Charles Krauthammer is turning his reunion to more use than nostalgia:

I was reminded of [an earlier conversation] upon receiving my med-school class’s 40th-reunion report and reading some of the entries. In general, my classmates felt fulfilled by family, friends, and the considerable achievements of their professional lives. But there was an undercurrent of deep disappointment, almost demoralization, with what medical practice had become. The complaint was not financial but vocational — an incessant interference with their work, a deep erosion of their autonomy and authority, a transformation from physician to “provider.”

As one of them wrote, “My colleagues who have already left practice all say they still love patient care, being a doctor. They just couldn’t stand everything else.” By which he meant “a never-ending attack on the profession from government, insurance companies, and lawyers . . . progressively intrusive and usually unproductive rules and regulations,” topped by an electronic-health-records (EHR) mandate that produces nothing more than “billing and legal documents” — and degraded medicine.

I hear this everywhere. Virtually every doctor and doctors’ group I speak to cites the same litany, with particular bitterness about the EHR mandate. As another classmate wrote, “The introduction of the electronic medical record into our office has created so much more need for documentation that I can only see about three-quarters of the patients I could before, and has prompted me to seriously consider leaving for the first time.”

You may have zero sympathy for doctors, but think about the extraordinary loss to society — and maybe to you, one day — of driving away 40 years of irreplaceable clinical experience.

(source: Government Is Forcing Doctors to Spend More Time on Data Entry and Less with Their Patients)

And a trenchant punchline:

Why did all this happen? Because liberals in a hurry refuse to trust the self-interested wisdom of individual practitioners, who were already adopting EHR on their own, but gradually, organically, as the technology became ripe and the costs tolerable. Instead, Washington picked a date out of a hat and decreed: Digital by 2015.

(source: Government Is Forcing Doctors to Spend More Time on Data Entry and Less with Their Patients)

It is important to respect the organizing principle of each society within the nation, not to simply treat all questions as matters for the regime to problem-solve; when we don’t, we turn brain surgery into blunt-force trauma in a heartbeat.

Aristotle:

The discussion of the first question shows nothing so clearly as that laws, when good, should be supreme; and that the magistrate or magistrates should regulate those matters only on which the laws are unable to speak with precision owing to the difficulty of any general principle embracing all particulars. But what are good laws has not yet been clearly explained; the old difficulty remains. The goodness or badness, justice or injustice, of laws varies of necessity with the constitutions of states. This, however, is clear, that the laws must be adapted to the constitutions. But if so, true forms of government will of necessity have just laws, and perverted forms of government will have unjust laws.

(source: The Internet Classics Archive | Politics by Aristotle)

Livy:

Henceforward I am to treat of the affairs, civil and military, of a free people, for such the Romans were now become; of annual magistrates and the authority of the laws exalted above that of men. What greatly enhanced the public joy on having attained to this state of freedom, was, the haughty insolence of the late king: for the former kings governed in such a manner, that all of them, in succession, might deservedly be reckoned as founders of the several parts at least, of the city, which they added to it, to accommodate the great numbers of inhabitants, whom they themselves introduced. Nor can it be doubted, that the same Brutus, who justly merited so great glory, for having expelled that haughty king, would have hurt the public interest most materially, had he, through an over hasty zeal for liberty, wrested the government from any one of the former princes. For what must have been the consequence, if that rabble of shepherds and vagabonds, fugitives from their own countries, having, under the sanction of an inviolable asylum, obtained liberty, or at least impunity; and uncontrolled by dread of kingly power, had once been set in commotion by tribunitian storms, and had, in a city, where they were strangers, engaged in contests with the Patricians, before the pledges of wives and children, and an affection for the soil itself, which in length of time is acquired from habit, had united their minds in social concord? The state, as yet but a tender shoot, had, in that case, been torn to pieces by discord; whereas the tranquil moderation of the then government cherished it, and, by due nourishment, brought it forward to such a condition, that its powers being ripened, it was capable of producing the glorious fruit of liberty.

(source: The History of Rome, Vol. 1 – Online Library of Liberty)

Hannan:

If there’s one thing that distinguishes English-speaking civilization from all the rival models, it’s this: that the individual is lifted above the collective. The citizen is exalted over the state; the state is seen as his servant, not his master. If you wanted to encapsulate Anglosphere exceptionalism in a single phrase, you could do a lot worse than what John Adams said about the Massachusetts state constitution: “A government of laws, and not of men.” Except that those words were not John Adams’s; he was quoting a ­seventeenth-century English Whig, James Harrington—neat proof of the shared inheritance that binds us together.

(source: How To Noisily Concede Your Liberty | Hang Together)

Before I move on, I just want to offer two bullet points in response to the assembled quotations above:

• Elision:  By the time we get to the end of the citation chain (roughly, and obviously with gaps, Aristotle, Livy, Harrington, Adams, Hannan) the distinction between “the constitution” of a society–the historically contingent distribution of power (economic and coercive) and cultural authority by which “a people” subsist as such (possibly across many regimes)–and “the laws” of that society has been elided.  Note that for the classical tradition, the fitness of a regime to the constitution of a society is crucial (see Cicero especially).  Burke would be helpful here.
• Conflation:  Hannan also conflates individualism (strictly, the doctrine of “popular sovereignty”) with republicanism (to which “of laws not men” properly belongs), and in so doing also conflates this individualistic republicanism with some species of managerialism (or administrative state).  I expect a protest on this last, because it seems unlikely that Hannan has this in mind; but if each “individual…is exalted above the state” so that the regime must be seen as “his servant,” and if we don’t simply classify this as empty rhetoric, then the regime’s sole business will be to apportion services to all of its masters.  Ineluctably, this will produce a society of DMV employees, educrats, special-issue “czars,” executive orders, rule interpretation memos, and other panjandrums and panaceas, not of laws.  This is a common trajectory from individualism to totalitarianism, and speaking English does not immunize us against it.

