Senior officials of the Federal Reserve now warn that the United States faces a Japan-style deflation and a prolonged period of stagnation like Japan’s “lost decade” of the 1990s. The New York Times’ website reports:

The warning by Bullard, who is a voting member of the Fed committee that determines interest rates, comes days after Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, said the central bank was prepared to do more to stimulate the economy if needed, though it had no immediate plans to do so.

Bullard had been viewed as a centrist and associated with the camp that sees inflation, the Fed’s traditional enemy, as a greater threat than deflation.

But with inflation now very low, about half of the Fed’s unofficial target of two percent, and with the European debt crisis having roiled the markets, even self-described inflation hawks like Bullard have gotten worried that growth has slowed so much that the economy is at risk of a dangerous cycle of falling prices and wages.

The Federal Reserve has conducted the most stimulative monetary policy in its history, keeping the federal funds rate (the overnight lending rate to banks) at only 0.25 percent, while purchasing over $2 trillion in securities from the markets. And that has not helped at all.

Now St. Louis Fed President Bullard wants the United States to consider a “quantitative easing” in the form of direct purchases of Treasury securities from the market. That’s what the Fed has been doing, and that’s what the Japanese did, in massive size. It didn’t help there, either.

It is disturbing to hear such idiocy from senior officials of the central bank. In all the American recessions and recoveries of the past four decades, big businesses shed jobs permanently and startups created new jobs. There is an enormous literature on this phenomenon, which I have reviewed in the past. The Census Bureau and the University of Maryland recently calculated the net creation of jobs by age and size of business, and the results show that new and businesses create most new jobs.

Source: University of Maryland and Census Bureau

The Fed and the administration claim that the problem is that small businesses can’t get bank loans. The problem, they insist, is monetary policy. Big businesses are being rewarded for laying off workers, stripping down to bare bones, and earning profits on their core businesses. They are—wisely, given the fecklessness at the rudder in Washington—hoarding cash; they don’t want to borrow.

But startup small businesses shouldn’t be financed with bank loans (except for secured financing of inventories and receivables). Most small businesses fail. This is Portfolio Theory 101. If you own the stock of 100 startups, and 99 go bust but one becomes Microsoft, you get rich. But if you are a bank, and you lend money to the 100 startups, and only 1 can pay you back, then you go bust.

Thus startups are financed with equity, not debt. This is taught to first-year finance students.

It doesn’t occur to the somnolent wizards of Constitution Avenue that the way to lure capital back to entrepreneurial activity is to increase the after-tax reward to entrepreneurs, by eliminating the capital gains tax, for example, or, even better, eliminating all taxation of capital income. Monetary policy has nothing to do the case. Monetary policy best addresses currency stability. Tax incentives best address economic growth.

Demographics drive deflation, and our demographics are not good. First, an aging population saves, and savings are deflationary. As people near retirement, they must substitute future goods (savings instruments entitling them to consumer in the future) for present goods (consumption)—so the price of present goods falls.

The government may attempt to substitute its own spending for household spending but it never quite works, no matter how many public works projects the government sponsors. Japan poured more cement than anyone else—and the decade was still lost.

As I wrote in July 2009, America’s demographic profile has a disturbing resemblance to Japan’s at the beginning of the 1990s,the beginning of its famous “lost decade.” Its population had just began to age dramatically. Over the decade, the elderly dependency ratio rose from 17 percent to 25 percent. As the Japanese aged, their appetite for savings naturally and rationally grew, and they had to save more and more as their stock portfolios and home values crashed. But the more they saved, the worse the economy did. The government lowered interest rates to 0.25 percent or less and ran up spectacular government deficits and couldn’t change the aging population’s desire to save as much as they could. The result was deflation: falling asset values and a strong yen.

Fast forward to America in 2010, with an elderly dependency ratio of 19 percent, a little higher than Japan’s in 1990. By 2020, it will rise to 25 percent, almost as fast as Japan’s. Americans also have seen their stock prices and home values crater, and—again, naturally and rationally—have suddenly shown an insatiable appetite to save rather than spend.

There’s a second reason aging drives deflation. Old people are creditors, young people are debtors. Inflation transfers wealth to debtors from creditors, because the debtors pay back their debt in cheaper dollars. A country with a preponderance of old people will show strong political pressures against inflation. That’s why the Japanese never objected to deflation. As an aging people, too many of them benefited.

Japan Dependency Ratios Medium variant 1970-2020

United States of America Dependency Ratios Medium variant 1970-2020

Source: United Nations

There is nothing that the United States can do about its aging demographic in the short run. The deflationary headwind is built into our aging population. But that should increase our sense of urgency about the need for pro-growth economic policy, including a pro-family policy that eventually will bring down the average age of the population, so that we don’t end up a geriatric ward like Japan two generations from now. America can’t afford to lose a decade.

David P. Goldman is a senior editor at First Things.

Resources

David Goldman discusses Japanese style deflation on CNBC's Kudlow Report.

As one member of Solidarnosc said to me with some bitterness in 1990, “If you socialized the Sahara, in two years people would be lining up to buy sand.” In fact, most of those associated with the early years of Solidarnosc—the great Polish liberation movement SolidarIty—had had all the collectivism, socialism, government-controlled economy, nanny state, and thugocracy they could stomach.

Since I do not read or speak Polish, I was not able to learn all the arguments by which Solidarnosc came to formulate its own first principles, or to govern its daily actions. What I do know (from a distance) is Solidarnosc as a real movement of people during our lifetime.

Solidarnosc was a lone movement that, against the expectations of a world that considered Communism a permanent structure, led the Polish people to throw off communism almost as a dead snakeskin. And then, amazingly, it held free elections almost immediately, launched a quite honorable government, and got Polish democracy off to a good start.

Naturally, Solidarnosc was comprised of socialists and social democrats. The surprise was that its leaders in the years 1989 to 1991 spoke more forcefully in favor of “democratic capitalism” than those of any neighboring country—and most western European countries, too.

Pope John Paul II’s closeness to Solidarnosc—its place in his heart, and his sense of its world-historical rupture—was never in doubt. I remember meeting him in the first group to meet with him after the attempted assassination, the Slovak World Congress. He was pale and thin, but full of good humor and wit. He immediately spotted the Solidarnosc button I was wearing on my lapel, broke into a huge grin, laid his index finger on the button, and called it to the attention of all around. (He ignored my Adam Smith tie.)

I remember, also, back in late 1992 or 1993, a young man appearing at my office door in Washington, not a little nervous at being in a place called “The American Enterprise Institute,” the very infernal pit (as it might be thought back home) of Marx-blackened “capitalism.” In a hesitant voice, he told me he represented Solidarnosc, and was here from Krakow to ask me if Solidarnosc please could publish my new book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, in Polish.

I gave him an immediate “yes.” Then I said, mischievously, “But I will have to charge you royalties.” His face fell. “In fact, two royalties." He was disconsolate. "First, you must send me one copy. Second, you must get a copy to the Pope.” The young man’s face lit up brightly. “The second,” he said,” will be easy. The first may take us a little longer.”

We shook hands. He was happy. I was exultant. It was a great, great honor to help such a God-given movement as Solidarnosc, even in so small a way. I still have two Samizdat copies. Miniatures, about as big as a hand. They are my treasures. I have donated one to the Library of Congress.

Later I was told that Vaclav Havel held a study group on this book, discussing it part by part in a mountain hideaway in the Czech territories. In 1990, shortly after the “Velvet Revolution," it was the second western book to appear in Czech translation, after Friedrich Hayek’s.

A world-shaking movement such as Solidarnosc cannot, I think, be expressed in one philosophical idiom only, let alone in some narrow ideology. It was real, it was concrete, it was human, it was moving forward from contingency to contingency. It had its own goals clearly in mind, and followed its own inner lights quite faithfully.

Five hundred years from now, the world shall still be in its debt. It brought Communism to a premature death, and saved the world from an immensely costly, seemingly endless war.

I saw the new intellectual movement associated with Solidarnosc as part of the inner energy of the economic thinking of Pope John Paul II, part of his concrete, this-worldly hope for a New Civilization of Love. I suspect that Pope Benedict XVI holds very similar views, but it is manifest that many in Rome still hanker for collectivist solutions, and are afraid of free persons acting freely.

I wish Solidarnosc had taught them a lesson they would never forget, as obviously they have. For Solidarnosc showed in the most unlikely circumstances the power of freedom in the lives of men driven by their faith and its vision (per John Paul II) of a free and open society.

Michael Novak has just retired from the George Frederick Jewett chair in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute and is a member of the editorial board of First Things.

On visiting San Francisco in 1968, Tom Wolfe stumbled across what he describes as a “curious footnote to the hippie movement.” Doctors at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic were treating diseases, Wolfe claims, that no living doctor had ever encountered before: “diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.”

The diseases returned, says Wolfe, because the hippies living in the communes wanted to sweep away “codes and restraints,” including those rules

By getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, and the rot, the hippies were “relearning” the laws of hygiene.

It is often said that for national security conservatives, it is always 1938. A corollary is that for us religiously-oriented conservatives, it’s always 1968. Our society is always having to be retaught the laws of moral hygiene.

Take, for example, a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times that argues the “war on drugs” has also contributed to the HIV epidemic around the world. It references “the executive director of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and other prominent scientific leaders,” and claims that

Somehow the editors and the "prominent scientific leaders" they invoke managed to miss the fact, as Matthew Hanley recently noted in an article for On the Square, that there is no reliable evidence needle exchange programs reduce the incidence of HIV infection.

Why would anyone think it would? Giving clean needles to heroin addicts makes as much sense as giving clean toothbrushes to a Haight-Ashbury hippie: They'll still share it—both the needle and the toothbrush—with the bass player from Jefferson Airplane because they either don’t understand or don’t care about the hygienic consequences of their actions.

In response to this type of foolish disregard for the codes and restraints of nature and society, doctrinaire liberals and libertarians always proffer policy solutions that require . . . further disregard of traditional codes and restraints. How this leads to a better society is unclear. But they harbor no doubts that it would work if only The Man, and his arbitrary rules, weren’t holding everyone down.

Naturally, we religiously-oriented conservatives are skeptical. Unlike these Rousseauian utopians, we can’t even pretend to know how to build a healthy political and social structure. What we do know, however, is how to recognize a sick one.

Just as physicians define bodily health as the absence of sickness, conservatives view the absence of sickness as the best gauge of the health of the body politic. Our primary socio-political objective, therefore, is similar to that of medical doctors: preventing and eliminating moral sickness.

The media critic and educator Neil Postman used this same medical analogy in describing the proper role of teachers. In his essay “The Educationist as Painkiller,” Postman proposes that educators don’t try to make students intelligent (“because we don’t know how to do that”) but instead try to cure stupidity in some of the more obvious forms: “either-or thinking; overgeneralization; inability to distinguish between facts and inferences; and reification, a disturbingly prevalent tendency to confuse words with things.”

Acquiring similar expertise should be the goal of all conservatives. Fortunately, the process for gaining such prowess is clear and well-established.

To become an apprentice of stupidity one merely has to pass through the stage of life known as adolescence. The lessons you’ll learn by observing the behavior of yourself and your peers provides the tacit knowledge of what stupidity feels, looks, sounds, and tastes like.

But to become a true expert in stupidity requires becoming a parent. The task of raising a child consists primarily of recognizing and preventing the myriad varieties of behavioral stupidity that children engage in—mental, moral, hygienic, spiritual. Whether it’s keeping a toddler from eating the contents of the cat’s litter box, preventing a teenager from fornicating with a lip-pierced lothario, or simply stopping the kid from sharing their Shasta with a hippie, parenting is a non-stop immersion course in counter-impudence.  

This is why the natural family, the preeminent conservative institution and the primary conveyor of Tradition (the mores and habits of stupidity prevention inherited from previous generations), must be continuously protected from the pollution of our libertine culture. It's our first and strongest line of defense against the excesses of unfettered individualism. If we don’t preserve the natural family, we’ll all learn firsthand, as Sergeant Stryker said, that “Life is tough, but it's tougher if you're stupid.”

Joe Carter is web editor of First Things.

Resources

Matthew Hanley’s “Reducing Risk, Increasing AIDS” can be found here.
Tom Wolfe's "The Great Relearning" can be found at the website of The American Spectator.

One does wonder sometimes about God’s ways with his most devoted servants. Several years back, Father James Schall, S.J., one of the greatest of American Jesuits and the living embodiment of Catholic liberal learning at Georgetown, was struck by an illness that cost him an eye. This summer, Father Schall is recovering from some nasty surgery, which involved removing a cancerous jawbone and its attendant teeth and replacing the jaw with bone taken from Schall’s leg. Father Schall has taken this with his customary faith, good humor, and sang-froid; his convalescence, and his enormous grace amidst suffering, prompt me to pay him long overdue tribute.

He is a deeply learned man, yet he wears his learning lightly. He looks the part of the old-school Jesuit he is: if someone told me that, like the late Cardinal Avery Dulles, Schall uses duct-tape to fix his battered shoes, or that he cut chunks out of old Clorox bottles to make the tab collars for his faded clerical shirts, I wouldn’t be surprised. He is a marvelous teacher and a great spiritual director; and he is both because he is a man at peace with the absurdities of the world, which he knows to be part of a divine plan he doesn’t presume to grasp fully. Yet he is no ambiguist: he would rather thrust his hand into the fire than put a thought not congruent with the truths of Catholic faith on paper. I imagine he would happily die a martyr; the thought of the axeman’s face, confronted with Father Schall’s smiling, one-eyed visage, is worth a meditation.

