Against the Stream

Michael Oren on Who Has a Right to the West Bank

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Michael Oren, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, was recently interviewed by The New Yorker. During his interview, the reporter pressed Oren on the question of what right Israelis have over the areas the currently constitute the West Bank and Gaza. While he punted (a bit) on Gaza, he was pretty clear on the West Bank:

So you think that you, as a Jewish person born in New York, have a right to be anywhere in Israel—

Absolutely.

Plus the West Bank, plus Gaza.

Absolutely. Not Gaza. We can debate whether Gaza is part of the land of Israel.

O.K., Israel plus the West Bank.

Even if you wanted to include Gaza, I’d say absolutely, yeah. The question is what is smart. What’s possible.

Who gave you the right to live anywhere you want in the West Bank? That’s what I am trying to understand.

Absolutely.

Where did you get that right?

It’s my heritage for three thousand years. It’s the same exact right I have from where I am talking to you. I am talking to you from Jaffa. I live in Jaffa. The same right I have to live in Jaffa I have in [the settlement] Beit El or Efrat, or in Hebron. Exact same right. Take away one right, the other right makes no sense. By the way, P.S., most of the lands of pre-1967 Israel are not even in the Bible. Haifa is not in the Bible; Tel Aviv is not in the Bible.

So, the argument seems to be that, as a Jew, Oren has the right to live anywhere within any of the area historically controlled by Israel, based on some idea of "heritage." It's a strange and very weak argument. It's not at all clear what heritage means here or why "heritage" confers any kinds of "rights" of any kind. Furthermore, this kind of argument is of course susceptible to the obvious reply: If Jews have a right based on their heritage, then why do the Palestinians have any less of a right.

It's interesting to note that I've been arguing with a Twitter troll on this point for much of the day, and it's clear to me that the only way this argument works is if they can somehow deny that there have been Arabs living in the area of modern Israel and Palestine for millennia. They get to this conclusion mostly through acts of special pleading and attempting to play semantic and demographic games. Such arguments don't withstand the slightest scrutiny, but that doesn't prevent them from being argued vociferously, as though their conclusions were self-evident and the natural outcome must necessarily be the right of Jews, and only Jews, over the entire extent of Greater Israel.

If the argument were the more modest claim that Jews had the right to live in the modern state of Israel because Israeli law allows it, that would be a far more defensible claim. However, that would not allow for the more expansionary proposals that argue, as Oren does above, in favor of the right of any and all Jews to any and all areas in any and all of what Israel has ever claimed for itself, as far back as 3,000 years.

Since this is an obviously absurd argument, and can't be reasonably defended, the interview does not improve from there:

O.K., I just want to understand this because I don’t want to misunderstand it. You are saying there are Palestinians living in various areas of the West Bank right now—

There are, indeed.

—which may or may not at some point become a state. But you are saying that, wherever they are living, they have less right to be there than you as a Jew born in New York.

I didn’t say that. Don’t impute words to me I didn’t say.

I’m sorry, I thought you just said that.

No, I did not say that in any way. Listen, I don’t think I want to continue this interview. I don’t think this is a constructive interview. You can do with it—I would like to request you withdraw it. I don’t think you are actually interested in anything I have to say. And that’s been my experience with The New Yorkerall the time. You guys are just into delegitimization. You are not really interested. Why don’t we call it quits right here, and I will pull this interview? I am relying on you to do that, as a journalist.

I think what honestly happened here is that Oren got out over his skis. He realized that he couldn't defend the implications of his argument and so had to run away from the interview as fast as he possibly could. And who could blame him?

In fairness, he never quite says that he has more right to live in the West Bank than a Palestinian who was actually born there, or that the Palestinians have less right. But it's certainly a reasonable inference from his arguments. If Jews, by virtue of their "heritage" have a right to, as Oren argues elsewhere in the interview the entirety of Greater Israel "down to the last millimeter." Many thousands of those millimeters are of course already occupied by the bodies and the lands of other, non-Jewish human beings. And so this principle necessarily implies that Oren's right as a Jew to that land outstrips that of the Palestinians already living there. The only concessions Oren is willing to make on this point are purely pragmatic.

Also of note in this interview is Oren's contention that the Two-State solution is not supported by anyone in Israel today, except for those on the "moribund" left, leading to annexation as the predominating position of the vast majority of Israelis. Whether Oren is right on this or not I have no idea. But if so, it raises once again the underlying contradiction at the heart of current Israeli policy: It cannot continue to be both Jewish and democratic if it continues these current policies. It ultimately has to choose, if it abandons to the Two-State solution, whether it will be a state of all of its citizens, or whether it will be an apartheid state. Given the moral and political contortions this leads to, is it any wonder that there are those who would propose to cut the Gordian knot and suggest deporting the Palestinians wholesale. Of course, as an act of ethnic cleansing, this would be a humanitarian violation of the highest order, and undermine fatally any claim to national morality that Israel would otherwise be capable of claiming.

James Baldwin and Reinhold Niebuhr in Conversation

A few days ago, Fred Clark at Slacktivist posted a video of James Baldwin and Reinhold Niebuhr being interviewed in the wake of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing.

Fred also points to a Commonweal interview where Niebuhr comments on the white evangelicals of his own day, in words that are equally germane today:

One of the ironic facts of American history is that both slavery and post-slavery injustice prospered in the states that were formed by two kinds of idealism — a Jeffersonian idealism and evangelistic Protestantism. All the horrible racial cruelties that are practiced in Alabama and Mississippi are done by people who have been “converted” five, six, seven, or eight times. …

Then along comes Billy Graham for his great evangelistic meeting. His manner is bland and he’s a great biblicist. He speaks in a convincing way and, while the choir sings softly, he tells the people to pray and to give their heart to Christ and sign the decision card. He tells them in the words of St. Paul that “if any man be in Christ, he will be a new creature.”

This is fantastic, because it shows the weakness of Protestantism — individualism. It deals with collective sin, particularly the race question, in purely individualistic terms. You can’t overcome race prejudice by simply signing a decision card. Yet Billy Graham tells them that if they sign the decision card they will become “color-blind.” Why is it that we see no evidence of the color-blindness when these people leave the evangelistic meetings?

Fred comments: "What Niebuhr condemns here as “individualism” is the idea of religion — of “salvation” — without justice. He was as unconvinced of the possibility of such a thing as the prophet Isaiah was. ... Evangelical individualism, he believed, divorced love from justice, turning it into something sentimental and gormless and vapid."

The Morality of Annexation

Over the past several days, a controversy has arisen over an article written in The Federalist by Jason Hill, a colleague of mine at DePaul University. Hill is a professor of Philosophy specializing in ethics, and the title of the article was "The Moral Case for Israel Annexing the West Bank." The article was notable not only for its choice of topic, but in its daring choice to make an ethical case for an immoral policy, without any pretense of allegiance to the facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its history, the status of international law, principles of human rights, or even principles of sound argumentation.

