I haven’t been over to Viola Larson’s blog, Naming His Grace, for a while—in large part because, for a lot of reasons, I’ve been very low on energy for dealing with the internecine warfare in the PC(USA)—and now I rather wish I hadn’t. Nothing against Viola in the slightest, and in fact it’s a good thing that I know about this . . . I just wish it wasn’t there to know about.
In an attempt to get the Presbyterian General Assembly to not receive the paper Christians and Jews: People of God the Israel/Palestine Mission Network lied about the Jewish organizations in the United States suggesting that they sent a bomb to our Presbyterian headquarters and burnt down a church. They also lied about the Jewish people in their synagogues. The Israel/Palestine Mission Network lied.
Why won’t more Presbyterians speak up? Surely even those Presbyterians who believe that everything Israel is doing is wrong can’t believe that lying about Jewish organizations in the United States is the right thing to do? Why isn’t there an outcry from fellow Christians about this?
The IPMN insists that the rising anti-semitism, the caricatures of Jewish people, in all countries, is caused by the Jews themselves. That is an old story. Less than eighty years ago such lies led to the death of six million Jews.
Anti-Semitism is on the rise again, driven by this queer alliance between the Western Left and the anti-Western wing of Islam; it’s grievous to me to see people trying to use the PC(USA) to further it.
My thanks to Jared Wilson for pointing out this gem from one of my favorite NT scholars, D. A. Carson:
People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.
That’s dead-on, but as Jared goes on to say, it does raise another question: what does grace-driven effort look like, and how is it different from all other forms of effort?
I think grace-driven effort springs from parking ourselves at the gospel and beholding. People who behold (super)naturally move into mission. . . .
We don’t graduate from the gospel. We hold true to it. And it alone propels us out and empowers us to press on.
Grace-driven effort is effort that flows from the joys and wonders of worship that flows from beholding the amazing gospel of God’s grace.
That’s dead-on too. If you’re having trouble seeing the distinction, you might say it’s between doing something because you have to and doing something because you want to. Legalistic religion motivates by pushing and bribing, the carrot and the stick. The push may be an appeal to fear—which is a very powerful driver in most people’s lives, since an awful lot of folks out there are slaves to fear in one way or another—or it may be a guilt trip, or it may play on people’s sense of their own weakness and inadequacy; the bribe tends to be tailored to people’s “felt needs” (hence the popular “7 Steps to a Better ________” approach). Whatever the particulars, it’s all about control, both for the leader and for the followers.
The opposite to that, of course, is the drift that Dr. Carson talks about. Grace-driven effort is a wholly other thing; it is the action that springs from amazed gratitude at the unparalleled and almost incomprehensible grace of God; from joy in worship that focuses our minds and hearts on his beauty and goodness; from desire for his restful purity and undivided holiness, which frees us from our chaotic impurity and unrighteousness, which divides us against ourselves; and from whole-hearted love for him who first loved us, and who loved us that much.
The problem, I think, is that too few of us preachers actually trust that message to have any effect; it’s too easy and too tempting to go for the “short cut,” to go right to messages prescribing whatever efforts we deem most important. But effort which does not arise in response to the gospel of grace, even if it seems to be in the right direction, is not the right sort of effort, and in the end, it will not bear fruit in keeping with repentance.
Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.
Douglas Wilson, of Credenda/Agenda and Christ Church of Moscow, Idaho, is at his best when he can let his snark ascend and just turn it loose. He’s also at his best when he has something deep and profoundly important to set his teeth into and be snarky about. (This is, I think, why he was the perfect person to debate Christopher Hitchens.) As such, it’s no surprise that his recent guest piece at the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” blog, titled “Foxy News,” is Wilson at his best.
Preaching against porn while consuming it avidly is certainly inconsistent, and is what theologians in another old-timey era used to call “a sin”—a theological category that perhaps needs to be rehabilitated. But I want to consider this issue at another level—we need to start thinking about the politics of porn. . . .
A number of evangelicals are up in arms about President Obama himself, and Obamacare, and Obama-other-things, and Obama-anything-else, and are warning us in dire tones about the impending slavery that is involved in all this “socialism.” And—full disclosure here—I am economically pretty conservative myself, just slightly to the left of King Arthur, so I am not pointing out this part of it to differ with any of it. But what I am noticing in this discussion is a striking public tolerance for right-wing skankyness. When I am cruising around for my Internet news, I am far more likely to run into Moabite women at Fox News than anywhere else. . . .
Surely it should be possible to access fair and balanced news without running into women who think they are supposed to be a sale at Macy’s—with 40 percent off.
