Another Dot, For Good Measure

Lest you think my previous post was just an attempt to make hay out of a crisis currently under the popular spotlight, let me toss out another example where efforts to artificially decrease the scarcity of a “good” thing can backfire: Higher Education.

The pattern fits: “Having a college education is good.”  Agreed.  “College educations are expensive.”  Agreed.  “There are well-meaning and hard-working people who would like a college education but can’t afford it.”  Agreed.  “Let’s distort the market by making a college education artificially inexpensive.”

Now, let’s do a quick mental exercise: what can we expect to happen when we try to artificially deflate the cost of a college education?  There are a few ways to do so, each with its own particular side-effects.

If we make a lot of free money available to pay for tuition (grants and scholarships), we have reduced the scarcity of tuition dollars, and thus can expect an inflationary rise in tuition.  (People can still afford the same out-of-pocket cost as they could without the grants, why should the college not extract just as many dollars from them PLUS the newly-minted grant dollars?)

If we create alternative subsidized institutions (city/county/state universities), we can expect for them to be perpetual cost centers in government budgets and for them to need to limit enrollment (demand) by capping class sizes (rationing).  In terms of the price curve, the “state option” doesn’t actually compete with private options because it’s understood that it can hemorrhage money and that the shortfall will be covered by the good faith and credit of the state, so the low tuition at these universities does not actually cause other universities to compete with them on price; nobody is “kept honest” because everybody knows that public tuition is a shell game in which everyone’s contribution via taxation is hidden under the table.

But let’s flip the economics around the other way: is it necessarily a good thing to get everyone into and through college?  The road to a bachelor’s degree in many ways is a poor fit for someone who wants to go into the trades (traditional or modern).  Mass enrollment combined with the incentives of a school’s reputation for achievement naturally drive grade inflation, which in turn drives an overall devaluation of the bachelor’s degree, driving the employers everyone went to college to qualify to work for to demand masters degrees for those positions instead.  And so begins a treadmill: higher education is turned into a commodity; a secularist value-free market then reduces it to the lowest common fungible denominator in order to drive efficient low-cost delivery; higher education’s original value proposition (a competitive advantage) is replaced with factory-floor, cookie-cutter information transfer (once the realm of technical/trade schools) devoid of relationship, character formation, critical thought, and innovation; the resulting certification thus devalued, our beneficient leaders drive to do the same thing to graduate education, and while they’re at it, to impress the same dehumanizing regularity upon earlier stages of education as well to “prepare” students for the mill.

Is it good to have universities?  Yes.  Is it good that many people attend them?  Yes.  Does this necessarily mean that coercive tax policies and tax-underwritten market intrusions are going to be good for the university as an institution or the people whom it intends to serve?  No.

Amplified Bedazzlement

The other day I tweeted that I am more impressed with my savior’s humility than my own pride, and more bedazzled by his faithfulness than my own inconstancy. I just want to amplify that comment a bit.

First, let me say that I take these polarities between the new Adam (Jesus) and myself in the present age as given. He is faithful, I am not. He is wise, I am not. He is humble, I am not. He is shalom, I am a wreck. He is contented and satisfied, I am too-often overwhelmed by hungers and lusts.

However, I also recognize that it would be unbiblical of me to make such statements and follow them with a period, full stop. This is most emphatically not how Paul spoke to his struggling flocks, and I’m beginning to lose patience with some of my brothers and sisters in Christ who seem content to wallow, in word, thought, and song, in recognition and confession of their failings without always proceeding to the essential next step: “Such was your old life. But do you not know what Christ has done? Therefore, live a new and different life in Him!” (see Romans 6, 1 Cor 3, 1 Cor 6, 1 Cor 9, Colossians 3, Ephesians 4, etc)

Now, some theological neatniks will invariably misunderstand me and say that I am downplaying sin in general or my own sin in particular, but in so doing they demonstrate that they have missed the point and are straining at gnats.  I am acutely aware of my own faithlessness; however, if I am not even more acutely aware of Christ’s faithfulness, I have proven that I am still a self-worshiping idolater who would rather fix his eyes upon himself than upon his savior.  If my consciousness is overrun by my own foolishness more so than awe at the depths of the riches of the mind of Christ, both at and with the generously-given wisdom of God, then I truly remain the worst kind of fool, unrepentant, unregenerate, untransformed by the glorious redeeming grace which has been offered to me in Christ.  In Christ: a new creation.