Ordinarily, I would not take to a public forum to criticize a fellow professor at my own institution. But after student inquiries led me to the article, and local news began to report on a student petition to have Dr. Hill censured or in some other way penalized for his opinions, I thought it was important to write something. There are two reasons for this. First, because his arguments are truly and deeply egregious in every way, and second, because I believe that it is important to model to students what a vigorous exchange of ideas in an academic setting looks like. Academic freedom does not simply mean that as scholars we are free to write what we like, but that we are also free to respond, and to engage with one another forcefully around issues of public political and moral importance. And as my field is also ethics, I believe I have a responsibility to engage Hill's arguments on their own terms.

So what is Hill's argument? His thesis, succinctly stated is that "Israel has the moral right to annex all of the West Bank (even Area C) for a plethora of reasons." He then proceeds to enumerate four arguments in support of his thesis. First, that Israel made a mistake in allowing the Palestinian "pretense," second, that the Palestinian Authority is a terrible government, third, that Israel has a right to defeat terrorists, and fourth, that the Palestinians have no moral authority.

I want to make a couple of general observations about Hill's argument before proceeding to examine the bill of particulars. First, it's worth noting that Hill offers very little, verging on nothing, that constitutes actual evidence for any of his claims. The entire article is made up of sweeping generalizations followed by broad claims and no factual backup. What's more, anyone familiar with the facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it has developed over the course of almost seventy one years would recognize that Hill's account is a massive distortion of the actual truth of the matter. This is not to say that there is not a way in which one can squint at Hill's account and see a version of the truth, but it is a version that has been thoroughly filtered through several layers of Likud propaganda. If the only thing one knew about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict came from Hill's account, not only would one not have the whole story, but they would actually be more ignorant of the truth of the conflict than if they had not read his account at all. Total ignorance of the conflict would actually be less ignorant than what one would walk way with from reading Hill's article.

Furthermore, it's strange that Hill's article should be entitled a "moral case" for annexation, as it's not a moral case for anything. There's not a shred of morality about it. It's not even immoral. It's anti-moral. There's not an iota of a genuinely moral argument in the entire piece, and there's no detectable account of morality generally that undergirds Hill's account. To the extent that one could extract a moral principle from the article, it is this: What suits Israel, according to its most right-wing elements, is good, and what doesn't suit it, regardless of any other factors, is evil. This is not a moral case for anything, and it would have been more honest if Hill had simply made a Thrasymachean argument that the good is in the interest of the stronger.

Now, onto the specific arguments that Hill makes.

The Palestinian Pretense

At the outset, Hill argues that "Israel made an altruistic mistake toward the Palestinian people after the 1967 defensive war with Jordan. Rather than regard them as 'war settlers' or refugees or, after legally occupying conquered territory, as 'illegal occupants,” they made the Palestinian people their political and moral problem." On Hill's account, the conflict with the Palestinians is rooted in Israel's overly generous and altruistic spirit, as they chose to allow the Palestinians, who had, after all, only lived in the West Bank for thousands of years, to remain, instead of simply expelling them wholesale into Jordan. Lest you think I am exaggerating for effect, here are Hill's words: "Under a different set of political sensibilities, the Palestinian people would have been militarily removed from the area because, morally speaking, after the 1967 war, they never belonged there. The proper response from Israel should have been to immediately annex the land and make the people there the responsibility of their original political homeland: Jordan."

Of course, there is a reason that Israel did not annex the West Bank in 1967 and it was not because they were simply too nice. It was because under international law, it was illegal for them to do so. The West Bank was occupied territory and Israel was not entitled to annex it under international law. It's still not. What's more, under international law, if Israel had annexed the West Bank, they would have been obligated to make the Palestinians Israeli citizens. There is simply no provision in international law to expel the residents of an occupied territory, and certainly none to annex the territory and expel the residents. It's not that this is not covered under international law. It is. It's called a war crime.

So Hill's first argument is that Israel should annex the West Bank now, because it chose not to commit war crimes in 1967. Better late than never, I guess.

Because, to be clear, he is still not in favor of granting Palestinians citizenship rights post-annexation. More on that momentarily.

The Palestinian Authority Is a Terrible Government

First, it is undeniably true that the PA is a terrible government. It has been more or less from the beginning. However, it's a strange and ironic argument that says that Israel should annex the Occupied Territories because of the incompetence and corruption of the PA, given the looming threat of indictment hanging over the head of Benjamin Netanyahu himself. While on a gradient, the PA may be an objectively worse government than Natanyahu's Likud government, it should be clear that it's the same measuring stick. It's hardly a compelling moral argument to state that one terrible government should be abolished and replaced by another terrible government.

What's more, while Hill will no doubt disagree, the idea that Americans under Trump are in a position to stand in judgement over someone else's terrible government is rather laughable. The Trump administration is perhaps the most corrupt American government in US history. Certainly more corrupt than the Bush Administration (and let us never forget just how corrupt that bunch were!), more corrupt than Nixon. More corrupt than Harding! When the history books are finally written, it will be said that there was never a President prior to Trump who was more corrupt than he was. Nor a Congress more supine in its willingness to allow his corruption go unpunished.

So yes, the PA is corrupt, though it is a distortion beyond comprehension to argue that "PA has destroyed the freedom Palestinians enjoyed under Israeli rule." This is simply factually untrue. First of all, even in those areas putatively under Palestinian sovereignty, they are still under Israeli rule in every meaningful sense. The PA's authority in those areas is severely constrained and to the degree that Palestinians find their freedoms have been destroyed, it remains the case, as it was before the Oslo Accords, that the primary actor in the destruction of their freedom is Israel.

However, to be clear, Hill's real point in this section is not to offer an account of Palestinian corruption, but to make case for the cultural superiority of Jews over Palestinians tout court. "Jewish exceptionalism" he argues, "and the exceptionalist nature of Jewish civilization require an unconditional space for the continued evolution of their civilization. What’s good for Jewish civilization is good for humanity at large. Jewish civilization is an international treasure trove that must be protected." Unconditional space, please note, because of the inherent virtue of "Jewish civilization."

How then to secure such unconditional space for the expansion of "Jewish exceptionalism"? Hill is quite explicit: "Given the voting patterns of Palestinians—towards Islamicism and terrorist organizations for the most part—that openly advocate and work for Israeli and Jewish destruction and annihilation, a strong argument can and ought to be made to strip Palestinians of their right to vote—period."

Leaving aside for a moment the deeply misleading claims about Palestinian voting patterns, which in Hill's account is cleansed of any kind of context, analysis, history, or indeed data, note what is solution is: The total disenfranchisement of a population, a population which would then either be forced to live as rightless non-citizens or else expelled entirely from the West Bank. Please remember that this is a moral case for annexation, all appearances to the contrary!

