Why the Tap Dance?

June 26, 2020 (1,385 words)

Talk about beating around the bush… It seems the only people who speak or write seriously about the social teaching of the Catholic Church do so in such an ephemeral and theoretical manner it’s hard for the average lay person to know just what such teaching is supposed to look like in actual practice.

We are always assured it constitutes “a great treasury of moral teaching,” with insights and principles based on eternal truths that can help rescue a Western culture now on the brink of internal collapse.

Unfortunately, though, when it comes to the particulars all we get is a lofty meditation on the one-line description to be found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It plays on sort of a continuous loop:

“The Church’s social teaching proposes principles for reflection; it provides criteria for judgement; it gives guidelines for action.” (n. 2423)

When the discussion does occasionally descend from the heights, the proscription for action looks suspiciously like a rather mundane display of conventional political partisanship: A tacit rejection of the Democrats’ attempt at “wealth distribution,” and an equally tacit endorsement of the Republicans’ wobbly “family values” platform.

This jives with oblique warnings about those who would “misuse” the Church’s social teaching to promote political agendas that are at odds with the truths it presents and proposes. The problem, we are being told, is finding the great treasury intact, without some form of “misinterpretation” through a political filter that is often foreign to the teaching itself.

Hmmm… Whatever could that mean…

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looking for policies that are pure an undefiled…

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We lay persons are grateful to our bishops for their profound reflections on the Church‘s social teaching. But I’m wondering if these concerned prelates are suffering from a mild case of paralysis by analysis when it comes to applying that teaching. I fear many of the most orthodox among them may be hamstrung by an unrealistic expectation for public policies that are pure and undefiled. Since those qualities are very hard to come by in this world of ours.

To my learned and esteemed superiors: Everybody agrees on the broad outline. The social teaching of the Catholic Church describes the values, principles, and truths that are good for all men and women, in every time and place. These include respect for the dignity of all human life. And promotion of marriage and the family as the first cell of society, along with the social order founded upon that first cell. This constellation of values, principles, and truths provide the glue for a truly just social order. They must be worked into the leaven of society so that all may share the benefits of creation.

But of course that’s a mighty tall order to fill in our pluralist, liberal democracy.

It’s important to make the lay faithful aware of all this, to guide their everyday actions where they live and work. But frankly it does no good for a well-meaning bishop to remind them of the obligation to properly form their conscience, in order to vote in a manner which is “consistent with our baptismal vocation,” if all that bishop has in mind is their continuing to vote Republican.

Don’t get me wrong. I welcome the waxing poetic about “recovering and serving the REAL common good,” and calling for Christians to “take back” and “re-present” this concept by “articulating a vision for a new Catholic action.” I just think we need a completely different definition of what that “action” should look like, given the existing political marketplace of ideas we have to work with.

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I don’t think that word means what you think it means…

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In our attempts to properly elucidate Church teaching, I’ve noticed a pronounced tendency on the part of right-minded souls to conflate foundational truths with aspects of the conservative-libertarian approach to life. This leads some believers into thinking conservative politics perfectly embody Christian principles.

(I actually just read somewhere that “intellectual conservatism is inherently Roman Catholic.” Oh my word, what on Earth has that poor writer been drinking….)

For instance:

“By common good is to be understood the sum total of human conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily. The common good concerns the life of all. It calls for prudence from each, and even more from those who exercise the office of authority…

“Public authorities are bound to respect the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person…. In particular, the common good resides in the conditions for the exercise of the natural freedom indispensable for the development of the human vocation”…

Bits like this are cribbed from the Catechism of the Catholic Church (n.1906 and n.1907). But conservatives have convinced themselves these sentiments echo what’s to be found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. And many a hardworking bishop, struggling to apply some sort of moral compass to the reckless life we now lead, looks back on the American Founding with fondness, and sees in it a beacon of hope.