Hypocrisy

PZ Myers has his panties in a wad because a so-so apologist and his former-child-actor friend wrote a critical introduction to an abridged version of Darwin’s Origin of Species.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/06/for_dedicated_bibliophiles_onl.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/09/foil_the_depraved_designs_of_a.php

Lest anyone forget: this is the same guy who offered a bounty for a duly-blessed communion cracker so he could desecrate it.  Apparently it’s only reprehensible to speak ill and tamper with his holy things.

Nobody Plays “Connect The Dots” Anymore

In the 90s, the federal government of the United States tried to promote a “culture of ownership” by promoting banking and HUD policies that lower the bar for individuals and families to acquire credit to purchase residential real estate.  By unnaturally inflating the number of dollars available to purchase homes, these policies produced an unnatural inflation of housing prices, and encouraged the development of a whole collection of financial innovations (securitized aggregated leveraged mortgage derivatives and the like) to manage the massive influx of both dollars and risk into what had previously been a relatively stable system.  And, for a time, all was well.

Then, the proverbial bubble burst.  Too much inflation had been absorbed into the housing market, and commodity sellers – particular petroleum – called the bluff and ran their own prices up.  The sheer mass of risk aggregated in mortgage securities wasn’t properly quantified because it was never properly understood, and when the assumptions undergirding those securities proved not only to be false but to be delusionally optimistic, we saw a precipitous crash in worldwide credit markets from which we have not yet recovered.

So, follow me here and see if this makes sense.

It’s 1993.  “Home ownership is good.”  Agreed.  “Home ownership is expensive.”  Agreed.  “There are well-meaning and hard-working people who would like to own homes but can’t afford to.”  Agreed.  “Let’s distort the market by making credit artificially inexpensive.”

It’s 2009.  “Access to top-notch health care is good.”  Agreed.  “Top-notch health care is expensive.”  Agreed.  “There are well-meaning and hard-working people who would like access to top-notch health care but can’t afford it.”  Agreed.  “Let’s distort the market by making top-notch health care artificially inexpensive.”

The experts in the 90s assured us that greater home ownership will be good for banks, construction, commerce, employers, families, retirees, and everyone else.  Here it is in 2009, and many of those same experts are assuring us that this new adventure in market tinkering can’t possibly have a serious down-side to quality or availability of care, to medical education or employment, to the insurance companies shareholders, to those who are insured through their employer, to employers, to the unemployed, and to everyone else.  So forgive me if I’m skeptical about this cadre’s ability to project all of the economic side-effects of their little experiment.

As they say, “let’s be clear”: we haven’t even worked out the side-effects of the $1B that’s been dumped into the “cash for clunkers” program.  We know that there’s been an uptick in new car purchases, but we also know that a significant chunk of that was people who deliberately deferred buying new cars in recent months in anticipation of this program.  We know that the program has taken lots of late-model used cars off the road, and thereby out of the used car market, decreasing supply without doing anything to correspondingly decrease demand, which (if you learned anything in econ 101) tells us that the price of used cars will be on its way up, possibly leading to stifled demand (and, therefore, market stagnation).  On top of that, it’s not yet entirely clear where all of those $1B went; there were cries for audits and accountability for last year’s bank bailouts (and rightly so), but we can’t shovel more money into this program quickly or indiscriminately enough.  And nobody but nobody outside of the “fringe media” is bothering to even ask the question (publicly, anyway).  So, again, count me as skeptical when the White House assures me that their proposals will somehow work out as “market neutral”, let alone “deficit neutral”.

Looking forward to my new life on the flag@whitehouse.gov blacklist.

Effing the Ineffable

Recently attended a debate on the existence of Satan. Two of the panelists were Mark Driscoll (of Mars Hill Church in Seattle) and Deepak Chopra (famed new-age guru). I have many thoughts about the debate, but I wanted to write down this one small reflection fairly quickly since it’s both simple and essential to the heart of my disagreement with Chopra and much of what passes for “spirituality” in our age.

Several times in the course of the debate, Chopra described “god” as “transcendent and ineffable”. With the first adjective, I have no problems; assuming we are talking about the same God and using the same (western) meaning of “transcendent”, the statement stands in agreement with the heart of Evangelicalism, Puritanism, Lutheranism, Roman Catholicism, Augustine, and the church fathers. My complaint is with the second adjective.