Underlying the entire argument is Hill's central claim: On the one hand you have "exceptional" Jewish civilization. On the other hand you have a civilization that is "abysmally inferior and regressive based on their comprehensive philosophy and fundamental principles—or lack thereof—that guide or fail to protect the inalienable rights of their citizens." It's hard to see how this statement can be read in any way other than that the Arab population of the West Bank is some how subhuman. It certainly can't be the case that they are even in possession of "inalienable rights" that attach to citizenship, because Hill's chief argument is that they should be deprived of those rights, stripped of their land, and expelled from the territory so that "Jewish civilization" can have "unconditioned space."

Israel Has Every Right To Defeat Terrorists

In this section, Hill digresses into a discussion of the Gaza Strip, about which he argues "the wholesale destruction of Hamas in Gaza ... is an application of democratic law protecting the rights of the individuals who rightfully belong there." Now, as with corruption in the PA, so with Hamas, it is undoubtedly the case that it has engaged in a long running campaign of terrorism against Israel. Though if the argument is that no government or organization that has engaged in terrorism can ever be legitimate, that creates difficulties for, among others, the legitimacy of the United States government and the legitimacy of the Israeli government, both of which were founded by organizations that achieved their aims through acts of terrorism.

However, I don't think there's much point in defending Hamas. What's more interesting is the implication that Hill draws from this, namely that Israel "has every moral right to wage a ruthless and unrelenting war against Hamas and to re-settle the land if it ever so desires."

Those who have paid attention to the damage inflicted on the Gaza by the Israeli military over the past decade or more have some sense of what a "ruthless and unrelenting war" against Hamas would look like. Not to put to fine a point on it, but it would look like the wholesale slaughter of a civilian population. One imagines that Hill does not think that Israel has yet been sufficiently ruthless in its campaigns against Gaza.

However, it is worth noting here that, while it is certainly true that Israel, in a formal sense, "withdrew" from the Gaza in 2005, since then it has kept a stranglehold on the population there, keeping what was already a poor and immeserated population in continual and increasing misery, punctuated by periods of abject terror and death as the result of the latest round of bombing. One wonders why, under such circumstances, an organization like Hamas, which seems to be the only one willing to stand up to such intolerable social conditions, would gain public support, regardless of their many failings.

And of course all of this assumes that you can easily sort out behaviors on the one hand that can be called "terrorism" from those that on the other hand can be called "self-defense." Apart from eschewing violence entirely as a tactic, the question of when an act of violence is terrorism and when it is mere war is not nearly so easy to sort out as Hill might like to believe. If ineffectual SCUD attacks on Israeli towns, that result in no deaths, are terrorism, then how is it not terrorism when the Israeli military bombs highly concentrated populations centers, resulting in the deaths of thousands. While the moral discourse around the conditions of war can offer some insight into the distinctions, they are fundamentally meaningless to the five-year old girl, weather Israeli or Gazan, caught in the middle of the violence. Terrorism in this regard, as well as self-defense, are very much in the eye of the beholder.

This is, of course, not to say that one cannot make distinctions between acts of terror and acts of war. It is, however, to say that the distinctions are far murkier in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than Hill might prefer.

The Palestinians Have No Moral Authority

With perhaps unintentional irony, Hill opens this section by referring to Israel as "our political and moral alter-ego in the Middle East." This may be more true than he knows, to the misfortune of both the United States and Israel. He goes on to state that the Palestinians "have never come into their own as a people largely because they have never explicitly held a philosophy that can support freedom, the basic liberal principles of individual rights, and a free market economy." On this basis, he argues that they do not have the moral authority as a people to govern themselves. What's more, Hill argues "Whatever actions Israel or any of her allies take against them in a war against terror are their responsibility, and are moral." Whatever actions, mind you. Since he condemns what he alleges are the "genocidal aspirations" of the Palestinians toward Israel, presumably he's willing to make allowances for the genocidal aspirations of Israel toward the Palestinians. Whatever actions. Apparently this also includes "Forc[ing] Jordan to re-revoke its citizenship status of the Palestinian majority in Jordan." Not content to deprive the Palestinians of voting rights within a Greater Israel, Hill believes Israel should seek to deprive Palestinians of voting rights everywhere.

Hill concludes oddly, writing that "One cannot admit anti-Semitics [sic] devoted to the destruction of Israel into the domain of Jewish civilization. There has to be some semblance of re-shaping the political sensibilities of those outside the historic process. If this is not possible, then we have to admit to their intrinsic humanity, but also, nevertheless, confess to their tragic status as political ballasts." It's hard to see how, given the totality of his argument, he leaves any basis for affirming the "intrinsic humanity" of the Palestinians. The logic of his argument, as I noted above, implies that they are sub-human, not subject to inherent human rights or any of the prerogatives of citizenship, not only within Israel, but anywhere.

As I wrote at the outset, this argument is not merely immoral, but anti-moral. It is an argument that we would rightly reject if it were applied to Jews. We would rightly reject it if it were applied to African Americans. If his logic held, the British would have had free reign to continue to oppress the Irish from the days of Cromwell to today.

A morality rooted in any theory of basic human rights, whether as described by Aquinas and the Catholic tradition, John Locke, John Rawls, Michael Walzer, or Martha Nussbaum would have to recognize Hill's argument as philosophically incoherent and morally bankrupt. It is not an argument worthy of a professor of philosophy at DePaul or anywhere else. That said, academic freedom does not only apply to good arguments. It applies no less to abysmally bad, poorly constructed, and intellectually vacuous arguments such as these. Hill is well within his rights as a professor to make such a laughably terrible argument. And the rest of us have a right, indeed, an obligation, to respond, lest anyone be left with the impression that Hill's colleagues at DePaul approve of his argument, or in any way think of it as a credible contribution to the discourse. The best thing that the students who are outraged by Hill's argument can do is to clearly and loudly argue in opposition to him, to articulate a counter argument, armed with facts, which will make it impossible for such specious arguments to be taken with any kind of seriousness.

A Statement from Christian Ethicists Without Borders on White Supremacy and Racism

I am one of the signatories of the statement below. If you are a Christian ethicist, I urge you to follow the links at the bottom of the page and add your name.

A Statement from Christian Ethicists Without Borders
on White Supremacy and Racism

August 14, 2017

As followers of Jesus Christ and as Christian ethicists representing a range of denominations and schools of thought, we stand in resolute agreement in firmly condemning racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and neo-Nazi ideology as a sin against God that divides the human family created in God’s image.

In January of 2017, white nationalist groups emboldened by the 2016 election planned an armed march against the Jews of Whitefish, Montana. On August 11th and 12th, hundreds of armed neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. As we mourn the deaths of 32-year old counter-protester Heather Heyer and state troopers H. Jay Cullen and Berke Bates from this most recent incident, we unequivocally denounce racist speech and actions against people of any race, religion, or national origin.

