A number of those most consistently and honestly upset by Obamacare seem to be libertarians and I’ll side with them on this issue though I consider myself to be what some have called Orestes Brownson—a radical conservative. I’ll ignore the clueless conservatives and liberals who think moral order to be a gloss upon their favorite campaign slogans.
I would defend and nourish the inherited truths of Christian tradition but have been forced to see that those truths currently bear too heavy a load of human beliefs whose truth was contingent upon knowledge which was once plausible but no longer is. Those sorts of beliefs, we can even call them `lesser truths’, are necessary but we are bound to always update our understanding of Creation to reflect the best knowledge we have. In terms acceptable to those with a variety of beliefs: it’s a simple matter of recognizing our concrete reality which doesn’t contain all truth but can’t be incompatible with any truth, however grand or abstract.
I dealt with some foundational issues of politics in three earlier essays: The Liberal Mind: How Much Health-care Do We Need?, Moral Order vs. National Welfare Systems, and Does Expensive Weaponry Undo Western Traditions of Liberty?. See The Liberal Mind: What is politics? for a discussion of the fundamental nature of politics.
I’ve also written essays in which I’ve claimed the United States to be an incoherent collection of political entities held together by the wealth of the government in Washington coming from its power to collect lots of taxes. Our incoherent understanding of what a “political community” truly is, and the bad policies we’ve adopted as a consequence, has damaged the United States, probably beyond repair. I’ll provide a link to The Fragmented States of America for a bit of background on my views of our current political mess.
A nation held together by the force of arms and systems of bribery which are made possible by the tax-collection power of the central government isn’t a real nation; to the extent it be coherent, it has the order of an ant-hill with a host of parasitic queens and has not the order proper to a human community. I’m greatly disturbed by the inclination of so many Christian leaders to see the gathered hoards of money and then to think of all the alleged good to be done with it, good done at the point of guns bought with money collected with earlier threats of violence.
I have an extremely low opinion of the government of the United States as it has developed after World War II and a merely low opinion of that government as it was between the time the Founding Fathers left public life and the beginning of the Cold War. The Founders were human but not merely human; they were men of substance, of moral character, though sometimes that character was infected with too much ambition or greed. Arguably, the Founding Fathers were as good as it can get at this stage of the evolution and development of human being, individual and communal. Americans accepted without protest the transition from those Fathers to the self-serving scoundrels Tocqueville found in political power by the 1820s. Tocqueville’s head was full of images of great American leaders because of the stories of his father’s friend, the Marquis de Lafayette and that young Frenchman was horrified at what he found in that age just after the Founders’ age. He was disturbed by what it might say about the public moral character of the United States, though he struggled to find good in this country. The future is here and I’m not frightened so much as I’m disgusted by the opportunities thrown away by Americans even as they pretended, and still pretend, to have made good on their opportunities.
We Americans have the government we deserve as numerous commentators have warned us, but we don’t feel any need to examine our own slavish attitudes, figuring that we’ll take any master who promises to ease the difficulties of life in this mortal realm. And, by way of an expansion into the most fundamental realms of human life, education and healthcare and regulation of a huge number of human relationships, the Federal government seems to have done well in providing for us, until you look at the longer-term, the years when future generations will be paying for our irresponsible and self-centered uses of power over the various assets of our human communities. Government has become our means of stealing from our children and grandchildren, of stealing from our various communities.
I’m not opposed to government as a matter of principle, though I admire some libertarians who do take that stance. I can admire the courage and integrity of those who take positions I consider quite wrong, at least when they place some true moral goods, such as peace and freedom, at the center of their structures of belief. Currently, it seems as if there are ten morally courageous libertarians for every morally courageous conservative such as Pat Buchanan; the number of morally courageous collectivist liberals has grown vanishingly small since the passing of the generation of Lionel Trilling and Edward Shils.
