Eating as Politics

Daniel Larison has a really well-written post on the political and even religious importance of how and what we eat:

…This scandalizes and terrifies many modern conservatives because they seem to have a limited or debased understanding of what it means to say that something is a political act, and they tend to associate it for the most part with the government and the business of electioneering and passing legislation.  Were you to say that there is so much more to the life of a community, ta politika, than its government, laws and elections, these same conservatives would agree wholeheartedly and would probably make a point of saying admiringly that most people who would call themselves conservatives today are not activists and are concerned mostly with their families and churches….  Even so, to then say that it matters in some important way what they eat, where it comes from or how the animals and soil that provide them sustenance are treated is usually to lose much of their interest.  Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, the language of unfettered desire and autonomy crops up: “I want what I want, and who are you to say otherwise?”  At least with many libertarians, this is to be expected, but it is a strange reflex for those who are supposed to prize restraint and wisdom.

Right-wing Super-consumerism

Larison points out a startling fuel-policy recommendation by El Rushbo: don’t conserve fuel, and instead have the State ensure we can keep up our greedy consumeristic habits (see his original comments). Daniel’s comments are worth the read:

Limbaugh offers here the absurd spectacle of “conservatism” as the embrace of endless consumption and degradation of nature, and really what this reveals is a desire to belong to something like a pink subsidy state… The implication here seems to be that if the market can no longer accommodate sufficient levels of consumption, the state should come in to subsidize that consumption and over-consumption, but above all it is a declaration that egregiously conspicuous consumption has something to do with national status and power.

Lilla Revisited

David Congdon has some great interaction with Mark Lilla’s anti-political theology here: Between Atheism and Fundamentalism.

Evangelical Law

Calvin outlined the telos of law in three parts: the pedagogical, the civil, and the didactic. The first two, serving as condemnatory ends, fit neatly into most political theologies. But the third use is more problematic: “it serveth also for our instruction, that we might learn to discern between good and evil, and again it quickeneth us up” (Calvin, Sermons on Galatians). Or as Peter puts it, law is instituted by God “to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good.”

So practically, this raises several questions. If law and gospel sometimes work toward the same telos, how should we expect a mature Christian society to order itself? Take the prison system, for example. If law stood apart from love, criminals would be punished with no purpose toward a restitution of the crime, nor a restoration of fellowship. And if love stood apart from law, then we’d have the Quaker “reform system,” which failed so miserably because of an erroneous understanding of the human condition. But when law and good news function together, the situation gets messy. You have to start tempering justice with mercy. You have to condemn the judges and forgive the adultress. You must sometimes hand over to the devil in order to save the soul. You must live in paradox. This seems to be the dizzying complexity of a properly-ordered society.

In the end, as Augustine argued, when an entity is well-ordered, it finds its end in love—specifically, love of God. Misordered love leads to the desire for power or self-rule or uninhibited consumption. True Christian love, however, works out of a proper worship toward the betterment of the objects of God’s love: our neighbors. Love therefore fulfills the law, and does not abolish it. It is in fact the perfect law.

Michael Pollan: Theonomist?

Not really.

But I just read this interesting passage in Omnivore’s Dilemma, in which Michael Pollan stumbles upon some ancient agricultural wisdom:

Naylor’s perspective on farm policy was shaped by a story his dad used to tell him. It takes place during the winter of 1933, in the depths of the farm depression. “That’s when my father hauled corn to town and found out that the price of corn had been ten cents a bushel the day before, but on that day the elevator wasn’t even buying.” The price of corn had fallen to zero. “Tears always came to his eyes when he recounted the neighbors losing their farms in the 1920s and ’30s,” Naylor told me. America’s farm policy was forged during the Depression not, as many people seem to think, to encourage farmers to produce more food for a hungry nation, but to rescue farmers from the disastrous effects of growing too much food–far more than Americans could afford to buy.