White supremacy and racism deny the dignity of each human being revealed through the Incarnation. The evil of white supremacy and racism must be brought face-to-face before the figure of Jesus Christ, who cannot be confined to any one culture or nationality. Through faith we proclaim that God the Creator is the origin of all human persons. In the words of Frederick Douglass, “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”

The greatest commandments, as Jesus taught and exemplified, are to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves; and so as children of God, and sisters and brothers to all, we hold the following:

• We reject racism and anti-Semitism, which are radical evils that Christianity must actively resist.
• We reject the sinful white supremacy at the heart of the “Alt Right” movement as Christian heresy.
• We reject the idolatrous notion of a national god. God cannot be reduced to “America’s god.”
• We reject the “America First” doctrine, which is a pernicious and idolatrous error. It foolishly asks Americans to replace the worship of God with the worship of the nation, poisons both our religious traditions and virtuous American patriotism, and isolates this country from the community of nations. Such nationalism erodes our civic and religious life, and fuels xenophobic and racist attacks against immigrants and religious minorities, including our Jewish and Muslim neighbors.
• We confess that all human beings possess God-given dignity and are members of one human family, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or country of origin.
• We proclaim that the gospel of Jesus Christ has social and political implications. Those who claim salvation in Jesus Christ, therefore, must publicly name evil, actively resist it, and demonstrate a world of harmony and justice in the midst of racial, religious and indeed all forms of human diversity.

Therefore, we call upon leaders of every Christian denomination, especially pastors, to condemn white supremacy, white nationalism, and racism.

• Contemplate and respect the image of God imprinted on each human being.
• Work across religious traditions to reflect on the ways we have been complicit in upholding and benefiting from the sins of racism and white supremacy.
• Pray for the strength and courage to stand emphatically against racism, white supremacy, and nationalism in all its forms.
• Participate in acts of peaceful protest, including rallies, marches, and at times, even civil disobedience. Do not remain passive bystanders in the face of the heresies of racism, white supremacy, and white nationalism.
• Engage in political action to oppose structural racism.

We will bring the best of our traditions to an ecclesial and societal examination of conscience where rhetoric and acts of hatred against particular groups can be publicly named as grave sins and injustices.

Finally, as ethicists, we commit—through our teaching, writing, and service—to the ongoing, hard work of building bridges and restoring wholeness where racist and xenophobic ideologies have brought brokenness and pain.

(If you are a Christian ethicist or teach Christian ethics and wish to add your name, please email Tobias Winright at [email protected] or Matthew Tapie at [email protected] or Anna Floerke Scheid at [email protected] or MT Dávila at [email protected] with your name, highest degree, title, and institution. Institutions are named for identification purposes only and this does not necessarily represent their support of this statement, although we hope they do, too.)

For a full updated list of signatories, please click here:

Trump, Confederate Monuments, and Overt Nazism

Two years ago, I wrote a post about the problem of Confederate monuments. I concluded the post this way:

What I would propose then, is that we begin the process of dismantling and replacing those Confederate memorials with memorials to the reality of slavery. That we replace statues celebrating confederate soldiers and generals with statues celebrating union soldiers and generals, and that, at long last, we construct a national memorial that confronts the reality of slavery, so that we can confront our national shame squarely, and be called to account for it. Indeed, I'd suggest a national slavery museum, much like the National Holocaust Museum, where Americans can confront the history of slavery, unvarnished by revisionist, pro-confederate propaganda, and recognize the genuine evil that the South fought on behalf of, and that remains unacknowledged to this day. It would be my hope that, within my lifetime, someone wearing a Confederate flag would be looked on with the same kind of disgust that we would currently reserve for someone wearing a swastika.

Of course, this was before the 2016 election. This was before the era of Donald Trump. This was before actual white supremacists were given positions in the White House. And this was before last weekend in Charlottesville, when neo-Nazis marched openly wearing the symbols of fascism. We've moved beyond the point where the general shame associated with overt racism is a sufficient disincentive to prevent the mass mobilization of actual, honest-to-goodness Nazis, marching unmasked in the streets.

 

It's rather remarkable to me that we've come to this point in the United States. I literally couldn't conceive of it two years ago, as the post above demonstrates. Hell, I couldn't conceive of it 10 months ago, before the last election. I thought we were better than this -- more stable, more sane. The fact that as a nation we are not is deeply troubling to me. The question for us all to contemplate is what we do now, given that this is the world in which we now dwell. As of this moment, I don't have anything resembling a detailed plan in place. All I do know is that whatever we do, it needs to be encapsulated by one key concept:

 

Resist.

What I would propose then, is that we begin the process of dismantling and replacing those Confederate memorials with memorials to the reality of slavery. That we replace statues celebrating confederate soldiers and generals with statues celebrating union soldiers and generals, and that, at long last, we construct a national memorial that confronts the reality of slavery, so that we can confront our national shame squarely, and be called to account for it. Indeed, I'd suggest a national slavery museum, much like the National Holocaust Museum, where Americans can confront the history of slavery, unvarnished by revisionist, pro-confederate propaganda, and recognize the genuine evil that the South fought on behalf of, and that remains unacknowledged to this day. It would be my hope that, within my lifetime, someone wearing a Confederate flag would be looked on with the same kind of disgust that we would currently reserve for someone wearing a swastika.

When Bonhoeffer Schooled Barth on Ethics

W. Travis McMacken at Die Evangelischen Theologen shares the story of when Dietrich Bonhoeffer challenged Karl Barth on the ethical import of Christian theology (via Charles Marsh's Strange Glory):

Barth was explaining his understanding of theology’s peculiar place among the academic disciplines: theology is the science that ventures to speak a word about God . . . the second-order reflection on the church’s primary speech and practice, the writing that seeks to capture the bird in flight, to speak the impossible. Bonhoeffer asked what this had to do with reality (italics McMacken's)

Apart from the boldness of the challenge, it's striking that Bonhoeffer is raising these concerns with Barth, for whom he had enormous regard, in 1931, the year after he returned from studying at Union Theological Seminary in the United States. In New York, Bonhoeffer studied with, among others, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Marsh notes elsewhere that Niebuhr's lectures (combined with Bonhoeffer's direct experiences worshiping in the African American community in Harlem) seemed to have a fairly substantive impact on Bonhoeffer's subsequent thought. As Marsh writes:

Bonhoeffer was both moved and inspired by Niebuhr -- by the example of a theologian who engaged the social order with civil courage and ultimate honesty. For his part, Niebuhr found Bonhoeffer altogether sympathetic, despite his imperious gaze during class and habit of slowly laying down his pen a few minutes after the lecture began. Niebuhr appreciated Bonhoeffer's prodigious intellect, his intensity and ardor; and he understood what a rare thing it was that a German theologian, with all his native prejudices, should choose to spend a year in America. Niebuhr was also confident that he could assert a positive influence on the restless twenty-four year old Berliner who held two doctorates to Niebuhr's none.

