Obedience and Other Forbidden
Words
If offered a choice between being
famous and being wise, most college kids would look at you like
you’d lost your mind. No contest. Fame trumps wisdom, every
time.
I submit there is a reason we lack
wisdom. We are afraid of legitimate authority. In fact, many
in our culture question whether any authority really is legitimate.
Therefore, we have no concept that obedience can be a virtue.
As a matter of fact, obeying your parents can be the simplest
and most straightforward way of gaining wisdom.
Obedi-phobia is a cultural and
personal disaster. Don’t bother looking it up: I just invented
it. Obedi-phobia means a pathological fear of obedience to legitimate
authority.
What is legitimate authority? Everyone
who knows more than I can be a legitimate authority on that
subject. Parents are legitimate authority figures over their
children. The Law, in our Anglo-American tradition, exercises
authority over us all, because the law is made through the participation
of large numbers of people, in a reasonably transparent process.
Americans obey the law, not because some Dear Leader says so,
but because the Law says so. In the Judeo-Christian tradition,
people obey God, not because God is a cosmic bully who will
punish us if we don’t. We obey God because we believe He loves
us and has our interests in mind.
Here is how obedi-phobia hampers
our quest for wisdom.
The ancient Greeks called prudence
“practical wisdom.” Prudence did not mean, doing whatever you
can get away with, as it now means in political parlance. The
Greeks considered prudence the virtue of doing the right thing
at the right time in the right amount, even when this can’t
be deduced from general principles. Prudence shows us the difference
between courage, a good thing, and rashness, a foolish thing.
Seen in this light, the Greeks regarded prudence as the queen
of the virtues, that held all the others
together.
Prudence requires experience with
actual people in actual situations.
Experience shows us how to recognize
the difference between a sincere complement and groveling flattery.
Experience teaches us how to distinguish between joyful spontaneity
and idiotic self-indulgence.
But children have no experience.
By definition, at the beginning of life, it is impossible to
have accumulated the store of experiences that would allow a
person to be genuinely prudent.
So, how can the young acquire prudence
or practical wisdom? As Dennis put it on his show, the relatively
pain-free method is to listen to what other people have to say,
or to observe other people’s mistakes. The painful method is
to jump off the cliff to see for yourself whether gravity really
works for you, or whether gravity is just a cynical plot by
old people to suppress the exuberance of youth. In the first
two cases, the young person acquires wisdom by learning from
the experience of other people.
There is an even simpler alternative:
The child could obey his parents. (Gasp!)
Jennifer Roback Morse
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/
JennniferRobackMorse/2006/02/06/185299.html
--
Censorship by Firing Squad
In the current uproar over the
cartoons of Mohammed, printed in a Danish newspaper, and eventually
in other European papers, I have some sympathy for Muslims,
who believe it is blasphemous to create images of Mohammed.
In one of the twelve cartoons, Mohammed tells dead suicide bombers
he has run out of virgins to give them as their reward. Another
showed him in a bomb-shaped turban. But the political barbs
are almost beside the point. Even positive images of Mohammed
are offensive to Muslims as too close to idolatry. It is not
just extremists and street crazies who are complaining about
these cartoons. Muslim moderates and professionals are upset
too.
If millions of people think their
faith is compromised by illustrations of a particular religious
figure why not just drop the illustrations? Columnist Charles
Krauthammer once wrote that in America “pluralism works because
of a certain deference that sects accord each other. In a pluralistic
society, it is a civic responsibility to take great care when
talking publicly about things sacred to millions of fellow citizens.”
Defending free
speech in the 1989 Rushdie case, Leon Wieseltier
of the New Republic took a different and harder line.
He said, “It was blasphemy that made us free. Two cheers
today for blasphemy.” That was a voice of the secular intelligentia
that doesn’t hold much sacred, dismissing the concern of supposedly
backward people who do.
John Leo
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/johnleo
/2006/02/06/185301.html
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Judicial Confirmation and the
“Mystery Constitution”
A Review of Judge Charles Pickering’s
Supreme Chaos
Many Americans have looked at the
judicial confirmation process, the vicious disparagement of
exceptional men and women who have given their lives to public
service, and wondered in dismay, “How did it come to this?”