He is the author of many books: some, exercises in political philosophy of the highest caliber; others of a more popular sort. His scholarly work is finely balanced between Jerusalem and Athens, embracing both revelation and reason. And while he has written on just about everything, from Plato to American sports, he brings to whatever engages his attention that sense of wonder with which all true thinking starts.

The man is also very, very funny. Indeed, he once concocted the greatest book subtitle since Gutenberg. Another Sort of Learning is a guide for university students adrift in the vacuities and disarray of so much of contemporary higher education. An insight into Father Schall’s qualities as mentor to those lost in the groves of academe (or to those wondering, years later, what happened to them there) may be gleaned from what follows the invitation to “another sort of learning” on the book’s cover: “Selected Contrary Essays on How Finally to Acquire an Education While Still at College or Anywhere Else: Containing Some Belated Advice about How to Employ Your Leisure Time When Ultimate Questions Remain Perplexing in Spite of Your Highest Earned Academic Degree, Together with Sundry Books Lists Nowhere Else in Captivity to Be Found.”

Were I ever to find anything I had written on a James Schall book list, I would face the final assize confident that I could give a satisfactory answer to the question of what I had done to all those trees.

How did Catholicism get great priests and teachers like Father Schall? That’s perhaps the most urgent question facing Catholic higher education today, as the generation of giants that emerged from the Catholic intellectual renaissance of the mid-20th century passes from the scene. My hunch is that the giants we have known—and, in the case of Father Schall, hope to know for years to come—combined a distinctively Catholic rootedness in the intellectual tradition of the West with a sense of adventure in engaging a modernity of which they were neither overawed nor afraid. A solid son of the American Midwest (Pocahontas, Iowa, in his case), James Schall could think clearly in the turbulence of the late 20th and early 21st century because he was solidly grounded in the enduring truths, and because he was a man of faith who knew that God’s purposes would, finally, win out in history. May God grant him a swift recovery and many more years of showing us the way.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

A scruffy man, tanned and good-looking, dressed in an old leather jacket and snug jeans, is on a motorcycle zipping through a neighborhood near you. He’s a restaurateur into “local” everything, a man whose produce vendor is one among many sexy women who want to hook up with him. He was also, years ago, a sperm donor who, unbeknownst to him, achieved reproductive success.

Meet Paul, who is about to encounter the California lesbian couple who each became pregnant with his sperm. In a moving, at times ambivalent and, despite its attempts at realism, largely fantastical exploration, the new hit movie The Kids are All Right probes the emotional fall out after eighteen-year-old Joni makes a phone call that results in a first-ever meeting between the two teenagers, their biological father (played by Mark Ruffalo), and the mothers (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) who raised them.

The movie is rich on particulars and complexity; there are no stock characters here. The lesbian mothers are sympathetic, funny, and attractive, but have their faults. The daughter is a classic overachiever who wants to protect her mothers. The fifteen-year-old son is a jock with feelings, at ease in a world of women but not one of them. If you came looking for a heavy-handed defense of gay marriage or a commercial for gay families, all happy-go-lucky behind their white picket fences, you won’t find it here.

What you will find is a sometimes searing exploration of the raw emotions at stake when women who never intended for their children to have a father suddenly find a father in their lives. “The plan was to limit the involvement,” says one, desperately. “He’s their biological father and all that crap,” says the other. “And it’s really sh---. Like we’re not enough or something.”

The film also exposes the task that confronts children when they meet their sperm donor father, for the first time, once their childhood is largely over. On their way to meet Paul, protective Joni warns Laser, her brother, “I just don’t want you to have big expectations.” Later, Laser asks Paul, “How much did you get paid?” Paul admits, “I got paid 60 dollars a pop.” Laser flinches, and so do we, at a child’s bald confrontation with the cold facts of his commercial conception.

Despite the attempts at realism, the movie is a fantasy. To begin with in real life, these kids would not have found it so easy to find their sperm donor father. And it’s equally unlikely that he would resemble the easy-going, available Paul.

The movie implies that the children have an identity release donor, a concept pioneered by the lesbian-friendly Sperm Bank of California in the 1980s. The policy allows children to learn the identity of their sperm donor when they turn eighteen. Once Joni makes the phone call, in the blink of an eye Joni, Laser, and Paul are sitting at an outdoor table, bathed in sunlight, playing get-to-know-you.

For most donor conceived persons, this is the stuff that dreams are made of. Throughout its long history (the first recorded case of donor insemination in America took place in Philadelphia, in 1884), sperm donation has nearly always been an anonymous transaction. Male infertility was a source of shame, and going outside the bonds of marriage to reproduce with the aid of modern medicine was thought best kept a secret for the sake of everyone involved.

Even today, with greater societal openness about sexual matters, still most donor offspring have not even been told the truth by their parents about how they were conceived, and the law continues to allow anonymous donations of sperm and egg. If young people do find out they were conceived through sperm donation, they have almost no hope of finding their biological father.

While lesbian couples and single women who use sperm donation have tended to be more open about how the children were conceived (the obvious lack of a father does raise the question), they often use anonymous sperm donors, too. Some lesbian women fear that a non-anonymous donor might someday challenge them for custody of their children. Others have other reasons, recently highlighted in a publication by COLAGE, a support and advocacy organization for children of gay and lesbian parents and their families.

One lesbian mother says she and her partner chose an anonymous sperm donor because “we didn’t want to triangulate our parenting or form a life-long negotiated relationship with anyone else but ourselves.” Another says she had a “fear that our child [would] at some point wish for a father and embrace a relationship with the donor seeking this, in ways that harm[ed] our child or displace[d] our parenting relationship.” Another says, “we wanted [our children] to have 2 parents who were moms only.”

Granted, Joni and Laser have an identity release donor. But in these cases, the sperm banks only promise to provide their most recent contact information for the donor to the child who has reached age eighteen. It’s up to the sperm donor to keep his contact information updated. If you do locate him, he probably won’t live a short motorcycle ride away, as Paul does. He could live in another part of the country, or another part of the world. He probably now has a family of his own (in the movie, Paul does not) and his wife might not be thrilled about him meeting his other children. Or he could be dead.

The film also implies that Joni and Paul are the only children resulting from Paul’s donations. The fantasy depends on his being able to give them his undivided attention (and so it is also useful that Paul is single). In the United States, there are no limits to how many children can be conceived with one donor’s sperm. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine offers merely a professional recommendation that one donor father no more than 25 children.

If a man donates at more than one clinic, there is no way to know how many children he has. Some donors have discovered they have dozens of children. One donor in the United Kingdom has more than sixty. If other children conceived with Paul’s sperm start coming forward, how much of Paul will there be to go around?

But for the moment, let’s accept the premise of the movie. The kids have found their sperm donor biological father. Now what? Ambiguity reigns, and it’s up to the children to make sense of it all.

The COLAGE guide is authored by a young man who was himself conceived through sperm donation and raised by lesbian mothers. Of the sperm donor, he says, “we must decide what this person means to us.” He notes the “challenging task of defining the relationship with your known donor.” He reassures the reader, “It is completely normal and okay to speak up about the kind of relationship you want with your donor.”

When the institution of something called fatherhood falls apart, this is what happens. We leave children to define the relationship of themselves to their fathers. Children must decide what this person “means” to them. They should “speak up.”

Some might be able to do this. But what about the others? What about the ones who are not gifted with emotional intelligence—the ones who aren’t skilled at negotiating ambivalence and speaking up about their own needs in the face of their parents’ tender feelings?

And what about those whose sperm donors have no interest in being fathers? In the COLAGE guide, one young woman says, “My donor doesn’t seem to be particularly into the whole father thing with me, and it caused me quite a bit of pain trying to get him to be.” Another says: “I grew up having certain expectation of what roles my [sperm donor] . . . would play in my life and when [he] didn’t fulfill those expectations, I was hurt.”

A recent study of donor-conceived adults, reported in My Daddy’s Name is Donor, found that, overall, donor offspring are hurting more, more confused, and more isolated from their families compared to those who are adopted or raised by their biological parents. Two-thirds say, “My sperm donor is half of who I am,” even though few know who that donor is. They are significantly more likely than other children to be struggling with problems like substance abuse, delinquency, and depression.

In The Kids are All Right, the actors benefit from a script. In real life, there is no script for these kids. It’s up to them to figure everything out and make the best of it. The person whom a child rightly considers her father is a man who might well believe—probably does believe—that he is just a “donor.” That is not—at all—all right.

Elizabeth Marquardt, the director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values, is co-investigator of the ground-breaking My Daddy’s Name is Donor, which reports a large study of adults conceived through sperm donation. The report is available at FamilyScholars.org, where she also blogs.

For a long time as a young teacher, I believed the danger of prostituting their minds by believing falsehoods was the preeminent, or even singular, intellectual danger my students faced. So I challenged them and tried to teach them always to be self-critical, questioning, skeptical. What are your assumptions? How can you defend your position? Where’s your evidence? Why do you believe that?

I thought I was helping my students by training them to think critically. And no doubt I was. However, reading John Henry Newman has helped me see another danger, perhaps a graver one: to be so afraid of being wrong that we fail to believe as true that which is true. He worried about the modern tendency to make a god of critical reason, as if avoiding error, rather than finding truth, were the great goal of life.

Like Plato and St. Augustine, Newman presumed that human beings fundamentally seek to know the truth. Our hearts are restless, not with fear of error, but a desire to rest in God, who is the fullness of all truth. The fulfilling activity of intellectual life is to affirm truth rather than recoil from falsehood.

Critical reason, which Newman sometimes calls “strict reason,” and which he certainly did not reject, parses arguments, examines premises, and tests hypotheses. It filters belief. Strict reason is critical, not creative. The methods of critique “will pull down, and will not be able to build up.” Clear-minded and scrupulous analysis clears the underbrush of error, but it cannot plant the seeds of truth.

Therein lies the danger. If we fear error too much, and thus overvalue critical reason, we will develop a mind active and able in doubt but untrained to move toward belief, a mentality too quick to find reasons not to nurture convictions.

Ideally, we would like critical reason to minister to the more fundamental project of affirming truth. We picture ourselves scrupulously examining various truth-claims, weeding out the irrational ones, and then judiciously assenting to those that seem to have solid grounds.

As Newman recognized, life does not work that way. In the first place, our mental machinery isn’t so finely tuned. Of any one of our convictions, he says in a pithy formula, “That according to its desireableness, whether in point of excellence, or range, or intricacy, so is the subtlety of evidence on which it is received.”

In other words, answers to really important questions can’t be answered very easily. Is equality more important than freedom? Does my bodily death extinguish my existence? Are my moral obligations to others more important than satisfying my desires? Is happiness the same as pleasure?

The great French mathematician Blaise Pascal made a similar observation, which I formulate in the following way: The certainty with which we can know a truth is inversely proportional to its importance.

Neither Newman nor Pascal implied that we cannot reason about important things. On the contrary, Pascal famously formulated an argument designed to induce us to answer one of the most important of all questions: Does God exist? As Pascal’s wager suggests, both Pascal and Newman recognized that truth outruns our powers of reason. Therefore, we need to risk error as we leap forward to grasp what we hope to be the deeper truth of things.

In my experience, although the modern university is full of trite, politically correct pieties, for the most part its educational culture is cautious to a fault. Students are trained—I was trained—to believe as little as possible so that the mind can be spared the ignominy of error. The consequences: an impoverished intellectual life. The contemporary mind very often lives on a starvation diet of small, inconsequential truths, because those are the only points on which we can be sure we’re avoiding error.

We can worry about getting on the wrong train in the foreign train station whose signs we can’t read. But we should also worry about dithering in the station too long and thus failing to get on the right train. We could starve to death in that station if we never leave. This, it seems to me, is the essence of Newman and Pascal’s insight. Sometimes, the dangers of failing to affirm the truth are far greater than the dangers of wrongly affirming falsehood.

If we see this danger—the danger of truths lost, insights missed, convictions never formed—then the complexion of intellectual inquiry changes, and the burdens of proof shift. We begin to cherish books and teachers and friends who push us and romance us with the possibilities of truth.

The life of the mind turns into an adventure. Errors risked seem worthy gambles for the sake of the rich reward of engrossing, life-commanding truths that are only accessible to a mind passionate with the intimacy of conviction rather than coldly can critically distant.

R.R. Reno is a senior editor of First Things.

If Pakistan's intelligence service continues to plot terrorist attacks with the Taliban in Afghanistan, as the mass of documents released yesterday by Wikileaks allege, who is responsible for covering this up for so many years? The answer, I argue in this morning's Asia Times Online, is everybody.

As of 9:00 a.m., there was nary a mention of one of the year's biggest news stories on either National Review or the Commentary magazine website. Perhaps that is because the new documents put as much egg on the face of the previous Republican administration as on the present Democratic one. "What elephant in the parlor?," sadly, is not a full-credit answer.

It is hard to dismiss the documents as a fabrication: Who has time to forge 92,000 documents in a credible style imitation of American military-speak? And if the documents are genuine, it is hard to dismiss them as unimportant. Even for those of us with an extremely dour view of the Afghan War (and I took such a view in my May 2010 First Things essay, "The Morality of Self-Interest"), the contents are eye-popping. Certainly they reinforce my view that the nation-building strategy of the past Republican administration was a delusion. Social engineering doesn't work, whether attempted by the right or the left.

Everyone has a good reason to ignore the suppurating mess that is Pakistan:

No one will accuse me of dovishness. But to continue to sacrifice American lives in Afghanistan under the circumstances seems stupid and immoral. It may be true that Afghanistan will be a breeding ground for terrorism when American troops leave, but Pakistan already is a breeding ground for terrorism. But there are other, cheaper ways to deal with the problem. Here's an idea: freeze travel between Pakistan and the United States (or subject prospective travelers to extreme scrutiny) until Pakistan roots out and punishes the elements of its military who help the Taliban kill Americans and their allies.