What then? On the assumption that what we are willing to associate with in public is just a fraction of what we are willing to associate with in private, one of my basic concerns about evangelical involvement in politics in the age of Obama (measured in this discussion by their general friendliness to Foxy News) is that they are not nearly as hostile to “slavery” as some of the rhetoric might seem to indicate. I know that politics is supposed to make strange bedfellows, but “strange bedfellows” was always supposed to be a metaphor, wasn’t it?
A man cannot sell himself into slavery in his private life, and then turn around and successfully take a stand as a free man in the public square. At least, that is how the thinking used to go among conservatives. If sexual indulgence is one of the more obvious bribes that can be offered to a slave, how does it change anything if a person takes the bribe in private? And if that bribe is taken in private, over time, indications of that reality will start to show up in public, in the sorts of ways I have been discussing.
Be sure to read the whole thing—it’s truly priceless. I remember when Fox was a favorite target for ire of conservatives, because of shows like “Married . . . with Children” and, yes, “The Simpsons.” (It seems a little strange now to think of that.) People would occasionally point out, as a mitigating factor, that Rupert Murdoch was pretty conservative in a lot of ways, but that was usually dismissed with the comment that the sleaze he peddled disqualified him. Until he launched Fox News, and before too long, political expediency took over . . .
I have thought more than once that someone ought to try to apply systems theory to economics in a systematic way. The application of systems theory to family therapy by Murray Bowen was a huge step forward, as was Edwin Friedman‘s work in turning Bowen’s model more broadly to congregational dynamics and leadership; Rabbi Friedman’s book Generation to Generation is one every pastor should read (and periodically re-read). Systems theory helps us to understand that problems don’t exist in isolation and can’t be addressed as if they did; we all exist within interlocking relational systems, and the problems of any given individual relate to the problems of the systems of which they are a part (and indeed, may have more to do with the health of the system than with that individual).
As a consequence, systems theory teaches us that the brute-force approach to problems, the use of compulsion and coercion, is often not the best approach, because it attacks the symptom without doing anything about the underlying issue—and indeed, will likely make the underlying issue worse. Rather, it’s necessary to address problems by changing the system. To do that, you have to identify the ways in which you are supporting the system and enabling its current dysfunction, and then change your own behavior. This changes the incentive structure within the system and shifts the stress of maintaining it off of you and on to the other members; this creates a great deal of pressure on the system which will ultimately, given sufficient time, break it, thus making real progress possible.
The same is true of our economy, which is itself a system—or perhaps one might say, a meta-system, since the “individuals” which interact are corporations, which are their own complex systems—and which is, of course, embedded in the even larger meta-system of the global economy. Problems, whether they be with companies, sectors of the economy, aspects of the economy, or whatever, don’t exist in isolation, and can’t be addressed as if they did. This means that the brute force approach, the attempt to compel the behavior one desires of a given corporation or industry through legislation and regulation, is at best highly inefficient and at worst actively counterproductive. It’s like swatting at a mobile—you put the whole thing in motion, setting it turning in ways you couldn’t have predicted, leading to results you didn’t anticipate. This is why the Law of Unintended Consequences has such force.
Rather than simply trying to regulate the economy into moral behavior, we need to recognize that it’s a complex interlocking system of human relationships, and to try to address corporate and economic issues accordingly. Obviously, this is easier said than done, as the system is far too complex to be fully comprehended by the human mind, but taking this approach at least gets us closer to understanding the real issues. For instance, don’t just look at bad behavior—whether of a rebellious teenager or a company that’s cooking the books—look at the structure of incentives within the system and see what that behavior is in response to, and what’s rewarding it.
This is not a new idea in the world of economic theory; in fact, it’s quite important in the work of the Austrian school of thought, of folks like Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. It’s one of the reasons I believe they were closer to right than other economic approaches, because they understood and emphasized that the incentive structure drives economic action—that people will tend to do what they have an incentive to do, and to avoid doing what they have no incentive to do—and that when the incentives are out of whack, it will produce behavior which will be bad for the economy. One example of this is Hayek’s Nobel Prize-winning theory of the business cycle, which makes clear that if interest rates are set such as to provide an incentive for highly speculative investments, people will speculate; the result will be an economic bubble which will eventually, inevitably, burst. Just check the housing market.
To try to rationalize the economy, then, to produce steady, sustainable growth, we need to understand (as best as possible) how our laws and regulations and the decisions of government entities like the Federal Reserve and Fannie Mae create incentives for counterproductive behavior; and then we need to work to change those incentives to reward behavior that will produce long-term health rather than short-term big profits. This means not trying to fix the economy by regulating it more—indeed, it might well mean deregulating it to some degree, not because “business can be trusted” (it can’t, but neither can government), but because deregulation simplifies the system and makes it easier to see what’s actually going on.
