Everyone talks about “dialogue,” but very few of us have the patience or are willing to do the hard work to engage in it.

Ideology and the Corruption of Language


by Randall Smith

In a remarkable 1978 essay entitled “Power of the Powerless,” Vaclav Havel—poet, philosopher, and future president of the Czech Republic—wrote:

In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means . . . ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority. The principle involved here is that the center of power is identical with the center of truth.

Havel’s most famous example from that essay is of a greengrocer required by the communist authorities to put in his shop window a sign with the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” “Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world?” asks Havel. “Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?” No, answers Havel. It is not the content of the word or gesture itself that is ultimately significant; it’s what the word or gestureimplies (or might be interpreted as implying) about the person and about the person’s loyalty (or secret disloyalty) to the “correct” ideology. The discourse ofideology, argues Havel, gradually turns into “a world of appearances, a mere ritual, a formalized language deprived of semantic contact with reality and transformed into a system of ritual signs that replace reality with pseudo-reality.”

We might ask ourselves, with some embarrassment, whether, after decades of enforcing politically correct speech codes, the plight of black people (or any of the other disadvantaged groups we say we want to help in American society) is any better than it was before we developed our current hypersensitivity to people’s every word and gesture.

As we find ourselves in a world more and more like Havel’s, it might be worth trying to distinguish the characteristic marks of an “ideology” versus a “principled position.” Not every person arguing vigorously for a position is putting forth an “ideology” in the sense Havel describes. Havel himself set forth a position and argued for it vigorously. If we assume that all arguments are merely “masks” for a person’s will to power, then it is likely that we ourselves will come to view our own words that way. And if we assume people are merely hiding behind words and not honestly expressing what they take to be a serious position, then we will insulate ourselves from every true and open dialogue we might have had with people who could help us correct our errors. Everyone talks about “dialogue,” but very few of us have the patience or are willing to do the hard work to engage in it.

Ideology Eschews Argument and Feeds on the Corruption of Language

So how do we recognize the language of “ideology” and distinguish it from a “principled position”? One common clue is that those who hold a principled position welcome arguments; they welcome having their position tested and possibly corrected. A principled position always has room for increased subtlety and greater complexity. Holders of an “ideology,” on the other hand, will tend to eschew argument or any examination of the ideology’s underlying presuppositions or premises, often refusing to concede that greater subtlety may be required to apply the principles to real-life situations. Ideology disdains argument; people with principled positions embrace it warmly and engage in it gladly.

Note, however, that “engaging in argument” is not the same as a dual monologue or sharing complaints about opponents. If you’re unsure what a dialogue is supposed to sound like, read one of Plato’s. Socrates is as good a teacher of dialogue as anyone who ever lived. Personally, I suggest beginning with the Gorgias.

In the Gorgias, Socrates defends “dialectic” (the question-and-answer method he engages in with interlocutors) and distinguishes it from “sophistry.” What Plato especially disliked about sophistry was its corruption of language: the belief that language was not primarily for the expression of truth but for the acquisition of power. Sophists bragged that they could convince the ignorant masses of anything, even better than people who were experts on a subject. How did they do this? By twisting words and using language to inflame the passions rather than to engage the logic of the mind. Appeal to fear and play on people’s anxiety, never asking them to think about the evidence for your claims or reflect on the possible unintended consequences of a course of action.

This corruption of language is a characteristic sign of ideology. Throughout the Platonic dialogues, Socrates spends a great deal of time trying to clarify words, attempting to get clear on what people mean when they use terms such as “good” or “just” or “great.” Ideologies want to skip over all that hard work. Asking what someone means by “good” or “just” or “fair” is, to the devoted ideologue, like the greengrocer refusing to put the sign in his window. It suggests you’re not a party member.

Watch out for this. Refusing to discuss one’s terms because the point is “obvious,” insisting on using euphemisms rather than plain speech, relying on a very specialized vocabulary and being unable to express one’s thoughts without it, using speech to vilify persons rather than to clarify positions: these are all clues that you’re dealing with ideology, not principle.