As for the threat that Pakistan may become a failed state: Pakistan already is a failed state. America's natural ally in the region is India.

David P. Goldman is a senior editor at First Things.

In the early spring months of 1950, the city of New York witnessed an outbreak of juvenile delinquency. Late at night, prowling gangs were stealing those iconic Department of Sanitation iron-mesh trash cans from New York’s street corners—and local newspapers at the time were in a dither.

That was also the time when America was going through one of its many flying-saucer crazes, a mania that would in that same decade bequeath to pop culture the delightfully cheesy sci-fi movie The Day the Earth Stood Still and the equally cheese-laden TV hit The Twilight Zone.

The coincidence of these two “leading cultural indicators” prompted the always whimsical New Yorker to publish a captionless cartoon by Alan Dunn in its 20 May 1950 issue, which showed a flotilla of flying saucers bivouacked on the Great Lawn of Manhattan’s Central Park: in the foreground could be seen aliens schlepping up DSNY trash cans into the cargo holds of their spaceships.

While all this was going on, the famous Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi was working away at the famous government laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. One day, he was chatting to Edward Teller and Herbert York as they walked over to a cafeteria for lunch, where they were joined by Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and John von Neumann (all except Fermi and York were Hungarian émigrés).

Their topic was the recent spate of UFO sightings. (Roswell, site of perhaps the most famous claim of alien-visitation, was after all in the same state.) At that point another colleague, Emil Konopinksi, joined the group and told his fellows of the Dunn cartoon. Fermi drolly remarked that Dunn’s was a reasonable theory because it accounted for two distinct phenomena: the disappearance of trash cans and those recent reports of flying saucers. Just what scientists are supposed to do!

When the men sat down to lunch, discussion turned to other topics. Then, in the middle of the conversation and seemingly out of nowhere, Fermi asked: “Where is everybody?” Thus was born what has become known ever since then as Fermi’s Paradox.

Orbiting a middling star nestled among a teeming flock of other suns in our galaxy, which is itself one galaxy among billions of others, the earth must be one of countless planets just like it, so obviously we are not alone. But if there are so many ETs out there, then, as Fermi asked, where is everybody?

Fermi’s is a genuine paradox, because the same principle that is invoked by others to say that intelligent aliens are out there he used to refute the assertion. That principle is called the Copernican Principle or, perhaps more helpfully, the Principle of Mediocrity, which in colloquial terms means “We ain’t that special, so get over it.”

If we suppose—as the Mediocrity Principle tells us we must—that we have appeared somewhere in the middle of countless other episodes of intelligent beings emerging from their countless earth-like planets, then these earlier aliens must already have evolved far beyond our own pathetically primitive civilization. So they should already have arrived, and a long time ago too—just to show off their fancy new hotrod spaceships, if for no other reason. We would. But they haven’t. A paradox.

There are of course ways of short-circuiting this paradox, the subject of a most amusing book by the physicist Stephen Webb—whose amusement starts with its lengthy title: If the Universe is Teeming with Aliens, Where is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life.

There are three basic options for answering Fermi: either aliens have already been here (Hollywood’s preferred solution); or they exist yet have chosen, for whatever reason, not to communicate with us (which is possible, but runs afoul of Ockham’s razor); or they don’t exist (Fermi’s solution).

Actually, solution #1 was already mooted that day at lunch when Fermi first enunciated his paradox. Szilard said, no doubt with a twinkle in his eye: “They are among us, and they call themselves Hungarians,” presumably a droll reference to the Hungarians’ remarkable intelligence.

And of course all those people who claim that the pyramids in Egypt were built by visitors from outer space, or that they themselves have been abducted by aliens, or actually saw flying saucers landing on their patios right next to papa’s home-built barbecue pit, have resolved the paradox to their satisfaction. Don’t believe them? Well, just check out the photographs taken on their iPhones and posted on their Facebook pages! (Skeptics might refer to unidentified flying objects, but they’re not at all unidentified to the folks who laps up supermarket tabloids.)

Webb has no trouble dispatching these reports of UFOs (and takes Hungarian chauvinism in stride too). The big problem with option #1—and it is a big, big problem—is the “slowness” of the speed of light.

Now the speed of light might seem pretty fast to us. But when judged against the vast distances in the universe, it plods along like a Sunday stroller out to take in the sights. It takes a full four years for the light coming from earth’s nearest star to get here, and billions of years for light from distant galaxies to get here. On earth, down in this woe-begotten vale of tears, even Indian smoke signals get better results.

Moreover, photons are able to travel at the speed of light only because they’re massless. Something as heavy as a spaceship laden with supplies for a long journey would take prodigious amounts of energy, and even then it would arrive at many of the Milky Way destinations we’d like to visit in about the same amount of time it took the human species to evolve from its last hominid ancestors about 200,000 years ago. And as for intergalactic travel, forget about it.

But since radio waves also travel at the speed of light, surely we should have picked up by now signals from the exo-versions of I Love Lucy and The Ed Sullivan Show. But so far, nothing has been picked up—despite numerous toilsome efforts of those dedicated drones who check their computers and radio telescopes every night at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. No ET seems to be phoning here.

So maybe the third solution is the only one left. Certainly we’d have to conclude we are truly alone if evolution on earth is as contingent as some evolutionary biologists say it is. For example, the late Steven Jay Gould claimed that if we rewound the “tape of evolution,” it would be extremely unlikely that humans would emerge again. Daniel Dennett retorts in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea that in that case SETI would make as much sense as the search for extraterrestrial kangaroos.

But even if the emergence of intelligent humans is quasi-inevitable, that still doesn’t mean that the Mediocrity Principles now kicks in. Perhaps the features of our solar system make earth unique as a home fit for life. Such is the argument of Simon Conway Morris’s book, whose subtitle gives away the thesis: Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe.

Conway Morris teaches both evolutionary biology and earth sciences at Cambridge University, which gives him a double expertise in this debate. (He is also a practicing Christian and gives Richard Dawkins a scorching blast of well-deserved criticism in his book).

According to him (and numerous others cited by Webb), Jupiter’s position and size are crucial, enabling it to serve as a kind of deflector shield to keep most asteroids and comets from hammering away at earth on a regular basis. Moreover, the moon had to come into being with only this mass and this orbit in order to stabilize earth’s own rotation around its current tilted axis, which of course has to be tilted “just so” to allow the right weather fluctuations to permit life. And how likely is that to be replicated elsewhere? these authors rhetorically ask.


Webb concludes his book—after covering far more options than I have outlined here—by insisting that we are indeed alone. Myself, I’m rather agnostic on the debate and can identify with W. H. Auden’s chipper cleric in his poem “Letter to Lord Byron”:

At least my modern pieces shall be cheery
Like English bishops on the Quantum Theory.

I can’t claim, though, that Webb’s conclusion is all that “cheery,” but it sure is awesome—in both senses of awesome: filling us with both awe and dread. This is the kind of feeling Pascal was referring to in his Pensées, where he said: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” (This line, which is said by French critics to be the most beautiful sentence ever coined in the French language, and one that is supposed to be memorized by every French schoolchild, should perhaps be cited here in its French original too: Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.)

Whether Pascal was speaking in his own person here may be doubted, since there are indications that he was writing up a draft for a kind of Dialogue Concerning Religion in the manner of David Hume but died before he could shape his randomly collected thoughts into coherent form. At all events, he certainly anticipates later existentialists when he (or his fictive dialogue partner) says:

One of my favorite Christian authors, writing about the Christianity of his day, said that popular faith is “like a farmer who needs a horse for his fields; he leaves the fiery stallion on one side, and buys the tame, broken-in horse. This is just the way men have tamed for themselves a usable Christianity, and it is only a matter of time and honest thought before they lose interest in their creation and get rid of it.”

The man who wrote those words was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German Lutheran theologian. For Bonhoeffer, Scripture was not an academic discipline, or a personal hobby, or a collection of useful wisdom. It was the living Word of God, the furnace that powered his life. And it had a cost. It led him to oppose National Socialism, then to work against Adolf Hitler, then to his arrest, and finally to his execution.

There’s nothing tepid or routine about a real encounter with Sacred Scripture. In his Narnia tales, C.S. Lewis warned that Aslan is a good lion, but he is not a “tame” lion. Likewise, God’s Word is profoundly good, but it is never “tame.” Augustine thought Christian Scripture was vulgar, inelegant, and shallow—until he heard it preached by St. Ambrose; then it grabbed him by the soul, and turned his world and his life inside out. When Jesus said “I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled” (Lk 12:49) he spoke not as an interesting moral counselor, but as the restless, incarnate Word of God, the Scriptures in flesh and blood, on fire with his Father’s mission of salvation.

Scripture is passionate; it’s a love story, and it can only be absorbed by giving it everything we have: our mind, our heart and our will. It’s the one story that really matters; the story of God’s love for humanity. And like every great story, it has a structure. Talking about that structure and its meaning is my purpose here today.

A simple way of understanding God’s Word is to see that the beginning, middle and end of Scripture correspond to man’s creation, fall, and redemption. Creation opens Scripture, followed by the sin of Adam and the infidelity of Israel. This drama takes up the bulk of the biblical story until we reach a climax in the birth of Jesus and the redemption he brings. Thus, creation, fall, and redemption make up the three key acts of Scripture’s story, and they embody God’s plan for each of us.

Creation

Modern Christians often seem uneasy with the Bible’s account of creation. As a result, we miss the important truths embedded there. At the heart of the Christian story of creation is the fact that God is good, and the Maker of all things. Therefore, all of his creation has an inherent goodness. At the center of the creation account stand man and woman, made in God’s own image and likeness. In Genesis, humanity crowns the created world as a final, perfected expression of God’s love. In a sense, our love for each other, which is most obviously shown in the covenant of marriage, is a reflection of God’s own identity. God himself is a communion of love in Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and this is the divine joy that God created us to share in.

Fall

At least that was the plan. Unfortunately, we know what happens next. Scripture moves pretty quickly from creation, to man’s temptation and Fall in Adam’s original sin.

Here we need to understand the Book of Genesis for what it is: a poetic account, not a newspaper report—but nonetheless a reliable expression of the truth about the history of humanity. God’s Word tells us that at some very early point in our past, our first parents freely chose to violate their original innocence. They turned away from God’s will. In doing so, they imprinted a wound and a weakness on all human generations that followed them, including our own. This is what the Church means by original sin. Every one of us is born a victim and carrier of that original wound. It separates us from God. It inclines us toward selfishness, weakness and evil. And we cannot heal that wound by ourselves. We cannot save ourselves. Only God can do that.

We live in a time that treats science not simply with the respect we should feel for a useful tool, but with a kind of idolatry for the power it seems to promise us. Sin is an “unscientific” idea, an embarrassment to human pride. Therefore it’s out of fashion. But unfashionable does not mean untrue. The proof of original sin is written on every page of the record of the last 100 years: the bloodiest in human history, with the worst sort of barbarism done in the name of the highest sounding political idealism. Sin is real. And more to our point today, the fact of original sin is a foundation stone of the biblical narrative. The cross of Jesus Christ means nothing at all if original sin is unreal. A Gospel of “redemption” makes no sense if we have nothing—no captivity to sin and death—that we need to be redeemed from.

Sin makes us, as St. Paul says, “fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23). It defaces who God intended us to be. Sin quite literally “de-humanizes” us. This is its tragedy; but it’s also the context for understanding the mission of Jesus Christ.

Redemption

To claim that Jesus “saves us from sin” is certainly true. But it also understates the grandeur of God’s plan for us, achieved through the blood of his Son. Jesus does more than erase our sins, like a debt canceled or a blot washed away. He goes far beyond that. Jesus does indeed free us from sin, but he also elevates us for sonship (Gal 4:3-7).

In his death and resurrection, Jesus restores each of us, to use the biblical language, to the glory of God. This is why the Church sings at the Easter Vigil the Exsultet, “O felix Culpa,” O happy fault of Adam. Adam’s sin is reversed and transformed in the redemption won by Jesus Christ. It’s a “happy fault,” a beautiful and Godly irony, because our freedom purchased with the blood of Jesus Christ has not only restored the dignity of humanity, but lifted all of us beyond our imagining.

Grace heals, perfects, and elevates nature. And therefore Jesus seeks more than just our healing or even our perfection, which would simply take us back to the original innocence of Adam and Eve. Jesus goes even farther, seeking to “elevate” us, desiring nothing less than to give men and women a share in God’s own nature. As St. Peter says in his second epistle, God has granted us his power so that we may become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pt 1:4).

New Creation

At this point in Scripture, the biblical theme of a new creation begins to make sense. The New Testament tells us that the victory won in the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not simply a new exodus from sin, but even more grandly, a new creation.

At the start of Jesus’ passion, we find him praying in agony in a garden (Jn 18:1). The early Church Fathers saw Gethsemane as an echo of Adam in the Garden of Eden, and St. John’s Gospel goes out of its way to stress that Jesus’ tomb is likewise in a garden (Jn 19:41). St. Luke may also be referring to Eden when he recounts the words of Jesus to the good thief, that he will be with him in paradise, using the same word in Greek that Scripture uses for the Garden of Eden (Lk 23:43). Luke’s Gospel also takes Jesus’ genealogy all the way back to Adam, implying that Jesus is the new Adam (Lk 3:23-38).

