Ladies and gentlemen, your regularly scheduled Hang Together blog post is being interrupted to bring you the following important message.

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BAT-DAN!

We now return to your regularly scheduled Hang Together blog post. We apologize for the interruption.

Dan, I agree that things like this can be called “involuntary servitude.” And if this kind of blatantly unjust exploitation – the strong taking money from the weak and giving it to their friends simply because they can – were the primary activity of the federal government, I think we’d have no choice but to say that the state had crossed the line that divides a legitimate government from a criminal enterprise that masqureades as a government. (“With all that that implies,” as the guy from The Iron Giant would say.)

However, I’m not ready to go with you and say that 2/3 of the federal budget consists of involuntary servitude (“with all that that implies”).

1) Your comments on why people continue to support these programs if they’re involuntary servitude basically boil down to “they don’t understand what’s going on.” Well, I’m glad to see you’ve dropped your opposition to my earlier argument that elections are very imperfect as indicators of the public’s policy preferences. In fact, you’re now going much farther than I did! Doesn’t your position here imply that people aren’t responsible for their own voting?

I think people are more than well aware that entitlement programs are funded by taxes. If you want to take the position you do, you’re going to have to wrestle with the fact that almost no Americans are libertarians.

Ultimately, obedience to what we know to be right trumps popular consent. However, the presence or absence of popular consent is one of the critical components we need to factor in when judging what is right. Before we label the entire modern state a system of slavery, let’s notice that it arose and it continues to exist because it is what people want. That does not by itself justify the system, but it makes it much harder to call it a system of slavery.

I’m not saying there aren’t problems here, I’m just asking you not to paint with so broad a brush.

2) Your thought experiment on “making the programs voluntary” shows the weak point of your argument, I think. Is it your position that if a government collects taxes coercively, that government does not exist by consent? You see the problem. If you answer yes, you’ve eliminated the possibility of legitimate government. If you answer no, my response is “then why do you describe the modern state as involuntary?”

3) I disagree with your view that moral consensus only relates to prudential questions rather than the question of what government has the authority to do. This goes to the heart of government by consent of the governed. Where does legitimate authority to govern come from if not from the consent of the people (within the bounds of moral law)?

Jeremy Beer over at The American Conservative posted, presumably in recognition of our recent holiday of love, a profile of David L. Schindler, a theologian at the John Paul II Institute here in DC entitled “Philosopher of Love.” The good news, if we can call it that, is that I think Schindler is, perhaps, right. The bad news is that that means that liberalism is the problem and we’re all in trouble because we don’t even have a system within which we can really work, at least not with integrity or hope of lasting succes. Why? Because

all of our political, economic, legal, and religious institutions are necessarily grounded in some conception of order—in a metaphysics—even if they reject or ignore the Christian claim. From the Christian view, liberal institutions foster a problematic “mode of being”—a distorting matrix for the formation of our intentions, attitudes, and ideas. Thus, the idea that just putting “good people,” or at least those with the “right ideas,” into political office will make a decisive cultural difference is insufficiently attentive to the shaping power of this matrix in a liberal regime.

Is Schindler right?

Since I don’t want to be mistaken for a supporter of involuntary servitude, I’ll depart from the example of my boyhood idol (pictured above) and refrain from holding Dan at gunpoint. But I will follow his example by posing a few riddles:

1) If it’s really involuntary, why does everyone vote to continue if?

2) Locke said it was a contradiction in terms to say people consent to be ruled by an absolute authority, because it amounted to saying you consented to be ruled against your will. Isn’t your claim liable to a similar charge? Isn’t it the point of HT that governance by moral consensus is the alternative to involuntary servitude?

3) If we are broadly Lockean and/or Jeffersonian in our political philosophy, does your position imply the U.S. government is a tyranny?

These may seem to some to be three different ways of asking the same question but they’re not; they’re distinct but related questions.

4) Bonus question: Suppose Social Security was converted to a mandatory private savings program, where everyone is required to save a government-determined amount of money until old age, but you still own your own money. Would it still be involuntary servitude?

While we wait for answers, a note to appease the fans: yes, I know that’s not really a gun he’s holding. It’s fake. He used it to trick Batman into arresting him when he’d done nothing wrong, so he could charge Batman with false arrest and require him to appear in court and reveal his identity. Happy?

Good stuff this morning from Tim Keller on right and wrong ways – and right and wrong reasons – for pastors to exegete culture:

I think it may be possible to say that every sermon should have three aspects or purposes. First, you need to preach the text in its scriptural context; second, you need to preach Christ and the gospel every time; and finally, you need to preach to the heart….In that schema, where does “cultural engagement” come into my sermons? Most people would say that it does not fit into the scheme—preach the text, preach Christ, and preach to the heart. They might be tempted to add a fourth category. But that might suggest that cultural references are principally there to give the preacher some personal credibility. That would be a mistake.

Go see where he says it fits into the three-part schema – the answer surprised me. Here’s the comment I left:

Excellent point! I would add that exegeting culture is also essential to the first element, staying faithful to scripture. The meaning of scriptural texts is dependent upon their cultural context, so our ability to grasp that meaning is equally dependent on our ability to get our heads out of the box of our own cultural context and into theirs (for hermeneutical purposes). To do this we must understand our own culture. If we don’t understand our own culture we’ll read into the text all kinds of assumptions that aren’t there.