But such hope is misplaced. The Founders’ language doesn’t mean the same thing that Catholic language does, even though the words themselves sound so similar. There is a misappropriation that has taken place. It centers on phrases like “human freedom” and “human flourishing.” Another culprit is the frequent citing of “natural law.” These concepts are the bedrock of all Catholic thought, as everyone knows. But since our Founders made repeated reference to their version of these concepts, the easy linguistic familiarity has swayed conservative commentators into asserting the United States at its core is simpatico with key Catholic paradigms.

(This has also resulted in the generic term “limited government” being routinely invoked by conservatives as an unassailable expression of the Catholic concept known as “subsidiarity.”)

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a long line of modern luminaries who reject Catholic thought…

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Our Founders may have been exceptional men, but let’s not forget they were each just another in a long line of modern luminaries who rejected the Church’s teaching as no longer having answers to the political or economic dilemma. So it’s odd when certain Catholic spokespeople now contend our Founders were model citizens who inadvertently got everything right, in spite of their flamboyant rebellious streak, because they were unconsciously channeling their “inner Thomas Aquinas.”

While modernity was busy blazing its rowdy trail, Christianity’s way of trying to corral the unruly tendencies of pluralism and liberal democracy, and create a rational framework for this new social order, was to assert any “free” society must have a moral basis. (Just as the Catholic Church has taught throughout its two thousand year history that no individual can be truly free unless and until that individual conforms their actions to the objective moral order.) Another carry-over component of its philosophical outlook is to insist – just as in the past – that all of us are called to lead an “integrated life” in which faith informs every aspect of who we are and how we live.

But something important has gotten lost in translation. Certainly no one today leads anything close to an integrated life. Christian discernment fails when adherents carry on as if their economic behavior is not subject to traditional moral oversight. Or when they assume fiscal policies that fall under the heading of “economic freedom” are automatically congruent with Christianity.

The Industrial Revolution, to reference a prominent for instance, may have converted poverty to prosperity. But a catchy sound bite rarely captures the whole story. Unintended consequences and collateral damage litter the landscape, even when edited out of the official report. What else was taking place while this magnificent improvement in material circumstances was unfolding on the main stage? Has that improvement enhanced the “moral basis of society,” or has our moral compass been a casualty of our progress?

I think we all know the answer to that one. And what, pray tell, has been the political vehicle responsible for the widespread disregard of morality that has obviously occurred? And who commandeered it?

For those of us who agree Western culture is now on the brink of internal collapse, and authentic Catholic social teaching can rescue it from such a fate, I suppose another obvious question that should be addressed is: When did the collapse begin?

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr
June 26, 2020

Perverting the Aim of Government

June 19, 2020 (1,374 words)

A few weeks ago Marc Thiessen devoted one of his Washington Post op-eds to the success of the recent SpaceX launch on May 30. It marked the first time in history NASA astronauts launched in a commercially built and operated spacecraft, on its way to the International Space Station.

Mr. Thiessen used this as an opportunity to trumpet the power of American free enterprise. He called it “one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism.”

He reports: “It took a private company to give us the first space vehicle with touch-screen controls instead of antiquated knobs and buttons. It took a private company to give us a capsule that can fly entirely autonomously from launch to landing – including docking – without a human crew. It also took a private company to invent a reusable rocket that can not only take off but land as well.”

One can imagine conservative-libertarian enthusiasts across the nation, silently fist pumping and mumbling to themselves about government waste and inefficiency, as they read this over their morning coffee.

And Mr. Thiessen does make a very good case, rattling off a series of cost comparisons between NASA and SpaceX that can’t help but make one sit up and take notice. Even the non-conservative comes away from his op-ed feeling hey, government isn’t the answer for everything. Maybe the privatization of space travel is the right way to go.

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taking some of the wind out of Marc Thiessen’s sails…

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Then last night I was reading more of Rich People Things by Chris Lehmann, specifically his “The Lobbying World” chapter. What Mr. Lehmann has to say here about Washington lobbyists takes the wind out of Marc Thiessen’s sails. The case for free enterprise and privatization being an undisputed societal good is not quite as open-and-shut as Thiessen would have us believe.