Hayek, by the way, though an advocate of the free market, was by no means opposed to regulation; he was enough of a realist about humanity to recognize that there is a proper role for government to play in economic matters. As such, there have been those on the Right who have criticized him for not supporting the free-market system enough. From an Austrian perspective, it seems to me, the key is that the government should only regulate cautiously and with humility, out of the expectation that it knows and understands far less than it thinks it does.
Regulation to prevent clear injustice is necessary, as are efforts to insure the free flow of information, because most people will abuse the system if you give them a clear shot and a big enough reason; but regulation to try to control outcomes is almost certain to backfire. When the government tries to pick winners and losers, you end up with crony capitalism and the disasters we’re seeing now. The best we can do is to try to keep the process as fair as possible, so that everybody’s playing by the same rules; try to keep the structure of incentives as rational as possible, so that the market isn’t tilted either towards excessive risk or excessive caution; and to remember this insight from Hayek’s 1988 book The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (quoted at the end of the rap video “Fear the Boom and Bust”):
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
Incidentally, the odds are pretty good that you’ve seen that rap video, produced by filmmaker John Papola and economist Russ Roberts (of George Mason University and the blog Café Hayek, which I have in the sidebar), which envisions a rap duel between Hayek and John Maynard Keynes; after all, it’s now up to nearly 1.2 million views for one version of it on YouTube alone. If not, though, unless you absolutely can’t stand rap—and maybe even then—you really ought to watch it here; it’s a great piece of work. Then go read the explication of the video (which I linked above) by one of the posters on Daily Kos (yes, seriously), and Jeffrey Tucker’s piece on the website of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. You’ll be amazed how much you can learn from a rap video. (For my own part, I’m no more a Keynesian than I ever was, but I definitely have more of an appreciation for his work now than I did.)
I’ve said before that I think the greatest need in American politics is more politicians who, like Sarah Palin, are independent of the party machines, and thus willing to call out and take down their own party when it deserves it—and particularly for a Democratic equivalent to Gov. Palin. There aren’t many like that on the Republican side of the aisle (Nikki Haley, whom Gov. Palin recently endorsed for governor of South Carolina, is one notable exception; that would be why the GOP leadership down in Columbia is trying to destroy her before she wins the nomination), but if they’re thin on the ground among Republicans, they would seem to be nearly absent among Democrats. The only real figure I can find right now is blogger Mickey Kaus, currently challenging incumbent Barbara Boxer in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in California. His challenge is probably doomed to fail, which is too bad; I have to agree with Jonah Goldberg:
Kaus is way too liberal for me. But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be an exhilarating addition to the Senate in the grand tradition of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Like Moynihan, Kaus is a fearless asker of hard and unwanted questions. He may have the single most finely attuned B.S. detector of anyone in the journalism business—or any other business.
When I pastored in Colorado, one of the best people in our congregation was an environmental engineer who specialized in groundwater. A lot of his business involved wetlands in one form or another, but he also got involved in housing construction, helping builders avoid basement water problems. I remember him pointing out one house where the basement had been sunk too deep into the ground, for a combination of reasons, putting it down into an underground stream; as a consequence, whatever that family did, they had water in their basement. Seal the outside, seal the inside, nothing they could do could permanently fix the problem, because whatever you do, water always finds its way in.
When he told me about that, my mind immediately went to politics and the whole question of campaign-finance reform—which is a joke, because the whole concept is that you can keep money out of politics. Not totally, to be sure, but that you can control the inflow—that you can limit how much of it comes in, and how, and where. A lot of well-meaning people believe this, but it’s ludicrously out of touch with reality. Laws are fixed, like concrete; money flows, like water; and just as the water will always find its way over, under, around, or through in the end, so too will money. The pressure is there behind it, pushing it in, and the demand is there for it, drawing it in, and so whatever laws you may write and whatever regulations they draw up, all they will succeed in doing is defining the cracks—or loopholes, if you prefer the term—through which the money will inevitably leak.
Want to reduce the importance of money in politics? Well, in the first place you might want to rethink that, since all that would likely accomplish is to further strengthen incumbents and further reduce turnover among our elected officials; but if you do, fine, more power to you. But doing it the brute-force, frontal-assault way isn’t going to work, because it never has. If you want to reduce the importance of money, you’re going to have to find another way. In the battle of water vs. concrete, the water wins every time.
