Who Says Resurrection Is All That?

Last night I happened to see an article posted on Facebook titled, "The Challenge of Easter." It's a very thoughtful and well-articulated statement of the importance of Easter, and the event it celebrates--the resurrection of Jesus after his crucifixion and death--for the Christian world-view. There's one passage in particular that I thought was interesting:

If you don’t believe in the Resurrection, you can go on living your life while perhaps admiring Jesus the man, appreciating his example and even putting into practice some of his teachings. At the same time, you can set aside those teachings that you disagree with or that make you uncomfortable—say, forgiving your enemies, praying for your persecutors, living simply or helping the poor. You can set them aside because he’s just another teacher. A great one, to be sure, but just one of many.

If you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, however, everything changes. In that case, you cannot set aside any of his teachings. Because a person who rises from the grave, who demonstrates his power over death and who has definitively proven his divine authority needs to be listened to. What that person says demands a response.

In short, the Resurrection makes a claim on you.

Uhhh... why? I don't entirely get the logic here, the one that says "resurrection → authority." And I'm not even talking here about my own personal quibble with the "god → authority" logic, although I do also have a problem with that. No, I'm talking about the "resurrection → god" step in the reasoning. Because there's plenty of non-god creatures that can rise from the dead. Vampires, for instance, and zombies. Or wights, though they're less popular these days. Oh, and Time Lords, of course. (Jesus was clearly a Time Lord.) The simple fact of his resurrection doesn't really narrow down which of these he was. Now, you may say, ah, yes, but vampires, zombies, and Time Lords aren't real. Okay, but... neither is god. It's a level playing field!

Or, at least, we haven't yet established that god exists: the author uses his resurrection as evidence for his authority. Obviously if you already believe he's god, then he's god, but if you don't already believe that he's god, I don't see how his supposed resurrection really gets you any further toward that destination. I might be very impressed by someone who can rise from the dead (presuming, of course, that he's not in the zombie/vampire/etc. scary-undead category of people who rise from the dead), but why on earth should I conclude that he's my sovereign?

What Religious Liberty Really Looks Like

I just read Linda Greenhouse's piece about how the Court is shaping up in the wake of Justice Scalia's death, and something in it caught my eye. She mentions a case, Ben-Levi v. Brown, in which Justice Samuel Alito wrote a dissent from the denial of certiorari, a highly unusual move and one that Greenhouse couldn't recall ever seeing Justice Alito make. That case concerned a prisoner's religious liberty claim: he wanted to meet up with fellow Jewish inmates for religious study and/or worship (there was some dispute about which one, and it might matter), but the state wouldn't let him, because there were only two other Jewish inmates. You might think that shouldn't matter--and you would be right!--but it mattered because the state had apparently been informed by a rabbi that collective Jewish worship requires the presence of ten Jews in order to form a minyan. Hence, the state's rules allowed Jewish inmates to meet up for worship so long as there were at least ten of them. Alito, in his dissent from the denial of cert, thought this was ridiculous: what mattered isn't what some rabbi says, but what Mr. Ben-Levi himself believed.

And... he's right about that. I think Ben-Levi should have won that case, and easily so. I don't even necessarily even need to get the Free Exercise Clause involved here: this policy seems to me to violate the Establishment Clause pretty clearly. One prong of the traditional test under that Clause is that government policy must not create "entanglement" with religion. Basically the idea is that we really, really don't want the government dictating religious doctrines. This is the aspect of the Establishment Clause that's meant to protect religion from government as much as the reverse. And so I would say, the government has absolutely no business enforcing the minyan rules. Maybe they could simply not allow for group study/worship by Jewish prisoners, or maybe in appropriate cases they could limit the right to participate in those groups for individual prisoners whose poor behavior merits it. But if they're gonna allow the study at all, they absolutely cannot base their rules about when it is or is not permissible based on some view of what constitutes the correct interpretation of the religion in question; that's flatly impermissible.

And it's totally different from the other "religious liberty" case this term, and all the high-profile one of the past few years. Greenhouse speculates that Alito may have been "practicing" for the upcoming blockbuster case Zubik v. Burwell, where a bunch of religious groups and/or companies (because apparently that's a thing now) are complaining about the government's new rule saying that they don't have to provide insurance that covers contraception to their employees if they don't want to, they just have to let the government know that they object and then the government will provide that coverage separately. This, you see, still makes them culpable for whatever sins they think the contraception will perpetrate, according to their own religious convictions.

Spot the difference? It's simple: whereas Ben-Levi (and presumably his fellow Jewish inmates) just wants to practice his own religion his own way, these companies are fairly explicitly claiming a religious right to obstruct others' behavior that violates their own beliefs. I deny wholeheartedly that the latter has anything to do with "religious liberty." But to anyone who thinks this means I don't believe in religious liberty, that's wrong: I do support real religious liberty claims, like Ben-Levi's.