While Chris Lehmann’s observations in this book are now approximately a decade old they still apply, and they still resonate.

“Some thirty thousand lobbyists clog the high-end restaurants and leafy suburban estates of the metropolitan world I live in. It’s true that the ranks of registered lobbyists number just over 11,000 – but lobbying, like the campaign fund-raising system, is a fungible thing; the majority of Washington’s influence peddlers are tricked-out nowadays with job titles like consultant, messaging strategist, or advocate – thereby sparing them the casual stigma of being identified with Jack Abramoff’s profession, and more importantly, the pesky disclosures that come with full certification as a lobbyist.” (page 145)

“It’s no coincidence that the great boom in lobbying has coincided with the consolidation of the Reaganite conservative revolution in the 1980s, as Thomas Frank has argued in his 2008 book, The Wrecking Crew.

On the face of things, this shouldn’t stand to reason. The conservative revolution was all about shrinking the size of the federal government, after all, and instituting crucial market-inspired reforms into the supposedly inefficient and bloated federal bureaucracy, such as cost-benefit analysis of proposed federal rules on private industry. “

“The Reagan White House even instituted a separate federal agency, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, granting affected industries the opportunity to reverse proposed new federal rules that presented too big a potential setback for their bottom lines

“The ideologically-charged brand of conservative misrule that has so deeply disfigured federal governance, is not, as Frank argues, the stuff of happenstance or personality-driven scandal. It is, rather, ’the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society.

“’This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction: it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are first, the capture of the state by business, and second, what follows from that: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we’ve come to expect from Washington.’” (page 148)

“Of course, the genius of the conservative regime that created this stupendously toxic lobbying climate is that most Americans who follow the doing of Congress in our context-challenged national media see something like the backward march of meaningful health-care reform and write it off as yet more evidence of the inherent inefficiency – nay, the actively evil nature – of government.” (pages 150-151)

If I read Chris Lehmann and Thomas Frank correctly, it’s the pot calling the kettle black for a conservative like Marc Thiessen to complain at this late date about government waste and inefficiency, when it was conservatives of the Reagan era that “disfigured federal governance.” It is conservatives who have facilitated “the capture of the state by business,” resulting in “the incompetence, graft and all the other wretched flotsam that we’ve come to expect from Washington.”

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a thorough cost analysis is far above my pay grade…

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It is certainly far above my pay grade to speculate on what impact “The Lobbying World” may have had on NASA’s expenses all these years. Such as the cost “per seat” to put an astronaut into orbit, or launch a kilogram of cargo, or any of the other line items Mr. Thiessen effectively chronicles in his short op-ed. As I just mentioned, the time may indeed have come for the federal government to cede the future of space exploration to private industry. Lord knows there are plenty of other pressing (and underfunded) social programs that government is tasked with helping to provide.

However it strikes me as a little disingenuous for a Washington insider like Mr. Thiessen to use this latest turn in the space race to continue his capitalism-is-great crusade in such a linear, blinders-firmly-in-place manner.

Visionaries like Elton Musk and Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have taken a keen interest in space travel, and can afford to dump piles of their spare cash into the effort. But this this celebrity advocacy does not readily translate into a slam-dunk defense of the capitalist’s basic premise: Namely, that ownership of the “means of production” across our entire economy should always be left in private hands.

This is the heart of the national debate we are having – or almost had – about the “merits of socialism,” as it has been pejoratively labeled. The debate was derailed before it got started, simply by opponents invoking the dreaded specter of socialism. When what we should be talking about is something completely different. We could be taking our cue from the way Catholic social teaching has framed this contentious issue for about a century and a half now:

While acknowledging the important role of private property in a society that respects human dignity and is committed to human flourishing, experience has shown those lofty aspirations are actually thwarted when – in certain situations – ownership of the “means of production” accumulates in privately-held monopolies.