Ideology Makes Blanket Claims and Makes Ad Hominem Attacks

When people make blanket claims about a group (“white people are like X;” “black people never do Y”), they are expressing an ideology, not using words tailored to fit reality. Human beings are simply too diverse and complicated to fit into such universal categories. If you hear someone summing up the “state of the Russian mind” or “what the American people want” or claiming that politician X shows sure signs of a social pathology, but there is no evidence of research nor of any time spent personally examining the psychology of the individual, then you’re dealing with quackery; the person is a fake. Such people will check their scientific methodology at the door in order to gain a place in the arena of modern media’s ideological shouting match. They are welcomed by groups that want a certain sort of “voice”—not a quiet, calm, thoughtful voice, but one that will provide pseudo-intellectual “cover” for all the prejudices that group already possesses.

If, rather than trying to glean evidence from observable reality, a person seems more intent on forcing reality into the categories of his or her system, then you’re dealing with an ideologue. If evidence supporting a theory is trumpeted loudly and repeatedly, and evidence that may refute it is ignored repeatedly, then it’s an ideology, not a principled position. If every bit of data, no matter how contrary, is taken as evidence of the truth of the theory, then it’s ideology, not science.

If media conversations are staked two-to-one against a position, then the organizers are ideologues, not holders of a principled position. If organizers clearly set out to disadvantage one side rather than the other, they are ideologues. If interlocutors spend most of their time engaging in ad hominemattacks rather than examining terms, premises, or arguments, then they’re ideologues, not holders of a principled position. If an interlocutor seems more concerned with “looking smart” than with coming to some common understanding of the truth, then he or she is probably an ideologue. If the most pressing argument is the prestige and ostensible expertise of the speaker, or the supposed lack of these on the part of the interlocutor, then you’re probably dealing with an ideology.

Having principles doesn’t mean never making exceptions or ignoring the need for principled compromise with others. But a complete lack of consistency—especially of the sort that repeatedly makes exceptions for people on “our” side but never for those on “their” side”—is a sure sign that what’s driving the engine is an ideology, not a set of morally defensible and intellectually sound principles.

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Randall B. Smith is the Scanlan Professor of Theology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. He is author of the new book, Reading the Sermons of Thomas Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide.

Read more: www.thepublicdiscourse.com

If the federal government doesn't reform entitlements soon, the country will face a debt crisis.

The Courage Deficit

By STEPHEN F. HAYES



The math isn’t complicated. If the federal government doesn't reform entitlements soon, the country will face a debt crisis. There is no disputing this. It's inevitable. The only unknown is timing. And the stubborn determination of some leaders in both political parties to ignore runaway entitlement growth—the most urgent domestic challenge facing the United States—means the crisis will come sooner rather than later.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2008 federal debt was 39 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). In the summer of 2016, it was 75 percent of GDP. Without changes, it's projected to be 86 percent of GDP in 2026, and 20 years after that, in 2046, it will be 141 percent of GDP—an all-time high. That is a disastrous trajectory with potentially devastating consequences. In the anodyne jargon of the CBO: "The prospect of such a large debt poses substantial risks for the nation and presents policymakers with significant challenges."

The Heritage Foundation frames the issue in a slightly more colorful way:

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are so large and growing that they are on track to overwhelm the federal budget. These major entitlement programs, together with interest on the debt, are driving 85 percent of the projected growth in government spending over the next decade. The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, further adds to the problem, increasing entitlement spending by nearly $2 trillion in just 10 years. The long-term unfunded obligations in the nation's major entitlement programs loom like an even darker cloud over the U.S. economy. Demographic and economic factors will combine to drive spending in Medicare, Medicaid (including Obamacare), and Social Security to unsustainable heights. The major entitlements and interest on the debt are on track to devour all tax revenues in fewer than 20 years.