What Kind of God Is This

I'm doing the last set of readings for my Capital Punishment class, one chunk of which is about innocence, that is to say, about the process of getting people out of prison and out from under a death sentence on the grounds that they actually didn't commit the crime. And some of the readings are about the case of Anthony Ray Hinton, recently exonerated off of Alabama's death row after nearly three decades. Hinton was surprisingly honest about how angry he was, saying, for instance:

"The State of Alabama let me down tremendously. I have no respect for the prosecutors, the judges. And I say that not with malice in my heart. I say it because they took 30 years from me."

And:

"When the very people that you've been taught to believe in, the police, the D.A., these are the people that are supposed to stand for justice, and when you know that they lied to you, it's hard for you to have trust in anybody."

Pretty, y'know, reasonable, right? I share his sentiments, basically, though I've never suffered from the problems he's talking about. But then there's this:

"I've got to forgive. I lived in hell for 30 years, so I don't want to die and go to hell. So I've got to forgive. I don't have a choice."

And can I just say, f*ck that. That is so effing messed up. I mean, look, some people find it therapeutic or whatever to forgive those who have wronged them; certainly there's something to be said for not carrying your anger around with you forever. But, like, the people in question do not on the merits deserve forgiveness (at least, unless any of them have fessed up and admitted that they made a mistake, as the original prosecutor in another one of these cases did). They did something that was not so different from a murder, when you think about it, in robbing a person of the ability to pursue any happiness at all for the better part of his adult life and probably making it damned difficult for him to do so even after he's been released.

And the idea is that God, the Almighty and Benevolent, will punish Hinton with an eternity of damnation and torment if he does not forgive these people? That's just... that's just sick. Whatever there can be said for forgiveness, I think it just cannot be something that anyone gets to demand of you. Forgiveness is an act of grace, a fact which I believe is a big part of Christian theology.* And this is worse than just the various prosecutors and judges and the like demanding forgiveness from Hinton as of right. The idea here is that failing to forgive in Hinton's situation would be a sin, an offense not against those who wronged him but against the sovereign, so to speak. What kind of sovereign makes that a crime? What kind of sovereign turns to the victim of such a horrid injustice and says, look matey, if you don't find it in your heart to forgive your oppressors, I will consider that an offense against me and I will punish you for it, harshly? Like, what the hell? A god who demanded such of his subjects would not deserve words like "benevolent," to my mind; no, he would deserve words like "tyrant." Certainly he would not deserve our allegiance, let alone our love; perhaps our obedience, simply through raw brute-force deterrence, but that's not a very awe-inspiring figure.

Fortunately, the god in question (almost certainly) does not exist. But the people who propagate the idea of that god do exist. And really it's them I'm angry at. Anthony Ray Hinton should not be required to forgive the judges and prosecutors who robbed him of the better part of his life on pain of damnation; that's obvious. But equally, Anthony Ray Hinton should not be led to believe that he has to forgive those judges and prosecutors on pain of damnation. They don't necessarily have as much to answer for as the judges and prosecutors themselves, but the people who lead other people to believe in a tyrant god like this have an awful lot to answer for.



*Okay, yes, there is or at least has been a big split over whether salvation is a matter of grace or a matter of doing good works. But I'd say that the latter camp basically doesn't believe that salvation is a matter of forgiveness, of god's forgiving people for their sins, but rather sort of a matter of weighing a person's sins against their good works and seeing which predominates. I think. But don't really ask me, it's really not my area.

Every Sperm is Sacred, Declare Five Old Catholic Dudes In Robes

So apparently in the batch of orders issued the day after the final actual day of the Supreme Court's term, they basically indicated that yesterday's Hobby Lobby decision doesn't just apply to those methods of birth control which certain religious groups choose to describe as abortion-y. Apparently closely-held companies whose owners are Catholic, and particularly the kind of Catholic who thinks contraception and the recreational sex it makes possible are sinful, can get out of giving their employees health insurance that covers any kind of contraception. Basically, this:

Oh, and did I mention that the particular five Justices constituting this majority are all Catholics? Hmmm, interesting coincidence ya got there.