Marsh goes on to suggest that at least some of Bonhoeffer's subsequent concentration on ethical issues, particularly in the midst of the crisis of Germany under the Nazis, was attributable to Niebuhr's "positive influence." And here we have an account of Bonhoeffer challenging Barth from the "realist" point of view the very next year. Marsh goes on to note that the disagreement between Barth and Bonhoeffer was not in terms of the essentials, but their application:

The student agreed with the master on most of the basics: the theologian must be a servant of the church, and the basis for thinking truthfully about God is Jesus Christ. But Bonhoeffer was now living with the conviction that theologians must be willing to speak clearly and have a personal stake in their claims. He found Barth impervious to the ethical and social dimensions of doctrine—in fact, irritatingly so.

McMacken is also at pains to note that Barth actually deals with ethical issues at numerous points throughout the  Church Dogmatics, stating that "[Barth} thinks Christians have this responsibility [to change society], just not theology as such." He also notes Marsh's account of the end of this exchanges, which was apparently very welcome by Barth:

Though Bonhoeffer worried about the impression he had made, he would be relieved to hear from a classmate that Barth had thoroughly enjoyed the exchange. The contrarian voice was perfectly welcome, and when the seminar resumed the next day, Barth asked Bonhoeffer to introduce himself to the other students. There soon followed an invitation to dine with the professor at home.

Who Does Not Work Shall Not Eat

Frequently in arguments over social policy, conservatives will haul out Paul's admonition in 2 Thessalonians "Anyone unwilling to work should not eat" in order to justify cutting or eliminating welfare programs, on the ground that such programs promote "idleness" among the poor.

In Religion Dispatches, Dan Schultz critiques those arguments, first by noting some of the inherent problems that both those on the right and the left face in translating scripture into social policy, but then by noting how misapplied the this particular passage is:

Paul wasn’t writing to a “sect.” It was a particular church at Thessalonica, and he was writing to correct a mistake of his own creation. In 1 Thessalonians, he tells the church that Jesus will be coming soon. That encourages some of the members to give up their jobs in preparation for the parousia, living off the community while they wait. Those are the people Paul says should get back to work: Jesus may be coming, but not so quickly that you don’t have to contribute to society.

Perhaps Rep. Arrington knows of a widespread problem with people receiving SNAP benefits who refuse to work because they think the second coming is just around the corner, but I sort of doubt it.

I’m going to give the edge to Protas here. Generalizing away from specific passages, the unmistakable pattern in scripture is meaningful social care for the poor. That doesn’t command government intervention, of course, but neither does it rule it out.

Schultz rightly notes that plucking this passage out of its context in order to justify refusing support for the poor does violence to both the situation in which Paul was writing, and to the overall tenor of both Judaism and Christianity with respect to care for the poor. It is also worth noting, in passing the context of both Greek and Roman society at large, which were based on the widespread use of slave labor. For most of the privileged classes, "idleness" was not a problem for the poor, but a problem for the wealthy. The poor had no choice but to work if they wanted to eat, and in the case of slaves had no real choice at all. But in the case of the rich, the landed, the elite, who were often also the ruling classes, the legislators, the statesmen and the philosophers, idleness was a fact of life. They relied on the labor of the poor and of slaves in order to support their idleness.

However, the larger point remains vital and relevant: How should we use scripture in the formulation of public policy. On the one hand, in a pluralistic democratic society, the answer is "we shouldn't" at least in the sense that, just because we believe the Bible says something is not, in itself, a reason we should enact that thing as law. On the other hand, however, as Schultz notes, for people of faith, the traditions to which they belong, including scripture, form their moral predispositions and attitudes in inescapable ways. We learn who we are as moral beings through our engagement with those texts and traditions, so they inevitably shape our attitude toward social policy.

But in that case, it's vitally important that we understand and interpret those texts properly, in their own contexts and with respect to their relevance to our time and place. Without a robust hermeneutic that can allows us to move from the time and place of those texts to our own, at best we will misinterpret the social implications of the Bible, and at worst, we will use those misinterpretations in ways that harm the poorest and the most vulnerable among us.

Was Reinhold Niebuhr a "Real Theologian"?

As I mentioned the other day, there is a new movie being released on the life and work of Reinhold Niebuhr. As a result, we are seeing the reemergence of the perennial question of whether or not Reinhold was a "real theologian." Most recently, this question was raised again  on the blog Die Evangelischen Theologan by J. Scott Jackson, who writes:

Just how theological was Niebuhr's work -- at least the main body of it? To what extent did specifically Christian theological and moral commitments shape his vocation as public intellectual? From what I've read, I'm inclined to answer the later question: "a very great deal." But the earlier question seems a little more ambiguous. To be sure, Niebuhr, who never earned a doctorate, did not write extensively, say, about the intricacies of trinitarian dogma; nor did he offer in-depth analyses of atonement theories; nor did he offer a thorough critique or defense of two-natures Christology. That said, I do have to point out that Niebuhr was a prolific and world-class preacher, who could engage biblical texts with extraordinary sensitivity and insight.

As Jackson's comment indicates, he is well aware that Niebuhr was a very biblically literate preacher, and was able to work with a biblical text in order to produce some genuinely stirring sermons (and for those who are interested in doing so, I highly recommend Niebuhr's book Discerning the Signs of the Times, which contains several examples of his sermons). So an important preliminary question to answer is "what do we mean by theologian?" And it turns out, that depends on who you ask.

Most of those in the "Niebuhr was not a theologian" camp are barthian -- followers of, or strongly influenced by, the work of Karl Barth. Barth's theology, of course, is vast and encompassing. His magnum opus, The Church Dogmatics, which was unfinished at the time of Barth's death at fourteen densely packed volumes. Barth is generally understood to be a "dogmatic theologian" or as we Americans might say, a "systematic theologian," and thus approaches theology with the goal of examining the theological enterprise as a comprehensive whole. Paul Tillich, while very different from Barth, is a theologian in the same sense: Interested in the doctrinal dimensions of Christian thought and their implications. Additionally, both Barth and Tillich saw theology as the work of the Christian community as manifested in the Church.

Probably the most trenchant critique of Niebuhr on this point, at least in the last few years, has been Stanley Hauerwas. Hauerwas, while clearly having carved his own theological identity, is among those for whom Barth's theology was a major influence, and this shows particularly in his treatment of Niebuhr. In his Gifford Lectures, With the Grain of the Universe, Hauerwas writes the following:

For Niebuhr, theology was tested -- or to use his language, validated -- by its ability to provide provocative accounts of the human condition. Accordingly, Niebuhr's theology seems to be a perfect exemplification of Ludwig Feuerbach's argument that theology, in spite of its pretentious presumption that its subject matter is God, is in fact but a disguised way to talk about humanity. (115).