Twenty years. We will be there before a child born this week can legally have his first beer. Without changes, every penny of taxes collected by the federal government will fund entitlements, the drivers of our debt, and the interest on the debt driven by entitlements. No money for national defense. Not a cent for safeguarding our nuclear stockpile or energy research. Nothing for infrastructure, welfare for the truly needy, unemployment for those displaced in the changing economy.

External factors could slow slightly the spinning of the debt clock numbers (strong economic growth) or speed it up (higher interest rates). But there is nothing at all under serious consideration in Republican-run Washington to reverse them.

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Read more: www.weeklystandard.com

Michael Novak recognised that capitalism alone didn't nurture a good society

The capitalist who knew capitalism was only a third of what we need
By Tim Montgomerie

• Michael Novak recognised that capitalism alone didn't nurture a good society
• Both Thatcher and Pope John Paul II were inspired by Novak
• It's up to us to fight Michael Novak's battles now

We live in a world where politicians and campaigners define themselves as pro-market or pro-state. Academics, meanwhile, are increasingly specialists in narrow and very specific corners of their subject area. And nearly all of public debate is materialist – with huge attention given to our status as employees, entrepreneurs, taxpayers, welfare recipients, public sector workers or litigants.

There’s very little focus on our relational existence and how our role as parents, neighbours, volunteers, churchgoers or trade unionists might be protected, or even enhanced. The invisibility of these ties of blood, locality, faith and cause – all of which bind to socially important effects – is illustrated by the lack of any serious attempts to even measure changes and inequalities in social capital.

In this artificially divided, heavily materialist and mismeasured world, Michael Novak was a watcher and describer of the wood rather than the trees. While he believed that capitalism was superior to other forms of economic organisation, because of the ways in which it rewarded human creativity, he argued that the free enterprise system provided roughly only a third of what produced fair, strong and morally content societies.

He was a capitalist who understood the importance of the courts, of anti-monopoly policies, of the state guaranteeing a safety net for the poor and vulnerable, of a free press, of strong family networks and of people-sized institutions that were human enough to treat individuals as individuals rather than as accounting units.

For Margaret Thatcher, he “provided the intellectual basis for my approach to those great questions brought together in political parlance as ‘the quality of life’”. And this American Catholic of Slovak heritage is also credited with moving John Paul II towards the more sympathetic account of free enterprise contained in the papal encyclical Centesimus Annus – published shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when some were talking giddily of capitalism’s “end of history” triumph.

Such complacency would not have appealed to Novak. In part, this was because of his awareness that most economists and most advocates of capitalism were not just ill-equipped to explain why Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” led to moral as well as material enrichment – they didn’t even see much of a need to do so.

Novak’s 1982 work, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, from which his high status in Downing Street, the Vatican and many other centres of power flowed, stood very much in the mould of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments. At least as interested in moral argument as practical economic workings, Spirit placed the capitalist system within a political and cultural context and made the case that trouble inevitably resulted when market, democratic, legal and social structures were either too strong or too weak.

Professor Novak, a deeply committed Catholic, met his Maker two weeks ago, aged 83. Scandalously few column inches remembering the man and his works have been buried underneath a Milo of Yiannopoulosity – all only serving to confirm the continuing Trumpification of US conservatism and, equally as concerning, the descent of many once proud news organisations into ratings-chasing branches of the entertainment industry.

Novak would have been disappointed, but not surprised, at Milo-isation – and itsCoulter-isation overture. The possibility that movements as well as nations and individuals can either mend their ways or completely lose the plot within the space of just one generation was central to this Catholic professor’s theology.

Simultaneously, he recognised the almost boundless creativity in human beings, made as we are in the image of God, but also knew that, as descendants of Adam and Eve, we are all equally capable of eating forbidden fruits with disastrous consequences.

This realistic view of both human potential and frailty meant he was never a one-eyed zealot for laissez-faire, state intervention or any other simplistic one-club, one-bullet or one-ideology approach to public debates.

He might not have been the compelling moral advocate for “democratic capitalism” that he became if he hadn’t – as “a good Christian” – begun on the Left. In his own words, “business was merely buying and selling, mere hucksterism, after all”.

