In a fascinating article about the perennial attraction of some people to the idea that the U.S. Constitution “has failed” or “is obsolete” and needs to be rewritten, Kevin Williamson mentions that Peter Thiel “is involved in sea-steading, a plan to create autonomous free-trade cities in international waters. Google’s Larry Page pines for ‘safe places’ to experiment free of government interference.”

I must confess that the idea has always held a certain fascination for me as well. It need not involve a radical, total separation from existing society; in fact it probably would not. Right now, the costs of medical care have been so outrageously inflated by bad laws and regulations (all of which, ironically, are intended to expand access to care) that for a while now some companies have actually been paying employees to travel to places like India to receive major surgeries. How hard would it be to buy a surplus aircraft carrier and hang out a shingle twelve miles from Los Angeles? Everybody wins. Okay, okay, maybe they don’t sell aircraft carriers on the secondary market – although they should. But you get the point.

The serious seasteaders, though, don’t strike me as the modest type. They’re rationalistic techno-futurists. So it’s worth noting serious limitations on the possibility of creating your own utopia in international waters.

If anything is clear in the history of political philosophy, it is that civil communities that take up only a small geographic area cannot accommodate a wide latitude for diverse moral viewpoints and practices. People confined to a small space come into conflict with one another more frequently, and the consequences of conflict are higher because getting out of each other’s way is harder. It is simply in the nature of things that small communities must share a much higher degree of moral agreement about what is good, right and fair in human life. Larger communities can accommodate more diversity simply because it is easier to get out of one another’s way on a day-to-day basis; the level of conflict is low enough that it is easier to create political, legal and economic systems where less is taken for granted about how much we agree.

This, in case you have forgotten, is the whole point of Federalist 9-10. It is also the whole point of The Merchant of Venice; in spite of Venice’s proud boast that its laws treat all people equally, the law must actually be animated by a particular moral view, so enforcement of the law necessarily excludes other moral views. And in a city as small as Venice, a Shylock cannot simply be dismissed by the court; his continuing presence in the community is an ongoing threat to public order. He must be crushed – left with no alternatives but to submit to the dominant worldview or flee.

All this becomes much clearer when you think about the practical challenges involved in a seastead. How will conflicts be resolved? What’s the political system? With so few people in such a small space, I can see only two real practical alternatives. The optimistic scenario is that the seastead is created by a community that had a strong shared value system before they embarked for international waters; in this case, the specific process for resolving conflicts is less important because in practice conflicts will always be resolved according to that shared value system, whatever the process. Social legitimization would demand it. The less optimistic scenario, which unfortunately is the one more likely to occur in real life, is that the seasteaders – influenced by the rationalism of techno-futurist ideologies – believe they can write a set of clear, rational rules that will make the correct resolution of conflicts plain. All they need then is a relatively simple quasi-court system to enforce the rules. In real life, such a system will lead to major conflicts relatively quickly, because it is not in the nature of justice to be reduced to a set of clear, rational rules that can be written down. The conflicts will be absolutized because each side of the conflict, influenced by techno-futurist rationalism, will believe that the other side is irrational and illegitimate. The likely outcome would be, in effect, the dictatorship of a charismatic leader.

In short, seasteads can’t be independent of real, morally “thick” communities. They could work if they brought their community with them from the shore, to provide shared meanings for the moral terms that their rules must enforce. If they are set up as a flight from community, they will have what political philosophers have always recognized is the only form of government possible without community: tyranny.

My thoughts drift to the scene from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, as Maximus stands in the gladiatorial arena after a victory shouting to the watching masses “I do not entertain.” While the Gladiator can make the argument that he fights simply to survive, the obvious truth is that he most certainly entertains.

Today, in the aftermath of yesterday’s elections, political analysts are scrambling to explain why one candidate lost and another won. Their answer: extremism. In the mind set of most political pundits, “extremism” is a sure way to lose an election. But is extremism accurately defined? In almost every case, the accusation of being ‘way out there’ deserves an immediate riled response of “I am not extreme!” but the truth is that this defense carries no more weight than that of Maximus, and will be listened to just as little.

According to Merriam-Webster’s, ‘extremism’ is “belief in and support for ideas that are very far from what most people consider correct or reasonable.” But how is this term used in American Politics? Candidate A says hot, but candidate B says cold. Fifty-one percent agree with A, forty-nine percent with B. Therefore, Candidate B is an extremist. Obviously, this is not in keeping with the definition of extremism. The term ‘extremism’ would be more accurate if Candidate A suggested a raise in taxes but Candidate B suggested that the government should give every citizen one million dollars. “Most people” would agree that the US government does not have sufficient funds for such a policy. This would indeed be an extreme suggestion.