UPDATE: Attempts to Limit Hobby Lobby Turn Out To Be Gibberish

So my previous post was about how the way Justice Alito distinguishes the contraceptive mandate from other potential health insurance tells us that the real point of his opinion is that he doesn't think it's that important to provide universal access to contraception. Apparently that's not entirely correct. Apparently the Court assumed that the government interest in the case was compelling, and based its decision on the whole "least restrictive means" thing. But this is a problem. RFRA violations are those laws which substantially burden religion and which are not the least restrictive means to further a compelling government interest. Thus, if one thing is a RFRA violation and another isn't, then they must differ in one of three ways: either one of them substantially burdens religion and the other doesn't, or one of them is in furtherance of a compelling interest and the other isn't, or one of them is the least restrictive means to furthering such an interest and the other isn't. It could be all of those three, but it's gotta be at least one of 'em. But if Alito was stipulating the strength of the government's interest, then that can't be the difference. The fact that, in the passage quoted in the previous post, he discussed not the question of the burden on religion but of the government's interest suggests he thinks that vaccine mandates do substantially burden religion, so that can't be the difference. So the difference must be the least-restrictive-means thing, right? Well, wrong. Because as Justice Kennedy points out, the government could just pay for this part itself. That would be less burdensome on the Green family's religion. So would establishing an all-out single payer system where the government just does all of this stuff directly and leaves the employers out of it. And both of those are gonna be there as less restrictive alternatives for all of these mandates, aren't they? Like, the logic is in fact exactly the same, Alito's protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

So.... it looks like the "legal reasoning" behind limiting this to contraception is basically just bullshit. There is no reasoning. It's narrow because Alito wants it to be narrow, as do Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas. Maybe because they think Congress might actually amend RFRA or something if they issued a broader decision? I dunno. But it seems pretty likely that the only reason why they're treating contraception differently from all other kinds of potential health insurance mandates is that it's suddenly become politically controversial, and/or that they're five old Catholic dudes who have been taught from birth to believe that contraception is sinful. Whatever it is, it ain't law.

Hobby Lobby is About Sex, not Abortion

One of the questions in the Hobby Lobby litigation was whether the exemption sought by these companies could be extended to things other than contraception. Could companies whose owners held somewhat less mainstream religious beliefs decide to stop covering, say, blood transfusions, or vaccines? Could religious "freedom" become a shield for racial discrimination? Nope, says Justice Alito. The ruling is strictly limited to contraception. Other medical things like transfusions or vaccines he essentially said would have to be considered in later cases, and might or might not survive the same test that the contraception mandate failed. And he specifically said that racial discrimination in employment practices cannot find support in this decision, that the government's interest in eradicating that evil is strong enough and direct enough that "religious freedom" is no shield against it.

Kevin Drum comments that the logic behind limiting the decision to contraception seems to be about abortion:

I think it's important to recognize what Alito is saying here. Basically, he's making the case that abortion is unique as a religious issue. If you object to anything else on a religious basis, you're probably out of luck. But if you object to abortion on religious grounds, you will be given every possible consideration. Even if your objection is only related to abortion in the most tenuous imaginable way—as it is here, where IUDs are considered to be abortifacients for highly idiosyncratic doctrinal reasons—it will be treated with the utmost deference.

I don't think that's quite right.

Hobby Lobby and the Sanctity of Human Life

Ugh. Not a good day for the law. Not on any dimension. The policy of these decisions is horrible. Admittedly it's not as horrible as it could have been had Alito not decided to write deliberately narrowed opinions. But the price of that narrowness was absolute legal absurdity. I mean, there was plenty legal absurdity anyway, but the narrowness created even more. I don't really think it's possible to maintain that what the Court was doing today was law. Not really. And that actually offends me pretty deeply, as someone who believes that there is such a thing as doing law, for real, in the best sense of that word.

But here's a slightly ancillary thought I have about the Hobby Lobby decision. The purported reason why providing coverage to their employees that included contraception would have violated Hobby Lobby's religious beliefs is that certain forms of contraception were, in the store's owners' view, abortifacients. And we all know that opposition to abortion is that most sincere of religious beliefs; religious people of a certain type are committed to seeing abortion as murder, because they supposedly value the sanctity of human life. And, y'know, I gotta say, I see the ethical case that late-term abortion is something seriously resembling murder, or rather homicide (the difference being that the former assumes the wrongfulness of the act). I have pretty good reasons, I think, for not thinking this means we should criminalize it, although I do think there might be ways to regulate late-term abortions in some way. But I do think we should view late-term abortions as a pretty serious moral Bad Thing, and work hard to minimize the frequency with which it's the least-bad option.

But that's not what Hobby Lobby is about. Hobby Lobby is about birth control. It's about IUDs, which prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg on the uterus wall. This, like a few other forms of birth control (but unlike, say, condoms), prevents pregnancy after the moment of conception rather than before it. It operates at the post-zygotic stage. And therefore certain religious types, though apparently not the medical or legal community, consider it to cause an abortion, and to end a human life. (Apparently scientific types think life begins at implantation or something.) Here the ethics aren't so complicated: the ethical badness of destroying a pre-implantation zygote is precisely zero. It's the same thing as killing a bacterium. It has one cell. It has no computing power, no sensory apparatus. It does not have experiences. It cannot feel pain. It does not have a beating heart. It differs in this regard, of course, from later-stage fetuses, but zygotes and blastocysts are just ethical nullities.