As the seduction of the Left’s heart-on-sleeve morality began to meet the reality of poor practical results, however, especially in the Communist-run nation of his parents’ birth, his view of commerce evolved too.

It increasingly resembled the understanding articulated so eloquently by Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone. The Lord Chancellor for Mrs Thatcher’s first two terms declared that “the great advances which have been made in human happiness have been just as much due to the spinning jenny, the internal combustion engine, and the generation of steam as to the moral sublimity of a Shaftesbury, a Florence Nightingale, an Elizabeth Fry, or a Mother Teresa”.

And this takes us to what, in a completely inadequate acknowledgement of the nearly 40 books that he either wrote or edited, are three great lessons from Michael Novak’s works.

One was aimed at the Communists of his day – and could be aimed at the crony capitalists and corporatists of our own. This was that human ingenuity is what makes capitalism most special.

The second was the importance of reaching out to those, like his young self, who saw capitalism as morally deficient.

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Read more: capx.co

Dreher's proposals have been criticized as an intellectually astute form of cultural retreat. But a careful reading puts this notion to rest.

Joy in the Mourning
One man's prescription for a post-Christian culture.
By ANDREW T. WALKER


According to Rod Dreher, Western culture is irretrievably lost. No amount of politicking or resistance-as-usual can turn back the tide of intellectual currents that began with the death of metaphysical realism in the 14th century, the idea that “the essence of a thing is built into its existence by God, and its ultimate meaning is guaranteed by this connection to the transcendent order. This implies that Creation is comprehensible because it is rationally ordered by God and a revelation of Him." In short, the sacramental world ordered by God was dethroned. And it has all been downhill from there.

Where it was once understood that God ordered the world, a pernicious individualism displaced this view of the cosmos, making man's will the manufacturer of reality. This results in what Dreher calls "fragmentation"—the shattering of universals and common culture. The humanist turn, which resulted in many advances such as scientific progress, also splintered humankind's understanding of authority and knowledge. This gave birth to the social order we now have, and the one Dreher believes is diametrically opposed to orthodox Christianity: moral therapeutic deism, untrammeled belief in the inherent goodness and progress of man, and, most pressing today, the sexual revolution.

To complicate matters, Dreher also offers an indictment of the Western church's false sense of security—a security that has bred a lethargic church accustomed to social privilege and now immune to the intellectual resources Christianity possesses to resist cultural decadence. Hollowed-out religion simply will not last. And as he recounts his plan for resistance, Dreher describes the contours of his proposal:

The idea is that serious Christian conservatives could no longer live business-as-usual lives in America, that we have to develop creative, communal solutions to help us hold on to our faith and our values in a world growing ever more hostile to them. We would have to choose to make a decisive leap into a truly countercultural way of living Christianity, or we would doom our children and our children's children to assimilation.

The model Dreher holds up is Saint Benedict, the 6th-century father of Western monasticism, who renounced the secular life amidst the fall of Rome to devote himself to prayer and the disciplines necessary to survive the coming Dark Age. Making a pilgrimage to modern-day Norcia, Dreher visits contemporary Benedictines and investigates those practices that have sustained them throughout the centuries—and that the modern church might emulate. In monasticism, Dreher sees the seeds for resistance and rebirth—attentiveness to one's community through the disciplines of liturgy, prayer, community, work, asceticism, and stability. Only a church responsive to its own disciplined identity will survive the times. In short, for the church to have a chance at external witness, the church must first remedy itself internally.

Dreher looks fondly on the tactics of Cold War anti-Communists who, driven nearly underground, were forced to engage in "antipolitical" politics: "Every act that contradicts the official ideology," he writes, "is a denial of the system." Christians must "create and support 'parallel structures' in which the truth can be lived in community." He is also practical in offering practices that contradict the reigning zeitgeist—among them, attentiveness to the role of technology in children's lives and an emphasis on the importance of Christian education for Christian cultural renaissance.

