Category Archives: Culture and society

John Mackey, Mark Steyn, and the intolerance of “tolerance”

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A couple weeks ago, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey wrote an excellent piece on health-care reform in the Wall Street Journal—I posted on it at the time—drawing lessons from his company’s experience with health-care benefits and laying out a free-market alternative to Obamacare. The result has been a nasty backlash from leftists who are outraged to discover that their favorite socially-responsible grocery store isn’t dedicated to all their socialist causes; there is of course a petition (isn’t there always, these days?), which declares,

Whole Foods has built its brand with the dollars of deceived progressives. Let them know your money will no longer go to support Whole Foods’ anti-union, anti-health insurance reform, right-wing activities.

“Deceived”? Really? Has Whole Foods ever claimed in the past to support socialized medicine? No, the “deception” is all in the mind of folks on the left. They simply and unquestioningly assumed that because the company is opposed to factory farming and other aspects of the modern agricultural industry, it therefore must be equally liberal on every other point; now, since its CEO has revealed himself not to be a socialist on the issue of the day, they assume he must have been lying about everything else—and must be, among other things, “anti-union.”

Which is, not to put too fine a point on it, ludicrous. As an example, Michelle Malkin offers this letter from a Whole Foods employee:

I work for Whole Foods, and I am a long time loyal employee. I love our company, and our CEO! John Mackey stands for what he cares about and believes in! This company offers awesome benefits and puts us team members first!

She also cites a commenter on the company’s online forum, who writes,

  • Mackey lectures at Universities about the horrors of factory farming
  • He says “Right now, Americans have to pretend factory farms don’t exist. They turn their eyes away, because there’s no alternative, there’s no choice. Once there is a choice, we will allow ourselves to be outraged.”
  • He makes $1 a year and donates his stock portfolio to charity.
  • He set up a $100,00 fund to help his employees with personal problems.
  • He’s a vegetarian and his company will not buy from producers that treat their animals unethically.
  • He flies commercial, rents the smallest cars, and stays in the cheapest hotel rooms – not because he’s cheap, but because he has no need for largesse
  • He and his wife participate in yoga
  • He gives over $1 million a year to animal welfare groups, education, relief work, and spiritual movements.
  • Employees have full say in who they work with—a new employee must receive a 2/3 vote in order to make it past probation.
  • Employees also vote on all company-wide initiatives
  • There’s a salary book in every store—“no secrets” management believes everyone should know how much everyone else is making
  • Executive salaries are capped at 14 times the lowest workers salary—If they want more money, everyone else has to get more money first
  • Non-executive employees hold 94% of company stock options
  • Pay is linked to team performance—profit sharing
  • At least 5% of annual profits go to local charities
  • Full-timers get 100% of their health care costs paid for—under plans the employees have selected
  • “They just have a lot more respect for you as a person here,” says an employee
And because he had a different idea about how the United States can fix it health care situation, none of this matters? He’s a caring person and many of you want to treat him like a monster. Why? Not because he opposes reform, but because he’s bringing more ideas to the table.

Read her whole post; the person who e-mailed Malkin that comment has a remarkable account of falling in with Mackey and his friends on the Appalachian Trail and spending a few days hiking with him.

As for the commenter and his question: yes, because Mackey had a different idea from the Left, none of that matters; as Andrew Breitbart points out, such is the true nature of the liberal idea of tolerance. You see, it breaks down this way:

  • Tolerance is the highest virtue.
  • Tolerance means affirming everyone no matter what they believe.
  • Except that, since tolerance is the highest virtue, we must not tolerate those who are intolerant.
  • Which is to say, we must not tolerate those who are unwilling to affirm everyone no matter what they believe.
  • Which is to say, we must not tolerate those who do not believe the same way we do about tolerance.
  • Which is to say, tolerance is only for those whose beliefs we find acceptable.

Which is, definitionally, intolerance. I hasten to say, I have no necessary problem with that; there are certainly things which any rational person should refuse to tolerate, and we all have the responsibility to figure out where to draw that line. There’s no law saying that those who disagree with me have to find my opinions tolerable.