“God is ineffable” is a popular saying in present-day “spiritual” circles. The compact OED gives us only two (only two, a paltry sum indeed!) meanings for ineffable: “too great or extreme to be expressed in words”, and “too sacred to be uttered”. Let’s consider each of these in turn.

If God is completely and truly ineffable in the first sense, then — catch this, it’s subtle — even calling Him “ineffable” is a contradiction, because it expresses something about Him in words. Similarly, if we call Him ineffable in the second sense, we have similarly contradicted ourselves, because — again, this is subtle — we have attached a word to the sacredly unutterable Identity and uttered it, thereby demonstrating that we think it is not ineffable after all.

Now, these critiques only apply if we treat “ineffable” as a first-class property of Divinity. It is quite a different matter to speak, as Christians often do, of the ineffable ages of God’s eternity, the ineffable depths of His love or compassion, or His ineffable power and mercy. With this we are saying something substantial, that God actually and truly possesses particular attributes and abilities and traits, but that He possesses them in measures which defy expression. There is no contradiction (with the first definition, anyway) in calling God ineffably Holy. It is only the “ineffable god” of vague spirituality which is, literally, nothing but nonsense.

Why is this important? For starters, the reason the “ineffable deity” meme is so popular today is that its own meaninglessness and nonsensicality invites its adherents to embrace equally irrational ideas about everything else. You are free to judge and condemn those who argue for an objective standard of justice. You are free to speak of rehabilitating that which you call irredeemably evil. You can champion education as the cure for wickedness even as you rail against any attempts to include efforts at moral formation in public education. You can adopt nonsensical spatial metaphors (“beyond” right and wrong, “beyond” liberal and conservative) to evade uncomfortable questions about the glaring inconsistencies in your own thinking or the dastardly ethical implications of your vacuous worldview.

If God is ineffable, then categories like “God’s justice” or “God’s will” or even “God’s existence” are likewise nonsensical. The mind consumed with the ineffable delusion reflexively dismisses such notions without regard for their merit. Consumed with vanity at having grasped the ungraspable, of having effed the ineffable, they exalt their own understanding and become futile in their own thinking, which (if we are willing to think Biblically) are the immediate forerunners to folly, idolatry, and judgement. “God is ineffable” is a cop-out, a word game played by those lacking the humility to allow that God might speak and that His words might mean something.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit

And not, as some in the mainline are fond of saying, “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier”. God is not an abstract amalgam of roles, no matter what the Sabellianists and Modalists say. God does act in those roles, but He has not invited us to know him only by narrow functional titles; we are made to meet face-to-face, not face-to-nametag.

But, of course, “Father” and “Son” hit us too close to home; we cannot hold someone called “Father” or “Son” at arms length without doing violence to our own humanity. We can love or we can hate, but the one thing we are incapable of doing is not caring. A “Creator”, however, can safely be observed from afar, or (more likely) simply ignored.

And, lest there be any confusion: That’s the God and Father or Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

But I will give them this: at least it’s linguistically artful, which is more than can be said for ecclesiastical abominations against our noble tongue like “God Godself”.

More Seattle Cognitive Dissonance

A few months ago Seattle had a series of severe winter storms. By “severe” I mean, of course, that enough snow fell to not melt instantly when it hit the ground. Anyway, those of you fortunate enough to have visited Seattle when such events occur will know that the city is absolutely crippled by them. We have a lot of arterial roads that run up and down very steep grades, and our four snowplows and two road graders just can’t keep up.

Well, those of us from cities that actually know how to handle winter weather invariably chirp up and complain that Seattle DoT needs to get its act together. To which a predictable cadre always reply “Why should Seattle make that huge capital outlay for an event that happens once a decade?”

Now, there are ways to have substantial snow-handling capabilities with minimal capital outlay by the city, but let’s set that point aside for the sake of argument.

The interesting part comes a few months later when a debate about Anthropogenic Climate Change comes up, and this same predictable cadre of people shout from the rooftops that we should expect more dramatic seasons (hotter/dryer summers, colder/snowier winters) because of it.