Now, I understand Dan’s recent post “How To Noisily Concede Your Liberty” to say that we should argue “I should be permitted to [X]” based on the principle “because everyone should be permitted to [X]” rather than “because I have a religious obligation to [X].”  I argue that we should do both, and I have both principled and pragmatic reasons for doing so–and reason to believe that the pragmatics are not shortsighted moves that “sell out” the larger principles.

I think some distinctions will help us reason through these matters.   Continue reading →

Dennis Prager has a series which opens with the sort of language that should sound familiar to readers of Locke, and which is of interest here given Greg’s specific reading of Locke’s work:

I grew up in a liberal world — New York, Jewish, and Ivy League graduate school. I was an eight-year-old when President Dwight Eisenhower ran for reelection against the Democratic nominee, Adlai Stevenson. I knew nothing about politics and had little interest in the subject. But I well recall knowing — knowing, not merely believing — that Democrats were “for the little guy” and Republicans were “for the rich guys.”

I voted Democrat through Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976. He was the last Democrat for whom I voted. Obviously, I underwent an intellectual change. And it wasn’t easy. Becoming a Republican was emotionally and psychologically like converting to another religion.

(source: To Defend a Position, You Must Understand Both Sides)

Prager’s first entry in a projected series of articles deals with the difference in basic moral calculus between what Americans denote as “conservative” and “liberal” tendencies.  Landing on the conservative side, Prager concludes as follows:

…the vast majority of equally poor people — black or white — do not riot or commit violent crimes.

Likewise, many liberals believe that most of the Muslims who engage in terror do so because of the poverty and especially because of the high unemployment rate for young men in the Arab world. Yet, it turns out that most terrorists come from middle-class homes. All the 9/11 terrorists came from middle- and upper-class homes. And of course Osama bin Laden was a billionaire.

Material poverty doesn’t cause murder, rape, or terror. Moral poverty does. That’s one of the great divides between Left and Right. And it largely emanates from their differing views about whether human nature is innately good.

(source: To Defend a Position, You Must Understand Both Sides)

I concur.

(I would divide the analysis slightly differently, but the difference is really subtle.)

Want moral consensus?  You’re going to have to know what you’re up against.  From a lengthy, somewhat grumpy, but generally spot-on column by Quin Hillyer:

We’re now told that we can’t spank a misbehaving child; that we can’t read Huckleberry Finn because it features the “n” word; that we can’t name sports teams in honor of Indians; that syllogistic or “linear” logic is culturally oppressive; that it’s offensive if we pray in public or say “Merry Christmas”; and that we can’t allow our own 20-year-olds to drink a glass of wine with us in our own homes as a civilizing part of a holiday meal, but that we’re disastrously prudish if we don’t give them condoms for the sex we should be glad they are engaging in as a necessary form of self-expression.

In short, we’re told that so much of what we know is good and normal is actually bad, while so much that’s objectively awful is actually no big deal or even something worth admiring.

(source: At Sea in an Alien Culture, Where ‘Normal’ Is Defined as ‘Deviant’)

Rine’s description, quoted below, rings true for both my upbringing (where my much-beloved summer camp’s wonderful director nevertheless felt the need to preach his signature sermon “Puppy Love Leads to a Dog’s Life” in the middle of every teen week) and my time among evangelicals.  It even tends to cover the spectrum beyond that, wherever one encounters any attitude better than “anything goes.”  And don’t get me wrong, this is slightly better than “anything goes”–but, as Rine discovers, not by much:

As I consider my own upbringing and the various “sex talks” I encountered in evangelical church settings over the past twenty years, I realize that the view of marital sex presented there was primarily revisionist. While the ideal of raising a family is ever-present in evangelical culture, discussions about sex itself focused almost exclusively on purity, as well as the intense spiritual bond that sexual intimacy brings to a married couple. Pregnancy was mentioned only in passing and often in negative terms, paraded alongside sexually transmitted diseases as a possible punishment for those who succumb to temptation. But for those who wait, ah! Pleasures abound!

There was little attempt to cultivate an attitude toward sexuality that celebrates its full telos: the bonding of the couple and the incarnation of new life. And there was certainly no discussion of a married couple learning to be responsive to their fertility, even as a guiding principle. To the contrary, the narrative implied that once the “waiting” was over, self-discipline would no longer be necessary. Marriage would be a lifelong pleasure romp. Sex was routinely praised as God’s gift to married couples—a “gift” largely due to its orgasmic, unitive properties, rather than its intrinsic capacity to create life.

(source: What is Marriage to Evangelical Millennials?)

Abandonment of the proper understanding of marriage among many American Christians is a key reason we find it hard, even when we try, to live and plan and teach as we know we ought.  Even when we know better, we are constantly made to feel that we are outliers, that we don’t quite “get it.”  We are vulnerable to the lie that ours is a holdout position, mere nostalgia for a past nobody wants.

Man and woman were made for God, first, and for each other; and marriage was made to ground and fecundate that reality; its proper fruit is children.

For this reason husbands and wives should take up the burden appointed to them, willingly, in the strength of faith and of that hope which “does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.  Then let them implore the help of God with unremitting prayer and, most of all, let them draw grace and charity from that unfailing fount which is the Eucharist. If, however, sin still exercises its hold over them, they are not to lose heart. Rather must they, humble and persevering, have recourse to the mercy of God, abundantly bestowed in the Sacrament of Penance. In this way, for sure, they will be able to reach that perfection of married life which the Apostle sets out in these words: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church. . . Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the Church. . . This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the Church; however, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.”

(source: Humanae Vitae)