The “new creation” images found throughout the work of St. John climax with the resurrected Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit upon the apostles (Jn 20:22), just as God breathed his Spirit into Adam in the first creation (Gen 2:7). And of course, the picture of a new Eden closes out Scripture’s story in the Apocalypse. The Heavenly Jerusalem that comes down to earth is described as having a river running through its midst with the tree of life beside it, bearing 12 kinds of fruit, and leaves for the healing of the nations (compare Gen 2:10 with Rev 22:1-2).

The resurrection of Jesus itself, however, is the central and most powerful scriptural image of a new reality. St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 says that Jesus is the “first fruits” of God’s new creation. He goes on to contrast Adam with Jesus, referring to the latter as the “last Adam” saying that “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven” (1 Cor 15:49). In Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians he stresses that Jesus’ resurrection ushers in a new creation, saying, “Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come” (2 Cor 5:17).

Matthew, Luke and John all name the day of Jesus’ resurrection as the first day of the week. The early Christians saw this as signifying the first day of the new creation. The old creation came about through the symbolic six days of creation. Now, the new creation has only one day, what the Gospel narratives refer to as the “first day of the week.” This single day for the new creation, in contrast to the six days for the old, hints that the new creation has only just begun. God has begun the work of the new creation with the resurrection of his Son. And this Godly work, begun on the first day of the week, teaches us that a new age has begun. Those who believe in Jesus Christ, and conform their lives to him, take part in this new creation.

Early Christian converts studied the faith in the catechumenate for up to three years to prepare for baptism. This time of study focused on the story of God’s plan as recorded in Sacred Scripture. They immersed themselves in the Bible’s story so that they could see God’s story as their own story. After their time of study, which intensified during the weeks of Lent, they would then come to the Easter Vigil where they would be baptized.

Many ruins of ancient Christian churches have a baptistery, often with three steps that lead into a small pool, and three more steps going out on the opposite side. Catechumens would strip off their old clothes before descending into the water. Then, after being baptized, they would robe in a white linen garment. The disrobing signified the putting off of Adam, and the enrobing the putting on of Christ. In another tradition mentioned by St. Augustine, the persons seeking baptism would stand on animal skins and furs, a symbol of discarding the robes that Adam and Eve made for themselves when they hid from God. And after they were baptized, they would put on cloth sandals so that their feet wouldn’t touch the earth, indicating they were no longer of this world but of the new creation.

The baptismal rite showed that not only do we die to Adam and our old sinful nature, but also that we’re now clothed in Jesus Christ; partakers in his resurrection and in the life of this new man. In baptism we become, to use Paul’s words, a “new creation in Christ.” But equally important for Paul is whether or not we’re now actually living as a “new creation” and being true to our new identity; at least that is what he says in his closing words to the Galatians (Gal 6:15). Paul even goes on to give a blessing to “those who walk by this rule” (Gal 6:16).

Sharing in God’s blessed life Now if this is God’s plan for us—to walk by this new rule, living as a new creation; or as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, sharing in God’s own blessed life (CCC, 1)—just how are we supposed to do that?

In his Letter to the Galatians, Paul spells out how Christians are to “walk,” which is a Hebrew metaphor for the moral life: “But I say, walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Gal 5:16). The Holy Spirit is the key to the new creation. In baptism the Christian is healed, her sins are washed away, and in receiving the Holy Spirit she has divine life imparted to her. And just as God’s Spirit hovered over the waters at the creation of the world in Genesis, so too since Pentecost, the Holy Spirit has poured out upon Christians, pointing to the truth that God is once again pursuing his creative ways, bringing about a regeneration and renewal—in effect, a new creation (Titus 3:5-6).

The Holy Spirit is the engine of the new creation, but we need to freely choose to cooperate with God’s work. We need to “walk” by the Spirit and be “led by the Spirit” (Gal 5:18; Rom 8:14). Paul contrasts the works of the flesh with the fruit of the Spirit: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal 5:22-24). For St. Paul, we must choose between two roads, the way of the flesh that surrenders to the disordered passions we inherit in our wounded human nature; or the way of obedience to the Holy Spirit, which allows God to take root in us and bear the fruits of love, joy and peace.

Paul uses that metaphor of “fruit” as a characteristic of God’s new creation. And this is very deliberate. Fruit must be carefully cultivated. We can’t just plant seeds and sit back expecting a big harvest. Likewise, in baptism the Holy Spirit is planted in our souls, but we can’t be passive or tepid about our faith. The farmer labors over his fields. The gardener cultivates her garden. This takes time. So too, the extent to which God’s new creation takes root in us depends upon our efforts, sustained over time, to help it grow.

On our own, of course, we’re unable to achieve anything—much less live the life of God; the life of heroic love and goodness implied in Jesus’ new creation. We succeed as Christians only in the degree to which we allow God to graft us into the life of his Son. Each of us has a unique and unrepeatable role in the drama of salvation history. But God is author of the story, and its main actor. Therefore we succeed as disciples and as genuinely “human” beings only if we live in Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ works through us for our own salvation and the salvation of others.

We do that by creating in our daily lives a time for prayer, silence, and for reading and studying the Word of God. We do it by worshipping together in the community of God’s people. And we do it by submitting our pride and our lives to our mater et magistra—the Church who is our “mother and teacher,” precisely because she is also ecclesiam suam, “his Church,” the Church Jesus Christ founded, guides and loves for the salvation of his people.

More than 15 centuries ago, St. Leo the Great said, “Christian, recognize your dignity, and now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return to your former base condition by sinning.” His words are equally true today. The story of Scripture is the greatest story ever told—a story of God’s creative power, man’s betrayal, God’s redemptive love; and a new destiny for humanity greater and more beautiful than anything any of us can imagine. What man has violated—including himself—God makes new and better.

A friend of mine recently took the train from Chicago to Denver, and during the journey he met about a dozen Amish families with children and young adults of all ages. They were traveling together, all of them in their distinctive clothing, to a vacation Bible camp in the Rockies. The Amish live a radical version of New Testament Christianity shaped by family, community, humility and separation from the world. Many avoid the use of electricity. Many will not ride in automobiles. But what struck my friend in his conversations with these families wasn’t their strangeness, but their joy, their lack of fear and their trust in each other.

Here’s the lesson. The Amish have plenty of problems, just like everyone else. Life without an SUV doesn’t keep the devil away. But the Amish do, radically and communally, what Bonhoeffer did in the difficult circumstances of his time, and what God calls each of us to do in our own daily actions: to order our lives wholly and zealously to the Word of God, trusting that his Word is the source of all justice, peace and truth. It’s also the source of an extraordinary joy (see Rom 5:2, Phil 4:4-7, and Jn 14:27).

God created us because he loves us with a tenderness and a passion written across the stars and woven into the beauty of the world around us; and his mercy, his loving kindness, endures forever. Our destiny is joy and glory in God’s new creation. That’s God’s plan for each of us. So be agents of that new creation. “Put on Christ” and “walk in the newness of life,” steeped in God’s Word and eager for God’s grace in the Liturgy. Live the life God calls you to right now, this weekend, in this conference—and in your witness, God will renew the face of the earth.

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., is archbishop of Denver.

“Intelligence,” both in the national security as well as the ordinary sense of the term, is limited by the culture from whence it stems. Dana Priest’s and William Arkin’s Washington Post account of chaos in the American intelligence community, “A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control,” has prompted a round of finger-wagging at both the Bush and Obama administrations. But the glaring problems in America’s intelligence services stem from an underlying failing in American culture, exacerbated by massive over-resourcing and duplication of effort in response to 9/11.

According to Priest and Arkin, “The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is actually counterproductive, say people who receive them. Some policymakers and senior officials don’t dare delve into the backup clogging their computers. They rely instead on personal briefers, and those briefers usually rely on their own agency’s analysis, re-creating the very problem identified as a main cause of the failure to thwart the attacks: a lack of information-sharing.” They report:

But where is the intelligence community likely to find personnel qualified for foreign intelligence? A rough but useful gauge is the number of university students studying the languages terrorists typically speak.

According to the Modern Language Association’s 2006 survey of instruction in foreign languages, American universities enrolled only 2,463 students in Arabic at the advanced level. Of those “advanced” students, perhaps one in ten would become expert. Apart from immigrants, whom intelligence agencies employ only with great caution, the prospective hiring pool of advanced students in Arabic is measured in the hundreds.

In other languages of special interest to counterterrorism, the MLA reports the following number of students (but does not tell us how many are “advanced”): 0 Albanian, 94 Bengali, 243 Farsi, 301 Indonesian, 5 Kurdish, 5 Malay, 103 Pashto, 4 Somali, 624 Turkish, 344 Urdu.

One simply can’t find Americans to process foreign intelligence in Middle Eastern languages, much less infiltrate hostile groups. Israel, by contrast, has more Arabic speakers than it requires. An Israeli friend who served in the intelligence corps as a translator of electronic eavesdrops of Egyptians (he once transcribed an Egyptian general engaged in telephone sex with his mistress) was relieved of his last decade of reserve duty, because the army had a surfeit of language experts.

As I wrote seven years ago in another Spengler essay, America may have the lowest-quality intelligence service of any great power in history in linguistic and cultural capacity. Why don’t more Americans learn foreign languages why do the children of immigrants forget the languages they already know? At German festivals in Wisconsin with lederhosen-wearing brass bands, Weissbier and bratwurst, no one can form a single German sentence. Italian-Americans march through the streets to celebrate Columbus’ birthday without knowing more than a few obscenities in a southern dialect.

The reason is that these people came to America precisely in order to shed their culture—more precisely, to flee the tragic destiny of their cultures. The poor and the rebels Immigrated to America. Not the Milanese but the Calabrians, not the Berliners but the Bavarians, not the assimilated Jews of Germany but the persecuted Jews of Russia made their way westward.

These people had—with a few exceptions like the German political exiles of 1848—little stake in their own cultures and no connection to the high culture of the countries they abandoned. What did the Irish immigrants care for Shakespeare, or Russian-Jewish immigrants for Tolstoy? They shed their old culture almost as fast as their traveling-clothes.

By contrast, as John Keegan reported in his book Intelligence in War, no more than 3,000 regular British officers controlled India under the British Empire. They could do so with so few because they spoke local languages, often wore native dress, and knew the culture of the native troops they commanded.

As I noted in a “Spengler” essay, the British Raj depended on soldier-adventurers like Richard Burton., Traveling South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and even the American West, he learned twenty-five languages and fifteen dialects, and his translations of Arabic and Sanskrit classics remain in print. He passed for a Sindh on the Northwest Frontier and for a Haji in Mecca. T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) earned a first in Medieval Studies at Oxford and spent years in archaeological excavations in Syria before serving as an English agent in World War I.

Ten thousand cubicle-dwellers with a master’s degree in international relations won’t produce the results of a single Lawrence or Burton. As a result of this failing in American culture, the 850,000 Americans with top security clearances keep busy shuffling intelligence reports provided by foreign governments, already translated into English.

The problem is, as I say, exacerbated by the massive over-resourcing and duplication of effort in response to 9/11. Under great pressure to do something after 9/11, the Bush administration threw unlimited resources at the problem, and the Obama administration is doing the same. The result brings to mind the 1415 Battle of Agincourt, where the French lost 7,000 to 10,000 men, the English 112. The French literally tripped over each other.

According to the now-standard account, English archers did not directly cause most of the casualties. Instead, the chaotic French response entrapped the superior French forces in a sea of mud and left armored French knights the prey of common soldiers with knives. Military historians write about the “jostling effect” of undisciplined French cavalry attempting to charge through a limited space at the same time.

America is fighting a sort of Agincourt, but from the French side, and with similar results. A similar “jostling effect” arises from the interaction of 850,000 government personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances and their staff, producing tens of thousands of “briefings” per day. If a hostile power wanted to confuse and distract the American military, it could not do better than to flood American policymakers with irrelevant and confusing data.

The signal-to-noise ratio is so low that information of value is irretrievable. Of course, different branches of the military respond to the problem by creating their own intelligence services outside of the normal channels.

The French catastrophe at Agincourt arose from a cultural flaw. The historian C.W.C. Oman wrote that French armies of the period were “composed of a fiery and undisciplined aristocracy that imagined itself to be the most efficient military force in the world, but was in reality little removed from an armed mob.” The French aristocracy never dared put weapons that could kill armored knights into the hands of peasants; English yeomen, meanwhile, mastered the longbow.

The Obama administration has made matters worse, though, in an important way. American intelligence had major weaknesses during the Cold War, but managed some important victories through defectors. Many defectors from the former Soviet bloc were horrified by what Communism had done and joined the American side for moral reasons. This was particularly true when the Reagan administration restored America’s economic position and world standing.

By analogy, radical Islam has attracted many highly-educated Muslims who live in the West, and they are the most dangerous among the potential terrorists. But these Muslims are vulnerable to the message that Western freedom is superior to the blind and brutal submission of radical Islam’s death-culture. The Reagan administration’s bold denunciation of an “evil empire” in the Soviet bloc was echoed in the Bush administration’s characterization of an “axis of evil.”

President Obama’s un-exceptionalism—for him, “American exceptionalism” is the same as “Greek exceptionalism”—makes bringing in defectors much harder. In the absence of defectors, America must rely on other intelligence services for language skills and at present it relies on less-than-friendly ones to a disturbing extent.

Israel always has been an important collaborator with American intelligence, and one presumes that India, with its enormous linguistic and cultural resources, might become one as well. Our cultural failings leaves us no choice but to rely on others, but we must be careful to choose on whom we will rely. The “Augustinian realism” that I advocated in “The Morality of Self-Interest” in the June-July issue would seek alliances of principle that would ameliorate the deficiencies of American intelligence.

David P. Goldman is a senior editor of First Things.

