A voice in the wilderness: finding Pope Francis in American polity

Mindless Pontificating: Silent heroism during the Greek crisis

“David, I think Greece is on the verge of another catastrophe,” Maria, the director of the Salvation Army branch in Athens, warned me last December. We were sipping Greek coffee at the organization’s headquarters in Athens, a building the size of an American small-town thrift shop which services a city of over four million. I was perplexed. Had Greece not already hit “rock bottom?” What further catastrophe could ravage a nation which had a third of its population close to or in poverty, or a 35 percent increase in suicides since 2011? Perhaps, I mused as the “optimistic American,” Maria’s prediction would be mistaken.
Needless to say, a cursory scan of front pages this summer proved Maria’s view prophetic. Despite a new “deal” between Greece and Europe, dark clouds of uncertainty still grip the nation. No real change in Greece’s largest problem, be it endemic corruption, a decaying safety net and toxic populism, is on horizon. During my junior year in Athens, I was honored to witness the heroic struggle of Maria, her husband Polis and the Salvation Army’s staff.
Every day, they enter into the crisis with remarkable fortitude against great odds. In her work with victims of human trafficking, Maria has discovered terrible collaboration between hotel owners, city police and pimps. She makes sure all the refugee women who come to the Salvation Army have someone to accompany them home for fear of kidnapping. On a visit, I once saw a member of Golden Dawn, Greece’s fascist party, outside. He apparently stands near their office for a few moments every week to intimidate immigrant families coming inside. A few weeks before, party members marched through this predominantly immigrant neighborhood, chanting hateful slogans and waving Neo-Nazi flags. In their acts of service, Maria and her husband Polis encounter not only tragedy, but evil underneath the surface of a “civilized” European country.
These are extreme examples of the daily trials their vocation requires. Families who constantly come pleading for baby milk, diapers and food cannot always be helped. The Salvation Army operates on a limited budget, as they refuse to accept government funds, knowing of many NGOs ruined by the statist, corrupt tentacles of Greece’s bureaucracy. As a Protestant organization in an Orthodox country, many potential donors reject them as insufficiently “Greek,” all the more so for devoting so many resources to migrant families instead of “their own people.” Given the economic deterioration, there is sometimes not much that can be done beyond the provision of basic resources, prayer and a warm embrace. Their work is remarkable, but how can it ever contend with the scale of the problems before them?
It is in such encounters with continued despair that the true nature of the heart is revealed. What happens to your commitment when idealistic visions of progress are no longer possible, when the arc of history does not seem to bend any closer to justice? What happens to your generosity when your efforts seem unappreciated and your impact invisible? Such crises are judgments; they reveal to us, as Dostoevsky wrote, that “love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”
Such moments expose those whose service to others was simply out of loyalty to ideological causes or, even worse, a subtle manifestation of one’s own egotism and need to control others. But such judgments also reveal the love that “always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
The Greek crisis has indeed made visible the hearts of Maria, Polis and countless others in Greece. Tuesday mornings at Salvation Army are filled with joy as dozens of screaming migrant children run around with toys, finger paint and learn letters and colors. The joyful and sacrificial spirit of Maria and Polis amply proved Mother Teresa’s maxim that our life’s aim is faithfulness, not success. Yet this faithfulness brings its own small victories for Salvation Army, like a new senior citizen program and a freely donated building for children’s activities. The seeds of a renewed Greece blossom silently in this remote Athenian charity building.
Maria and Polis exemplify an alternative path forward for idealistic millennials today, the “Generation TED” constantly fed with well-intentioned but frequently naive slogans about optimism, change and achievement. In high school and Bowdoin, we have been identified as change makers who can, as Thomas Paine mused, “begin the world anew.” Alternately, Maria and Polis exhibit Reinhold Niebuhr’s “pessimistic optimism,” conscious of the “tragic realities of life and history,” and both the limitations and necessity of moral choices in the movement of history. Struggling to keep alive human dignity in a fallen world is a mighty task. But it is a struggle worthy of their, and our own, lives.

