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The Resurrection of American Philanthropy

Fri, 01 Nov 2013 00:02:00 -0400

Obamacare as Civil Right

Thu, 05 Sep 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Democracy and the Future of Islam

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:03:00 -0500

Tariq Ramadan emerged after September 11 as an apologist for a liberal, peaceful interpretation of Islam, earning him plaudits from the Western media, including the title of the “Muslim Martin Luther” in a 2004 Washington Post op-ed . In his new book, Islam and the Arab Awakening , he is at pains to stay on script. More than anything, he means to show that the Arab Spring is not a catalyst for the rise of Islamist regimes, but instead could be the initial step in throwing off the yoke of European colonialism and American imperialism in favor of new political arrangements that embody both democratic pluralism and a reinvigorated sense of Islamic identity and culture.

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Another Federal Court Finds Fault With Contraception Mandate

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:03:00 -0500

A federal appellate court in Chicago issued a temporary injunction two weeks ago barring the enforcement of ObamaCare’s contraception mandate against Grote Industries, a Catholic-owned company in Indiana that makes vehicle safety systems.

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Has American Fiction Lost Sight of God?

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 00:04:00 -0500

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ObamaCare’s Crisis of Conscience

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:01:00 -0500

Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma City-based chain of arts-and-crafts stores, must provide employee health insurance that covers abortion-inducing drugs, a federal judge has ruled, despite the owners’ claim that such drugs violate their religious beliefs.

The ruling states that Hobby Lobby and its sister company, Mardel Inc., which sells Bibles and Christian study books, have no constitutional protection from the broadly construed contraceptive requirements in ObamaCare because “Hobby Lobby and Mardel are not religious organizations.”

This is tantamount to saying that if you’re a Christian, you have no right to run a business based on your religious principles. Even a belief as closely held as opposition to abortion is not enough, the judge said, to supersede the government’s “compelling interest” in providing birth control coverage, including abortifacients.

Hobby Lobby, a family-owned business that grew from a mom-and-pop operation in the 1970s to a chain of 514 stores now employing 13,240 people full-time, is the largest company yet to challenge the health care law. The company’s statement of purpose says the board of directors is committed, first and foremost, to “Honoring the Lord in all we do by operating the company in a manner consistent with Biblical principles.”

But in its brief to the court, the Obama administration argued that, “Hobby Lobby is a for-profit, secular employer, and a secular entity by definition does not exercise religion.” In the administration’s opinion, the religious beliefs of any company’s owners are irrelevant when weighed against a federal mandate to pay for birth control. The qualms of the religious, in this view, are “too attenuated to qualify as a substantial burden.”

One of the great conceits of ObamaCare is the assumption, implied in its many rules and mandates, that those who oppose the law would eventually cast their convictions aside and just go along with it.

The administration did not foresee”indeed, could not even imagine”that state governors would opt out of the Medicaid expansion or refuse to establish health insurance exchanges, as an increasing number are now doing. There is no provision in the law for such a contingency, and it is not at all clear that ObamaCare will work without the full acquiescence of the states.

Neither did it occur to the law’s authors that millions of uninsured Americans might just choose to pay a penalty rather than comply with the individual mandate, or that some companies would choose to cut employee hours to avoid having to pay for costly, benefit-laden coverage to full-time employees.

But perhaps most shocking was the administration’s hubris in assuming that religious organizations, business owners, and individuals with deeply held beliefs about contraception and abortion would agree to provide coverage for abortion-inducing drugs such as the morning-after pill. Were federal officials surprised when the Catholic Church objected to mandated contraceptive coverage? Did they really think Catholic-owned hospitals and universities would accept such a rule? Did they think conservative Christian schools like Wheaton College”which forbids alcohol, tobacco, and even unsanctioned dancing on its campus”would somehow be willing to provide its employees with morning-after pills and other abortifacients?

The only explanation for these gross miscalculations is that the liberals and progressives who crafted the health care law do not take seriously the convictions of Americans who oppose abortion and contraception on religious or moral grounds. To them, such convictions are repugnant, backward, and intolerable”and those who hold them should keep quiet about it.

In the government’s brief for the Hobby Lobby case, we see a wholesale dismissal of the moral convictions of the company’s owners that borders on contempt. But there is something even more insidious in the argument: the assertion that “for-profit” businesses are inherently secular, that corporations have no rights to freedom of speech or religion, and that even if they did, they are nothing compared to the government’s “compelling interest” in health care reform.

This amounts not only to a kind of secular diktat in the public square, but also to a refutation of numerous Supreme Court decisions that affirm First Amendment rights for private citizens and also for voluntary associations, including corporations.

But it is not at all clear the administration will succeed. Last month, a nearly identical federal suit went in favor of a Christian publishing company , which won a preliminary injuction exempting it from the contraception mandate, as did a separate suit filed by a Catholic business owner. Dozens of other lawsuits are on the way. As administration officials push ahead with the implementation of ObamaCare, they should know that this fight will likely go to the Supreme Court, and they should remember that companies are run by real people with real beliefs, who will not lightly cast their religious convictions aside”no matter what the government orders them to do.