For as long as people have been farming, fat years have posed almost as stiff a challenge as lean, since crop surpluses collapse prices and bankrupt farmers who will be needed again when the inevitable lean years return. When it comes to food, nature can make a mockery of the classical economics of supply and demand–nature in the form of good or bad weather, of course, but also the nature of the human body, which can consume only so much food no matter how plentiful the supply. So, going back to the Old Testament, communities have devised various strategies to even out the destructive swings of agricultural production. The Bible’s recommended farm policy was to establish a grain reserve. Not only did this ensure that when drought or pestilence ruined a harvest there’d still be food to eat, but it kept farmers whole by taking food off the market when the harvest was bountiful.

Milbank and Pickstock Podcast

From a CBC interview last June: The Best of Ideas: On Radical Orthodoxy (added on the Milbank resource page).

Sleep and Resurrection

A culture’s view of sleep seems to be closely parallel to their view of death and the afterlife, soul and body. Modern views of sleep focus almost entirely on the mechanism of sleep; the metaphysics of sleep are largely assumed to be beyond explanation or definition. Premoderns largely tended to see it as a portal into the realm of spirit, a higher and better plane of existence.

The Bible provides a large volume of material on sleep, all of which draws out the antithesis starkly. Those who trust in God are promised fruitful sleep, while the lazy are cursed with the abundance of the very thing which was supposed to be a blessing. But at the very heart of the Bible’s language about sleep is the close analogy between sleep and death. The close relationship between these two things led the Irenaeus to assert that before the Fall Adam must not have experienced sleep (which he argued, ironically, while commenting on the passage in Genesis in which God puts Adam to sleep in order to create Eve).
Continue reading…

Food Ethic Revisited

Republicans aren’t allowed to eat well or eat heathy. If you do, you’re a liberal.

If you have a well-developed sense of humor, go read Newsbuster’s laughable response to AmConMag’s issue on food. Schwenkler’s response is worthy of consumption.

Other POI:

• Caleb Stegall summons a bit of Japery in a piece on Foodism and Michael Pollan.
• Russell Arben Fox on the AmConMag piece and … Stegall.

More on the Emergent Conservatism

As a follow up to yesterday’s post, I wanted to point out another excellent post by Josh Grimm on the emergent conservatism (the local, crunchy, communal kind). He suggests that love (and not the kind suggested by Olaskian compassionate conservatism) should be the operating principle of the Right:

Love, then, mandates the contrast to conserve what is good and salvage it from damnation and stereotyping by association. (That is indeed a cross for us to bear in love and in humility.) Therefore, the contrast is worth evoking to communicate to our friends in mainstream America that truly humane conservative principles, which I would say coalesces in the principles Dreher’s crunchiness but also has space for Milbank and Russell Arben Fox’s “traditionalist socialism”, is distinct from and is not discredited by, the failures of the GOP and the mainstream conservative movement. The contrast is worth evoking to shout from the rooftops to mainstream America that the Gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ has nothing, NOTHING, to do with unjustified wars, with torture, and with making capitalism the beginning-and-end of life and of politics. What hath Jerusalem to do with cutting corporate tax rates and giving free reign to the building of strip malls?

Which makes me wonder that there must be a paradox here.

In the quest for absolute economic or political freedom, conservatism has lost sight of the love of neighbor. Just last night, I saw a Republican congressman rail against the new housing bill on the grounds that prosperous members of society shouldn’t have to suffer along side those who made bad investment choices (e.g. first time home buyers who were assured that a no payment down ARM would be just dandy). Of course, his argument makes complete sense outside of Christian witness. But honestly, isn’t this just the sort of mindset which Christ and the Apostles uniformly call on us to reject?

The encouraging thing is, if you pursue love and sacrifice your own welfare, a perfect freedom returns in its place (John 8:33-36). Seems to me, conservatism could afford to think about this for at least the next four years.

Conservative exile

Everyone is expecting to see John McCain handed his own head on a platter come November, which of course sparks all sorts of speculation about the state of the conservative movement. Lib media figures like Keith Olbermann are enjoying the momentary ascendancy (as is only natural). And the young generation of conservatives is splintering off from the traditional, Reaganesque wing of the movement—moving now in several directions. Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat penned Grand New Party, reimagining a working class GOP (“Sam’s Club Republicans”) that leaves behind much of the libertarian-conservative fusionism that’s lasted since the 1950s. See Patricia Cohen’s piece in the NYT on the changing topography of conservatism.