Mindless Pontificating: Preserving the liberal arts through great books and great questions

In early 2015, Governor Scott Walker’s administration aimed for a dramatic shift in the University of Wisconsin’s mission statement. Gone was flowery talk about “public service” and “the search of truth”; such goals must bow to the imperative to meet “the state’s workforce needs”. Students of ancient Greek philosophy and their apparently hopeless job prospects have been a punchline in Senator Marco Rubio’s stump speeches, Such attitudes show a disregard for the conservative imperative to pass on a cultural inheritance. But they also speak to a larger shift, the rise of a technocratic and utilitarian approach to education that alarms conservative, Marxist, and liberal writers alike.
Liberal arts education is frequently defended by appealing to its contribution to critical thinking, social progress, and the common good. These are undoubtedly valid ends. However, set by themselves, we risk losing confidence in the oldest aim of the liberal arts education: to cultivate personal character through an engagement with the Great Books, through the “the best of what has been said and thought” in the words of Matthew Arnold. This is hardly a pinning of nostalgia. Numerous American colleges still have core Great Books seminars asking students to take great literature and philosophy seriously. It’d be hard to count as backward institutions like the UChicago or Columbia,
Admittedly, a 21st Century Great Books program will look different from an Oxford or Cambridge curriculum in the 1800’s. It will be concise in a time when more students major in the physical and social sciences or want to enjoy a range of electives. Calls for greater diversity of voices should not be dismissed as political correctness. It would be inconceivable for a study of the human condition to not include Eastern or Islamic philosophical traditions. No curriculum today would be complete without drawing from voices like Wright, Márquez, Morrison, or O’Connor.
There must be a balance between necessary adjustment and preservation, however. Certain Western writings, such as Plato, Kant, or Marx in philosophy or ancient Greek dramas and prose, the Hebrew Bible, or Shakespeare in literature, dramatically shaped the entire history of ideas and the nature of our own culture, in both its virtues and weaknesses. To keep alive these texts in core seminars is not “Eurocentric” but an act of humility.
A Great Books program today need not be a systematic reading list universal for everyone on campus. Rather each professor would choose certain works for seminars clustered around Great Questions. What is the good life and ideal community? What do we mean by social justice and freedom? How does one understand both religious and secular views of the world? How do we make sense of and live through evil and suffering? These are the questions a liberal arts education needs to take seriously.
This proposal might come across as too “ivory tower”. Should we not direct more core requirements into learning as much as we can about pressing political and social problems? Does all this talk about Great Books and Great Questions come from an extinct time when privileged colleges lay far too isolated and aloof from the world’s crises? Perhaps - but Tolstoy grasped a profound truth when he wrote that “everybody thinks about changing humanity, but nobody thinks of changing himself.” Individual transformation of leaders precedes their contribution to lasting social change.
Just look at history. Movements like American abolitionism and the Civil Rights Movement brought lasting change because their members immersed themselves in older, deep wells of moral thought and right living. Conversely, those who lacked any appreciation for the past or concern for the interior life often saw their idealism descend into destructive ideologies. The French guillotine and the Russian gulag need only remind one of this final point.
A great error is to assume that such literary or philosophical texts would impose a particular ideology upon students. Irving Howe points out in a fabulous New Republic essay why a course on social thought including Nietzsche, Plato, Machiavelli, Jefferson, or Dewey would be a source of “a variety of opinions, often clashing with one another, sometimes elusive and surprisingly, always richly complex. These are some of the thinkers with whom to begin, if only later to deviate from.” The goal is not treat past authors as infallible oracles but to wrestle with important ideas.
It is critical for more colleges to restore towering past works of world literature and philosophy into an essential, if inevitably more limited, part of today’s curriculums. Those works save us from the “tyranny of the present”, assuming that the end of history directs to those who think and act like ourselves. They show how our assumptions about liberty, justice, or human nature are not obvious but lie atop a rich, contentious history. Their wisdom can teach us how to order our emotions and values as we enter a “real world” of tragedy and moral complexity. A few might count this position as reactionary. I’ll end with Roger Scruton’s words: “We have inherited collectively good things that we must strive to keep.”