John Daniel Davidson is a policy analyst for the Center for Health Care Policy with the Texas Public Policy Foundation , a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin, Texas. He may be reached at jdavidson@texaspolicy.com .

RESOURCES

Judge: Hobby Lobby Must Offer Morning-After Pill

More GOP governors decline to create health insurance exchanges

Health-Care Law Spurs a Shift to Part-Time Workers

Judge grants company injunction against health-care law contraception efforts

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A Review of Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:01:00 -0400

A few days before he fell ill, Christopher Hitchens said in an interview, “One should try to write as if posthumously. Because then you’re free of all the inhibition that can cluster around even the most independent-minded writer.” At the time, he was on a book tour in New York promoting his new memoir, Hitch-22 . One morning he woke up in his hotel room, “feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement.”

Thus begins the account of Hitchens’ final days, the nineteen months between his diagnosis of esophageal cancer in June 2010 and his death in December 2011 at age sixty-two. The essays he produced for Vanity Fair during this period, while he was deported “from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady,” form the bulk of Mortality , Hitchens’ first (but perhaps not last) posthumous collection of writing.

He took his own advice: these essays, written no doubt with the weight of impending posthumousness bearing down on him, are as free of inhibition or embarrassment as anything he wrote. With characteristic wit and aplomb, Hitchens reports on the language and culture of “Tumorville,” the futility of prayer, the error of Nietzsche’s claim that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and, most movingly, the loss of his voice. In that piece, we get a more personal glimpse of the man himself as he grapples with the loss of something he considered indispensable to his life and work:

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A Review of The Good of the Novel

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 00:01:00 -0400

Declaring the novel dead has been a kind of parlor game in the literary world for a century. Every now and then a prominent critic will proclaim anew that fiction as we know it is finished and offer a vision of what’s to come. A few years ago Lee Siegel did the honors with a New York Observer op-ed that argued contemporary fiction is culturally irrelevant, hermetic, and crassly commercial.

As the Wall Street Journal ’s Cynthia Crossen noted a few months ago, in 1902 it was Jules Verne proclaiming the novel’s demise”because of daily newspapers, of all things: “Newspaper writers have learned to color everyday events so well that to read them will give posterity a truer picture than the historic or descriptive novel could do.”

Verne’s prophecy might seem dated”especially since the daily newspaper itself is dying”but his comment demonstrates how we’ve always been a little uncertain about the place and purpose of modern fiction. Contemporary novelists, one could argue, are hopelessly competing for the attention of readers who are addicted to social media and overloaded with information. So the novel is, once again, doomed.

But not really. Far from being doomed or irrelevant, the novel remains the best medium for understanding and exploring human experience. That’s the thrust, anyway, of a collection of essays published last year, The Good of the Novel , which examines thirteen notable Anglophone novels of the past thirty years. Each chapter is a long review-essay that considers a different novel on its own merits”an approach that embraces an older and more nuanced view of the novel, and recognizes the importance of the old-style, evaluative literary critic.

Editors Ray Ryan and Liam McIlvanney are concerned with the question of “novelness””“with what is distinctive and indigenous to the novel form,” a question they claim has been provoked by the emergence of books like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth . These highly-acclaimed “hysterical realist” novels exemplify a style marked by complicated or fractured narratives, huge amounts of ancillary data, and high page counts.

But attempts by Wallace, Smith, and many others to recreate the cacophony and confusion of the postmodern age have disappointed because their techniques don’t necessarily improve the art form; they usually get in the way of what is, otherwise, great writing.

The good of the novel, as the editors and contributors to this volume argue, is not so much that it can mimic the aesthetic qualities of its time or comment on cultural trends, but that it can reveal hidden truths about the human condition in ways no other medium can.

The editors take as their starting point Milan Kundera’s claim that, “The sole raison d’être of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.” But the novel reveals truth indirectly, relying, as the editors state, “on patterns of imagery, on parallel episodes whose significance is nowhere made explicit but remains unstated, open-ended.” Another way of saying this is that the novel’s truths are incomplete, provisional, and as complicated and multifaceted as a human being.

The kinds of truth novels tell”when they manage to tell truths”have mostly to do with emotion and interiority and therefore with a certain level of mystery. To convey in writing what it’s like to be alive is to transcend the realms of knowledge inhabited by science, journalism, and documentary, even theology and philosophy, and enter into the heart of the mystery of being, where all other forms of knowledge are inadequate. At best, the novel can only suggest a reality that is impossible to describe in categorical terms. But that is much”or at least enough that the best novels are able to shine a light into an unseen world.

