Items of Note (2/24/09)

• Blow-by-blow account of a debate between philosophical heavy-weights Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Dennett.
• James K.A. Smith responds to the last chapter of Nate Kerr’s new book, Christ, History, and Apocalyptic.
• Douglas Knight has posted his new, in-progress work on Scribd. His latest chapter, The Church in the City, advances some quietly provocative arguments for setting the “place” of the Church at the center of society. Knight makes an interesting eschatological explication of Augustinianism that really intrigues me. I’m looking forward to the completed work.
• Also from Douglas Knight: “On the Way to Easter.” Of particular interest, Dr. Knight analyzes the current economic situation by means of a lenten theology.

UPDATE: The links for Dr. Knight’s material have changed. Best way to access them is probably to go to his main Scribd site.

The End of Conservative “Patriotism”

In lieu of original material here (I’m deep in the muck of grad school prep and decision-making), I’d recommend Patrick Deneen’s provocative post at the American Conservative blog, “The End of Right Patriotism?” Historically speaking, newly-demoted minority powers often experience a period of disillusionment with the national narrative. Liberals were pessimists during Bush II (Colbert and Stewart wouldn’t have thrived otherwise); now the Obama ascendancy is reinvigorating the dynastic hopes of the left. Deneen points out that the conservative movement started out as a cautionary movement, one that was transformed by the essential optimism of Reagan conservatism. Thirty years later, we’ve come full circle. Says Deneen:

It may indeed be the case of a rejuvenation of pre-Reagan conservatism, drawing deeply from the works of such authors as Kirk, Weaver, Niebuhr and other “pessimists” (or, I would submit, Realists) may doom any such New/Old/Paleo conservatism to irrelevancy in the American narrative. However, if some of its basic message has remained the same, times have decidedly changed. Faced with a collapsing economic system, the undoing of the American-led Post-World War II global consensus, the growing evidence of environmental and moral depletion all around us, the message of conservative realism may be ripe for a re-hearing and reassessment. Everywhere people are realizing that the message of optimism – don’t worry, be happy, and pay for it tomorrow – was in fact a message of deception, duplicity and fraud. Neither the mainstream Left nor Right appear capable of speaking meaningfully to the import of this moment. Ironically, the very moment that the Left has re-connected to its message of “liberal faith” may be the very moment when that faith is proven to be too much evidence of things unseen. In the meantime, a critique of the American narrative – combined with a reconsideration of “Another America,” a tradition of localism, community, self-government based in limits, a culture of memory and tradition, undergirded by faith and virtue – may have found its moment.

Kerr and Hauerwas

Over at The Church and Postmodern Culture, the discussion of Nate Kerr’s new book continues. Today’s installment comes from John Wright, who responds to Kerr’s critique of Hauerwas’ alleged anti-liberalism and emphasis on ecclesiology-over-Christology. Very much worth the read. Excerpt:

One wonders, however, about this reading of Hauerwas. Surely Kerr is aware that liberalism began as explicitly anti-Christian, at least Christianity in it evangelical, orthodox, and especially Catholic form. The Constitutional Church in revolutionary France first demanded a loyalty oath from clergy against loyalty to the Catholic Church in its attempt to wrest authority/loyalty away from the Catholic Church. To define any Christian position as anti-liberal is to call the Oedipal offspring a victim of its own attack on its parent. By defining Hauerwas as “anti-liberal” (why is liberalism not “anti-Christian” or at least “anti-Hauerwas”), Kerr asserts a subtle normativity to liberalism, rather than recognize that the church had worked out its convictions, profoundly imperfectly practiced as still done today, before the fathers (and the male gender should be noted) of liberalism intellectually, rhetorically, socially, and violently attacked them. Hauerwas is not “anti-liberal”; he is a Ressourcement theologian who attempts to up-date the thought of the church to address the current age by re-stating its normative past…

The Red Tory Rebuttal

British Conservative leader David Cameron is reportedly giving Phillip Blond’s Red Toryism an audience. In a speech at Davos two weeks ago, Cameron argued that the traditional political paradigm had failed, and that the world needs a “moral capitalism.” Cameron’s track record leaves me skeptical, but I’m interested to see how this develops. Cameron’s comments have already sparked outrage (I’m not exaggerating) from the Thatcherite faction of the Conservative Party. Simon Heffer foams with objectivist indignation:

[Cameron] complains about the “absence of a moral framework” from capitalism. It shows his profound misunderstanding of the term “capitalism”; it echoes the misunderstanding that he and his decerebrated shadow chancellor have had of this crisis ever since it began to develop….

“Markets are a means to an end, not an end in themselves,” he says, in one of the clichés that pepper this speech and reveal the collection of small minds that were at work on it (“the stakes are high” and “the devil is in the details” are two more depressing examples).