Now, my point could be that it's ridiculous, and kind of sick, to think that destroying one of these nullities is the same thing as killing a living human being. But it isn't. Rather, my point is that it is deeply sick to think that killing a living human being is the same as destroying one of these nullities. That is to say, I don't think it's really possible that anyone at all reacts to the death of a blastocyst or a zygote the way one is supposed to react to the death of a human being. I do think it's possible that people react that way to the death of an eight-month fetus or whatever, and at some point in between it flips, but let's just say that that point is sometime after there are at least 16 cells in the organism. And so if you maintain that you view the two as equivalent, that you think IUDs are murder, well, that's gotta tell us something about how much respect you have for, like, ordinary human life, right? And it tells us nothing good. I think it's gotta tell us that the sense in which you condemn ordinary murder is somehow cheaper than it should be. If the value that you place on human life doesn't change from the moment of conception all the way through the moment of death, I don't think that value can be as high as the value that I place on human life from birth through death. There's just no way you can actually be giving that much value to a zygote, not really. Maybe you have some kind of theological sophistry telling you that killing zygotes is sinful, but you can't really believe that aborting them is murder, not the way we mean that word.

So either there's an act of dishonesty going on, at some level, when people say they think these contraceptive devices cause murders, or these religious types have just tipped that their conception of the "sanctity of human life" is awfully shallow. One or the other, and neither is exactly great.

Cosmos and Creationists

Back in 1980, Carl Sagan, noted astrophysicist and public-intellectual ambassador for science at large, ran a TV series on PBS called Cosmos, which presented a great deal of scientific knowledge about various cosmological issues for public consumption. It was highly successful. Earlier this year, Neil deGrasse Tyson, perhaps the closest thing to Sagan in today's popular culture, rebooted the series on FOX. The first few episodes have aired, and predictably, people who don't like what science has to tell us about these cosmological questions are not happy. According to this article, creationists are apparently trying to demand "equal time;" I can't tell whether they want that time on Cosmos itself or whether they want to be given a show of their own with which to answer NDT. Here's the money quote from some creationist guy:

I was struck in the first episode where [Tyson] talked about science and how, you know, all ideas are discussed, you know, everything is up for discussion –- it's all on the table -- and I thought to myself, 'No, consideration of special creation is definitely not open for discussion, it would seem.'

The thing that's so striking about this is how very, very wrong it gets what having an open mind means for a scientist. What it means is that you don't rule out any ideas before you look at the evidence. What it most emphatically does not mean is that you don't rule out any ideas after you look at the evidence. If you can't rule things out after you look at the evidence, well, what's even the point of looking at evidence? Why bother having science at all? The whole point is to let the universe tell us what it's like. If, to use the incredibly-cliched comparison, we aren't allowed to conclude, after looking at all the evidence, that the earth is round and not flat, well, it's absurd to call what we're doing science. It's some kind of weird philosophy of how you can never really know anything, blah blah blah. To a scientist, the shape of the earth is an open question precisely until we actually observe something in the world which is only consistent with one particular answer.

And the evidence says that the universe as we know it goes back about 13.8 billion years, at which time everything in it was packed into an unimaginably small region, and immediately after which it underwent a period of extremely rapid inflation and has been expanding more gradually ever since. (In fact, we just got another big bunch of evidence supporting this explanation, which is pretty cool.) Now, there's stuff to be said about the ability of religious types to craft "yeah but god made it happen" responses to this kind of evidence, but that's not really the point. The point is that it's absurd for a bunch of people who happen to dislike what the universe has told us about its nature to demand that a science show, devoted to telling people what we know about the world, spend any significant amount of time talking about specific "alternate" theories about the universe that are known to be wrong. NDT can, and I believe did, spend a significant amount of time laying out all of the reasons why we know that the universe is 13.82 billion years old et cetera, and doing so implicitly states that any particularly literal Biblical creationist beliefs are wrong. That's the most those beliefs deserve from him.

The Qualifying Offer System, Macbeth, and Religious Morality

The current collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball and the Players' Association ushered in a new era of compensation for teams that lose a top player to free agency: the qualifying offer. It used to be that the Elias Sports Bureau would simply rank some free agents as top players, either in the A tier or the B tier. A team signing a type A or a type B free agent would forfeit its top draft pick; the player's former team would get that pick, and for a type A free agent they'd also get a bonus compensation pick after the first round of the draft. Now, each team is allowed to make a "qualifying offer," defined as being around the 75th or 80th percentile of all MLB salaries or something (and in practice around $13 or $14 million dollars the first two years), to any or all of their departing free agents. If the player declines a qualifying offer, then any team that signs them (other than, of course, their original team) forfeits their top available, unprotected draft pick, and the offering team gets a compensation pick. The top ten picks are protected.

