In a spirit of brotherly love, I’d like to ask Matthew Schmitz to re-read this post, notice which of the two cultures Dawson identified as embodying “do as you would be done by,” recall the origin of that phrase, and reflect on the significance of Dawson’s having chosen to advocate the other culture.
My wife has a rare combination of two chronic illnesses. Her treatment regime does not conform to the rigid requirements of standardized bureaucratic medicine. If we lived in the southern European countries Dawson and Schmitz find so ennobling, she’d be dead.
Not everyone has an example that close to home. But a good, hard look at the sheer scale of human suffering in southern Europe ought to renew our appreciation for the “bourgeois” cultural heritage that has – for all its faults, and it does have the faults Dawson identifies – embodied “do as you would be done by” better than the alternatives.
Dawson connects the debate between northern and southern Europe to the Reformation. That makes me think about Thesis 50: “Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St. Peter’s church should go to ashes than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh and bones of his sheep.”
I firmly believe that if Dawson appreciated the human cost of socialism, he would rather see southern Europe’s ennobling culture go to ashes than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh and bones of its people.
September 13th, 2012 | 3:23 pm
Very simple response: I did not endorse the quotation from Dawson.
That said, neither do I fully share Greg’s view. Surely the answer is to hold these two impulses in tension.
September 13th, 2012 | 4:40 pm
The impulse to do as you would be done by should be held in tension with other impulses? I had thought “do as you would be done by” was an ethical telos, not just one among competing goods.
September 13th, 2012 | 4:47 pm
I suppose Italy is in Southern Europe? Having lived long stretches of my life both in Italy and in the USA I do not understand what this post is talking about. The two health systems are different, but I never noticed such a dramatic superiority of the US one.
September 13th, 2012 | 10:05 pm
Carlo, have you ever required a treatment that didn’t conform to the standard model? Bureaucratization means standardization – everyone gets whatever works best for the average person. So if you’re the average person, most of the time you’ll get what you need (though delivered less efficiently). The people who suffer catastrophically are those who don’t respond to the standard treatment and need something that doesn’t fit the bureaucracy’s plans.
September 14th, 2012 | 9:26 am
The leap in thought here from Dawson’s opposition of Catholicism and the bourgeois to a critique of socialized medicine is simply astounding. The Christian, unbourgeois, impractical character that Dawson describes, a character that considers only the one thing needful and takes no thought for the morrow, is not the kind of character that weighs out average happinesses or focuses on the average needs of the average person. The German is much more suited than the Greek to administer a bureaucracy — and in fact the German state, when not busy earning the accolades of American right-wingers by demanding its pound of flesh, enforces a kind of individual mandate for health insurance.
Schmitz’s point — that dime-store moralism in politics can run both ways — is entirely lost in Forster’s reply. There is something almost chilling about the reduction of christian morals to the Golden rule (a principle not at all unique to Christianity), to the exclusion of the parable of the workers in the vineyard, the words in which we pray to be forgiven in proportion as we forgive our debtors, and even the ordination by the Lord of Hosts of years of jubilee.
I am perhaps more ready than Mr. Schmitz to give assent to Dawson’s implicit radicalism, which I’m aware is fairly strong stuff for this website. But I’d go even a little further, and suggest that the “sheer scale of human suffering” under which Southern Europe labors is at least comparable to the problems we have in this country (to take one example: an American’s life expectancy is lower than an Italian’s, Spaniard’s, or Greek’s). And I’d even imply that the bourgeois mind, with its gratitude to capitalism and insistence that debts always be paid, may even be part of the problem.
September 14th, 2012 | 9:37 am
Greg:
is that concern based on your personal experience with the Italian health system? It just sounds like a general, abstract a priori statement.
I have a large extended family that has experienced all kinds of conditions and I never heard anybody being denied treatment because it was non-standard. But what do I know? Perhaps it happens.
All I am saying is that it sounds like you are talking about something of which you have no direct knowledge.
September 14th, 2012 | 9:46 am
Greg:
let me add: even if you may be right in some respects, the sentence about “sheer scale of human suffering” in southern Europe was just ridiculous!
I may think I am stupid, but I cannot have lived a quarter of a century in Italy, have hundreds of acquaintances and have never noticed such terrible situation…
September 17th, 2012 | 10:33 am
Thanks for a great, personal post.
In Washington, DC, one cost of our expansive welfare state is the jockeying that happens outside (and inside) our federal agencies, where hundreds of Beltway Bandits seek to enrich themselves on the government’s dime. Access and proximity to those doling out public resources leads to eerily similar “exactions of the pardon-preachers,” as the Reformers described. But the poor, the fatherless, and the taxpayers deserve better than “crony Statism.”
Instead, as you suggest we need a biblically mindful, moral case for free enterprise—and public policies that promote personal opportunity, rather than State redistribution.
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