However. I do object to people cloaking their intolerance in the language of “tolerance” and calling me “intolerant” for disagreeing with them—that kind of Orwellian Newspeak is something which I find, yes, completely intolerable; and I especially object to them using it as a weapon to expand their own right to free speech while infringing on mine, and on the rights of those who share my positions. If they want to boycott Whole Foods, let them go on ahead—I don’t agree with it any more than I agreed with the Southern Baptist boycott of Disney, but it’s their money, they can spend it however they wish—but the organized efforts we’ve been seeing from the likes of SEIU and the Obama administration to silence dissenters on Obamacare are quite another matter.

And if you don’t believe that restricting free speech and silencing dissent from the party line is what this is all about, just look at Canada, and its system of “human-rights commissions”; they’ve turned into ideological kangaroo courts, determining which speech is protected and which isn’t, all based on their own ideas of what they would prefer to tolerate and what they wouldn’t. Fortunately, when they went after Mark Steyn (because the Canadian Islamic Congress didn’t like what he said about the effects of Muslim immigration), he fought back, and he had the kind of public profile and financial backing he needed to win; but not everybody is Mark Steyn, and not everybody has the tools and the support to defend themselves effectively, and so the result is still the chilling of freedom of expression.

That’s why Steyn said what he did in his testimony this past February before the Ontario Human Rights Commission:

The Ontario Human Rights regime is incompatible with a free society. It is useless on real human rights issues that we face today and in the cause of such pseudo-human rights as the human right to smoke marijuana on someone else’s property . . .—in the cause of pseudo-human rights, it tramples on real human rights, including property rights, free speech, the right to due process, and the presumption of innocence. . . .

It’s all too easy to imagine the Terry Downeys of the day telling a homosexual fifty years ago that there is proper conduct that everyone has to follow. Or a Jew seventy years ago that there is proper conduct that everyone has to follow. That’s why free societies do not license ideologues to regulate proper conduct. When you suborn legal principles to ideological fashion, you place genuine liberties in peril.

He’s right.

One starfish at a time

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Earlier this week, I went along with the youth and kids of our church on a trip to the Fort Wayne Children’s Zoo. While walking the path through the Indonesian Rain Forest exhibit, I came upon a display with this quote from Edmund Burke:

No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

My first reaction was amusement to see a quote from one of the intellectual founders of modern conservatism so prominently displayed at a pretty liberal institution. (That’s not a complaint; it’s probably inevitable that zoos end up mostly staffed by folks on the liberal side of the spectrum. I can let the agenda slide, and it’s a good zoo.) My second was that Burke, as so often, had hit the nail on the head—both in identifying the problem, and in identifying it as a problem.

The mistake he names there is a common one, and all too easy a mistake to make. The problems of our world are large, and most of us can do little about any of them. Indeed, most of us, even only doing a little at a time, can only really try to do anything about a few of them. We are small beings, and limited. Doing anything can easily come to seem pointless. And yet, even the little we can do is well worth doing.

Why? Well, for one thing, we can never be sure that what we can do is truly as little as we think. Yes, we are small beings—and yet the course of history has many times been affected by individuals who gave it their best shot at the right place at the right time. To take but one example, how many people today remember the name of the man who converted D. L. Moody in a New England shoe shop?—but his boldness in that encounter changed the course of history, as it was multiplied many, many times over in the boldness of the great evangelist.

If we only change the lives of a few people, is that really so small a thing? You may well have heard the story of the old man, the little boy, and the starfish, which is one of my favorites. If you haven’t, well, it seems that one day a tired, cynical old man decided to walk down on the beach. As he walked, he saw a little boy walking ahead of him, picking up starfish that were high and dry on the sand and tossing them back into the water. The little boy walked slowly, so after a while, the old man caught up with him; when he did so, he asked the boy, “Why are you doing that? There are too many starfish for you to save—what you’re doing can’t possibly matter.” The little boy looked down at the starfish in his hand a moment, then looked back up and said, “It matters to this one”—and threw it in.