Mindless Pontificating

A voice in the wilderness: finding Pope Francis in American polity

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

October 1, 2015

During his recent trip to the United States, Pope Francis, truly a global icon since his unexpected election in 2013, was the subject of lavish veneration from American citizens, writers and politicians across political and religious backgrounds. Such universal praise is entirely sincere, and it offers hope of a genuine unity of human values beneath our many conflicts. At the same time, such flattering words cannot hide a tragic irony—the actual contact of Catholic social justice teaching Pope Francis so vividly embodies dwells in a lonely desert on our national political landscape.

To be sure, faith will inevitably conflict with any ideology, which precisely gives it creative power. Coalition building will always make for uneasy political bedfellows. In a pluralistic society with separation of church and state, people of faith must primarily use the language of reason and philosophy, as opposed to theology, to make their public arguments. Nevertheless, the strict ideological litmus tests on both our Left and Right excommunicates Catholics and other people of faith following the path of Pope Francis, who desire to live out consistently rather than cherry pick their vision of social justice.

Pope Francis’ denunciation of the moral ambiguities and uneven costs of capitalism are not unique to his papacy, but his candor has sparked visceral outrage among American conservatives. Pundits from Rush Limbaugh to George Will accuse Francis of “Marxist”, “communist”, and “Peronist” leanings. The evasive reactions of Catholic Republican presidential candidates to Francis’ environment encyclical “Laudato Si’” reveal an unwillingness to even slightly rethink their party’s libertarian economic orthodoxies.

More thoughtful Catholic conservatives rightly note that the Vatican is not an infallible think tank, releasing policy statements binding on the faithful. And papal teaching indeed broadly endorses private property and the market economy as proven tools for advancing both individual freedom and the common good.

Nevertheless, there is a consistent history of leading Catholic conservative intellectuals in America downplaying or ignoring their Church’s political teachings when it challenges the party line. As war drums beat for Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, religious conservatives neglected John Paul II’s perceptive warning that the intervention would lead to utter catastrophe. When Benedict XVI called for a major restructuring of the global financial system, writer George Weigel claimed that crafty left-leaning Curia officials, not the pontiff, were responsible for such proposals. Such examples point to a failure of American conservatism to build a sincere, honest dialogue with Catholic reflections on economic issues.

But the American Left is certainly guilty too of groupthink and ideological exclusion. One of the great tragedies of recent politics is the near disappearance of visible pro-life Democrats, who saw opposition to abortion, war, poverty, and capital punishment as a united commitment to a “consistent ethic of life”, a favorite term of the Christian Left. Even after Roe v. Wade, leading Democrats, including Sargent Shriver, Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson, expressed this view, although many adjusted their positions as the party’s direction became more dogmatic. Today, although a Gallup study in 2011 found that one in three Democrats describe themselves as pro-life, less than three percent of Democrats in Congress share this position. Indeed, a pro-life Democrat would find progressive circles an uncomfortable home when their principled view is vilified as medieval, patriarchal or uncaring. A presidential frontrunner can give paid speeches for Goldman Sachs or cynically flip-flop on countless issues, but if an aspiring Democratic politician or thinker even remotely challenges the party consensus on abortion—anathema sit.

The great religious progressives of an earlier era, be it Martin Luther King Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr or Abraham Heschel, would likely be horrified at the militant, condescending secularism common in contemporary liberal thought on most cultural questions. Their postwar liberalism drew on historic, traditional understandings of human personhood and dignity. Today, we see a descent into a “dictatorship of relativism” warned of by Benedict XVI, where older and spiritual and moral wisdom is ignored, caricatured and demonized in the pursuit of frequently shallow, postmodern definitions of freedom.

Pope Francis’ warnings about modernity’s “throwaway culture”, “globalization of indifference” or “idolatry of money” should not be political footballs but invitations for deeper reflection by every worldview and every person. It is time that our public life creates the space for the social and ethical thought he offers to share itself freely, in its fullness rather than isolated fragments. Catholic social teaching will neither transform America into a socialist dystopia nor a repressive theocracy. Rather, its wisdom will contribute to a richer understanding of human dignity and the common good our country desperately needs. Pope Francis captured our hearts and minds last week. Let us not allow his journey to America to have ended in vain.

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