Keller gets bonus points for this sentence: “In many parts of the world, citing Kierkegaard is not all that unusual.” Makes me think we need a new conversation – not just about contextualizing the gospel to culture, but about contextualizing the gospel to lack of culture. As long as Karen’s already got us talking about Tolerance Camp!

Dan recently posed the question, “how self-referential are we?”, and I’d now like to take a stab at answering that: A lot. How do I know? Three potential answers:

a) I live in Washington, DC

b) I teach undergraduates, or

c) I recently sat through two and a half hours of “dialogue” on diversity, engaging difference, and the Jesuit tradition of liberal arts education.

True, (a) is a strong contender, but the answer is (c). (I’m pretty fond of my undergrads, at least today, and in any case we can probably just expect them to be a bit self-referential at this stage.) The event started off well enough, with a Jesuit historian asking whether “engaging difference” is something that is consonant with 450 years of Jesuit liberal arts education tradition. He answered that yes, of course, a liberal arts education produces, as one of its happy side effects, the student’s ability to come out of himself, to expand his mind and, yes, engage different ways of thinking and seeing the world. Furthermore, though by no means perfectly, the Jesuits themselves have served as missionaries to just about every culture on earth, usually learning the local language and adopting local customs (in dress, food, lifestyle, etc.). So, you know, yes. We can both have a liberal arts education and engage people who are different from us.

This would all be just fine, if a bit, well, obvious (again, if we’ve been doing this for 450 years, why are we hosting a half-day symposium on the matter?), but then everyone else spoke. Topics included seminars for students on experiences and differences among socio-economic classes, racial identities, sexual orientation, etc. Very little was enlightening. In fact, the only genuinely thought-provoking question from the audience – asking why a program in which students have cross-cultural skype conversations as part of certain courses would insist on using only English, for this presumes that “we can understand the world in English alone” – was left unaddressed.

Before I’m hauled off by the thought police for hating diversity, though, I would like to repeat, for the record, the Jesuit’s point: we should engage people who are different from us. Yes. I’m sorry, but duh. At what point was that idea lost within the liberal arts? Was it when we were forced to read philosophy that challenged our core assumptions about the world? When we had to tackle the depths of Shakespeare – Western white man that he was – which provokes the imagination to see beyond the pale images of the life it sees on its own? Or was it through the study of history, which puts our own moment in time – and our own lives – into proper perspective as at once tiny and potentially earth-shattering?

Evidently that’s not enough, though. Rather, after the initial nod to the liberal arts, panelists, including current students, were lauded for having had “experiences” and “dialogues.” These experiences were usually a form of encounter rather than real engagement – e.g., a student studied in Egypt but lived in a dorm with the American students, falling into the habit of meeting with her assigned Egyptian family maybe just once a month instead of their scheduled weekly meetings. The dialogues were ways of talking about differences, rather than actually working with different people.

I don’t mean to be overly critical; I’m thrilled that these students are studying abroad and I’m thrilled that they at least have planted within the themselves the notion that their own perspectives are not the only ones. But what was missing from the entire conversation was a mention of truth. What mattered was that students had “experiences” and “dialogues”;  nowhere was the entire point of the liberal arts tradition – to come to know the world, oneself, and the truth – allowed to interfere with whatever impressions and feelings those experiences elicited.

I include the picture above in part as protection against the Thought Police/Academia Guardians (look! I like people who don’t look like me!) but actually to illustrate a point about engaging difference. The picture is of a man from Azilal, Morocco, with whom I worked to train rural association members in grant-writing and project-planning (water projects, ecotourism, aid for the disabled, etc.) The point I mean to make is that yes, we engage difference. But not for its own sake; for the sake of something higher. My boss in the Peace Corps, a very thoughtful Moroccan man who had studied in both Morocco and America, made an important point during our training. Yes, Peace Corps exists for the two-fold purpose of a) filling needs in developing countries for skills and knowledge and b) facilitating cultural exchange between Americans and the people of host countries. But as he pointed out, if you do (a) you will get (b) thrown in with it; if you aim only for (b) you won’t really get either. Getting to know another culture does not happen in a dialoguing vacuum. When you work side-by-side with Moroccans on a project, you will – of necessity – learn about their culture, ways of life, and different perspectives. But if you shirk your work duties and content yourself with drinking tea (er, “dialoguing”) with locals, yes, you may learn something about the culture. But you’ll never understand it. In my experience, those who only talk and absorb the culture mistakenly believe they really know something about it. Those who do the hard work of learning the language, working with people who initially make no sense to you (or drive you crazy) – or to whom you make no sense – find that there is infinitely more to learn about these people than they can ever hope to gain. They acquire at once a humility – not claiming to know everything that every Moroccan would say or do in situation X – and a firm understanding of at least some things about those people who are different.

And so it is, I think, with truth, including the truths we learn when we “engage difference.” If we just talk about it, we are likely to congratulate ourselves on having really learned what it’s like to be the person on the other end of the Skype conversation, because, well, they spoke your language and you never had to see them when they weren’t talking to you. But if instead you simply go about life seeking truth – in Dan’s words, “that truth that is independent of its adherents” – you’ll go ahead and work with those people that are different from you precisely because you are learning that you don’t know it all, nor will all the scattershot experiences and contrived dialogues get you there.

There is plenty of room in a liberal arts education for more exposure to great works of other cultures and to engage all kinds of differences. But this is no reason to abandon the mission to educate human beings in seeking truth – especially not in favor of the poor substitute of adding up “experiences”.