We tend to underrate the value and importance of individual lives; we never know how much it will mean that we help that one person, or what they will go on to do as a result. We think that only big things are meaningful, and that the only people who really matter in this world are those who have the power and position to do big things; and we forget that the good we do has a way of multiplying, and if we do the little good things that are in our power to do, they can help and inspire others to do the same, and cumulatively that adds up after a while.

And perhaps even more significantly, we forget that the people whose lives we touch are infinitely valuable in and of themselves, which is why an infinite God offered an infinite sacrifice for their sake, for ours, for each of ours. Whatever we can do for the good is worth doing, however small it may seem to us, because if even one person knows love, and hope, and joy, and peace because of us, that’s enough to justify all our efforts; that’s enough to make it worthwhile.

Photo © Jocelyn.  Free use.

Seen on a billboard

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along US 30 in rural Pennsylvania west of Pittsburgh—two-panel, comic-strip style, a slice of a conversation between two characters. One says to the other, “What do you mean, I can’t take a joke? I took you.” (The quote may not be completely exact in the first few words, but the rest stuck firmly in my brain.)

I wasn’t in a position to stop and look closely at the billboard, and the way the road was winding, I didn’t get a long look at it, so I have no idea who put it up, or why, or what their purpose was; whatever their reason, that’s an extraordinarily cruel line, in my humble opinion. It appears that what I saw is part of a larger campaign, because I saw a different two-panel comic-strip billboard in my rear-view mirror later on—I have no idea what it said, though, so it doesn’t bring me any closer to knowing what these billboards are about.

All of this has left me curious. I tried Googling the first billboard I saw, but with no result. Does anybody know anything about these billboards and their purpose?

The underlying problem

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Christians voiced anger and dismay Tuesday after a Bible, which was part of an exhibition inviting viewers to add their reflections, was defaced with offensive and foul-mouthed scrawl.

Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art has decided to put the Bible in a glass case after the exhibit, called Untitled 2009 and part of a show entitled Made In God’s Image, was vandalised.

Artist Jane Clarke, a minister at the Metropolitan Community Church, asked visitors to annotate the Bible with stories and reflections, as a way of making it more inclusive.

But visitors to the gallery took the invitation a bit further than she had anticipated. . . .

On the first page of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, someone had written: “I am Bi, Female and Proud. I want no god who is disappointed in this.”

It’s a pretty predictable story, really; Clarke appears to have been surprised by what happened, but that only shows her to be severely naive. She’s quoted as saying, “I had hoped that people would show respect for the Bible, for Christianity and indeed for the Gallery of Modern Art,” but that was never going to be the universal response, for reasons which the response I quoted above shows.

Most people, when they read the comment written on the first page of that Bible, will focus on sexuality; but the truth is, whatever you think of homosexuality and the biblical teaching about it, that’s not the most significant issue here. Whether this woman’s homosexual practices are sinful or not, her comment shows her to be guilty of a greater sin—indeed, the greatest of all sins—that of idolatry. She’s made it very clear what her real god is: her sexuality. All other claims on her allegiance are measured against that one; she’s willing to worship other gods as well, to add other deities to her personal pantheon, but only if they are content to serve her chief god.

And the Lord of creation, the God of the universe, won’t do that. He will never do that. He claims our absolute obedience and allegiance, and he will not share his glory with another—and that’s why so many people resist him. That’s the root of our objections to God, that he insists on being our only god, calling us to give up all competing loyalties and affections; and there are many who are unwilling to do so. If the church is going to reach out in any intelligent way, it has to start by realizing that fact. As Tim Keller says, we cannot effectively preach the gospel without naming and addressing the idols of our culture and our people.

HT: the Rev. Wayne Paul Barrett, who referenced this in his sermon yesterday at Delmont Presbyterian Church. (My apologies for initially failing to note this.)