It’s disheartening when a smart, successful Catholic like Marc Thiessen doesn’t factor this aspect of Church teaching into his thought process. He is obviously a bright guy, and a very talented polemicist. If only he would apply his gifts to broadening public understanding, instead of stoking the partisan divide.

And speaking of that divide, it may be of passing interest to note my three sons are of a conservative-libertarian mindset. They are currently 28, 23, and 20 years of age, and they worship at the same ideological altar as does Mr. Thiessen. On those rare occasions when they are all gathered at the family abode, their passion over government waste and inefficiency reaches such a crescendo that I often have to step out for air.

(For the record our only daughter is currently 21. She is cute and charming and knows how to get things done in a “Legally Blonde” kind of way. And to her credit she shows no interest in political squabbles.)

Spinning the final query of Thiessen’s op-ed, I would say this: Private-sector innovation may be allowing us to explore the further reaches of our solar system, but that’s no reason to continue denying the obvious. There are proven pitfalls to the hands-off, business-friendly approach Mr. Thiessen favors, in vast and vital areas of our economy such as health care, the energy sector, and internet access.

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr
June 19, 2020

Moderation Is The Key

June 12, 2020 (641 words)

I had a couple of aunts on my mother’s side of the family that both lived well into their nineties. They never really got sick, and they never put on weight. Their life-long motto was “moderation in all things.” I didn’t pay much attention to anything these two biddies had to say back then because, well, they were Italian. And everybody knows that Italians – especially little old Italian women – are kind of kooky.

But now that my own dotage is gently approaching, and the list of minor ailments continues to grow, I find myself reflecting back on many of my deceased relatives and remembering things each of them said. And I realize those quirky Italian aunts, in particular, were on to something with their commitment to moderation. As they were always fond of saying, there really can be too much of a good thing.

Moderation may indeed be the key to a happy life, but it also seems to be just about the hardest thing for any of us to pull off, doesn’t it? Take food, for instance. Who doesn’t like to eat? But we often end up eating too much, or too much of the wrong thing. And who doesn’t enjoy an adult beverage from time-to-time. But some of us, particularly of an Irish persuasion, tend to go overboard in this regard, killing needed brain cells and damaging vital organs.

Come to think of it, “going overboard” is pretty much everybody’s basic modus operandi. This is true even when we are trying to be healthy.

We know that regular exercise is good for us. But of the small percentage of people who actually heed that advice, many end up addicted and actually exercise too much, leading to sprains of various sorts, and pulled muscles.

But maybe the most glaring area of life where we find it hard to achieve a sense of moderation is at work.

Just about everyone I know takes great pride in being a workaholic. Certainly this has been true since at least the 1980s. Of course our jobs can and should be an important source of meaning and purpose in our lives. It’s the place where we get to share the gifts we have been given with the larger world. It provides an active, dynamic forum for the ongoing development of empathy toward those around us.

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our most important energy, the best hours of our day…

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Unfortunately, though, all we workaholics do with our most important energy, the best hours of our day, is earn a living. Our existence has been boiled down in large measure to a very narrow formula: we make money, and we spend money.

While material success sure is swell, and has allowed some of us to live in bigger homes, drive fancier cars, wear more stylish clothes, eat at better restaurants, and take more lavish and frequent vacations, this non-stop consumption does not necessarily feed our head. Or stir our soul.

No matter how challenging one’s work is, and how enjoyable the fruits of one’s labor are, everyone needs something else – an outside interest, a hobby, an avocation of some kind – that moves them in a unique manner. It can be anything. It just has to be an activity apart from what one does to pay the bills, and apart from the discretionary spending of disposable income that provides only fleeting satisfaction.

This is the reason retirement can pose such problems for certain people: They are just so out of practice. They’ve spent their entire adult lives doing nothing but making a buck, and then spending it. They haven’t developed any outside interests, and they haven’t learned the art of moderation in all things.