Supreme
Chaos answers that question, and offers some solutions
to bringing back the Constitutional standard.
Supreme Chaos could only
have been written by someone who, like our Founders, loves and
understands the right of self-government and the rule of law
and principle; it should be read by everyone who wants to do
the same. Supreme Chaos should be part of every
home library and used as a text in every government and citizenship
class. The US Constitution was written by thoughtful
men who loved and understood legal principle and the right of
self-government and articulated it for ordinary citizens could
understand. So also is Supreme Chaos.
It is as easy to read as a newspaper — and more logical, tracing
the history of Constitutional thought and principle to demonstrate
clearly what our Founders intended and how those principles
should be applied.
Judge Pickering tells the story
as only one who has survived the strife of ideologues could,
but it is more than his personal story. It is the compelling
story of our unique political compact at risk because of partisan
ideologues who have forgotten that our Constitution was the
result of months of debate and negotiation among the best legal,
economic and political minds of the time, by men determined
to keep power in the hands of the people, who considered deeply
the implications for posterity. They wrote our Constitution
to limit the power of government by keeping any one branch (not
party) from gaining too much power.
The fundamental principle at stake
is: does the Constitution mean what it says and say what
it means, or can a minority use any means to make it up as they
go to force through policies that the people have not permitted
through their elected representatives?
Judith Niewiadomski
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/books_entertainment/
reviews/JudithNiewiadomski/185284.html
--
Dissolving Marriage
Canada,
you don’t know the half of it. In mid-January, Canada was rocked
by news that a Justice Department study had called for the decriminalization
and regulation of polygamy. Actually, two government studies
recommended decriminalizing polygamy. (Only one has been reported
on.) And even that is only part of the story. Canadians, let
me be brutally frank. You are being played for a bunch of fools
by your legal-political elite. Your elites mumble a confusing
jargon to your face to keep you from understanding what they
really have in mind.
Let’s try a little test. Translate
the following phrases into English:
1) Canada needs to move “beyond
conjugality.”
2) Canada needs to “reconsider the continuing legal privileging
of marriage and other conjugal relationships.”
3) Once gay
marriage is legalized, Canada will be able to “consider
whether the legal privileges and burdens now assigned to marriage
and other conjugal relationships can be justified.”
4) Canada needs to question “whether conjugality is an appropriate
marker for determining legal rights and obligations.”
[Answers: The English translation
of #1,# 2, and #4 is: “Canada should abolish marriage.” The
translation of #3 is: “Once we legalize gay marriage, we can
move on to the task of abolishing marriage itself.”]
This argument was very publicly
made to Canadians in 2001, when the Law Commission of Canada
published its report, “Beyond Conjugality.” But nobody got it.
Everyone noticed that a government commission had backed same-sex
marriage. But few recognized, grasped, or could bring themselves
to take seriously, the central thrust of Beyond Conjugality:
that after the legalization of same-sex marriage, Canadian marriage
itself ought to be abolished. (For more on this, see my article
“Beyond
Gay Marriage”)
Martha Bailey, Queens University
law professor and chief author of the now infamous report advocating
the decriminalization of polygamy, played an important organizing
role in the Beyond Conjugality project (translation: the “Abolish
Marriage” project). In 2004, Bailey published an article, “Regulation of
Cohabitation and Marriage in Canada,” arguing that, after
the legalization of same-sex marriage, Canadians would be able
to turn their attention to the more urgent business of abolishing
marriage itself. (That article is the source of items #2, #3,
and #4 above.) So it is hardly surprising that Bailey has now
called for the decriminalization of polygamy. What’s that
you say? How does legalizing polygamous marriage advance the
cause of abolishing marriage? Canadians, I’m going to have
to spell it out for you in a way that Martha Bailey and her
friends on the Law Commission of Canada will not.
It’s like this. The way to abolish
marriage, without seeming to abolish it, is to redefine the
institution out of existence. If everything can be marriage,
pretty soon nothing will be marriage. Legalize gay marriage,
followed by multi-partner marriage, and pretty soon the whole
idea of marriage will be meaningless. At that point, Canada
can move to what Bailey and her friends really want: an infinitely
flexible relationship system that validates any conceivable
family arrangement, regardless of the number or gender of partners.
Stanley Kurtz
National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200602030805.asp
