnesota's judicial ethics rule limiting what candidates could say when running for election. Greg Wersel, the winning plaintiff in that case, still can't get elected judge, because Minnesota voters look at these things differently than Antonin Scalia.

Now, he's back in the news along with Citizens for the Rule of Law — an "organization" that started its blog on January 31st and filed a lawsuit Monday challenging how the Minnesota House and Senate grant themselves per diem payments. (Or, as one CRW post called them in a Latinate slip, Per Dieums.)

According to the St. Cloud Times:

Minnesota's part-time legislators receive $31,140 in annual salary, a level that has not been raised since 1998. They can receive daily per diem reimbursements to cover costs such as parking, food, dry cleaning and other expenses, but are not required to submit receipts for those costs.

Other reimbursable costs include travel within legislators' districts, communications costs, travel to conferences and workshops and hiring an intern.

Lawmakers who live more than 50 miles from the Capitol can also receive lodging and mileage reimbursements.

A Times' investigation last October found that some legislators' alternate compensation totals equaled or exceeded their 2007 salary.

Another salvo appeared in the Strib Feb. 8th, when Former Shorewood Mayor Tom Dahlberg and Erick Kaardal, self-proclaimed father of Minnesota neo-populism, inveighed against "the elitist ambitions of former Gov. Al Quie to take us backwards into the authoritarian appointment of judges by the elite bureaucratic class."

As far as I know, this is the first time "elitist" has appeared in the same sentence as the name of our former Republican governor.

Kaardal is the attorney in the CRW lawsuit. (That's his partner, William Mohrman, looking ready to bite the head off another nail in background of the 2002 Wersal photo.)

Given the choice of spending the weekend with Mac Hammond or these guys — and assuming suicide was off the table — I'd be singing hymns in Brooklyn Park on Sunday.

But...

But it pains me to say this, though I've said it before. The Legislature ought to get out of the undocumented per diem business as a way to increase pay. Make the case for a pay raise, vote for it, and take the heat. Or do this:

[Sen. Tarryl Clark, DFL-St. Cloud] said she and Rep. Larry Hosch, DFL-St. Joseph, were working on language for a possible constitutional amendment removing the setting of legislators' compensation from their duties and putting it in the hands of an impartial authority.

Wersal and the state's three other neo-populists would no doubt call it an elitist authority. But at least least it would spare me from having to look like I agreed with guys like this.