The real bigotry of Gatesgate

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isn’t racism, but classism—not black vs. white but elite vs. ordinary barbarian. Michael Barone captures this well in his Examiner piece from yesterday when he writes,

When Gates was shouting in the hearing of passerbys that Crowley was a racist, Crowley must have regarded this as a threat to his entire career. Allegations of racism could result in losing his job, being publicly disgraced, being unable to get another good job—the end of everything he’d worked for all his adult life.

Gates had much less to lose. His foolish mouthing off—in street talk, for goodness sake—at worst would get him a couple of hours in jail, as it did. That’s unpleasant, but even before being hauled off he could see a more-than-offsetting benefit: this could be the subject or the jumping off point for his next television documentary! Crowley had the power to put Gates in jail for a few hours, but not much else.

Gates, on the other hand, had the power to destroy Crowley’s career. And he seemed to enjoy wielding that power, or at least to be acting in reckless disregard of his capacity to destroy the professional life of another human being. Yes, Gates was jet-lagged and presumably irritated that he was locked out of his house. But the possibility that Crowley was a decent professional, not at all a racist, properly investigating a possible crime, doesn’t seem to have occurred to him. Crowley was just one of the little people, a disposable commodity in the career of an academic superstar.

This accounts well for something that rather surprised me: the swiftness and unflinching conviction with which Sgt. Crowley’s colleagues and the officials of his union stood up for him and stood behind him. I would have expected some of them to try to curry favor with Professor Gates, Harvard, the mayor of Cambridge, and the president, in the face of the radioactive allegation of racism—but none of them did. I think Barone’s right, that they recognized the real bigotry in the Gates-Crowley encounter, and though they didn’t play the victim, they weren’t willing to knuckle under to it, either.

As Barone put it, they refused to let “a Harvard swell . . . destroy one of their peers . . . on a totally specious basis for his own fun and profit.” Good on them. I don’t imagine there are a lot of Palinites on the Cambridge, MA police force—but they clearly have their fair share of strong, proud ordinary barbarians, and that’s a profoundly good thing.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

The disease of political hatred

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As the vitriol, invective, and dishonest attacks against Sarah Palin continue to come from the Left, demonstrating that their determination to destroy her remains high—and as she continues to refuse to fight hatred with hatred and vitriol with vitriol, which is one of the reasons I support her as strongly as I do—I can’t help thinking yet again of what a disease hatred has become in our politics in this country. It’s hard to believe, from a rational perspective, that this is really what our politics has come to, that some people in this country hate others because they don’t like their views on tax policy, or immigration, or foreign policy, or gay marriage; but sadly, it has.

I can remember, more times than I can count, hearing people denounce George W. Bush as a thief, a liar, and an abuser of presidential authority, but most of the folks who made those accusations didn’t dislike him for those reasons. Sure, there were probably some who did, but for most, it was the other way around. That’s why is why people who wrote off President Clinton’s perjury then waxed furious against President Bush for lying to the American people—which if true put him in the company of FDR and Lincoln, among others—while others who wanted President Clinton impeached turned around to defend President Bush; it’s also why many who spent 2001-08 screaming bloody murder about “the imperial Presidency” and declaiming that the president should be impeached for “destroying the Constitution” are now perfectly happy as Barack Obama continues to expand executive power. If you want defenders of congressional prerogatives (outside Congress itself, anyway), you’ll have to look on the Right. The hypocrisy here—which is not confined to one side, by any means—is enough to make you gag.

The key thing about all these charges and denunciations is that people’s views of them tend to be defined by their politics, not the other way around. That’s why criticizing Clinton’s character never worked for the Republicans, and it’s why accusing Bush of lying didn’t work for the Democrats (it was the specter of losing in Iraq, combined with the Katrina fiasco, that killed his administration): in our current political climate, for far too many people, only the politics matter.

Those on our side (whichever one that is) are the white hats who can do no wrong, and we love them; those on the other side are the black hats who do everything from evil motives, and we hate them. If the other side lies, cheats, and steals, we proclaim it from the housetops. If our side does, well, the other side reporting it just proves what rotten people they are. Not everybody takes this approach, of course—to give conservatives credit, the reaction to the Ensign and Sanford scandals has been encouragingly different in many quarters—but more often than not, this is American politics in the early 21st century.