Two years in, this system has come in for a ton of criticism. In particular, teams have been willing to make qualifying offers to mid-range free agents such as Kyle Lohse, Nelson Cruz, Kendrys Morales, and Stephen Drew. Unlike an elite free agent, these players have trouble finding much of market if their buyers also have to surrender a top draft pick. We've seen these players waiting until spring training had already started to sign, and it's speculated that it won't be long before a qualifying offer player waits until mid-season, after the draft has taken place and the compensation issue is off the board, to sign. Currently, Morales, Drew, and Ervin Santana have yet to sign, with actual spring training baseball less than a week away.

Another line of criticism, however, has emerged from this season. Of the thirteen qualifying offer free agents this offseason, four have signed with the New York Yankees. (Carlos Beltran, Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann, and Hiroki Kuroda, although he was a Yankee to begin with.) Two more have signed with the Baltimore Orioles (Ubaldo Jimenez and Brian McCann.) Of the four others who have signed, two signed with teams whose first-round picks were protected, Curtis Granderson to the Mets and Robinson Cano to the Mariners, and one, Mike Napoli, re-signed with his current team, the Red Sox. Only one team so far has signed exactly one qualifying offer free agent from another team and forfeited their first-round pick to do so, the Texas Rangers, signing Shin-Soo Choo.

What we see, in other words, is that already having signed one qualifying offer free agent makes signing the next one look a lot more appealing, because it's just your second-round pick you're surrendering. Trading your top one draft pick (and market salary) for one top free agent is a worse deal than trading your top two picks (and market salary) for two top free agents, because the draft picks have steeply declining value while the free agents do not.

Why do I mention this, and what does it have to do with Macbeth or religious morality? An excellent question. (In the unlikely event you haven't read Macbeth, read no more.)

Stop Saying Atheists Think The Universe is Purposeless (And Other Complaints About Ross Douthat)

So, as reported by Kevin Drum, Ross Douthat apparently has some new column or blog post or something that basically beats the old "how can you have morality without religion?" drum. Kevin Drum's response to Douthat is that secular ethics are in fact older than Christianity and are humming along just fine. Mine is slightly different. Here's the central passage from Douthat:

"The secular picture, meanwhile, seems to have the rigor of the scientific method behind it. But it actually suffers from a deeper intellectual incoherence than either of its rivals [the biblical or the spiritual world pictures], because its cosmology does not harmonize at all with its moral picture.

In essence, it proposes a purely physical and purposeless universe, inhabited by evolutionary accidents whose sense of self is probably illusory. And yet it then continues to insist on moral and political absolutes with all the vigor of a 17th-century New England preacher. And the rope bridges flung across this chasm — the scientific-sounding logic of utilitarianism, the Darwinian justifications for altruism — tend to waft, gently, into a logical abyss."

Can we just stop this already? It's hard to actually get to the bottom of how bad this is. I could go through it line by line. There is no sense in which the modern scientific-atheist cosmology describes the universe as "purposeless." Now, it is true that, as best we can tell, our universe was not created by anyone in particular, and therefore not for any particular purpose. It is also true that the universe was not aiming to create human beings, that instead they just arose from a not-particularly-random evolutionary process over millions of years and that they just as easily could not have. But, so what? Who said that the universe has to have been created for the purpose of having humans in it in order for anything to be meaningful or for individuals' sense of self to be real? Oh, that's right: religious people. That's entirely their idea. For most of us secular-scientific intelligentsia types, the quasi-miraculous facts of life and consciousness create plenty of purpose and meaning all by themselves. And they make it seem, well, pretty bloody obvious that the well-being of us conscious living types is important, and that people should generally act so as to increase it.

The Importance of Abstract State Intent

Here's one of my meta-theories of constitutional law: a wide variety of tricky constitutional problems can be simplified by modeling the government as an abstract corporate person, and drawing inferences about its state of mind from its actions. Or, to put it another way, forget about trying to divine the "legislative intent" of specific flesh-and-blood legislators. Just think about what might have motivated a reasonable government to adopt this measure. I'm most accustomed to thinking of this in the Equal Protection context, where my idea is that the state mayn't ever hold the belief that any of its citizens are inferior, and in the context of the religion clauses, where my idea is that the state mayn't ever adhere to a "comprehensive doctrine," e.g. a religion or a specifically atheist worldview, as opposed to a secular lack of any theological beliefs at all, positive or negative.

Well, I Suppose That's One Way to Look At It

Here's a passage from the article I'm currently reading on political thought during the Restoration Monarchy in Britain from the 1660s to the 1680s:

"The clinching argument [for the Tories] that sovereign authority must be God-given was that rulers had the right of capital punishment. Since the Commandment enjoins, 'Thou shalt not kill', the right to take life could not have been transferred by the consent of the people, for it was not a right that the people had to give."