In a similar vein, Shirley Guthrie, a student of Karl Barth's wrote his dissertation on Niebuhr's theology and ethics, and concluded as follows:

Nevertheless, we have seen that both on the basis of what Niebuhr has said and on the basis of what he significantly has not said, the questions we have raised about the "independent" character of his theology and ethic can and must be asked. Moreover, we have seen that they may all be summarized in one single question. It is the question, based on the New Testament faith itself, of the place of the person and work of Jesus Christ in Niebuhr's thought. An answer to the questions we have raised must begin above all with the question of his person and work as the risen Lord, and with the Church as the particular place in which he reveals himself and through which he works. For the problem of the Christian ethic, like that of any other ethic, is "what shall we do and say now?" and the Christian answer depends directly on what christ is today. We have seen again and again that this is the crucial point for evaluating Niebuhr's ethic and theology, the crucial point for judging the validity or inadequacy of his "mythical" or "symbolic" interpretation of the Christian faith, and for measuring his success or failure in fulfilling his own criteria. ... Is it not so that Niebuhr does not, and on the basis of his presuppositions neither need nor can, recognize the reality of the living, self-revealing, working Lord, Jesus Christ; and is it not so that just for this reason one must say that his presuppositions themselves as well as the theology and the ethic which follow from them cannot be independently Christian?

Guthrie packs a great deal into a short passage, but the implied answer to his question is that Niebuhr's thought cannot be understood to be "independently Christian," which is to say for Guthrie, as for barthians generally, it is rooted in some source outside of the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and thus not authentically Christian or in a real way genuinely theological.

In the Facebook conversation on Jackson's article, George Hunsinger recommended Guthrie's take on Niebuhr, asserting that it demonstrated that "all of Hauerwas's worst fears were realized." All of which is to say, all the barthians agree that Niebuhr was not a theologian. Though what they are really saying is that Niebuhr was not a barthian, which is self-evidently true, and a point that Niebuhr would not only have acknowledged, but celebrated.

But the accusation runs deeper than the idea that Niebuhr was not a theologian, even in the broad sense that he was not a dogmatic or systematic theologian. What is really being asserted by both Guthrie and Hauerwas (and, though I suspect he'd deny it, tacitly affirmed by Hunsinger) is that Niebuhr's work was not even genuinely Christian. Rather, there are three specific ways in which, for the barthians, Niebuhr fails the Christianity test.

First, they argue that he did not really believe in God, but was a form of religious naturalist, of the Feuerbachian sort. Hauerwas makes this accusation explicitly above. However, this is a drastic misreading of Niebuhr. As Gary Dorrian has noted, Niebuhr had a very strongly transcendent view of divinity:

Epistemologically, Niebuhr posited a divine ground of meaning and coherence beyond all finite notions of meaning and coherence; ontologically, he asserted the transcendence of God’s being over all contingent and temporal being while affirming that God is continually present to God’s creation in the workings of providence, the history of judgment, the grace of renewal, and the stirrings of individual moral conscience (The Making of American Liberal Theology, vol. 2, 468).

I've written on this topic myself in other places. In an article published in Political Theology, I wrote the following:

It is simply not credible for Hauerwas to attempt to paint Niebuhr as a “naturalist” for whom God was simply a projection of human desires and virtues and Christ was simply a good man. When Hauerwas makes such statements as “Niebuhr’s god is not a god capable of offering salvation in any material sense,” one wonders how Hauerwas can interpret such Niebuhrian statements as “the significance of a Christ is that he is a disclosure of the divine purpose, governing history within history,” or “the self-disclosure of God in Christ is significantly regarded by Christian faith as the final ‘word’ which God has spoken to man. The revelation of the Atonement is precisely a ‘final’ word because it discloses a transcendent divine mercy which represents the ‘freedom’ of God in quintessential terms.” ("Being Wrong and Being Right," 480-1)

Furthermore:

Given Niebuhr’s own emphasis on the human need for and longing for God as emerging from a realization that we are incapable of attaining our highest possibilities, it is difficult to understand how he could possibly see any version of “naturalism” as providing a solution to the problems endemic to the human condition. One might understand if Niebuhr were to reply in the spirit of exis- tential resignation, that the human condition is insoluble, but to posit God as the solution to the particular problems that Niebuhr identifies necessitates a rejection of religious natural- ism, not an embrace of it. (481)

Indeed, Niebuhr explicitly and emphatically rejects religious naturalism directly:

The trouble with religious naturalism is not only that it obscures the whole mystery of the divine, the mystery of creativity and grace, but that it also falsifies the whole drama of human history with its increasing heights of good and evil and in the paradoxical relation of persons to this drama. For persons are both the creatures and the creators of the process. Professor Wieman is under the impression that a classical Christian faith is merely a crude, pre-scientific way of looking at the world, God, and the self. He, with the help of modern science and the ontology of Dewey and Whitehead (more Dewy than Whitehead, for Whitehead did not understand the mystery of creation beyond the temporal process and consequently agonized about the relation of the "primordial" to the "consequent" God) will construct a more adequate view of God and the world. H will define either the temporal process itself as God, or that part of it which is value-creating. Since Hitler's day his is not so certain that the process of "integration" is of itself "value-creating."

This suggests that Hauerwas was far too eager to read Niebuhr through the Feuerbachian lens, and left on the cutting room floor any ideas or passages of Niebuhr's that didn't support his preconceived notion of what Niebuhr's theology, not being barthian, must necessarily be.

Second, they argue that Niebuhr did not have an adequate Christology. Though here again, the passages quoted above give a very clear indication of the way in which an incarnation Christology was central to Niebuhr's soteriology. And the entire second volume of The Nature and Destiny of Man is given over precisely to the question of the significance and character of Jesus Christ. As Langdon Gilkey notes:

This intimate relation in Niebuhr between social theory, political ethics, and "high theology" (Atonement and Christology) is nowhere more event than in Niebuhr's discussion of "powerlessness," the powerlessness and so the ultimate vulnerability of Jesus as the Christ. Here the agape of God, which represented the pinnacle of the divine transcendence and mystery, becomes in historical enactment the apparent opposite of transcendence, its paradoxical partner, powerlessness and vulnerability. In the divine love the ultimately unconditioned becomes the absolutely conditioned. And this paradox of unconditioned majesty and radical conditioned vulnerability, of ultimate power and absolute powerlessness, is for Niebuhr the center of the Christian gospel and of the Biblical message. (On Niebuhr, 186).

Paul Lehman as well, saw Christology as central to Niebuhr's thought, stating: "Christology has been and is the principal passion and purpose of his theological work ... Christology is pivotal, not peripheral ... a remarkably evangelical view of the person and work of Jesus Christ" (in Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought, quoted in Fackre, The Promise of Reinhold Niebuhr, 104).