RESOURCES

Priest and Arkin’s "A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control"
The Modern Language Association’s "Enrollments in Languages Other Than English" (Fall 2006)
Spengler’s "Do you call that an empire?"
Spengler’s "Why America is losing the intelligence war"
David P. Goldman’s "The Morality of Self-Interest" (Available only to subscribers)

Following the Supreme Court’s (in)famous 1947 decision, Everson v. Board of Education, which constitutionalized a strict-separationist interpretation of the Establishment Clause on the basis of the Clause’s purported original meaning, generations of scholars have sharply disagreed on what the original meaning actually is. In Church, State, and Original Intent, Donald Drakeman, a lecturer in Princeton University’s department of politics, shows that the strict-separationist interpretation was a house built on sand.

Beginning with the Mormon polygamy case, Reynolds v. United States (1879), the Court repeatedly turned to the most distinguished historians of the era to ground its historical claims. In writing their Everson opinions, Justices Hugo Black and Wiley Rutledge followed historians Charles Beard and Irving Brant.

The weak foundation they provided for the strict-separationist interpretation was the claim that James Madison’s and Thomas Jefferson’s activities and writings, particularly Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance and Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, grounded the Establishment Clause’s original meaning. “[E]stablishment clause jurisprudence,” Drakeman writes, “clearly owes a considerable debt to Whiggish myth-making by a number of respected historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”

Relying on the Justices’ notes and correspondence, Drakeman argues that both Black and Rutledge “set off on a premeditated search-and-employ mission to locate historical events” to support their preferred outcomes.

Rutledge, for example, marshaled the writings of Madison and Jefferson to protect “secular” public schools—and hence, in his view, American democracy—by refusing public funding for Catholic schools. He admitted to a friend that he “felt pretty strongly about the Everson case but tried to keep the tone of what I had to say moderate and also to avoid pointing what I had to say in the direction of any specific sect. The Virginia history was admirable for the latter purpose.”

Black agreed to the funding at issue in Everson, but refused to countenance further religious school funding. He then set out to cull arguments from Reynolds and the ACLU’s brief to support this outcome.

Drakeman’s work bolsters that of other scholars, such as Philip Hamburger in his Separation of Church and State, who have shown that many aspects of the Supreme Court’s strict-separationist interpretation were, as Justice Clarence Thomas described it in Mitchell v. Helms (2000), the product of anti-Catholic animosity. His exposition of the Everson court’s flawed history is both a cautionary tale for originalists and a lesson that today’s sophisticated originalism is a viable project.

First, originalism’s critics have frequently argued that originalism is a flawed interpretative methodology because it requires honest historical analysis of issues of great import and this is simply too much to ask of judges. There is a significant amount of truth to this criticism. Everson shows that judges can construct a plausible case for mistaken historical claims to achieve desired policy outcomes.

This brings us to the second lesson: Originalists, recognizing this criticism, have rearticulated originalism to overcome it. For example, today’s originalism focuses on the constitutional text’s publicly understood meaning when it was ratified, instead of the purported “intent” of the Clause’s framers. This makes it harder for justices to cherry-pick “framers” to reach their desired result. Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), exemplifies this approach.

Another move made by originalists, one followed by Drakeman, is distinguishing between constitutional interpretation and constitutional construction. Interpretation is the activity of recovering the Constitution’s determinate original public meaning. Construction is the activity of creating constitutional meaning when the original meaning is indeterminate. This distinction permits originalists to acknowledge when history “runs out.” It makes originalists modest in their historical claims by relieving them of the task of finding all the answers in history.

Given the Supreme Court’s historical focus and, more importantly, the stakes for the contending sides in the church-state debate, it is not surprising that Everson “created a cottage industry populated by prolific originalists.” Drakeman groups them into nonpreferentialists, strict-separationists, and the “enhanced federal[ists].”

Nonpreferentialists claim that the Clause permits nondiscriminatory aid to religious groups and activities, while strict-separationists contend that it forbids governmental aid to religion. Enhanced federalists make the more limited claim that the Clause preserves state jurisdiction over religious matters and denies jurisdiction to the federal government.

Drakeman gives each camp a fair hearing and, in doing so, performs his own historical analysis. He concludes—noting that this conclusion does not fit his policy preferences—that the Clause’s “original meaning was to forbid the establishment of a single national religion.” (Call this the “no-national-church” interpretation.)

The most important historical fact, he writes, is that the Clause’s adoption engendered little controversy or debate. The strict-separationist interpretation, which would have, is therefore implausible. Only the no-national-church interpretation, which was widely accepted by Americans in 1791, can account for this lack of significant debate.

The enhanced federalism position fits the absence of controversy and is therefore a plausible reading of the Clause’s text, but Drakeman rejects it. It “is arguably consistent with the language but unsupported by the documentary record [while the] no-national-church reading [has] a great deal of evidence in the records of all of the relevant events.”

Other historical evidence, he argues, makes his no-national-church interpretation superior to the strict-separationist and enhanced federalism interpretations. For example, both state and later the federal governments aided religion, while the primary substantive concern behind the Clause was that a Protestant denomination would become the established national church.

Drakeman also rejects the nonpreferentialist interpretation, though here his arguments are less persuasive. He acknowledges that state and federal governments aided religious groups and activities—both materially and rhetorically—but argues that, since this aid was primarily directed at Protestant denominations—to the exclusion of Catholics, Jews, and other religious groups—it is not evidence of truly nonpreferential aid. “Whether genuinely nonpreferential financial support for religion in general would have constituted an establishment in the minds of Americans in the Founding Era is an interesting but entirely hypothetical question.”

Why, then, if preferential aid to religion is not an establishment, nonpreferential aid is? If the original meaning of “establishment” did not preclude preferential aid to religion, it would not preclude practices less analogous to an established church, such as nonpreferential aid.

Perhaps the most potent example of federal nonpreferential aid to religion, as Drakeman notes, was the continuous federal aid to Indian missionaries, including Catholic missionaries. The extensive record of government aid to religion shows that the nonpreferential interpretation was, like Drakeman’s own no-national-church interpretation, relatively noncontroversial and therefore a plausible interpretation.

The no-national-church interpretation of the Clause, Drakeman argues, is the broadest interpretation the evidence will support. Beyond that core of determinate original meaning, there is insufficient linguistic consensus.

For instance, as he argues, the term “establishment” included legally established preferences for one sect or denomination, but we do not know what it may have meant beyond that. Hence, the Clause does not answer many of the questions that exercise church-state debates today. These are (or ought to be, under the Constitution) the domain of constitutional construction by the political branches.

Though one may disagree with this conclusion, Church, State, and Original Intent is a valuable addition to our understanding of the Constitution’s original meaning, even in a crowded scholarly field. Donald Drakeman provides a fair and accessible review of the history and scholarship on the Establishment Clause’s original meaning, shining a light on the unpersuasive historical basis upon which the Supreme Court adopted its strict-separationist interpretation.

Lee J. Strang is associate professor of law at the University of Toledo College of Law and is currently writing on the history of Catholic legal education (with John M. Breen) and on the place of virtue ethics in originalism .

Roland Bainton, who died in 1984, was a fixture at the Yale Divinity School for more than four decades and remained an influential Church historian over during two decades of retirement. His most popular book was Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther; but Luther scholarship has gone far beyond Bainton since Here I Stand was published in 1950. Bainton’s Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, however, which was first published in 1960, continues to exert a significant influence on Christian thought today. The question is whether that influence is helpful, or baleful.

According to Bainton, there are “three Christian positions with regard to war,” which evolved in “chronological sequence, moving from pacifism to the just war to the Crusade.” This evolution, Bainton suggested, was really a devolution or deterioration, reflecting an abandonment of primitive Christian purity and an untoward alliance with the state: after Constantine, the Church cut itself off from the moral purity of the evangelical counsels and the Sermon on the Mount and began, in Stanley Hauerwas’s memorable phrase, to “do ethics for Caesar.” A truly reformed Christianity—a Christianity true to its origins and to its Founder—is thus, necessarily, a Christianity that embraces pacifism.

That this historical schema is firmly fixed in many minds is self-evident to anyone who’s been involved in Christian debates over war and peace since Vietnam. That the prescription attached to the schema—a return to the purity of primitive Christian pacifism—has had a deep effect on the Catholic Church (which had long resisted Bainton’s understanding of the history of Christian thought on this point) is also obvious. Thus many Catholics who hold to some version of the just-war tradition now smuggle into it a pacifist premise: the just-war tradition, they argue, begins with a “presumption against war,” a “presumption” that goes far beyond the obvious moral truism that nonviolent problem-solving is preferable to problem-solving through war. That even Catholics who subscribe to this revised just war tradition feel somewhat guilty about doing so—and feel guilty on the ground defined by Bainton—is also obvious from the tenor of the Catholic debate before the Gulf War and the Iraq War.

Thus Bainton has cast a long shadow. But did he get the history right? Does his simple, straightline schema—from pacifism to just war to Crusade—stand up to the best of contemporary scholarship?

In an important article in the spring 2010 issue of Logos, the quarterly published by the Catholic Studies Program of the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., theologian J. Daryl Charles argues that Bainton got it wrong, by failing to give an “accurate accounting of the complexity and diversity of pre-Constantinian Christian attitudes toward the military.” Drawing on the last half-century of historical study of the early Church, Charles reminds us that, while there were indeed early Christian pacifists who took their moral cues for thinking about war and peace from the Sermon on the Mount, there were also Christians in Roman military service long before to the Constantinian settlement in the early fourth century.

Moreover, following the research of James Turner Johnson, Charles suggests that whatever difficulties military service posed for Christians in, say, the second century A.D., had to do with state-enforced idolatry rather than with soldiering per se. The early Church, as Charles puts it, lived with “divergent strands of thinking” on war and peace and the ethics of Christian participation in the military, a plurality of thought that “does not require” the assumption of a “universal or uniform conviction” that pacifism was the only imaginable Christian position, on the Bainton schema. Things were more complicated—and more interesting—than that.

The world being what it is—the Korean peninsula, the Middle East, Iran, jihadism and its lodgments in failed or dysfunctional states—the debate over the morally legitimate use of armed force is not going away; rather, it is going to intensify. Christians will best engage in those debates if they liberate themselves intellectually from the simplistic and inaccurate schema that Roland Bainton taught us 50 years ago.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Last year, the Irish government published the Murphy Report detailing sexual abuse cases among the clergy, and more damningly, cover-ups by the bishops. Then there was the dustup over a cleric from Pope Benedict’s old diocese in Germany, who was reassigned while in sexual rehab. Now we see very sad and ugly revelations about a Belgian bishop, along with the usual history of negligent oversight: bishops dismissing plausible accusations from faithful Catholics as mean-spirited gossip and leaving the abuser free to continue.

I won’t be at all surprised if there are more revelations, perhaps many more, and some of them even uglier. As David Hart once observed, human nature often disappoints.

But there is a deeper story, one missed by the mainstream media. I’m more and more convinced that we are witnessing an important moment of sociological change, of which the European scandals are as much symptoms as cause.

From time immemorial the leadership of the Catholic Church has been part of the European elite. It is the nature of elites to protect their collective status, which requires hiding faults, winking and nodding at various sins, being “realistic” about the harder requirements of their traditions, co-opting public authorities, and fixing more serious problems and transgressions behind closed doors, while interpreting criticism and exposes of problems as destabilizing attacks on the institutions of the elite.

Over the last year or two, when faced with what seems to them to be a strangely aggressive campaign against the failures of the hierarchy in the sex abuse scandals, Vatican officials have tended to mutter about “plots” against the church. Doubtless some very powerful people would like to torpedo the Catholic Church.

One wonders, for example, about Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, who famously described himself as a “collapsed Catholic” and pictured the Church as a force of “absolutism” opposed to “tolerance.” But in the main the notion of a coordinated, conscious plot seems implausible.

Nonetheless, the feeling of coordinated pressure is quite real. Recall Hillary Clinton’s infamous grips about a “vast right wing conspiracy.” A new sociological fact she did not recognize—the emergence of an articulate and politically powerful conservatism in post-sixties America—felt like a conspiracy. The Catholic hierarchy and the Vatican bureaucracy are also facing changed social circumstances that constellate into something of such force and consistency that it feels to those on the inside like a plot against them.

In the old days, chief investigators, mayors, judges, as well as media moguls, thought of the bishops as key partners in the elite governance of society and culture. You don’t embarrass partners in public. Instead, you work things out through back channels. The Church was happy with this arrangement.

Now, in part because of her own negligence and culpable mismanagement, but more significantly because of the dramatic decline of cultural relevance, the Catholic Church no longer enjoys the perks and protections of elite status. In fits and starts, powerful actors in Europeans societies are making all sorts of decisions—who to investigate and how hard, what to report and how hard—that can only be read as a judgment that the Church doesn’t get a pass anymore.

The Belgian story is perhaps clearest. I find it very hard to believe that when he was active whispers about Bishop Vangleluwe’s pedophilia didn’t reach people at high levels in the Belgian government. It’s not a big country. And I wouldn’t be surprised if officialdom held back, following the unspoken rules of elite society.

Then, BOOM. Police raids, computers impounded, and holes drilled into crypts so that spy cameras can be inserted. Perhaps the chief investigator’s office was as blindsided as the Vatican, suddenly waking up to the fact that the Church is now outside the magical circle of elite society, and that elite society, always attuned to changes in status, demanded the Church be treated differently. Scrambling to action, they overcompensated with heavy-handed tactics.

My point is not to criticize the Belgians. Nor do I want to give another analysis of the roots of the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. Instead, what I want to point to is the important—lastingly important—change in the Church’s place in the world the scandal has revealed.