So, stick this in your pipe and smoke it: If these fine folks (with their very high estimations of their own intelligence) actually believe that the current theories of anthropogenic climate change are “good science”, that means that those theories give rise to highly reliable predictions of things which have not yet happened. One of those predictions, and it is the “consensus” of the current majority opinion-holders, is that (statistically, of course) we’ll be getting a lot more snow a lot more frequently in places like Seattle. So it would seem to follow logically that these same people would be clamoring for us to build a massive snowplow fleet before the coming anthropogenic uberwinters devastate our fair city.

The Answer I Need is Not to a Question

“My head is filled with questions and I can assure you no answer to any one of them has ever brought me one iota of happiness.” (Arthur Dent, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, 2005)

I have read more Christian books than any reasonable human should hope, expect, or dread to have read.  I am well-studied in apologetics, Biblical theology, and theodicy.  I am blessed with numbers of friends far beyond my own social graces who bear wisdom beyond their years.  I possess an unusually keen gift for finding information on the web.  I have no doubt that, were my real problem ever an actual question, I could find an answer to it.

No, my real problem is not a question, and there is no truism, lemma, proposition, evidence, observation, argument or proof that can address it.  The answer I need is a new way – to think, to work, to labor, to suffer, to pray, to celebrate.  The answer I need is a new truth – grounded and unassailable, not subject to my own tepid indecision and wandering interests.  The answer I need is life afresh, because I can’t even hold death at bay as it eats away at everything in this world I thought I cherished.

I believe, emphatically, that Jesus Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life”.  He is not merely the exemplar of a new kind of humanity (although he is truly that), not merely the correct response to a theological inquiry (although he is truly that), not merely the agent of my eventual bodily resurrection (although he is truly that).  I believe, dogmatically, that Jesus Christ is the answer – not to my questions (foolish and ill-framed as they usually are), but to my actual need, the real problem and paradox of living a condemned man’s life amid this sin-decayed fraternity.

Another day, another idol

This election season is over, and thank goodness.  Just in time to begin the long and difficult process of preparing for the next one.  Because that, after all, is most of what American federal politics are about: re-election.

A nation’s politics tell you a great deal about that nation’s gods.  Before we even consider the issues of the day, look at how the USA treats the institutions of its democratic republic.  Voting is a kind of civic sacrament by which the will of the ultimate authority (the people) is revealed.  Our coinage, in a rather delicious twist of irony, is emblazoned with “In God We Trust”.  We see in political candidates godlike powers to feel and to heal our pain, bridge the gaping voids between our contradictory ideologies, and protect us from all of the uncertainties and unpleasantries which a real world brings (whether they be violent men wanting to harm us or violent cells turning our bodies against themselves).

Through the whole thing, I never cease to be amazed by the pervasive idolatry of both the participants and the process itself.  Both of the major parties degenerated into the most shameless form of idolatry – hero worship – with a war hero on one side and a symbolically significant idealist on the other.  And while the adoration art may have swung one direction more than the other, the adulative rhetoric of honor and patriotism running the other direction more than balanced it.  But most disturbing was that not even the prominent evangelicals who had platforms to inject their voices into the conversation bothered to ask whether we aren’t looking to these mere men to be something which only Jesus can be: a Savior who can deliver us from our sins and make the world new.

My own political inclination tends to run (little-”L”) libertarian, but unlike most of those with whom I tend to agree I will willingly stand first in line to decry its idols and folly.  “The market” — the savior of fiscal conservatism — is not a benevolent force which turns individual greed into virtuous affluence.  The market will indiscriminantly broker vice and virtue, setting the price for corn syrup and sex with underage prostitutes with eqaul vitality and precision.  As Douglas Wilson aptly noted, a market is not truly free when it consists of slaves exchanging chains with one another.  A market full of esteem for virtue may indeed suppress vice, but a market made up of greedy sinners will commodify their sin, driving it to greater and greater efficiency.  So it is not the market which I think will save us, but rather the providential hand of God working through redeemed men and their transformed wills to renew every institution from the inside out.

In a similar vein, I accept the social liberalism of libertarianism only because I prefer it as a necessary logical consequence of opposing the alternatives.  Specifically, I find it profoundly dangerous to endow the state with any power which you would not entrust to the hands of your enemies.  Let’s take an example: the state’s role in regulating marriage is an outgrowth of the eugenics movement, the idea that some people should not breed with each other; out of this we got marriage licensing. But the mechanism has since then so often changed hands, it has gone from a tool of population engineering to a tool of racism to a tool of public health (blood type checks) and is now being fought over as a tool of cultural normalization and validation, with the voice of the church chiming in from time to time on both wrong sides of every one of those issues.  And Christians today should ask themselves if they really want to use the law to impose one vision of social order when secular feminists, Oprahphiles, and post-free-love sexual libertines each hold a firmer grip on the voting psyche than we do (and are, therefore, better able to impose their visions of social order upon us by the same means).  Legal mechanisms always outlive the intentions of their creators.