In the real world, though, to declare a large minority as extreme is, well, extreme! For instance, in one election yesterday, the losing candidate was labeled as ‘too extreme.’ Yet, that election was decided by less than one percent. In another election, a candidate was said to have won because he was not extreme, obviously because he won by nearly twenty percent of the vote. Does this mean that the forty percent who voted against him are extreme? An extreme position, by definition, should be seen as incorrect by ‘most people,’ but sixty percent is far from ‘most.’ The truth is that very few political positions are as ‘extreme’ as they are labeled. To the victor go the spoils, allowing the victor to declare the loser as ‘extreme,’ even if they receive forty-nine percent of the vote.

So why does no one listen to claims of “I am not extreme!” Simple: They are extreme! If candidate A say hot, and candidate B says cold, and candidate A wins a simple majority, everyone should agree that, by definition, candidate B is not extreme. However, if what candidate B declares is so countercultural and so antithetical to human nature, candidate B will be declared, and quite accurately, as extreme.

The truth of the matter is that culture is not determined by a simple majority. Instead, culture is often determined by a vocal minority that has a majority of the influence. When this minority is opposed, even by a majority, such opinions are labeled as extreme. And, to point out the obvious, the vocal minority in American culture is largely anti-Bible and pro-whatever feels good and is good for me. When someone, politician or otherwise, begins suggesting Biblical Judeo-Christian values, it is viewed as extreme. This should come as no surprise seeing as Jesus Christ said Christians would be viewed as such.

The same was seen in the early church when it was declared ‘extreme’ by the vocal minority–the Roman government. When that vocal minority excepted Christianity officially under Constantine, the label of extremism dissipated. Sadly, so did Christianity’s prioritizing of scripture over politics. The history of the early church in Rome shows the dangers of being more political than scriptural. In the US, the goal of politicians is to be moderate enough to win an election. Being culturally extreme, even if not statistically or by definition extreme, can cost one victory in an election.

Sadly, many in Christianity, regardless of political party, allow their adherence to Biblical ethics and morality to slip in order to be less extreme and more electable. But Christians must hold to scripture, even if it means being labeled as extreme. It may mean that Christians win fewer elections, but that did not seem to bother the early Christians in Rome as they headed to their deaths in the arena. If being Biblical in one’s view of ethics and morality means bearing the label of ‘extreme,’ even when statistically a large portion of the US population agrees and only labeled as such because it disagrees with the vocal minority, then being ‘extreme’ is a label that should be carried with pride.

“A succinct synopsis”

Check out this amazing story-in-pictures over on TGC. An Emmy-winning illustrator shares her journey from “angry atheism” to Christianity – and shares the drawings she made of God before, during, and after her conversion. This line knocked me right down:

Gradually, cloud-god’s fierce brow started to soften. And then he became empathetic. He delighted in me. He grieved with me. And I guess it was not really cloud-god that was softening.

Don’t miss it.

I really appreciate this candid post from Joe Carter on the conundrums of the public intellectual – or, to use his terms, the “influence-seeker.” A lot of what he’s saying resonates with my own experience. And he raises the deeper problem of what counts as influence:

I’ve said and written things that have been seen and heard by millions of people…Yet if I assessed the level of influence I gained from appearing on those venues I would rank it from negligible to non-existent. When readers and listeners folded the newspaper, closed the magazine, and turned off the radio they completely forgot about my message.

Joe points instead to “regularity and rapport” as “the two keys to influencing hearts and minds.” That’s something you can achieve only with a much smaller audience – more on the level of 150 people than millions, he suggests.

There’s something to that. Yet there are other forms of influence that don’t rely on regularity and rapport. In the Kermit Gosnell case, a relatively small set of people forced several major national media outlets to begin covering the trial. Given the way it happened, it seems likely to me that this episode will have at least some lasting impact on the way the media covers that type of trial; once you’ve been shamed into doing something, and even into admitting that you’re being shamed into doing it, you’re not going to want to be put in that position again. Now, this handful of bloggers, tweeters and columnists – all of them obscure names outside their own religious and political circles – did not have to establish regularity or rapport with the editorial team of the Washington Post in order to move them. Nor did they reach millions of people and start a grassroots rebellion. What they had to do was say the right thing in the right way at the right time, and do so with just enough publicity in the right places that they couldn’t quite be ignored.

Think about it this way: Whose disapproval did these reporters and editors fear?