After World War II, the Catholic Church assumed a very important role in the political and social life of a re-constructed Europe. This was especially true in Italy and Germany, where de Gasperi and Adenauer’s successes, which were both narrowly won and of tremendous importance of post-War Europe, grew out of close cooperation with the Catholic Church.

And to a great extent, the impetus for reform at the Second Vatican Council came not from an effort to regain relevance, but instead from an acute sense of responsibility for reshaping the Church so that she might better fulfill her central place in Europe’s future. It was not to be. It is a cold sociological truth that since the Council drew to a close in 1965, European culture has gone in different direction, so much so that it is a commonplace among Vatican officials to speak of the Church as counter-cultural.

I don’t think, however, that the Catholic hierarchy has grasped the sociological and institutional consequences of counter-cultural status. If you’re not a player, you’re much more vulnerable: more vulnerable to being flayed by public opinion, more vulnerable to journalistic Jihads, more vulnerable to politically aware governmental officials who see that skewering bishops can advance careers, more vulnerable to angry protesters and bitter victims.

So, yes, of course the Catholic Church has brought the current scandals upon herself, with a great deal of blame going to the hierarchy. But the social impact, the lasting consequences, the feeling that a great deal it in peril? No, it’s not a function of sin within the Church, however horrifying the sexual abuse might be on its own terms. Instead, the scandals reveals a change that is part of a realignment within European societies.

Put simply: the Church has become largely disestablished on the ground, with few going to church (a social reality the consequences of which were masked, perhaps, by the remarkable charisma of John Paul II), and therefore it can no longer retain the privileges of social establishment, one of the most important of which is protection from debilitating criticism.

If I’m right about the larger dynamics at work in the current round of scandals, the Church is in for a tough season. The expulsion from the elite makes her leaders supremely vulnerable.

They will be soiled not only by the sins of the past (and present)—sins that arise with frightful immediacy out of the wickedness of the human heart—but also by the compromises of exercising power in a fallen world. Palms need to be greased. The sins of important allies require being covered up. Coalitions have to be built on less than idealistic foundations.

All this will continue. The Church cannot just drop her portfolio of establishment responsibilities and their corresponding assets. But now expelled from the elite, in the future these compromising social responsibilities must be exercised without the protections that flow to the elite. Indeed, German or Belgian or Italian authorities will be very tempted to make an example of the Catholic Church so as to divert attention from their own compromises and corruption.

The long term danger? As expulsion from the European elite creates more and more vulnerabilities, an atmosphere of crisis will allow liberals within the Church to rally, promising to restore the Church’s secular status by realigning her governance and doctrine—and particularly her moral teaching—with the methods and values of the twenty-first century secular elites.

This will be a tempting promise. It’s painful to slide down the ladder of status. Life at the top is not only more comfortable, it’s safer. Life would be easier if the New York Times and the Belgian police saw the Church as part of their club. Moreover, as the editorial policy of the Times in recent weeks has made clear, the secular elites will support the Catholic liberals.

It’s not as though Pope Benedict is unaware of this danger. He has identified the renewal of the liturgical life of the Church as the way to create ballast to weather what is likely to be the most important social change in European Catholicism since the French Revolution—or more accurately, the dramatic final act of changes initiated in 1789, if not in 1519.

But even Benedict’s renewal can only do so much. The Vatican also needs a more flexible central command, one capable of coordinated, intelligent responses to challenges. Her governing structures and bureaucracies are superannuated forms of a system originally designed to run a Church thoroughly intertwined with European society, not a vibrant, active, and counter-cultural Church. The Church needs a leadership that know they are always at a disadvantage, and that they can no longer rely on deference or favors if she is to meet the storm, and it will be a storm, of social disestablishment and elite hostility.

R.R. Reno is a senior editor at First Things and Professor of Theology at Creighton University. He is the general editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. Keller’s comments can be found in his 2002 column Is the Pope Catholic?.

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine features an optimistic cover story: “The New Abortion Providers” by Emily Bazelon. It recounts the decades-long struggle of abortion advocates to become more accepted by the medical profession, because at the moment, the vast majority of abortions are done in isolated, high-volume, abortion-specialized clinics. The new goal for abortion supporters is “to recast doctors, changing them from a weak link to abortion to a strong one . . . with the hope that, eventually, more and more doctors will use their training to bring abortion into their practices . . . to integrate abortion so that it’s a seamless part of health care for women—embraced rather than shunned.”

“This is the future,” writes Bazelon. “Or rather, one possible future. There’s a long way to go,” she exhorts.

But it’s not the future. And it won’t be—for the same reasons abortion hasn’t really become accepted in all these decades it’s been legal in America—indeed, for the very same reasons Bazelon cites in her article. Young OB-GYNs aren’t keeping up with their predecessors in performing abortions (“in a 1992 survey of OB-GYNs, 59 percent of those age 65 and older said they performed abortions, compared with 28 percent of those age 50 and younger”); fewer OB-GYN residencies are offering abortion training (“in 1995, the number . . . fell to a low 12 percent”); donors who fund abortion-training residency fellowships are scarce (two of the only main fellowship grants come “from one foundation and from one family [of which] the donor has chosen to remain anonymous”); the number of doctors providing abortions out of their offices has dropped significantly (“doctors’ offices now account for only 2 percent of the total number of procedures; hospitals account for barely 5 percent”); and the American public is more anti-abortion now than ever (“some poll numbers [show] that for the first time, more Americans call themselves pro-life than pro-choice—a shift that includes young people.”). Basically abortion supporters are growing old and aren’t being replaced as quickly by the younger generation. The dream to make abortion mainstream is dying.

With the facts as they are, the article’s optimism for increased abortion acceptance in mainstream America is at best wishful thinking, at worst willful delusion. The publication of the piece can’t help but seem a part of a pro-abortion agenda: trying to prop it up to be a successful, growing industry, supported by most of the public—despite the fact that it isn’t.

America and abortion have always been an uneasy match. Unlike in Europe, where abortion was legislated slowly over time democratically and with regulations built in from the start, abortion on demand in America was legalized overnight by a Supreme Court decision, which in part explains why it’s still such a volatile, unresolved issue in America today. Legalized abortion was rushed and forced from the start, and it’s been a hard, rocky road since. After a while the abortion supporters in this article start to sound like the infatuated person who’s in denial that her partner really isn’t right for her. She keeps thinking he’ll change, or somehow the road will smooth out and things will work, even though things have never gone smoothly with him. When it comes to widely accepted abortion, the shoe never quite fit for mainstream America, and, more than thirty years later, it doesn’t look like it ever will. Still, as this article reports, abortion providers are determined to keep trying desperately to make this relationship work.

But this is unfair, right? How can I say this? Well, really, because the abortion supporters say it themselves. They embody the single biggest indicator of delusion, which is this: In order to see things working out their way, they have to imagine the world different than it is. Bazelon describes one Planned Parenthood director who “looked out the window, at all the people who she wished could feel the urgency she does, and pointed out that change in medicine comes slowly.”

And abortion supporters need this to keep going—they need to keep looking forward to the vision they have in mind. But what they lose along the way is a deeper understanding of why abortion isn’t accepted in public and medical life. Rather than trying to understand why support for abortion dwindles, they turn away, they cover up, they try to hide the discomforting part of abortion from patients, from nurses, from themselves. As Bazelon reports, one woman who’s working to increase the reach of abortion training, asks residents when they’re done with her program,

This abortion provider acknowledges that some “nurses don’t want to assist her, and she tries to meet them halfway by doing abortions only up to nine weeks of pregnancy.” “The early threshold means that no one on staff has to contend with recognizable fetal parts,” explains Bazelon.

And there’s the story of University of Michigan professor, Lisa Harris, who wrote an academic article two years ago about performing an eighteen-week abortion while she was eighteen weeks pregnant. As Bazelon recounts it:

Somewhere in these women’s stories lies the reason why abortion still causes hesitation for much of the American public; the reason why many women who support the availability of abortion in the abstract say they wouldn’t do it themselves; the reason why many doctors who support abortion in polls don’t perform them in their offices. But abortion supporters, like those quoted in Bazelon’s article, find it hard to look closer to understand these reasons and grapple with them. One abortion provider says, “We want to bring this discussion more to the forefront, but it’s a bit dangerous.” It could distract from the agenda; taking a closer look into what makes the American public hesitate about abortion could make them hesitate, and they don’t want to risk that.

When they do hesitate, when they do find a moment when they feel uncomfortable or conflicted, as the women Bazelon interviews seem to show, they stop, reboot, and remind themselves why they’re doing this: It’s all for the protection of women. Despite all the pain, mainstream abortion access is important, supporters insist, because without it women may risk their lives attempting illegal abortions, like the woman in Kenya one practitioner witnessed, who came for medical attention “with a stick hanging out of her.” Without access to legal abortions, we’re back to back-alley abortions.

At least in America, women can legally have an abortion and survive. But in many ways, it’s still in the back alley. The story Bazelon’s article really tells us is just how impossible it is to take the back alley out of abortion. Abortion still isn’t accepted in the American medical profession; it still isn’t widely accepted in the American community; there will always be nurses or office staff who are uncomfortable assisting in abortions; there will always be doctors who don’t feel comfortable having abortion providers in their medical group; there will always be the health risks that come with abortion that causes medical-malpractice insurance coverage to be so high that family practice doctors don’t want to afford it; there will always be protests by people who see fetuses as deserving the same protections by law as babies after birth. These are the things we still see, and in growing number, decades after abortion was made legal in this country. This issue is not about to be settled anytime soon, and abortion will never be mainstream.

The procedure may be legally available and it may be performed quickly, cleanly, and skillfully, but the hard fact that some abortion supporters have trouble seeing is this: In many ways, abortion will always be in the back alley of public life. For many post-abortive women, it remains in the back alley of their minds: It’s not a place they’re proud of, not a place they’d like to linger, not a memory they’d like to revisit. And who can blame them?

Mary Rose Somarriba is managing editor of First Things.

In the pending court case for overturning California’s Proposition 8, which banned “gay marriage,” two leading conservative legal scholars face off: Charles J. Cooper, taking the classical conservative line that organic social institutions such as marriage have an inherent value and cannot be redefined by legal fiat, and Theodore Olson, taking the more libertarian line that government should simply regulate contractual relationships between individuals and not become involved in private matters.

Whichever is right—whether marriage is or is not a purely private matter in which the state has no abiding interest—the deeper and more immediate danger of the marriage issue for Christians is its potential use by gay activists to undermine the autonomy of the Church and other religious entities. If there is an inherent “right to marriage” for same-sex couples, religious groups that refuse to marry gay couples are violating their civil rights, which in turn could lead to a repeal of the churches’ tax exempt status—or a complete overturn in our law and culture of the religious understanding of marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

R. Emmet Tyrell, publisher of The American Spectator and a friend of both men, is in a quandary, and has proposed what he considers a peaceful solution to the issue:

Tyrrell has it backwards: rather than the state getting out of the “sacraments business” (which it really isn’t in), the Church should simply stop acting an agent of the state in the execution of marriage contracts. When a priest or minister says the magic words, “By the power invested in me by the State of ___,” he is acting as a civil magistrate binding the couple in the whole web of rights, duties, and obligations pertaining to marriage under civil law. His action is at one level religious, but it is predominantly legal.

Therefore, the Church becomes inextricably bound in the entire debate revolving around marriages—who can, who can’t, and under what conditions.

This has not always been the case. In the pre-Constantinian period, the Church had no legal standing, and sacramental marriage was utterly distinct from legal marriage. Even after Christianity was adopted by the Roman Empire in the fourth century, one still had to obtain a civil marriage from a magistrate before presenting himself in church for a sacramental union. A Church marriage only became one of the criteria for recognition of a union as a legal marriage in the sixth century.

Because Church and civil marriage were separate and distinct, the Church was absolutely free to follow its own doctrine with regard to marriage and its disciplines. In the patristic period, marriage was held to be an indissoluable sacrament that transcended death; therefore a person could enter into only one sacramental marriage in a lifetime.

In both the East and the West, the Church in principle upheld this ideal, and in the East, at least, did not perform “second marriages” or “remarriages” until the ninth century. Rather, when confronted by the pastoral reality of people who wanted to remarry after widowhood, or after divorce, the Church, recognized civil marriages and focused entirely on the reintegration of the remarried into the Church through prayer and fasting.

In the ninth century, however, the Emperor Leo VI abolished civil marriage within the Roman Empire and turned over total responsibility for administering marriage to the Church. The Church thus, for the first time, had to deal with the messy legal and social realities, including divorce and widowhood and the welfare of children.

To protect the integrity of its doctrine of indissolubility while meeting the pastoral needs of the faithful, the eastern Churches devised a non-sacramental “Rite of Remarriage,” which in effect took the place of a second civil marriage. Solemn and penitential in nature, it was explicitly a concession to human frailty and lacked the signs associated with sacramental marriage (in the eastern Churches, the Crowning, the singing of certain prayers, and the sharing of the Eucharist).

The situation in the West was quite different, because of the collapse of central secular authority and a somewhat different theology of marriage, but ultimately, the Latin Church also became responsible for administering all aspects of marriage, though it came to a very different solution to the issue of remarriage and divorce.

The same situation continued after the Reformation, because most Protestant states formed established churches, which, as extensions of the government, naturally functioned as government agents. And this worked because their was a general consensus between church and state on the meaning and purpose of marriage.

Even after the French Revolution severed the relationship of church and state in France and much of Western Europe, church and state still shared that consensus, but the state generally took over all the legal aspects pertaining to marriage. Only civil marriages had legal standing, and a couple would first get married before a magistrate before going to church for a sacramental wedding.