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Read more: www.weeklystandard.com

Homelessness policy. First, what kind of shelter system do we want? Second: Is homelessness possible to prevent?

Same Old Homelessness PolicyMayor de Blasio’s “new” strategy bears a striking resemblance to the old one.

by Stephen Eide

On Tuesday, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced a new plan on homelessness called “Turning the Tide on Homelessness in New York City.” Yet one searches in vain for any authentically new idea in its more than 100 pages. The part getting the most attention is the pledge to open about 90 new shelters to replace the use of “cluster sites” (jerry-rigged shelters in apartment buildings) and hotels. But phasing out cluster sites and hotels was already the mayor’s official policy. It would have been less misleading if, instead of releasing this “new strategy,” the mayor had simply issued a press release saying: “To everybody who says homelessness is out of control, be patient. I got this.”

De Blasio’s purportedly “comprehensive” plan glosses over two key questions about homelessness policy. First, what kind of shelter system do we want? Some have praised Turning the Tide for its dismissal of the idea that we could end homelessness any time soon. In policy terms, this means that New York City is reembracing the concept of shelter, or temporary or emergency housing. But that should in turn prompt a renewed debate about shelter quality. Are we talking about the housing equivalent of unemployment insurance—just a roof over their head while people get back on their feet? Or do the homeless need additional services? If they do, what should be done for them that the city’s vast social-policy apparatus is not already addressing?

The city describes the approximately 90 new shelters soon to open as “high-quality.” To sweeten the deal with neighborhoods that may not want a new shelter in their midst, these facilities are being pitched as community centers, with services available also to non-homeless residents. But the more attractive you make shelter—the higher quality the conditions, the better access to services and housing subsidies—the more sheltered homelessness you will get. Progressives never want to hear about the “draw to shelter”: in their view, no one ever becomes homeless by choice.

Second: Is homelessness possible to prevent? Having failed to reduce homelessness, de Blasio has clung to the argument that the problem would be worse still if not for the array of programs that the city runs. Under de Blasio, at least 194,000 New Yorkers have received a rental subsidy and/or some other service designed to keep them out of the shelter system. It’s not realistic to think that all these people would have wound up homeless if not for the city’s efforts. According to the administration’s own estimate, the shelter census would only be about 8,000 higher than the current 60,000 if not for its “major rental assistance” programs. Thus, any homelessness-prevention program has a built-in element of waste.

Clearly, this plan—designed by those who built the current system, such as Department of Social Services commissioner Steven Banks—does not represent a new approach on homelessness policy in New York. But that does not mean that improvements are impossible. 

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Read more: www.city-journal.org

How, exactly, does information technology increase inequality?

The DisruptersSilicon Valley elites’ vision of the future

by Gregory Ferenstein

In just ten years, Facebook built a global empire that surpassed General Electric in market value—and did it with just 4 percent of the Old Economy giant’s workforce: 12,000, compared with 300,000. Whatsapp, a recent Facebook acquisition, managed an even more impressive wealth-to-labor ratio, with a $19 billion value and just 55 employees. Combined, both companies reach roughly one-sixth of humanity. Facebook’s entertainment colleague just to the south, Netflix, crushed Blockbuster’s mammoth national network of 9,000 stores and 60,000 employees with its more nimble workforce of just 3,700 employees. It’s easy to see why: for just $10 a month, Netflix consumers could enjoy an unlimited video library larger than any of Blockbuster’s retail shops, without ever having to find their car keys. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy protection in 2010.

Blockbuster’s fate has been duplicated many times. The Silicon Valley economy has caused massive disruption of traditional business and business models—in the process, making a relatively small cadre of brilliant engineers staggeringly wealthy. Until now, these dislocations, while profound, have been reasonably manageable. But in the years ahead, a vast new range of technological innovation—from self-driving cars to robots—may make the disruptions we have seen so far look tame. In this coming world, driven by innovation and powered by individual brilliance, what role will “normal” employees and small-business owners have?