• Not their personal acquaintances. Each of them no doubt has a circle of something like 150 people with whom they have real personal relationships, but virtually nobody in those circles would have objected to their failure to cover Gosnell. Quite the contrary, they were much more likely to be made intensely uncomfortable or even positively offended by the decision to cover.
• Not their reading or viewing audiences. This is the “millions of people” Joe talks about. The previous generation of Christians and conservatives (two different groups but with much overlap and many parallel concerns about the direction of the culture) would have placed a great deal of stock in the virtue of the masses. The way to move an institution like the Washington Post was to appeal to the readers. Today we know better. I think it’s very unlikely that more than a handful of the readers/viewers were objecting to the failure to cover the trial, or would have objected even if they had continued not to cover it.
• But there’s a third group: their profession. Reaching out beyond the 150 people they personally know but long before they get to the millions of people they write and speak for, there is a group – probably in the thousands – of people who have invested their sense of identity and motivation for work in the idea that they are “truth tellers.” Here is the lever that moved them. Yes, most journalists are not personally inclined to prefer coverage of the Gosnell trial; that’s why there was no coverage as the trial began. But these same journalists have invested in an identity, and they will apparently act to protect that investment, even against their own more immediate preferences.

And professions are not the only intermediate locus of influence between the personal circle (which is small but over time can be moved with great force) and the teeming millions (which is large but normally can’t be moved much at all). Thinking in terms of these intermediate loci is central to the new conversation about culture change that’s going on simultaneously in both evangelical and conservative circles.

I prepared this as part of a presentation for a Men’s Breakfast this coming weekend, even before I saw Greg’s post on the topic!

I have noticed that many people view work like a violin. For most people, the value of work, like a violin, lies in what it produces. Just as a violin is valuable because it produces music, many people consider work to be valuable because of what it produces as goods and services for society. Work that fails to produce is viewed as about as valuable as a broken violin.

Still others say that work has no value unless it is done in a God-honoring way. These people would argue that my work has no value unless I give my best effort in my work and seek to honor God in my work. If I were playing a violin, it makes no difference how good the music I play is unless it is my best and my heart is in the right place as I’m playing. The argument here is that my work is as worthless as a broken violin if it is not done with the right heart. It’s not just what is produced in my work that gives my work value but how I go about producing it. If I’m not going to produce something from a correct mindset or with correct goals of honoring God, I might as well produce nothing because such work has no value.

But the more I have reflected upon the value of work from the Bible’s point of view, the more I believe that the Bible teaches something completely different from these two commonly held perspectives. To conclude that it is what I produce in my work that gives work value or to believe that it is how I produce what I produce in my work that gives it value is to basically believe that is it I who determines the value of my work. No production means no value. Incorrect goals and heart motivation means no value. If I want my work to have value, I must produce and produce from a good heart. Which means I’m in big trouble. There are many things in this world that I cannot control that affect production and I readily admit that I do not always have a correct heart, in fact, most of the time I don’t have a correct heart. We all sometimes punch the clock simply because that’s what we have to do to put food on the table and we can’t wait to get done with the day and get home to our families. If the value of work depends upon my behavior, my production, my heart, then a vast majority of the time, my work has no value, and that’s pretty discouraging. Most of the time, I’m about as good as a broken violin.

But, as I said just a moment ago, I believe that the Bible says that it is not we who give value to our work but God our creator who endows our work with value. All the way at the beginning, in Genesis chapter two, we read that God was at work creating the heavens and the earth. The word translated as work in our english Bibles is the Hebrew word for occupation or business. God’s occupation or business for six days was the creating of the world, and on day six, one of those creations was mankind, created in God’s image, in God’s likeness, to reflect the nature and actions of God in their very being. Mankind was created as God’s representative, as his reflection on earth. It should be no surprise then that in the book of Genesis we see God the creator telling mankind, the creature made in God’s likeness, to rule over the earth just as God rules over creation, to create by being fruitful and multiplying just as God created all things, and to work just as God himself worked for six days and continues to work in upholding our world. When we as human beings work we do so as part of our calling as creatures to reflect our creator. God calls us to work because He works. When you change tires, build houses, add numbers, teach classes, medically examine people, drive a truck, whatever work you do, you are fulfilling part of the calling that God the creator gave to all of us as human beings, as those made after his likeness, to work just as He our creator works. From beginning to end, it is the fact that God has called us to work as his creatures made in his likeness that gives our work its intrinsic value. Our work has value because it is part of our calling as God’s creatures from the very beginning of human existence. Our work has value not because of what we do but because work is part of God’s calling upon us as His creatures. Each day as we roll out of bed to begin another day’s work or as we head home from work at the end of the day we are reminded by Scripture that what we do has value, not because of what we bring to it, not even because of what we produce or how we produce it, but because of the God who calls us to work, as his creatures, reflective of Him, our creator, the one who was the first to work and still works in our world even now. It is understanding the intrinsic value of work as our calling from God that causes us to carefully consider and examine what we produce and how we produce it, not the other way around.