That's... an interesting argument, seventeenth-century Tories. Observing that your religion says killing is wrong, and that your kings possess the power of capital punishment, your conclusion is not that this royal power conflicts with the relevant Commandment and is therefore wrong, but that this is evidence that the kings have a kind of quasi-divine status that exempts them from the Commandment. Interesting.

The Greatly-Leveraged Man Theory of History

I am currently taking a course on English history from 1529 to 1660 (approximately), and one of the main focuses has been on the path of the English Reformation. Right now I'm doing some research for an essay on that topic, in particular by reading about the Reformations in other European countries as points of comparison. And the overall impression I get is that, by and large, the political disposition of a given country followed the inclination of that country's monarch. There are exceptions: Protestantism flourishing in Scotland under Mary Stewart's reign and surviving in England through the bloody years of Mary Tudor, and conversely failing in Ireland despite having the support of the English overlords. But by and large it seems that the personal inclination of the actual monarch played an enormous role in determining the religious fate of each country, that just about everyone in 16th century Europe knew this, and that the exceptions to the rule tend to feature pretty substantial countervailing dynamics (e.g., in Ireland Protestantism became associated with conquest and imperialism, Catholicism with nationalism and resistance).

Now, saying things like this, or for example "the English Reformation was caused by Henry VIII," sounds sort of like the "great man" theory of history, which glorifies (and/or vilifies) a handful of supposedly extremely important people who supposedly changed the course of everything simply by being so Great (or Terrible). The divide between this approach and the antithesis of its approach can be seen in the following analysis of the rise of the conservative Republican Party in America: "the conservative movement succeeded because it had such a formidable champion in Ronald Reagan" versus "the conservative movement was a decades-in-the-making cultural shift that would have found substantial success with any decently competent leader." And "great man" analysis is extremely unfashionable right now, and for basically sound reasons. I'd say in the case of the American political history analysis I just offered, the latter explanation is basically the correct one. It really isn't just kings and princes and Presidents who shape history, the great masses of not-in-power people are at least as important as the handful who rule.

But I also think that there is such a thing as power, and that some people throughout history have had a lot of power and have used it in unusually consequential ways not because they were particularly impressive people but because they happened to have power. Think of it as not being so much about the qualities of the person but about the situation they find themselves in. We can borrow a concept from baseball here, that of "leverage," or the relative importance of each situation to the overall outcome. If Randy Johnson started for the Diamondbacks against the Giants circa 2001, the at-bats in which he pitched to Barry Bonds would've featured arguably the "greatest" possible match-up possible in that year. But the game might have been determined by the Diamondback's weak-hitting shortstop facing some Giants middle reliever in the 8th inning with runners on base and a tie ballgame, or whatever. The cast of characters involved was more mediocre, and the result itself may have been eminently mediocre, an RBI groundout to score the winning run or something instead of a dominant strikeout or a majestic home run. But that result, because of the situation, would become leveraged into a far greater impact on the final victory or defeat than it, in a sense, deserved. But that doesn't mean it wasn't important! Modern statistical analysis of sports has helped de-emphasize the perception of some players as "clutch" just because they happened to do well in one or two extremely high-leverage situations, but that doesn't mean that what happens in those high-leverage situations doesn't tend to determine the game.

Suppose you have a country with a lot of people, each of whom has to choose between Catholicism and Protestantism, and one of whom is the king. We don't need to assume that the king is any different from any of his subjects to see that his decision might be a bit more importance. Certainly broad societal and structural factors play substantial roles even in influencing the monarch's own decision, but that doesn't mean the monarch is entirely constrained. If Queen Elizabeth had happened to die early in her reign, Mary, Queen of Scots would likely have inherited the English throne. And she was a Catholic. And she might well have lived as long as Elizabeth did or longer, and she might well have been able to do what Mary Tudor had failed at and properly restored Catholicism to England. Viewing history as contingent upon the quirks of who exactly happens to be in positions of power at particular times does not force upon us the view that these people were unusually great, or that they in any way deserved or earned their positions of historic influence. They may have done, or they may have been just fortunate to find themselves in their high-leverage situation.

Of course, one neat feature of the democratic age is that it blurs this distinction. Did the structure of American economic policy change forever in the 1930s because of a broad-based social movement, or because of the efforts of those in power? Both! The people in power were there because of the social movement supporting them! Franklin Roosevelt found himself placed in one of these highly leveraged situations because the people of America acting en mass felt it appropriate to place him there. Admittedly this is only of much use when the proposed "great man" is basically the President, or equivalent office; for instance, it doesn't help us resolve the debate over Reagan and the conservative movement. But in general the democratic identity of the government with its people ought to reduce the tension between observing the importance and, yes, in some cases greatness of individual leaders and paying proper respect to the power and importance of the people at large. Bill Clinton was a great leader and a great political talent, and the American people were pretty great in selecting him to lead them for eight years.