I sought to learn how the tech elite would answer these and other questions, and how they think more broadly, by polling dozens of start-up founders and conducting interviews with a handful of notable billionaires. To my knowledge, mine is the first representative opinion poll of tech founders, thanks to connections I made during my time directing political writing for the Valley’s premier tech blog, TechCrunch. At the time, TechCrunch owned an exhaustive, user-generated database of start-up founders and investors, called Crunchbase. It was an insider’s source for all things tech—the Wikipedia of Silicon Valley. I obtained the e-mail addresses of every founder and cofounder in the database and got many of them to answer a long battery of political and psychological questions, on everything from their thoughts on human nature to energy policy. To ensure that the sample wasn’t biased by my own connections, I randomly e-mailed thousands of founders on the list. A total of 147 founders made it into my final sample. I supplemented my randomized sample with direct outreach to a few billionaires and household names in tech (such as the founder of Craigslist, Craig Newmark, who isn’t a billionaire but did create one of the most widely used websites in the world).

As far as the future of innovation and its impact on ordinary people, the most common answer I received in Silicon Valley was this: over the (very) long run, an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial “gig work” and government aid. The way the Valley elite see it, everyone can try to be an entrepreneur; some small percentage will achieve wild success and create enough wealth that others can live comfortably. Many tech leaders appear optimistic that this type of economy will provide the vast majority of people with unprecedented prosperity and leisure, though no one quite knows when.

My aim in conducting this survey was to discover and report on the long-term economic vision of tech leaders, who are beginning to take on a broader role as public leaders. As such, I explore here two main themes. The first is the economic ideal of the elite and how their technologies shape their vision of an entrepreneurial yet unequal society. The second is Silicon Valley’s uniquely pro-government political ideology and how it feeds into its solution for the displacements that automation and transformation will cause: a universal basic income.

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Read more: www.city-journal.org

A lot of people are talking about rural life these days

THE BENEDICT OPTION IN PRACTICE: LIVING THE RURAL LIFE IS SURPRISINGLY NORMAL

by JASON CRAIG

Some tend to treat a move to the country as if it is a move to something wildly different from “normal” life. As someone who lives in the country, I have an opinion there, but first – a lot of people are talking about rural life these days, so where did all this talk come from?

A lot of the conversations seem to stem from Rod Dreher’s idea that Christians take a “Benedict Option”, which as I understand it seems like the simple proposal that we continue to engage the world for Christ, yet ensure that we have enough space, especially for our families, that allows for a Christian culture to really exist and grow, instead of living in constant reaction to the increasingly hostile world around us. Or something like that.

The whole idea seems to have struck a nerve since so many people have weighed in on it. And despite the fact that Mr. Dreher has repeatedly insisted it is not a retreat from the world, people cannot help but think it means (a) retreat in defeat and (b) you should probably retreat to the countryside and be a farmer. He has a book coming out on it soon – perhaps the critics will read it?

BENEDICTINE RENEWAL

Dreher was responding to hostile and ugly secularism, and blogging Christians have responded to the response, offering alternative “options” to help persuade all those poor saps that are running to the hills and “hunkering down” in the Benedict Option. I’ve heard of the Francis option, the Jeremiah option, and the St. Josemaria option. All of them basically saying don’t retreat – engage! Perhaps the authors hope their “option” will get as much play as Mr. Deher’s, but all of them, Benedict Option included, are simply Christians doing the necessary discernment of “how much am I in the world but not of it?”

I’d point out that the reason the “Benedict Option” resonates more than others is because of the fact of Benedictine renewal. It was the Benedictines that had so much to do with preserving civilization and renewing culture in the midst of darkness after the collapse of the Roman Empire and the birth of Christendom. It’s a historical reality recognized and written about by, among others, Alasdair MacIntyre (where Dreher got the idea), Christopher Dawson, Bl. John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Day (an oblate) and her coreligionist Peter Maurin, John Senior (an oblate), and not to mention Pope Benedict XVI, who I think is pretty clear-sighted on problems and solutions.

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Read more: www.catholicgentleman.net