Third, it is often argued that Niebuhr did not have an adequate vision of the role of the Church in Christian ethics. Now here, his critics do have a point. Niebuhr did not write extensively of the role of the church or its place in Christian ethics. Both Hauerwas (for whom the Church often seems to be about the only thing that does matter) and Guthrie hammer Niebuhr on this point. Yet, two things need to be said about this. First, Niebuhr himself was a lifelong church-goer and was a pastor for many years. He regularly preached in churches around the country. Clearly Niebuhr was, in his life, very closely affiliated with the church. Secondly, Niebuhr's innate suspicion of the way in which group egoism and self-deception functioned in institutional settings was no doubt a factor in his lack of attention to the church as any kind of exceptional institution. Indeed, the sad fact is that the Church as quite often remarkable precisely to the extent that it is not an exception on these fronts.

However, Niebuhr did recognize this as a deficit in his own thought, writing:

I think that I have increasingly recognized the value of the Church as a community of grace which, despite historic corruptions, has the 'oracles of God,' as St. Paul said about Israel. The church is the one place in history where life is kept open for the final word of God's judgment to break the pride of men and for the word of God's mercy to lift up the brokenhearted. Inasmuch as this has been only a growing recognition, Professor Wolf's criticism is justified. But when I see how much new evil comes into life through the pretention of the religious community, through is conventional and graceless legalism and through religious fanaticism, I am concerned that my growing appreciation of the church should not betray me into this complacency. (Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought, 437)

While it was never the subject of sustained attention in his thought, it was always in the background of his reflections, even if not viewed that way by Hauerwas and Guthrie, for whom the only validly Christian ethic is precisely one that takes place in and through the church. Of course, Niebuhr's ethic was in and through the church. As Gabe Fackre notes:

Critics often accuse Niebuhr of lacking an ecclesiology. As a pastor and teacher in the church he helped to found-the Evangelical and Reformed Church-I saw for myself his deep immersion in and love for the Church. This ecclesial context is basic to who he was and how he thought, especially so his shaping by both the Reformed and Lutheran traditions of his church. While Niebuhr never attempted to construct a systematic ecclesiology, his life and faith cannot be understood without a grasp of the functional ecclesiology in which they are grounded. (The Promise of Reinhold Niebuhr).

What it was not was by and exclusively for the church, which seems to be the bone of contention for Hauerwas.

To return to the question of what makes a "real" theologian: If the only definition of "theologian" that is acceptable is "dogmatic" or "systematic" theologian, then I suppose Niebuhr wasn't a theologian, but then I'm not sure that Augustine was either. Both wrote occasional theology, writing in context and seeking to illuminate the particular pressing theological themes with which they were confronted in their own time and place. While Augustine's range may have been greater than Niebuhr's, that hardly detracts from the idea that Niebuhr was a theologian in the same vein as Augustine, any more than one can say that, because Tom Brady has won more Super Bowls than Payton Manning, that somehow means Manning isn't a quarterback.

Sometimes, the "Niebuhr is not a theologian" argument is grounded in an assertion that Niebuhr himself denied that he was one. This of course, requires taking his words out of context. In the volume of critical essays about his theology, to which he responded, he took specific note of Paul Lehman's critique of him:

Thus the Christological center of my thought has become more explicit and more important. But, as Professor Lehmann declares, I have never pretended to be a theologian, and so I have elaborated the Christological theme only in the context of inquiries about human nature and human history.

This would seem perhaps to settle the case, until one turns to Lehman's article, because Lehman was specifically noting that Niebuhr was not a systematic theologian. His statement? "Reinhold Niebuhr is not a systematic theologian (Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought).

Honestly, the whole argument is intensely annoying to me precisely because it is typically used as a way of delegitimizing Niebuhr as a Christian thinker -- undermining his status not only within the field of Christian theology generally, but even as a Christian. At the end of the day though, I think, for all I've written here, I probably can't answer the question better than Langdon Gilkey:

To my knowledge, no one has tried to present Niebuhr's political and ethical views in the light of his entire theological viewpoint -- which was, I believe, the way that he always saw those views. that is to say, he understood politics and ethics theologically, in relation to what he regarded as the Christian understanding of human being, of the creativity and the ambiguity of freedom, and of the course of history under God. As he argued repeatedly, this theological framework is essential for any valid comprehension of the puzzles and paradoxes of our ordinary experience.

That sure sounds like a theologian to me.

 

What Is a "Nuanced" Stance on Abortion Anyway?

Yesterday I posted about Tom Groome's New York Times article arguing that the Democrats need to stop being the "abortion party," and noted the two Religion Dispatches articles criticizing Groome. After the article posted, Charlie Camosy chimed in on Twitter to argue:

 

It is pro-lifers (of mutiple parties) who have nuanced policy positions. Democratic party has utter lack of nuance. https://t.co/1CvFcQz78N https://t.co/Sl6SRGLDFa

— Charlie Camosy (@CCamosy) March 30, 2017

This led me to respond that I'd never found the pro-life position particularly nuanced, and that Groome's article reinforced that opinion. To which Camosy responded:

 

@ScottPaeth 20 week ban with exceptions vs #shoutyourabortion as a social good paid for by pro-lifers. which is more nuanced?

— Charlie Camosy (@CCamosy) March 30, 2017

And then it was on. You can go read the whole exchange on Twitter, but since it's very difficult to carry on a ... well nuanced conversation 140 characters at a time, I thought it would be worth thinking at a bit more length about the subject here.

As I read Camosy's defense of the "nuance" of a 20-week ban on abortion, I kept thinking I needed Inigo Montoya to show up and chime in "You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means." And this, it seems to me, was indeed part of the problem. We both understood by the word "nuance" something very different than the other did, though I have to say that, re-reading the thread this morning, I still don't think the word means what Camosy thinks it means, and it's certainly not very nuanced to portray "Shout Your Abortion" as representative of the default position of most pro-choice folks.

First of all, it seems to me that Camosy was repeatedly misrepresenting the current Democratic party platform on the issue, and Hillary Clinton's own words on the matter. To be clear, I was defending what for me has always been the best liberal approach to the question of abortion, as encapsulated by Bill Clinton back in the 1990s, that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare." Camosy, citing himself, kept referring to an LA Times article in which he asserted that the Democratic Party platform "betrayed millions of party faithful." But that article is hardly an example of nuance. It criticizes the platform for insisting on the removal of state restrictions on abortion, and insisting on it as a core element of reproductive health, while eliding all of the ... well nuance of the reason why those provisions were included in the first place: Repeated conservative attempts to throw up insurmountable roadblocks to abortion under any circumstances.

Even a passing familiarity with the ways in which Republican state legislatures have sought to do end runs around the Supreme Court rulings on abortion by, for example, requiring doctors working in abortion clinics to have residency at a local hospital, and then refusing them that residency, or creating expensive and unnecessary zoning and construction requirements for abortion clinics. These tactics have sought to create circumstances in which abortion, even if technically legal, became impossible to actually procure in some states. Ignoring those particular circumstances is not very nuanced.