But the most interesting development to me is the seemingly postmodern, and extremely traditionalistic response of some conservatives toward localism, community, and ecclesio-centrism. In other words: conservatives who are perfectly content as political exiles. John Schwenkler points to a post by Joshua Grimm (who in turn was responding to an interesting post by Daniel Larison at AmConMag). Grimm connects the current conservatism predicament to a Hauerwasian mentality:

It is at this point that I would give a word of caution to all Christians involved in socio-political engagement: it is our calling to engage and to be salt and light. But, as a modern Americans, our tendency to do so is to it in a modernistic way, a way that serves the interests of the secular State, of individualism, of consumerism, interests that are fundamentally idolatrous and antithetical to the Gospel. We must engage, but we must engage as people for whom the beginning and the end of the story is Christ, and whose community is first and foremost the Church, the called out and gathered Body of Christ.

Grimm’s post is worth a gander. Takes a special gumption to apply Hauerwas to conservatism. But even more than that, those of us raised in a culture of conservatism are often specially tempted by the prospect of gaining the whole world, when what we are really called to is the quiet and paradoxically peaceable life of Christian witness. Sometimes we’re called to embrace defeat.

Who’s Brainwashed?

The New Yorker has a fascinating essay on the younger generation of Chinese nationalists. What really stands out to me is not the nationalism itself, but the nationalism which stands to some degree against the Chinese government. A choice quote from Evan Osnos’ piece:

[Tang is] baffled that foreigners might imagine that people of his generation are somehow unwise to the distortions of censorship.

“Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed,” he said. “We are always eager to get other information from different channels.” Then he added, “But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.”

Another interesting point is just how unwieldy the internet is: what was meant as a vehicle for unbridled optimism is turning out to be an effective (subversive) means to sustain nationalism:

The Internet had barely taken root in China before it became a vessel for nationalism. At the Atlanta Olympics, in 1996, as the Chinese delegation marched into the stadium, the NBC announcer Bob Costas riffed on China’s “problems with human rights, property right disputes, the threat posed to Taiwan.” Then he mentioned “suspicions” that Chinese athletes used performance-enhancing drugs. Even though the Web in China was in its infancy (there were just five telephone lines for every hundred people), comments spread instantly among Chinese living abroad. The timing couldn’t have been more opportune: after more than fifteen years of reform and Westernization, Chinese writers were pushing back against Hollywood, McDonald’s, and American values. An impassioned book titled “China Can Say No” came out that spring and sold more than a hundred thousand copies in its first month. Written by a group of young intellectuals, it decried China’s “infatuation with America,” which had suppressed the national imagination with a diet of visas, foreign aid, and advertising. If China didn’t resist this “cultural strangulation,” it would become “a slave,” extending a history of humiliating foreign incursions that stretched back to China’s defeat in the first Opium War and the British acquisition of Hong Kong, in 1842. The Chinese government, which is wary of fast-spreading new ideas, eventually pulled the book off the shelves, but not before a raft of knockoffs sought to exploit the same mood (“Why China Can Say No,” “China Still Can Say No,” and “China Always Say No”).

Xu Wu, a former journalist in China who is now a professor at Arizona State University, says in his 2007 book “Chinese Cyber Nationalism” that groups claiming to represent more than seventy thousand overseas Chinese wrote to NBC asking for an apology for the Costas remarks. They collected donations online and bought an ad in the Washington Post, accusing Costas and the network of “ignominious prejudice and inhospitality.” NBC apologized, and Chinese online activism was born.

Read the whole piece here.

The Necessity of Sectarianism

Halden has a great post on Stanley Hauerwas’ sectarianism:

In other words, it is absolutely essential that the church be sectarian if it is going to truly be the church. Attempts to mitigate sectarianism are attempts to make the church and Christianity less churchly and less Christian. As such, these impulses must be rejected for the sake of faithful discipleship. Moreover, the sectarian imperative does not mean the withdrawal of the church from the world. Rather it is a call to a more radical way of being worldly, of doing world. For the church to be faithfully sectarian, the church must embody within itself the fullness of humanity being restored in the image of the new creation. The sectarian imperative is wedded to a strong assertion of catholicity.

Do read the whole thing.