Of course, this is nothing new; much the same could have been said about American politics across much of the 19th century, which gave us our first presidential assassination and most of the dirtiest presidential elections in our history. For that matter, it was nothing new then, either; so it has been, I expect, in pretty much every society or group that has politics, at least some of the time. I’m not accusing contemporary America of any sort of new or different sin. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to do something about it—hatred is a sickness that could eat our country hollow from the inside, if we let it.

We need to start to fight this—and by we I don’t mean somebody out there, I mean us, the common folks, the ordinary barbarians of this country. This isn’t going to be solved by politicians, or the media, or any of the rest of our country’s elite—from their perspective, that would be counterproductive; after all, as long as they can exploit the hatred so many people have been taught to feel for their own ends, they’re going to carry right on doing so (and exacerbating it in the process). The only way to begin to break down this culture of animosity is to do it at the grassroots level, following the example of (of all people) David Mamet:

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read “conservative”), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. . . .

The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler.

We need to do the same with those who disagree with us—not to change our minds, but to build relationships with our political opponents and listen to them respectfully, such that they know that we take their concerns seriously and with real care for what they think and feel and believe; that’s the only way we’re ever going to convince those across the political divide to do the same for us. We need to set aside the goal of changing people’s opinions—that might happen, but it shouldn’t be the purpose of conversation—and seek instead to change the way people hold their opinions, by building a spirit of disagreement in mutual understanding and respect.

The more we can do that, the worse it will be for our politicians—but the better it will be for us.

 

Perhaps too much credit?

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The other day, I tipped the hat to Barack Obama for his gracious response to Cambridge, MA police officer Jim Crowley. At the time, I hadn’t really thought about the fact that his motivation for doing so might be purely political—namely, that he might have significant political reasons for wanting the flap over his response to Henry Louis Gates’ arrest to go away as quickly as possible. Jennifer Rubin lays it out:

The president’s decision to weigh in on the arrest of his Harvard law professor friend Henry Louis Gates Jr., who mouthed off to a Cambridge cop threw a grenade into his health care PR offensive and revived questions about his promises of a post-racial presidency. He tried to defuse matters with a Friday appearance in the White House briefing room, but like his predecessor, he found it impossible to say “I am sorry” or “I was wrong.”

It is not surprising that the cable TV news and the Sunday talk shows continued to chew over the story. Unfortunately for the president, the comment was harmful on multiple levels. We can count at least five ways in which the story is a loser for Obama.

First, it suggests he is an uninformed busy-body. . . .

Second, he sucked the oxygen out of the health care debate at the very moment Democrats were pleading for him to become more involved. . . .

Third, Obama indisputably fanned the flames of racism and rekindled animosity on both sides by assuming or making this all about race. . . .

Fourth, the underlying fault line in Obama’s presidency and his agenda is the growing sense that government is getting too big and is accumulating too much power. It is not just core Republicans who think government is doing too much, but an overwhelming number of independents who are irked by the Washington power grab. . . .

Fifth, Obama has fallen into the unfortunate habit of blaming others.

Perhaps the most damaging thing of all this is the way it shows a reflexive assumption of racism on the president’s part.

Juan Williams, on Fox News Sunday, did the country an immense service by recounting what exactly occurred: “The president spoke without the facts. You can’t have a ‘teachable moment’ if it’s based on a lie.”As Williams explained, in this case, the neighbor called the police, Gates began to berate the officer (“Do you know who I am?”), trash-talking about the officer’s mother and pursuing him out of the house. The black and Hispanic officers confirmed Gates’ abusive behavior, and Sergeant Crowley took out the handcuffs and warned Gates before finally having to cuff him.

Williams asked, “Is this an instance of a poor black kid being beaten by the cops?” No. And in converting this into a tale of police misconduct (he acted “stupidly,” Obama said) and racial injustice, Obama only reinforced the country’s racial divide. Whites often think blacks scream racism at the drop of a hat; blacks think whites are out to get them. Good work, Mr. President.