Death Is Not Exile

I am currently in the deeply unfortunate position of having to read yet another piece of writing by Ernest Van Den Haag, prominent twentieth-century death penalty advocate and adversary of my grandfather, Charles L. Black Jr., in that debate. Now, there's a lot to dislike about the article, starting with the fact that every single moral claim he makes is vicious and wrong. But I find this an interesting passage:

"Capital punishment, a deliberate expulsion from human society, is meant to add deserved moral ignominy to death. This irks some abolitionists, who feel that nobody should be blamed for whatever he does. But murder deserves blame."

He goes on to argue that death is inevitable, while torture is not, so while we (justly in his view) have stopped torturing people as punishment, the mere act of changing the circumstances of their death to be more emphatically ignoble is perfectly okay. But, see what he does there? "A deliberate expulsion from human society." That's an awfully genteel way to describe killing, isn't it?

Of course, I assume that by using the phrase "human society" he means to imply that, when we kill these evildoers, they depart human society and arrive in the supernatural world, presumably in hell. And if you adopt a worldview with an afterlife, or even a judgmental afterlife with a heaven/hell distinction, then Van Den Haag's "exile" frame makes perfect sense. When you execute someone, after all, the only thing that happens is that they shift from one form of existence to another. That's not so different from exile from, say, Athens, or exile to the Australian penal colony. And it does make a lot of sense to suggest that, if you violate the moral laws of human society badly enough, that society is justified in exiling you. Given that there isn't any substantial portion of the earth that's used as a penal colony these days, and also no other planets we can send people to, the only method of exile would be death.

But if, instead, you assume that what probably happens when you die is that you simply vanish, that your consciousness and your personality and your everything are just snuffed out of existence, then we're not talking about some kind of metaphysical exile. Death is still inevitable, but if the only thing waiting on the other side of death is a vast gaping nothingness, then anything which hastens death by even the tiniest little bit becomes too severe a punishment to comprehend. Now, that statement by itself doesn't establish that such a punishment might not be deserved in some cases, although I also think that. But I can't help feeling like this rhetoric of treating death as exile, rather than as total extinguishing of every facet of existence, contributes to the willingness, nay, eagerness of the religious element of our society in particular for state-sponsored killing.

On Posthumous Mormon Conversion

I should preface this by saying that the Mormon custom of posthumously baptizing various "heathen" types, like Jewish holocaust victims, is weird in the extreme and kind of sick. Moreover, it's patently offensive, in the strict sense; it sends a clear message of "y'all are inferior and need our help," and there's every reason to find that message kind of offensive. And the All Dead Mormons Are Now Gay thing is bloody brilliant; these sickos deserve every little bit of messing-with we can give them, both for the weird posthumous conversion thing and for their general homophobia.

But I personally, as a strong atheist, find that the whole thing is just not a big deal. The people in question are dead. It doesn't, and can't, matter to them, because they're dead! It's just a bunch of lunatics dancing around in funny patterns and chanting absurd phrases in dark rooms in Utah. It's a nothing. Absolutely nothing about the universe, or the well-being of the dead persons in question, changes because of these absurd/obscene little rituals. You can't posthumously convert someone to Mormonism, because religious adherence requires a living mind to do the adhering. The Mormon Church can write down Anne Frank's name in a list of Mormons somewhere, but so what? That doesn't actually matter one tiny little bit.

Like I said, that doesn't change the fact that they're what I can only justly refer to as sick fucks for doing this, or the fact that it is offensive and should be considered offensive. But aside from the offensiveness thing, this isn't some big terror they're inflicting upon the world. It's just their own little insanity in their own little world.

Not What I Meant

In my Law & Society class we were just asked to give an example of an archetypal "cultural conflict"-type law, and I responded by mentioning the issues of gay marriage and contraception, which have been in the news lately. My professor's interpretation of how the contraception issue fits into that framework was that the Catholic institutions were claiming that a majority ideology they don't endorse was being imposed on them. That's not what I meant. The anti-contraception types are trying to impose their (very, very minority) ideology on everyone else. I suppose you can see it either way, depending on whom you're sympathetic to, but given how few people actually have an objection to contraception I think it's hard to really endorse the Church's claims that it's being victimized here.