So here’s to my Aunt Camille and my Aunt Annette. Thank you, ladies, for what you taught me. Even when I wasn’t listening.

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr
June 12, 2020

Floundering with the Flavor of the Month

June 9, 2020 (1,693 words)

All contemporary political and social commentary misses the mark. It fails to get at the heart of the problem it sets out to address. How can that be? The fly in the ointment, it seems to me, is how we have prioritized personal autonomy above all other considerations.

It is our highest ideal as a people, seen as the surest path to progress and human flourishing. While both are unmitigated goods and worthy objectives, our understanding of each has unfortunately been severely compromised.

Allowing everyone to have their say, and do their own thing, is the essence of personal autonomy. But that is a recipe for conflict and chaos, as any sensible man or woman who has their wits about them surely knows. So we seek to apply the necessary restraints to the free-for-all, being careful to preserve the sense of radical individual freedom we all cherish so dearly.

It’s a balancing act that is impossible to maintain. Even if it seemed to be working out fairly well there for a while, by which I mean a few hundred years.

Here is the problem in a nutshell: Human nature is unruly. Not everyone possesses an innate self-awareness and level of maturity to wrestle with and control their un-neighborly impulses. And life is complicated. Not everyone has enough information at their disposal to make informed decisions. Even more problematic, not everyone possesses the cognitive ability required to process some of the more nuanced information, even when it is presented to them.

The whole thing may have sounded like a good idea at the time, but this letting everyone to their own devices has resulted in many of us making rather poor choices. This leaves the little people, in particular, feeling adrift and at loose ends – when not downright stressed out.

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a society-wide liberation from superstition…

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If you’ll recall, the master plan was a society-wide liberation from what we were told was superstition. That is to say, we were told to forgo belief in anything that could not be seen, or held, or empirically proved.

In this new world order, the one that slowly emerged some five hundred years ago, custom and tradition – based on keen observation of past experience – were now seen as limiting human potential, rather than a life-giving fountain providing meaning and purpose.

Henceforth the only legitimate authority had to be elected by popular consent. Appointment to power was now universally frowned upon. Equally important, this grand getting-out-from-under would simultaneously put the common rabble on the path to improved material circumstances.

That’s ultimately how this realignment of priorities was sold to the masses: See here, poor souls, you will make out better in the long run.

Viewing all this through that limited lens, it does appear the human condition is much improved. As economists are quick to point out, most people are better fed, clothed, and housed than were their forbearers of, say, two centuries ago. But of course that doesn’t tell the whole story, now, does it?

For one thing, personal debt is at an historic high. Statistically speaking all may be well, since the average standard of living is on the rise. But the gains have not been equitably distributed, not by a long shot.

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even less regard for collateral damage than before…

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From a financial standpoint the push for personal autonomy has always been about enabling the clever and the advantaged to pursue their economic self-interest with even less regard for collateral damage than before. It’s always been the cream of the crop that embraced this new ethos most enthusiastically. They merely enlisted the rabble as needed to overthrow the old order, thus neatly consigning custom and tradition and concern for others to the dustbin of history.

In retrospect all the high-minded talk of liberty and equality was little more than an elaborate ruse. It’s always been business as usual. Those that have are still reluctant to share with those that don’t have. The cause of liberty and equality that drove the revolution may have made an appealing rallying cry, but those lofty aspirations were always intended to be limited to the right kind of people.

It’s certainly true the moral restraint of an earlier age, designed to keep the well-off from thoroughly ransacking the peasantry, was too often ignored or overlooked. And as a result the peasantry was routinely raked over the coals, and left to barely get by.

But now the pursuit of economic advancement is unfettered, without even a residue of moral restraint to rein it in. And anyone looking to improve their lot in life is encouraged to adopt the same approach. One might call it a license not to care about one’s neighbor.