It is also pretty damned difficult, and not all the books discussed in this collection are up to the task , which might be part of the point. If successful novels are often mystical and opaque, then evaluating ambitious but unsuccessful novels can sometimes better illuminate the virtues of the form. Examining Martin Amis’ The Information , contributor Jason Cowley quotes a 1990 interview in which Amis described the nineteenth-century British novel as “a superpower novel . . . 800 pages long, about the whole of society.” Amis disparaged the contemporary novel for being short, “sanitized,” and “about the middle classes,” and then claimed he was “trying to get more truthful about what it’s like to be alive right now.” Cowley argues that The Information , a tale of two middle-aged writers that Amis meant to be his own “superpower novel,” was in fact the novel that showed how limited a writer of fiction Amis had always been. The book’s fatal flaw”which Cowley claims is present, in varying degrees, in all of Amis’ fiction”is a “failure of imaginative empathy . . . instead of pathos, we have pontification; instead of empathy, we have stylized effect.”

To make up for this failure, Amis chooses themes and settings with obvious pathos and presumptive cultural purchase: corrupt capitalism, nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, the Holocaust, approaching apocalypse. These are meant to make us care about his stories, which are populated by characters who are reduced to being vehicles for style. As a stylist, Amis is talented, but The Information revealed not only the limits of that style but also his inadequacy as an investigator of the human condition. Cowley’s chief complaint is that Amis’ fiction lacks love, that he does not love his characters enough to empathize with them: “You cannot believe in them because their creator does not bestow upon them the gift of autonomous life nor does he want you to believe in them, and if you cannot really believe in them, you cannot care.”

If Amis’ characters cannot reveal important truths about human experience because of their creator’s lack of empathy, Paul Auster’s characters in Leviathan show that sufficient love and concentrated care by the author can bring fictional characters to life. Such characters “imply that, no matter how banal our lives, we all live deep in mystery. That there is only so much we can ever hope to know, even of the people we are closest to, even of ourselves.” So writes Kevin Jackson in one of the collection’s finest essays, on Auster’s 1992 novel Leviathan , whose story concerns a friendship between two American writers and the descent of one of them, Benjamin Sachs, into a strange world of ideology and terrorism.

As a theme, terrorism attracted a number of contemporary novelists, including Don DeLillo, whose Mao II is also, as Jackson notes, about writers and terrorists, although DeLillo comes at the subject in a rather less personal way than Auster. DeLillo’s characters awkwardly pontificate on writing and terrorism: on how the former used to be able to shape culture and society but how the latter now exerts more influence over ideas and attitudes. He comes at his theme rather like Amis does, as a subject for his characters to talk about.

But where DeLillo’s Mao II exists to facilitate academic ruminations on society, Auster writes about political violence not to instruct, but to get at something deeper in the human heart. Nor are terror and violence, in this case, mere plot devices to keep the reader interested.

Leviathan is narrated in the first person by the conspicuously named Peter Aaron, who is writing about his friend Benjamin in memoriam; we learn early on that his friend accidentally blew himself up while making a bomb. A series of disturbing events in Benjamin’s life leads him to “renounce words” and instead “step into the real world” as an eccentric kind of terrorist”one who blows up replicas of the Statue of Liberty. As Jackson explains, one of the difficult tasks for this novel is to create genuine sympathy for Benjamin, a figure whom we discover piecemeal but who is, in the end, an enigma. The facts of his life remain “mysterious, resistant to commentary and narrative,” which is itself a comment on human nature and experience: that we are, in the end, deep mysteries.

The unspeakable and unknowable is also a dominant characteristic of the last novel examined in this volume, John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun . Set near a lake in a remote part of rural Ireland, nothing much happens in McGahern’s acclaimed novel. There’s no obvious themes or chapter divisions, and no attempt by the narrator to explain or analyze the characters. In his essay, editor Ray Ryan argues that in this novel, “Meaning is always secondary to Being.” McGahern takes the reader into a world that can only be understood by participating in the silences and rhythms and repetitions of its inhabitants’ daily lives. What’s important are the mundane details of life, which McGahern evokes in language that elevates them and reveals them as divine. There is, according to Ryan, something liturgical in the way McGahern writes about the rituals of the everyday: “The economy of McGahern’s style, and the layers of being it encodes, provide something more and less than knowledge. It is less a moral vision of how to live than a creed that believes in something holy and still within the ordinary and also something ghostly and numinous beyond it.”

If there is a common theme to these essays, it’s that the good of the novel is bound up in its ability to reveal hidden truths, not by explaining or instructing or creating a hyper-realistic version of reality, but by evoking and suggesting and creating the world as it is, by incarnating and therefore revealing the mysteries of the human heart. And that’s not only a profound good; in our time it’s an indispensible one.

John Daniel Davidson is a freelance writer and journalist whose work has appeared in n+1, The Morning News, The Claremont Review of Books , The Millions, and elsewhere.

RESOURCES

“Where Have All the Mailers Gone?” by Lee Siegel, The New York Observer , June 22, 2010

“Is the Novel Dead?” by Cynthia Crossen, The Wall Street Journal , May 8, 2012

The Good of the Novel edited by Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan

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