Category Confusion and Religion

There's an article in the New York Times about religion, claiming to take a kind of "reasonable center" view between the "True Believers" and the "Angry Atheists." Never mind the general false-equivalence complaint to make about that kind of worldview; let's look at the way the author describes these so-called "nones," who don't fit in any well-defined religious box:

Nones don’t get hung up on whether a religion is “true” or not, and instead subscribe to William James’s maxim that “truth is what works.” If a certain spiritual practice makes us better people — more loving, less angry — then it is necessarily good, and by extension “true.” (We believe that G. K. Chesterton got it right when he said: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”)

There are a couple of problems here. One is that the "truth is what works" maxim could mean something fairly specific in a party-line scientific worldview: purported explanations of the world had damn well better be able to actually explain the world, as we observe it, or they're not true. Richard Dawkins likes to use this principle against various fundamentalist religious types, or a certain kind of "relativist" who disputes the notion of any real "truth": when you're at 30,000 feet being hurtled through the sky in a tiny little metal container, it's true that the theories of aerodynamics that predict that a plane with appropriately-shaped wings will be able to fly. Likewise, flu vaccines are based on the predictions made by evolutionary theory, and they work and fundamentalists who "don't believe in" evolution are typically perfectly happy to make use of the fact that they work. Alternately, "the truth is what works" could mean, "one ought to believe whatever it will make one the happiest to believe." This is a very different statement, but it sort of feels like that's the use to which the idea is being put in the above paragraph: who cares if it's true, as long as it makes us feel good to believe in it?

On the Ten Commandments

Noticing a theme here? Yep, it's all Establishment Clause, all the time for me today.

Anyway, I'm reading Van Orden v. Perry, in which the Court upholds the display of the Ten Commandments on the Texas capital grounds in Austin, where it is one of twenty-one monuments described as reflecting Texas' identity. The majority contends that such a display does not constitute an endorsement of religion, and to illustrate that point they mention the frieze around the walls of the Supreme Court. The frieze displays various lawmakers throughout the ages, one of whom is Moses, holding a partial copy of the Ten Commandments. The Court argues that, since this display is acceptable, the Texas display must be as well. But there's a huge difference.

The Origin of Christmas

The majority in an opinion upholding the display of creches at public Christmas displays refers to such nativity scenes again and again as depictions of the origin of Christmas. An essay by Michael McConnell argues that total secularism in society would abolish Christmas trees, Christmas lights, the star on top of the tree, etc., since each has a religious meaning. I don't doubt that those elements do have a religious meaning (though I don't know what the tree signifies). But the holiday of Christmas, as celebrated in America in 2011, did not "originate" with the birth of Jesus. According to Wikipedia, the gift-giving comes from Saturnalia, the trees, wreaths, and lights from the Roman new year, and the Yule log and much traditional Christmas food comes from various Germanic feasts, including, you know, Yule. That's the origin of Christmas: a whole bunch of ancient pagan winter festivals. Christianity co-opted those festivals, took perhaps the best of each of them, and then declared that the winter festival was now about Jesus' birth. (This, despite the unlikelihood of Jesus' having actually been born in late December.) Perhaps portraying the origin of the holiday is a secular purpose, but falsely portraying as the origin of what is actually an ancient pagan holiday co-opted by Christianity as having been Jesus' birth is plainly not one.

More on Establishment, Public Reason, and the Lemon Test

The three-pronged Lemon test, first used in Lemon v. Kurtzman to overturn state laws funding the teaching of secular subjects at parochial schools, states that a law is one respecting an establishment of religion, and therefore unconstitutional, unless it

• has a secular legislative purpose;
• does not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion; and
• does not result in an excessive entanglement with religion.

Conservatives don't like this test, and have basically managed to persuade the Court to abandon it, though never declaring that Lemon has been overturned. One thing to note about this test is that the first part, requiring secular legislative purpose, is awfully similar to Rawls' idea of public reason. You can enact a statute with a religious motive, according to this test, so long as you can also justify it using public reason alone. (Of course you still might fail the latter two prongs.) I like this requirement very much, for the following reason. Suppose the state enacts a law that could not possibly be defended under public reason, a law which could not possibly have been introduced in the legislature, in good faith, by someone lacking in any comprehensive doctrine and knowing only the public reason. What does this mean?

It clearly means that the state is not using public reason! Instead we can see that the state's internal motivation for its action must be derived from some comprehensive doctrine, or some class of such doctrines. And this means that the state itself has subscribed to a comprehensive doctrine, or some class thereof. But what on earth is an establishment of religion if not the state's subscribing to a particular religious doctrine, or a particular class of religious doctrines? Suppose that New Jersey passed a law saying "The State of New Jersey believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ." This would be plainly unconstitutional, right? Even if it doesn't have any tangible effect on anyone directly, this is an establishment of religion. But when the state passes a law that one cannot possible support without believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ, that law contains, implicitly, the above statement. It is therefore just as unconstitutional, every bit as much an establishment of religion. One can broaden the statement, perhaps maximally to "the State of New Jersey believes in God." That's invalid, therefore anything which could not be supported without that belief is invalid. Prayer to open legislative sessions, or court sessions, or whatever: invalid. "In God We Trust" on the money: invalid. "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance: invalid. All of these things declare that the government, not just the people, believes in god. And the government is not allowed to believe in god, even if every single one of its officials does.