But more generally, it's worth noting that the Democratic platform actually did a pretty good job of accomplishing the goal of ensuring that abortion was both safe and legal on the one hand, and rare on the other. The planks insisting on the right to access to abortion, and its importance for a general policy of reproductive health serve to ensure the first two criteria. The third is accomplished through platform language that ties the right to abortion to the right to health care generally and, most particularly to the right to have a child. Here is the particular language:

We will address the discrimination and barriers that inhibit meaningful access to reproductive health care services, including those based on gender, sexuality, race, income, disability, and other factors. We recognize that quality, affordable comprehensive health care, evidence-based sex education and a full range of family planning services help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions.

And we strongly and unequivocally support a woman’s decision to have a child, including by ensuring a safe and healthy pregnancy and childbirth, and by providing services during pregnancy and after the birth of a child, including adoption and social support services, as well as protections for women against pregnancy discrimination. We are committed to creating a society where children are safe and can thrive physically, emotionally, educationally, and spiritually. We recognize and support the importance of civil structures that are essential to creating this for every child.

And indeed there is ample evidence to demonstrate that, if your goal is to reduce abortions, these are the policies that you should be advocating. So when Camosy complains that the platform kept the "safe and legal" while abandoning the "rare," it seems to me at least that he didn't read the platform with sufficient ... nuance.

There is also evidence that, in terms of implementation of these policies, abortion rates decline under Democratic administrations. When I made that case to him, Camosy responded by linking to a Snopes article that he claimed labeled the assertion "False." However, a more ... nuanced ... reading of the Snopes article shows that what was false was something that I wasn't arguing, and what wasn't false was what I was claiming. The Snopes article addresses the question of whether abortions both go up during Republican administrations and decline during Democratic administrations. And, since Roe v. Wade, it is apparent that abortion rates do not in fact increase under Republican administrations, but they do decline (and decline more) under Democratic ones. This chart illustrates the point:

Charlie contended that a "Stats 101" analysis of the data would show something else, though he didn't elaborate. But while the trend line seems to either hold stead or decline only slightly during the Reagan and Bush years, it drops precipitously under both Clinton and Obama. So perhaps Charlie will get around to elaborating on his point in some other venue, but it still seems to me that the evidence does demonstrate that if your goal is to make abortion rarer, Democratic policies do the job better than Republican ones, though of course it's always worth remembering that correlation does not equal causation.

OK, so then, is a 20-week ban, as Camosy advocates, "nuanced"? Well it's certainly far more nuanced than the position taken by the Republican party, but a getting hit in the face by a brick in a gym sock would be more nuanced than anything in the Republican party these days. However, what the 20-week ban fails to account for is the situation of woman who, late in pregnancy, discovers a fatal defect in the gestating fetus, and the emotional and moral turmoil that women in that situation face. I suppose the response is that such instances are fairly rare, but then, late pregnancy abortions are rare to begin with. Camosy does of course note that the ban would come "with exceptions," but there the devil is in the details, and if the exceptions were sufficiently broad, it would basically make the ban worthless as policy anyway. A 20 week ban would almost certainly not make most abortions more rare in any respect, while increasing the suffering of families in genuinely tragic circumstances. Whether or not you think that abortion should be available in those cases, it remains the case that at the ban Camosy proposes once again fails the nuance test.

In the end, both Groome's and Camosy's complaints seem to amount to the same thing: They want the Democratic party to move closer to their position on abortion. That is of course a totally fair position for them to take. But to argue that the current Democratic Party policy isn't precisely what I said above -- to make abortion safe, legal, and rare -- suggests at a minimum a lack of charity in how the democratic position is understood and interpreted. And it certainly represents a failure of nuance.

For a Universal Basic Income

At The New Republic Jonathan Masalic makes the case for one, while also illuminating a similar proposal, that for the universal guarantee of a job. The universal employment proposal, which was suggested by Jeff Spross, would work like this:

Spross argues in the current issue of the journal Democracy, they ought to counter President Donald Trump’s rhetoric with a concrete offer to every American who wants dignity and a decent living: a federally funded job. Spross, an economics and business writer for The Week, makes a thorough case for a universal job guarantee, writing that “a job is not merely a delivery mechanism for income that can be replaced by an alternative source. It’s a fundamental way that people assert their dignity, stake their claim in society, and understand their mutual obligations to one another.” ...

Spross proposes that someone with a full-time job in the federal program would work on infrastructure and community development projects and be paid $25,000, plus full benefits. The proposal has precedent, not only in the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, but in Argentina within the past decade. With jobs of last resort paying well above the current federal minimum wage, unemployment would drop to nothing and workers higher up the income ladder would gain tremendous bargaining power. The “dignity deficit” would disappear immediately.

Masalic, by contrast, proposes a Universal Basic Income:

But because basic income is the more inclusive program—encompassing children, the disabled, and everyone else who cannot work—it promotes a kind of justice that a make-work program cannot. Moreover, in an economy that can substitute machines for human labor, a job guarantee could transform into a de facto basic income guarantee anyway. As Avent notes, the more expensive human labor is, the more appealing machine labor becomes. With a high wage floor and no slack in the labor market, it would make economic sense to automate jobs that humans currently do for low wages, like customer service, transportation, and sales. This would push even more people to take the guaranteed jobs. At some point, there might not be enough productive work to go around. Once people find themselves doing pointless make-work just to keep busy and qualify for a paycheck—in other words, once guaranteed jobs become bullshit jobs—we may as well call it art.

I've been persuaded for a long time that we need to find a workable mechanism to establish a Universal Basic Income in the United States. As Masalic notes, it would provide support for parents who want to stay home with their children, it would give workers the same kind of leverage that Spross's universal jobs program would, and it would allow those whose understanding of "work" does not correspond to the demands of post-industrial capitalist society. It could allow for a new well-spring of creative activity, from artists and musicians who are willing to live at the modest level a universal income would allow, while also allowing those who wish to strive to make more.

Here's the fundamental problem, which I think Masalic identifies well: When did we ever agree as a society that our lives should depend on our willingness to take crappy, dead-end jobs, and whittle our lives away on meaningless work? Why is it better to do that than to detach the need to survive from the need to "work" in the capitalist/acquisitive sense of the word? And, fundamentally, who benefits from the existing system? Not the lowest paid workers. Not even those in the middle class. This is a system which is set up to perpetuate itself by convincing anyone who isn't willing to take literally any job they're offered because they alternative is starvation that they are immoral, lazy bums.

The dignity of work is found finally in its meaningfulness. I'd ultimately be happy if we implemented a program like Spross's. But it ultimately needs to be a gateway to the far more radical, and far more necessary, guarantee of a basic income.