Today, the general consensus on marriage has become irrevocably broken. There are fundamental differences between the two regarding the nature and purpose of marriage, which in a secular society means, inevitably, that the state’s understanding of marriage is going to prevail, and be enforced by coercive measures.

We are reverting to the pre-Constantinian situation, where the Church has no legal standing and its doctrines are considered to be private matters (when they are not considered to be seditious). The solution is a return to the pre-Constantinian practice of the Church in which a Church marriage is a purely sacramental matter, subject to the doctrine and disciplines of the Church, but without legal standing.

Legal recognition of marriage would become a purely civil matter. A couple who wanted to marry would have to get a license and go to a civil magistrate. If they then wanted their union sacramentalized, they would go to the Church. If the Church refused to marry them because they did not meet its criteria for a sacramental wedding—if both parties were of the same sex, for example—the state could do nothing about it, since the Church is a voluntary association protected by the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.

Thus disencumbered from its role as an agent of the state, the Church would be free to teach, encourage, and set an example for the rest of the world. It would not have to worry about the legal ramifications of its actions. And this could provide the freedom the Church needs to reshape marriage in the West in a way political and legal activism will not, and cannot.

Decoupled from the state, the Church can preach the Gospel with regard to marriage and human sexuality generally, backed up by enforcement of its canonical and ascetic disciplines, without fear of state sanction—assuming the Church is willing to accept the burden of proclaiming a truth so contrary to the prevailing zeitgeist.

It will not be enough for the Church simply to surrender its role as an agent of the state in marriage; the bishops of the Church must also provide visible and courageous leadership, including setting their own house in order, regardless of the cost to their popularity and standing with the cultural elites. The Church must extend its leadership to the instruction of the ignorant, support for the weak or confused, and reconciliation of the fallen.

For, ultimately, it is not through the law that the oxymoron of gay marriage will be turned back, but by the conversion of individual human hearts. The power of the Church’s witness to truth, combined with a growing recognition of the necessity of traditional marriage and the havoc wrought by the host of “alternative relationships” will, if the Church remains faithful to her calling, lead to a return to sanity.

Stuart Koehl is a military historian and writer living in Northern Virginia. Tyrell’s “Another Peaceful Solution” can be found here.

He drifted on the water, the man dozing on the inner tube, and didn’t wake till he nudged the wall of scree and shattered rocks at the far end of the reservoir. Not that there is much of a current in that little lake, formed by piling earth and broken boulders across the neck of a red-rock canyon. Just enough to coast him slowly, peacefully, inexorably down the hundred yards to the stone-littered hill of the dam—where he woke with a yelp and a startled leap at the touch of those sharp-edged stones.

She drifted on the shore, the woman in the floppy straw hat, a green-print towel draped over her legs, and the black leotard top of her swimsuit framing her sun-burnt shoulders. Poking at a computer tablet, she seemed to be coasting vaguely from one link or file to another, surfing videos—the little squeaks and tiny tintinnabulations of the computer speaker just audible around her.

I drifted, too, there on the faded gray wood of the old, wobbly dock off to the side, my feet dangled down in the water, while my daughter practiced her swimming, back and forth across the green-gray lake. And the younger children of other families, splashing in the bright sun, with the sky so blue in its frame of red rock cliffs—too blue, really: almost false, and decorated with the kind of wispy clouds that only the hokiest painter would dare put in.

And the long dusty red striations of the canyon, capped with green-black pines: Squint a little, and those horizon-topping rows of trees have always looked to me like caravans, camels and horses and people, heading off to trade with the nearby mountains. Whenever I drift a little and stare at them, I get to thinking that maybe I should have gone with them on their journey. That maybe I should have done things differently. That maybe I have wasted my life.

Then the man on the inner tube awoke with a shout as the rocks brushed his feet—sitting up suddenly, too hard and too fast, so the inner tube squirted out to flip up in the air behind him and dump him with a splash into the shallow water. I think it must have been painful—those broken stones down at the end of the lake are sharp—and he yowled, scrambling along on hands and knees after the inner tube, trying to stand up and stumbling each time as the rocks sliced at his tender feet, before he finally caught up with the spinning tube and surged across it, belly first, puffing like a loud and startled walrus.

My daughter pulled up, bobbing in the water to see what the fuss was. The splashing children all froze in the shallows. The woman in the hat bounced to her feet in worry, shielding her eyes with her computer tablet while she stared anxiously down the lake till the puffing man began paddling his slow way back up from the dam—at which point, interestingly, she turned to check on the children before the uneasy look faded from her face.

The lake is chillier than you’d expect on a bright summer day; fed by a cold stream tumbling down from the hills, it’s maybe twenty or thirty feet deep out in the middle and never really warms up. My daughter was trembling as she climbed up out of the water, so I wrapped her in a towel and hurried her to the car.

The dust of the dirt road swirled up behind us as we drove back to town, a beige so light it looked in the rear-view mirror like a white fog trailing after the car, while my shivering daughter leaned forward, almost touching the heater vents on the dashboard.

This broken western country is home for me; mountain lakes in red-rock canyons hold echoes of the years gone by, and the presence of the past is what makes a moment rich with meaning, thick with memory. But the future: That’s what makes the present important. That’s what lends each moment significance and weight. That’s what forces consequence into the choices we make and the paths we choose.

We cannot drift, really. We cannot coast forever. We cannot agree with a shrug to leave our children a world of abortion, and endless war, and corrupt policy, and hurt souls. Though there is no final victory that we can achieve on our own, still we must fight so things don’t worsen. To have children is to look to the future and glimpse the moment’s consequence. To have children is to understand what it means that down at the end of the easy stream, the rocks are sharp and the water cold.

Joseph Bottum is editor of First Things.

“What if you die overseas and I’m not there,” my mom said when I told her I had joined the Marines. I laughed and said that even if I were a civilian and died in the United States she most likely wouldn’t be there. Still, she worried that one day she would get a call saying that I’d been killed or was dying far from home.

My mother worried for nothing. Instead, over a decade later, I was the one who got the dreaded phone call.

“Mom’s not expected to live much longer,” my younger brother said. “You might want to come home.” I had just arrived in Okinawa and had to fly back to mainland Japan. As I waited another three days for the next plane back to the United States, I began to wonder if I’d make it home in time.

Two years earlier, when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, my brother built a room onto his house so that she could live with him and his family. The past few months had been especially hard on them. The constant care, the weekly trips for the chemotherapy treatments to a Dallas hospital, two hours each way, the anxiety of watching her get worse, had worn them down.

When they picked me up from the airport they tried to be warm, but our meeting was strained. On the ride home they made clear to me—politely but unmistakably—that the prodigal son would be expected to take his turn shouldering the burden.

I hadn’t seen mom since she was diagnosed. The red-headed, vibrant woman had been replaced with a bald, weak shell of a human being. Our reunion was awkward and bittersweet.

I masked my discomfort by falling into a regular routine. At night I’d sit on her bed, prepare her medicines, including the morphine she needed for the pain, and then swab the shunt in her chest with rubbing alcohol. Concern about an infection seemed to be an absurd worry when the tumors were destroying her from within. But I performed the task with the utmost care and pretended that it made a difference. We would make small talk as she drifted in and out of sleep.

Four or five nights after I had returned home, I began loading the needle with morphine when I felt a strange impulse, similar to the urge to jump that overcomes you when you stand on the edge of a bridge. An extra dose, I thought. That is all it would take. My family would wake in the morning to a sense of guilty relief and the welcome release of dammed up grief.

There would be no autopsy, no questions. No one would know. An extra dose of morphine and the waiting and the pain and the suffering and the dying would all come to an end.

I sat with the syringe in hand, watching her labored breathing. My mother was dying, and dying in pain. And I could make it stop.

Although my mother had experienced suffering and pain many other times in her life, I had never before been tempted to end her life. What had changed that had made me consider, however fleetingly and out of a sickeningly misplaced sense of compassion, usurping the role of God? A wave of revulsion washed over me as I realized I had been tempted because I had forgotten a simple truth: The dying are still the living, and their inherent worth is not diminished simply because their remaining moments on earth are few.

After that night the routine changed. I’d say a prayer and carefully measure out the correct dosage—sometimes slightly less just to be safe. I stayed for three weeks, giving the shots, cleaning the shunt, making small talk, attempting to make my mom as comfortable as possible. Mostly, though, I would watch her while she rested and wait with her while she endured the pain.

We made it through Thanksgiving and it became obvious that she wasn’t finished living. My leave was running out and I returned to Japan. Mom held on for several more weeks before passing away peacefully in her sleep.

It was only after her death that I could fully appreciate the casual lesson she had taught me. She had once been a hospice nurse and had cared for dozens of people as they began to die, staying with them to the end. I once asked her what the job entailed. “Mostly waiting,” she said. “You just stay with them and make them comfortable. Let them know they are not alone.”

Her words reminded me of Jesus and his followers in the Garden of Gethsemane. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus tells three of his disciples: ““My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch.” (14:34). Then, going a little further into the garden, he prayed that the cup be taken away from him.

The disciples provide an example—or rather a counterexample—of what is expected of the rest of us when God has sent us to comfort the dying. The duty of friendship required that the disciples provide the solace that can only come from bodily presence.

They were not expected to hasten the end of their master’s suffering or even to suffer with him. Their task was merely to relieve his despair and loneliness simply by being watchful and near. Similarly, our task, as my mother had explained to me, consists mostly of waiting, of watching, letting those passing from this work know they are not alone.

As the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper reminds us, loving a person is a way of saying “it’s good that you exist; it’s good that you are in the world!” Those who are nearing the end of lives need to know that it is good that they exist, that it’s good that they are still in the world. And they need to know that we are with them, waiting and watching, till the end.

Joe Carter is web editor of First Things.

The scientific popularizers—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, and others—don’t go in for nuance, as David Hart has pointed out again and again in our pages. They cheerfully champion the most reductive sort of materialism, including the idea that free will does not exist because our minds are just neural networks that function according to physical laws.

Why are they so enthusiastic about this idea that our minds are just neural networks? It’s not at first sight a very attractive belief. After all, free will provides a sense of self-possession, and it’s the source of the drama in life.

We should never underestimate the satisfaction that comes from finding what one imagines to be the Magic Key that unlocks all the doors, but I think our Happy Warriors of Science get so excited for another reason. The basic thrust of a reductive science of the mind involves a move from cultural categories—“I have an obligation to care for my children”—to biological ones—“I only feel an obligation because human DNA has evolved to promote species survival.”

It is a way, in other words, to deny the reality and authority of culture. One belief unifies a great deal of social theory and philosophy of the last one hundred years, and it’s the belief that culture crushes and deforms us. Max Weber called it “the iron cage.” Jacques Derrida used fancier words, but the so-called “Metaphysics of Presence” amounts to the same thing.

This belief has been reinforced by the fact that most have located the vitalizing powers of human existence in destabilizing thrusts and eruptions that undermine established cultural patterns. Michel Foucault provides perhaps the perfect example. He was fascinated by explosions of erotic desire and vivid scenes of violence.

Duty, logical coherence, settled or inherited patterns of behavior—these are among the bad motifs in our postmodern anti-culture. Self-expression, transgression, unmasking, madness, smashing the system—they are the good motifs. The bad motifs are all associated with laws, norms, and principles that discipline the soul. The good motifs suggest an anti-discipline, a liberation of desire.

It is true, of course, that a romance with transgression leads to a pseudo-morality—a discipline—of sorts, one that teaches that our greatest duty is not to make and express moral judgments that might oppress others. Verily, verily, it is forbidden to forbid.

I’m not surprised by this postmodern anti-Sinai. The old motifs put stress and tension into life. The Socratic maxim—know yourself—animated St. Augustine just as much as Albert Camus. They disagreed about the meaning of life—Augustine sought the uncertain requirements of God’s will, Camus proposed misty notions of an authentic life—but both agreed that we need to enter into ourselves. We must carefully examine our lives so that we can weigh, assess, correct, repent, and renew our efforts to live as we should.

Self-examination turns out to be endlessly painful and difficult. Therein lies the appeal of reductive explanations. They release us from the task of self-examination and the need to discipline our errant desires and disobedient wills. What matters is something impersonal, something working at a deeper level than culture and its soul-shaping agenda: the Laws of History or Physics, the Unconscious or Natural Selection. We shouldn’t underestimate the appeal of this release—and the pleasing rest it provides.

It’s really not a new idea. In his poem On the Nature of Things, the ancient Latin poet Lucretius preached the psychological benefits of explaining away culture and our conscious participation in it. Our world is an accident, he observed. Human life is a speck of no significance in the vast reality of the cosmos. As Lucretius insists, everything that seems to be uniquely personal can be explained by universal principles of matter.

It sounds nihilistic, and it is. But it was the genius of Epicureanism, which Lucretius seeks to promote in his poem, to recognize that with nihilism comes psychological freedom. A reductive theory of our humanity releases us from the tensions of all sorts of questions. Should I marry her? Do I have to keep my word? Should I make a sacrifice for my family? Have I lived honestly and with integrity? All difficult questions, and questions that may have answers we don’t want to know.

If, miracle of miracles, my life is explained by the evolution of human DNA struggling for survival, I can set these questions aside. Then I can just—live.

Perhaps this promise helps explain the strange urgency and high moralism of folks such as Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and other scientists who write popular books with strongly evangelical tones. They want us to recognize that we are animals governed by impersonal laws of nature for a reason. That reason is that we will be happier if we set aside culture and its illusions about the meaning of life.

If all the mental images we have about ourselves are deceptions, who can blame us for screwing things up? Who can blame us for trying to snatch what happiness we can, even if we have to transgress the moral laws our parents held dear? With this excuse, we can act contrary to our consciences, since conscience itself can be explained away by recourse to a deeper law of nature or a material process.