But markets are the place in which the exercise of the free will of buyers and sellers takes place. How else would Mr Cameron have it? It can only be that free will should be restrained by some means or other; and how will that make us happier, when it will make us, in the end, a socialist-style wealth-limiting, freedom-starved command economy?

The Davos speech terrifies for what it says about the Tories’ approach to the government in which they may quite soon find themselves. Yet it is also meaningless, for the obtuse and infantile understanding Mr Cameron and his friends appear to have of the operation of capitalism would soon be corrected by global realities.

But Madeleine Bunting offers a different take.

Hauerwas and the Church’s Future

If the Church merely positions itself against the eschatologically-fading power of the State, it fundamentally limits its mission and teleology. It’s concerning this point that Nathan Kerr offers an interesting critique of the theopolitics of Stanley Hauerwas: Hauerwas, he argues, has neglected the future of the ecclesia, as well as setting up the Church as the ideological equal to the power of the old aeon, the State. In doing so, Hauerwas essentially simplifies the tension between State and Church into a dualistic struggle, rather than allowing for a more tenuous co-existence that will ultimately be resolved by the eschaton.

Thus, even though Hauerwas will readily admit that there is still a future to be had for this ecclesial society, his failure to articulate any real disjunction between this future and the parousia of the singular human being Jesus Christ means that this future must really be conceived teleologically as always-already present in the church’s political life here and now. The second point follows upon the first, and that is that Hauerwas compromises the eschatological tension between the ‘two ages’ that is characteristic of apocalyptic by reifying this tension in terms of a church-state dualism…. The church lives and embodies the new aeon inasmuch as it exists against the modern liberal nation state, and precisely as such does it limit, and resist assimilation to, the powers of the old aeon.

Christ, History, and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009), 124.

The Local Alternative

A good friend of mine and I were recently discussing the protectionism of President Obama’s stimulus package. While I believe that the problems with our president’s stimulus package are legion, I don’t think that its “buy American” provisions are nearly as worrisome as other aspects. 

I have no desire to take up a defense of protectionism, for a couple reasons: firstly, protectionism is a baggage-heavy label applied by its enemies to a scattershot group of economic theories; and secondly, I’m not a protectionist, by the usual definition at least. I much prefer localism, if labels are absolutely necessary.

Nevertheless, here are eight preliminary (and very simplistic) theses on economic localism, naked and unsubstantiated though they may be. 

I.
Protectionism can = selfish nationalism. I’m sure there are plenty of economic jingoists who proudly hold to protectionism. But that’s not anything I wish to defend. I much prefer the “localist” label. So…

II.
Localism stands against globalism, which isn’t to say that it is not concerned over the plight of other peoples. Rather, localism makes the case that globalism is actually one of the great oppressive forces in the modern world. Globalism wishes to provide products and services for the cheapest cost that “The Market” can offer. If a Chinese factory can produce G.I. Joes and Matchbox cars for one-quarter the cost of a domestic toy manufacturuing plant, guess who wins out? In 1965, manufacturing made up 53% of the American economy. As of 2004, that number is just 9%. So first, from the American point of view, globalism has made our economic viability utterly dependent on countless foreign industries. We are no longer self-sufficient; only astronomic rates of over-consumption keep us growing (until now, at least). Globalism has fueled almost limitless growth in the first-world, but at a tremendous cost to both the first-world and the third-world.

III.
Localism, even in its most “protectionist” forms, is not against trade between nations. It is not against the idea of imports. And it is certainly not mercantilism—not by a long shot.

IV.
Positively defined, localism prioritizes community rather than growth.

V.
Localism manifests itself in a number of different movements, including agrarianism and New Urbanism. It stands against modernity and its ugly bastard children: suburbanism/urban rot, strip malls, industrial agriculture, corporatism, Washington D.C., and iPods. It stands for urban renewal (read: parish life), regional architecture, small businesses, local and seasonal agriculture, city councils, and the local symphony. Localism doesn’t believe that economic hegemony (i.e. having a McDonalds on every street corner from St Louis to Turin to Bangkok) is healthy for a society. Localism disapproves of putting the liveihoods of a third-world village entirely at the disposal of a first-world corporation.

VI.
Localism emphasizes that in a global economy, the winners are the US corporations who can cut costs and the corrupt foreign leaders who offer up their laborers at unimaginably cheap rates. The losers are the second- and third-world poor. Even worse, when third-world villages are conscripted into the global economy, they become dependent on the “mercy” of their foreign employer. If the first-world corporation closes down production in the village, the workers are even worse off than before.

VII.
Localism believes that just rulers should protect the weak against the powerful. Some might argue that tariffs are a good way to do this. Others might advocate an alternative. See Phillip Blond.

VIII.
Localism is skeptical of the Babelesque goals of globalism. Christian localists often point out the religious dimensions of economic globalist rhetoric. See Cavanaugh’s Being Consumed.