Even so, social liberalism alone (by which I mean legal permissiveness toward behavior which does not actively harm others) does not give rise to cohesive civilizations.  As a legal framework, it works when people can (for the most part) trust one another to do the right thing, and to agree with one another that what a small minority is doing is indeed wrong.  Unfortunately, such an assumption in our own day would be patently false; when even a small fraction of my neighbors think there is nothing morally repugnant about dismembering and suctioning out the brains of an infant simply because it has not yet passed through its mother’s birth canal, I can no longer assume that the driver in the next car or the coworker in the next cubicle has any meaningful or coherent sense of right and wrong with which I can agree.  There is no more prevailing moral compass in the west, and there is no surprise in the result: the civilization tears itself apart because everyone is trying to pull it toward their own version of “north”.

So, with all of the caveats and more, I lean libertarian, not because I think they have picked the right savior — they have not — but because I see in it the clearest critique to the idol before whom every other political ideology bows low: Caesar.  A child is shot in a schoolyard?  Caesar will take away people’s guns.  A young man dies of a bacterial infection transmitted by spinach?  Caesar will establish stricter standards for the handling of spinach by farmers and distributors.  Someone is injured in a car wreck?  Caesar will make sure every restaurant gives easy access to their wheelchair.  A woman is raped?  Caesar will tell young children about how wonderful sex is and that they should try it as soon as possible so they don’t get sexually frustrated and start raping people.  And so it goes; tragedy happens (as, in a fallen world, it inevitably does), and the righteous cry that something must be done is immediately taken up by politicians and lawyers who compete with reckless abandon to seem the most heroic by spending money that is not theirs and crafting more and more rules which have less and less to do with the real problems of human brokenness.  There is room for a wise and judicious state to hold human sinfulness in check — Paul calls the governor a minister of vengeance upon the wicked (and that includes both the violence of the rapist and the greed of the corrupt insurance adjuster) — but the impulse in our day is to use the state to shape a new reality in which we can all live in a perpetual childhood, insulated from external danger, protected from our own folly, and oblivious to the mind-bending depth of human depravity and corruption (in others and in ourselves).  The state is a pretender to God’s titles as provider, defender, healer, and judge, and it is foolish of us as Christians (or anyone else for that matter!) to pretend to be able to craft a program to fill these roles without recognizing Caesar’s track record of virtually unbroken habitual poverty, oppression, sickness, and injustice, and without offering up a prayer of humility, supplication, and gratitude that in spite of this, by His grace, His righteousness has not been completely suppressed, His grace has not been completely hidden, our ministrations have from time to time served Him and others more than ourselves, and all of these are because He is indeed our good Savior, better than any we will ever elect.

Not Enough Options, You Insensitive Clod

Just got forwarded an email chain letter urging me to vote in an MSNBC live-poll…

	Should the motto “In God We Trust” be removed from U.S. currency?
		Yes. It’s a violation of the principle of separation of church and state.
		No. The motto has historical and patriotic significance and does nothing to establish a state religion.

Here’s my problem – I may have a “yes” or “no” opinion on the question, but I absolutely do not agree with either of the elaborations.

Regarding the first, the “principle of separation of church and state” is not a proper Constitutional legal doctrine… the only constitutional principles are “free exercise” and “no state establishment”.  So if “In God We Trust” should be removed, it would have to be on the basis of it either inhibiting the free exercise of religion (which it clearly does not) or because it somehow establishes a state church (which it also does not, although strident secularists would argue otherwise).

Regarding the second, the phrase does have historical and patriotic significance, but these cannot be decoupled from its theological significance.  While it clearly does not establish a state church (as I have claimed above), it does have religious significance, pointing to the fundamentally theistic philosophical foundations for our system of law and governance.

Of course, speaking as a Christian I find it deeply ironic that we print “in God we trust” on the instruments of Mammon, in whom we actually trust.  Were God actually an object of trust in any practical sense for America as a nation or its people, perhaps I would see more virtue than parody in the slogan.