A couple months ago, President Obama gave a speech in St. Charles, MO in which he argued that his health care plan would make Medicare stronger even as it cut the Medicare budget, because “There’s no cutting of Medicare benefits. There’s just cutting out fraud and waste.” As you can probably guess, I’m skeptical about that, but maybe not for the reason you think. I’m not skeptical because it’s him or his party—this is a recurring bipartisan theme. Politico’s Chris Frates put it well when he wrote,
Obama’s efforts follow those of a long line of Republican and Democratic presidents who promised to save taxpayers money by cutting fraud, waste and abuse in the government insurance programs. The sentiment is popular because it has bipartisan support and doesn’t threaten entrenched health industry interests that benefit from the spending.
“Waste, fraud and abuse have been the favorite thing to promise first because it’s a way of promising cost control while not doing any of the painful stuff,” said Len Nichols, a former senior health policy adviser in the Clinton administration. The method is “as old as the Bible,” he said.
“It’s a way of promising cost control while not doing any of the painful stuff”—that’s it right there. It’s how politicians convince us that they’ll be able to cut government spending (which we want) without cutting any of our programs (which we don’t want). After all, politicians who cut our programs—even if we elected them to cut spending, even if we know government desperately needs to cut spending—tend to become unpopular as a result, at least in the short term . . . and we know there’s nothing politicians hate worse than being unpopular.
The problem is, the idea that we can solve our budget problems (or even make a major dent in them) is a myth—a fairy tale—a chimera. It’s never happened yet, and it isn’t going to, either. That’s not to say, certainly, that we shouldn’t do everything we can to reduce waste and fraud, but we need to do so realizing that we’re fighting, at best, a holding action; we’re never going to achieve victory, and we’re never going to gain enough ground to make a significant improvement in the budget. In truth, just keeping waste and fraud from growing is an accomplishment.
That might seem cynical, but I think it’s just realistic. Waste is an inevitable part of any human activity, as we should all know from daily life. There’s always peanut butter left in the jar when it’s “empty”; there’s always shampoo left in the bottle when we can’t get any more out; there’s always some of the fruit that falls off before it’s ripe. We can and should work to reduce waste—say, the amount of energy given off by our light bulbs as heat rather than light—but we’ll never eliminate it. We’re simply too limited to ever achieve 100% efficiency.
Within large organizations, there’s an additional problem that reinforces and aggravates this reality: cutting waste isn’t to everybody’s benefit. The bureaucracy has its inevitable turf wars, which waste money, and its (often competing) agendas. What’s more, the people who control the money as it trickles down through the system have the same self-protective instinct as anyone; those who benefit from waste want to see it perpetuated, and this waste has a constituency. The people who profit by waste are there, they are connected, they have clout; those who would profit if waste were removed are abstract, theoretical, not present, not connected, and can’t prove their case, since it’s a might-have-been. Anywhere except Chicago, a voter who shows up and argues will beat a voter who isn’t there any day.
As for fraud, any time there’s a lot of money moving around, there will be those unscrupulous and clever enough to siphon some of it off. Whatever ideas you come up with to stop them, or failing that to catch them, will have only limited success; as in warfare, so in this area, the advantage is constantly shifting between offense and defense—the defense may pull ahead for a while, but the offense will always adapt and regain the advantage. What’s more, when it comes to preventing fraud, the defensive position is intrinsically harder, because the fraudster only has to find one loophole in order to succeed, while those on the other side have to keep every last loophole closed, even the ones they don’t know are there. In the end, we can only say of the fraud artist what Dan Patrick used to say of Michael Jordan: “You can’t stop him—you can only hope to contain him.”
All of which is to say, the commitment to fight waste and fraud in government is laudable, and we should certainly do everything we can to encourage our politicians in that direction—but any politician who tells you they can solve our budget problems by eliminating waste and fraud is selling you a bill of goods. The only way to significantly reduce waste and fraud is to significantly reduce the spending that produces and attracts them; if you want to cut waste and fraud, you have to cut government.
Just because it’s showing signs of life doesn’t mean it’s getting better. For those who think otherwise, here are some questions to consider. (And yes, as someone has already demonstrated, there are ways to try to explain away each question; but as any baseball fan knows, if there are a lot of “ifs” and they all have to have the “right” answer for things to go well, things probably aren’t going to go well.)
This is an excellent bit from Mark Driscoll laying out the nature of true repentance vs. the false repentance of worldly sorrow—the sort of thing we see in celebrities like Tiger Woods, who practice what he dubs “a pagan version of Catholicism.”