This sort of reaction on President Obama’s part directly undermines the foundation of his appeal among moderates and independents—namely, his promise of a post-racial America, free from this sort of conflict. That’s why, though this flap in and of itself is a minor thing, he might find it much harder to put behind him than his strongest supporters believe.

As Williams argued, his knee-jerk reaction to cry racism “hurt the country and it hurt him.” It was, to put it mildly, exactly what Obama didn’t need. A polarizing event—confirming the worst fears that he is arrogant, not at all post-racial, and prone to play last-and-loose with the facts—is not what he needed in the midst of the biggest political challenge of his young presidency. The stimulus is working, he is teaching us about race, and now he wants to run your health care. Not an attractive picture.

HT: Sister Toldjah

I will give the President credit

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after responding to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates in something of a knee-jerk fashion—which is understandable, since Dr. Gates, one of the high-profile members of the Harvard faculty, is a friend of his—has now acted quite graciously to defuse the situation and to defend the officer who arrested Dr. Gates, Sgt. Jim Crowley of the Cambridge police. While of course he continues to insist that the arrest was an “overreaction”—something which is easy to say from a distance, since from an outside perspective it’s clear that Dr. Gates didn’t actually intend Sgt. Crowley any harm—he has also unbent far enough to admit that “Professor Gates probably overreacted as well.” While that’s something of an understatement, given the professor’s loud, arrogant and abusive behavior (not surprising from a Harvard prima donna), it’s still a welcome admission. More than that, President Obama called Sgt. Crowley “a good man . . . who has a fine track record on racial sensitivity,” and admitted of his initial reaction,

In my choice of words, I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department, or Sergeant Crowley specifically. I could have calibrated those words differently, and I told this to Sergeant Crowley.

As well, President Obama gave the press another reason to feel good about Sgt. Crowley:

By the way, said Obama, at the end of his conversation with Crowley, there was some discussion of Obama, Gates, and Crowley having a beer in the White House. “I don’t know if that’s scheduled yet,” Obama deadpanned, “but we may put that together. But he also did say that he wanted to find out if there was a way of getting the press off his lawn.”

“I informed him,” Obama said, “that . . . I can’t get the press off my lawn,” drawing big laughs from the gathered reporters.

Since he’s now been the cause, in a friendly and familiar way, of a presidential joke, as well as the recipient of an official presidential pat on the back it seems unlikely that Sgt. Crowley should have to worry about any further attacks on his character . . . though he may still want to swing wide of Dr. Gates in future. But this is a guy who could easily have been savaged, given the way things go in this country, and who really didn’t have it coming; kudos to President Obama for his gracious handling of the situation to keep that from happening.

The shrunken savior of a bobblehead faith

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This from Ray Ortlund Jr. is just dead on, and brilliantly put:

Our local deity is not Jesus. He goes by the name Jesus. But in reality, our local deity is Jesus Jr.

Our little Jesus is popular because he is useful. He makes us feel better while conveniently fitting into the margins of our busy lives. But he is not terrifying or compelling or thrilling. When we hear the gospel of Jesus Jr., our casual response is “Yeah, that’s what I believe.” Jesus Jr. does not confront us, surprise us, stun us. He looks down on us with a benign, all-approving grin. He tells us how wonderful we really are, how entitled we really are, how wounded we really are, and it feels good. . . .

Jesus Jr. is the magnification of Self, the idealization of Self, the absolutization of Self turning around and validating Self, flattering Self, reinforcing Self. Jesus Jr. does not change us, because he is a projection of us.

I need to get caught back up on the Rev. Dr. Ortlund’s blog; my thanks to Jared Wilson for highlighting this one. Read the whole thing, because he really nails the core idolatry of so much of the American church. I’ve written before on what some have dubbed “the Jesus heresy,” but I think it would be truer to call it “the Jesus Jr. heresy,” because it’s this shrunken, sanitized, shrink-wrapped, shock-absorbed replacement Jesus that makes it possible.