This is how our revered concept of personal autonomy expresses itself when it comes to economic behavior. The odd thing is, defending such callousness has consistently been the core of what passes for the conservative position.

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dressing this up as a principled pursuit…

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Conservatives have always – always – dressed this up as a principled pursuit of what they like to refer to as “economic freedom.” But that freedom, in this context, means getting as much for oneself as possible, and giving away the bare minimum required to keep the rabble off one’s back.

This is where our compromised understanding of progress and human flourishing comes into play. Yes, human dignity demands that all have the bare necessities of life: enough to eat, clothes to wear, and a safe place to stay. And material improvements in the developed world over the last several centuries have indeed seen to those necessities, in large measure.

But the inherent dignity that every man and woman possesses from birth is not respected – and certainly not enhanced – by drowning the majority who lack an “ownership interest” in a sea of cheap consumer goods that lack any intrinsic value. The miscellaneous stuff every First World commoner can now afford to buy does not provide a sense of meaning or purpose.

The clever and advantaged may get off on increasing their net worth and enlarging their portfolios, ad infinitum. This seems to be a constant, down through history. But that cold pursuit offers little solace to the rank-and-file. Devoting one’s existence to a continual upscaling of debt leads decent people to question the logic of such a life.

Which then begs the obvious question: If this is where personal autonomy leads us, is it really the best organizing principle for a civilized society to follow?

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pushing back against an unrestrained economic exuberance…

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Pushing back against an unrestrained economic exuberance, with its undeniable tendency to bleed into an outright exploitation of the disenfranchised and the down-trodden, has always fallen to what we now refer to as the liberal voice. It serves as an important counter-balance to the economic status-quo. It functions as society’s conscience, if you will.

The liberal critique was unerring as long as it focused on the excesses of the economic elite. But, sadly, its integrity has suffered a serious blow, taken down a notch by its own variation on “personal autonomy” that has caused so much havoc in our economic life. During the course of the 20th century the liberal voice revealed its own wayward tendencies in supporting what is euphemistically referred to as freedom of expression when it comes to sexual activity between consenting adults.

Such as the notion that monogamy is overrated, and actually constitutes a form of arrested development. Not to mention it being all-but-impossible to maintain for a healthy biped. And heterosexuality is just one option among many acceptable forms of physical intimacy.

(It’s one thing to agree homosexuals should no longer be stoned to death. It’s another to hold them up and admire them as some sort of advanced species, more highly-developed than the rest of us. There is a compromise to be broached somewhere in there, between the two extremes.)

The revolution in sexual mores that for centuries was the sole purview of the well-to-do and the avant-garde, who could misbehave without incurring debilitating financial repercussions, began filtering through the rest of society early in the 20th century, before going mainstream in the 1950s.

Around the same time the general standard of living spiked as a result of the post-WWII boom, come to think of it…

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our modern faith excludes any consideration of the divine…

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Somehow our thoroughly modern faith in reason and scientific certainly, which excludes any consideration of the divine, means we can now fool around with whomever we please.

While conservatives have always been known to discreetly indulge the odd dangerous liaison, promiscuity became a pet project of the liberal agenda in the last half century or so, and is now a non-negotiable policy position. This may be due, in part, to a general revulsion at the sight of so many economic exploiters publically proclaiming to live by a Christian moral code, while blatantly violating that code’s most fundamental precepts.

The economic hypocrisy of the average conservative does not in any way justify the licentiousness of the average liberal, but the former has most definitely paved the way for the latter. As so often happens, the failings of the few have undermined the belief and practice of the many.

Which brings us to our current stalemate: Liberals continue to provide a valuable service when they hammer away at the glaring hitch in our economic clockwork – a lack of equitable distribution. But their Achilles heel is their full-on commitment to personal autonomy when it comes to sexual mores. Instead of emancipating free spirits from stifling bonds, as the brochure so attractively promises, it has created deep hurt among intimates.