Yes, free will gives life its drama. But a life without drama is less stressful, less perilous, less urgent, less tense, and the therapists recommend stress reduction. If I’m just DNA trying to out compete other DNA, the mess I make of my life doesn’t matter, and it may even help the onward evolution of the species.

The Happy Warriors of Science are fitting men for our therapeutic age. They provide the metaphysical underpinnings for the great postmodern word of absolution: Whatever.

R.R. Reno is Senior Editor at First Things and Professor of Theology at Creighton University. He is the general editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible.

Among David B. Hart’s articles on the “Happy Warriors of Science” are Believe It Or Not, The Dawkins Evolution, and Daniel Dennett Hunts the Snark.

T. S. Eliot caught a bit of flak in the 1920s when he claimed that Shakespeare’s most famous play Hamlet was, of all things, a flop: “Far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece,” he said in “Hamlet and His Problems,” published in 1922, “the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others.”

Although the bardolaters were predictably outraged, he surely had a point. The plot is a mishmash of disparate narratives; the expository opening scene, when soldiers on the night watch recount the tensions between Denmark and Norway, is deadening; and Shakespeare’s need to get Hamlet back to Denmark after his exile to England forces the playwright to resort to the preposterous expedient of having Hamlet’s ship be boarded by a subspecies of men previously unknown to history, well-intentioned pirates, who helpfully spirit the prince back to Elsinore without even demanding a ransom.

But of course the real problem with Hamlet, dramatically speaking, is the hero’s refusal to go into action, always a challenge to portray on any stage, since drama has to display action from start to finish, or it is not dramatic.

But Eliot’s complaint went deeper: it has never been clear to the audience, he claimed, exactly why Hamlet did not seek revenge for his father’s murder after promising his father’s ghost that he would do so. Indeed, no sooner has the ghost of his father returned to his place of punishment than Hamlet tells Horatio that he plans to “put an antic disposition on.” Why?

What was missing, Eliot said (in a coinage that became famous as a key term in his literary criticism), was “an objective correlative” to Hamlet’s inaction: that is, a motivation that makes sense to the audience.

Again, surely he has a point, as can be seen in the enormous variety of interpretations the play has witnessed in the last four centuries. Indeed, those readings often tell us more about the generation interpreting the play than they do of the play itself.

Thus Romantics like Coleridge and Goethe saw the prince as too morally sensitive to carry out his father’s command. Like Goethe’s young Werther, Hamlet lived in a brutal and uncomprehending age, hopelessly out of joint in an uncaring, Machiavellian polity. The Freudians, on the other hand, hypothesized that Hamlet refused to obey his father’s ghost because he was subconsciously relieved that his father had been dispatched and thus secretly identified with a deed he had all along really wanted to do himself.

But then came the New Historicists, who showed, at least to their satisfaction, that Hamlet’s motivation is perfectly understandable when set against the play’s contemporary Renaissance background. Since the Renaissance represents the confluence of two antithetical cultures, classical antiquity and Christianity, of course Hamlet is conflicted.

Revenge, after all, was never a problem for the ancient world, as Homer’s Achilles and Seneca’s plays glaringly demonstrate, nor was suicide ever condemned as such. Consider Shakespeare’s Brutus in his Julius Caesar, who shares many of Hamlet’s traits: he is introspective, takes forever to make up his mind, and bungles the job when he finally decides to act. Yet at the end of the play, he commits suicide with no compunction whatever.

But Hamlet cannot follow that route, because Christianity forbids both suicide and revenge (Rom. 12: 17-21). Brutus might well have had only the vaguest idea of an afterlife. But not so for Hamlet, who knows full well that the Almighty has set “his canon ’gainst self-slaughter.” This idea of the afterlife “puzzles the will” and forces Hamlet to “lose the name of action.”

True enough, says Stephen Greenblatt in Hamlet in Purgatory, but Hamlet lived not just in the time of the Renaissance but also during the Reformation, which raises the issue of which version of the afterlife had been puzzling Hamlet’s will: the Protestant version, with its outright denial of purgatory, or the traditional Catholic one, which included a very elaborate heaven, hell, and purgatory, as we know from Dante.

After all, it can hardly be accidental that Shakespeare places the prince as a student in Luther’s Wittenberg when his father is murdered. Moreover, when the ghost first appears to his son, he avows his residence in purgatory:

Thus, for Greenblatt, Eliot’s “objective correlative” is there for all to see, and has been all along. Hamlet’s hesitation is theological in nature: he must test the authenticity of the ghost because he cannot decide which eschatology is right, the Catholic or the Protestant one:

But Hamlet means too much to the culture, and its wildly variant interpretations of the play have embedded themselves too deeply in our minds, for the New Historicists to be able to claim exclusive rights to a purely historical setting.

Once that point is conceded, by far the freshest and most arresting interpretation I have ever seen of the play comes from a recent production sponsored by the Royal Shakespeare Company that was so successful on stage that it was later filmed and recently broadcast on PBS and now happily available on DVD. It stars, among other superb actors, Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart as Claudius and as Hamlet David Tennant, who until recently portrayed the eponymous hero of the popular BBC science-fiction series, Dr. Who.

To my mind, the success of this new RSC production stems from a host of factors, all of which work together in such a way that, pace Eliot, the play now finally makes sense.

First of all, each line is so freshly delivered that it sounds new (quite a feat for this play!). Even minor roles come across with distinctive personalities, including, of all people, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, who are usually played as completely interchangeable for humorous effect (other characters in the play regularly confuse the two). Here Rosenkrantz is the ambitious toady who would do anything to curry favor with the king, while Guildenstern approaches his commission to spy on Hamlet with a reluctance prompted by his affection for his old school chum. One feels guilty and the other doesn’t.

Second (and this is a negative virtue), this production eschews any Freudian interpretation, which by now has become an empty cliché, and even an embarrassment. Thus, in the famous “closet scene” in Gertrude’s bedroom, her son does not force his mother onto her marriage bed in a pose of feigned rape, and his rage against her is clearly prompted by her betrayal of a marriage that he had been depending on for his psychic health—and Gertrude herself feels so guilty about that betrayal that she too is already near a nervous breakdown. The scene is astonishingly powerful, and all without Freud’s extraneous kibitzing.

Third, the setting of the play is the contemporary national-security state, with CCTV cameras everywhere, and from whose tapes we see some of the action (interestingly, the ghost’s outline does not register on the tapes). As world literature’s most famous neurotic, Hamlet’s unstable personality is already sufficiently known by almost any audience; but in this production there is an added reason for Hamlet’s incipient madness besides his own volatile temper.

“Even paranoids can have enemies,” goes the old line; and that’s certainly true of Hamlet here: closed-circuit security cameras are everywhere, and he knows it. (At one point, right before he says “Now I am alone,” he rips out a prying apparatus lurking in one of the corners of the throne room.)

Fourth, the soliloquies are not treated as the dramaturgical equivalent of operatic arias, but flow naturally out of the action. In fact, the “to be or not to be” soliloquy is delivered almost offhandedly in a moment of philosophical reverie, while the other less famous speeches, especially the early ones, are made to reveal Hamlet’s deeply tormented soul.

Which brings me to the fifth and last great merit of this version: here Hamlet truly displays the dilemmas of his personality. It is one of the great mysteries of this play how Shakespeare manages to get the audience to sympathize with his protagonist.

Even on the surface he really is a quite appalling cad: after killing Polonius, he “lug[s] the guts” from Gertrude’s closet and calls the dead man a “foolish, prating knave”; jilts Ophelia (who clearly loves him) in the harshest manner, driving her to madness and then to her death; arranges for the death of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern without a pang of remorse (“They are not near my conscience,” he dismissively says, for which even his best friend Horatio upbraids him); and of course leaves the stage littered with corpses in the final scene.

Even Hamlet recognizes how abominable is his soul, as he avows to Ophelia:

And yet somehow the audience identifies with him, at least in the sense of seeing things from his point of view, which is due of course primarily to the soliloquies. But also to the acting.

Here, more than in any production I have seen, Hamlet truly suffers. He is caught in some unspecified trap of his own personality that long antecedes news of his father’s murder. (His first soliloquy, “Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,” is spoken before he sees the ghost.) In what must be regarded as a tour de force of acting, Tennant forces the audience to identify with him because his suffering is so acutely displayed.

In this version, there are, to be sure, some judicious cuts: the scene with the pirates is omitted (thus Hamlet’s return to Denmark is left unexplained); a few lines from the “to be or not to be” soliloquy are cut (which might seem like sacrilege to the bardolaters, but it does help undermine its over-familiarity); and Fortinbras, the prince of Norway, does not show up at the end to perform the obsequies (it being, presumably, too unlikely for a national-security state like this one to be invaded by any foreign power, let alone super-mild contemporary Norway).

But most of the play is there, yet so well-paced that the action never flags, not least because one cannot take one’s eyes off Hamlet in his suffering. As I say, here is a Hamlet that finally makes sense. Eliot was wrong after all.

Edward T. Oakes, S.J., teaches theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake, the seminary for the Archdiocese of Chicago. His article “Hamlet and the Reformation: The Prince of Denmark as ‘Young Man Luther’” appeared recently in the Winter 2010 issue of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture.

Eliot’s “Hamlet and His Problems” can be found here and information on Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory here. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet can be purchased here.

How many Americans will never work again? Perhaps a lot. A close look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey raises some alarming questions about the prospects of significant parts of the American population.

Thirteen percent of Americans twenty-five years and over without a high school diploma were unemployed in June (down from a peak of 17.9 percent in February, but much of that decline was due to a fall in the labor force participation rate from 62.4 percent in February to 61.4 percent in June). Ten percent of workers with only a high school diploma, were unemployed in June. Workers with a Bachelor’s degree, by contrast, had an unemployment rate of only 4.5 percent that month.

For African Americans over twenty years of age, the official unemployment rate in June stood at 17 percent. Most striking, only 58 percent of African-American men over twenty are employed, compared to 67.7 percent in 2000. For white Americans over twenty, the employment-population ratio fell from 64.9 percent in 2002 to 60.2 percent in 2009, a far smaller decline. There is almost no decline for Hispanics; the employment-population ratio stayed around 68 percent between 2000 and 2009.

The data suggest that black men with a high school education or less are dropping through the cracks in the economy. Adjusting for the decline in the employment-population ratio, the true unemployment rate for African-American men probably stands close to 30 percent. That is a frightening number.

Another striking data point is the collapse of employment for labor-force entrants aged sixteen to nineteen years. Jobseekers of this age have a low educational level and seek unskilled positions. In 2000, 45 percent of this population was in the labor force, but by 2009 the level had dropped almost to 28.4 percent. While unskilled workers of all ages are having difficulty finding work, young unskilled workers are finding it even harder.

Why is this significant? Unemployment for African Americans and those with less education has always been higher than for others, but most were eventually employed. The economic crisis has only magnified the differences. That would be bad enough. As matters stand, many of these workers may never find a steady job again.

As of June, 6.4 million Americans were on unemployment for more than 27 weeks, and the average duration of unemployment doubled from sixteen weeks in early 2008 to 32 weeks in June. These figures are, for the workers we are discussing, only going to get worse. Americans without educational qualifications are suffering levels of unemployment on the scale of the Great Depression, and for them that Depression may never end.

The sectors of the economy in which workers with less educational attainment were likely to find employment will continue to shrink. Foremost among these is home construction, where recovery may be decades away. By some estimates the US faces a 40 percent oversupply of large lot family homes by 2020, as the great retirement wave of the Baby Boomers leaves empty nesters with larger homes than they require.

Another sector is state and municipal employment. A significant proportion of job losses during the next several years will include unskilled workers employed by local governments.

Why should the discrepancy between white college-educated workers and others be so great? The world economy has changed, permanently. America once enjoyed a monopoly as a destination for capital and labor. The world’s savings poured into America during the 1990s and 2000s, contributing among other things to the homebuilding boom that employed many of the unskilled.

The fall of communism in 1989 and the incorporation of many countries from what we used to call the Third World into the global economy have eroded that monopoly. It has sharply reduced the number of jobs in manufacturing, which now employs only 15 percent of the workforce, and no longer offer unskilled labor an entry-point into the labor force. Again, the end of the housing boom and the decline in public employment in the wake of the financial crisis have also closed off other sources of employment.

There are three ways the situation could evolve, and two of them are bad. The first is that the American underclass might expand drastically, with attendant social and political problems. The second is that we will revert to methods last used during the Great Depression, when the Civilian Conservation Corps employed a tenth of America’s young men, encouraging the growth of government as an employer, even though governments are bad at providing jobs and the economy cannot sustain such programs.

The third way is the restoration of an economic regime that promotes entrepreneurship. The employment situation will not improve until small businesses begin to hire. In America’s creative-destruction economy, jobs lost by big companies usually are lost forever; they are replaced by jobs created by startups. Startups created two-thirds of all new jobs in the U.S. during the past three decades. This is the only real hope for the unskilled — but small business remains dead in the water.

We simply don’t know whether the next wave of entrepreneurship—if we are able to launch it—will absorb the millions of young, less-educated men who seem lost to economic activity. I fear that something like Roosevelt’s CCC may be required, despite my conservative’s aversion to government spending. There is, after all, a good deal of infrastructure to be repaired.

David P. Goldman is a senior editor of First Things and author of the Spengler blog as well as the Spengler column in the Asia Times.

RESOURCES
Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey
David P. Goldman, The Long Term Employment Bust
David P. Goldman, Clinton as Cargo Cult
Spengler, Bah, Humbug, and Labor Statistics