Conservatives, on the other hand, talk a good game when it comes to loyalty and honorable conduct, as everyone knows. But they sabotage themselves with their “economic” adherence to personal autonomy, which shreds the social fabric they claim to care so much about.

And there isn’t a single political or social commentator working today – no matter the following they may command in the moment – that shows the slightest awareness each side in our oh-so-familiar liberal/conservative cage match harbors a stubborn contradiction.

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr
June 9, 2020

The Company One Keeps

June 2, 2020 (322 words)

Just so we’re clear, the Catholic Church is as corrupt as any institution around. There is no denying it. When your organizational chart is filled with flawed human beings, you can hope for the best but should prepare for the worst.

So I’ve never been sure why evidence of such corruption turns certain people away, or justifies others in their outright rejection of the teaching.

It is the unassailable nature of that teaching which has attracted the attention of some of the most intelligent, hardest-working, and selfless men and women who have ever walked the Earth. And not just attracted their attention, but commanded their complete and utter devotion.

It’s fashionable these days to disparage any religious belief as hopelessly naïve. In particular, adherence to or promotion of anything remotely associated with the Catholic tradition comes in for special scorn.

Such is the spirit of our age.

The story of the modern era goes something like this: Having incorrectly determined Christianity is lacking in practical solutions, we long ago adopted rationalism, classical liberalism, and materialism to take its place, and guide our worldly endeavors.

We are convinced all thorny issues can be resolved by applying formulas we can see and touch and empirically prove.

But we threw in the towel much too soon. As the wise man once said: “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.”

The Christian ethos stills holds the key to every social problem we confront, even if its prescription is daunting and frequently asks the impossible of us. Matthew 5:44, anyone?

This unique culture, replete with challenging beliefs and aspirations, has been built and nourished in its purest form by the Catholic tradition. And by all those intelligent, hard-working, and selfless people who give of themselves to manifest its spirit.

Even if flawed followers and compromised leaders sometimes do a less-than-stellar job representing the supreme truth that tradition proclaims.

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr
June 2, 2020

The Missing Link

June 1, 2020 (371 words)

My slow-but-steady march through Rich People Things: Real Life Secrets of the Predator Class, a book of social criticism originally published by Chris Lehmann in 2010, and followed the next year with an expanded edition, continues apace. Some things are meant to be savored, and should not be rushed.

So the other night I’m reading his short chapter on Ayn Rand, and come across the following:

“Nowhere in Rand’s baby-simple sociological narratives is there the slightest room for any deviationist lurch toward the acknowledgement of any shared good, or even notional communities of interest, that her angry, atomistic ideal-type characters might have in common with each other, let alone with society at large.

“In no other works of fiction, ironically enough, does the parodic mantra ascribed to the Beat Generation’s critiques of conformist culture – I blame society – apply with such complete, totalizing force.”

This passage nicely encapsulates Mr. Lehmann’s primary message: Rich people only look out for themselves and this undermines the social fabric.

His sentences are chock full of descriptive references. The descriptions may be a little dense at times, and the references a bit arcane. But if the general reader takes his or her time, and maybe re-reads certain sections once or twice, the beauty of Lehmann’s language should open up for any interested bystander.

Chris Lehmann is as entertaining as he is intelligent, and his perceptive analysis is a joy to read.

Though I am starting to wonder just what he considers to be the antidote. What does a bright and exuberant progressive-minded polemicist think is the restorative principle that can save our most successful citizens from their self-absorption?

He has half the problem nailed. In this tome he diagnoses and lays bare the fatal flaws in our founding philosophy of enlightened self-interest as it pertains to economic behavior.

But isn’t it the same philosophy of self-interest behind the progressive insistence we indulge our every whim in the realm of personal behavior, aka personal morality?

Will Mr. Lehmann one day choose to analyze how this “letting it all hang out” when it comes to sexual preferences and pursuits also undermines the fabric of our community, every bit as much as the inclination to avarice?

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr
June 1, 2020