I believe this world is the story of God forming the Body of Christ, a human community enlarged greatly but one like unto the community which formed around Jesus of Nazareth during His life on earth, a human community which is the mortal form of the true Body of Christ—the community of those sharing God’s life on the other side of the grave. This is not a hierarchical community, as Christ Himself told us in His actions on earth and especially in His various commandments that all be servants of each other, including His special commandment at the Last Supper which was directed at those called to any sort of leadership. Even the Head of the Body is Himself a servant in a true way and not a servant whose entire duty is to give orders to the other members of that Body. Christ is not King so much as He is the Soul, the unity, of the Body of Christ because He is the divine stuff from which that Body and all of Creation was formed. For various reasons, including respect for all of God’s creatures and also a respect for our lack of knowledge of the true status of a particular human being, we Christians are bound to act with some degree of charity to all human beings, sometimes that charity taking the form of only non-intervention in their affairs. In a proper and usually modest way, we serve all, but we clearly are bound strictly to always serve those close to us in a strong and primary way.
It’s perhaps more useful in most analyses of practical matters to speak of our relationship to the Body of Christ in terms of dependencies, a relationship said by some in history and sociology to be the true cement of human communities. We are fully dependent upon our Maker and this is a tie which determines our loyalties in a radical way and forces us to be loyal first and foremost to the Almighty. See Justice: The First Step Towards God for a discussion of this issue which builds upon a claim of St Thomas Aquinas.
We are loyal, if only grudgingly and as a matter of justice, to that upon which we are dependent, but we should be truly loyal to that upon which we are willingly or even enthusiastically dependent. If the governments of this world care for us, feed us, pay us, we are very much dependent upon them. In my way of thinking, we should have good governments which can provide certain sorts of protection: defending us against hostile foreign powers, keeping our streets safe, protecting us against—for example—rent-seeking classes or corporations, and perhaps providing some buffer-zones for the interaction of groups and communities which have incompatible ways of—for example—setting the price for the exchange of money for goods. I would willingly accept my dependence upon such a government and would willingly accept my duty to be loyal to that government; others accept their dependency upon a government claiming omnicompetence and thus making a claim upon our total human being and they offer up a total loyalty which subordinates their loyalties to family and local communities and ethnic groups and certainly God and Church. The problem for now is that the rent-seekers are strongly attracted to the power of central governments and are willing to promise the sheep an end to all ills.
Some who think the government to have overstepped its boundaries, place those boundaries more tightly than do I; some even advocate the elimination of all entities I’ll just describe in naive terms as `central governments’. There are many such thinkers in all age groups but a seemingly larger percentage in the younger groups; after all, it’s the younger men and women who are looking at miserable working lives with poor pay and low benefits during most or all of their lives. Of course, those younger men and women won’t be able to subsidize the Social Security and Medicare benefits of us in the older age groups, especially when the choices come down to schools for their children vs medical benefits for an older generation whose members believe the world owes them a prosperous retirement and expensive medical treatments for their sedentary, overweight bodies. The Boomers and members of the X-generation will soon enough learn why the Millennials are so cynical and apathetic; if disaster strikes at its earliest possible point, then even the parents of the Boomers will smash into reality in their last years.
In any case, with Obamacare, the rubber has truly met the road. If this is implemented, it will be another massive program to further cripple a badly limping economy with the fees for the breakers of kneecaps passed to future generations, bills which will not be paid because the only way to pay them will be to sacrifice the needs of another and younger generation, closing schools or restricting them greatly, letting American infrastructure—already something of a joke in the developed world—deteriorate further, dipping into the already dwindling supplies of job-creation capital, and so forth.
Let me state a couple truths of human being:
- The younger generations will be morally well-ordered only if Grandma and Grandpa put in a sustained effort during their Golden Years to pass on stories reflecting moral truths and the particular ways of living which embody those truths within particular family-lines or ethnic groups, however imperfectly those truths are embodied.
- The younger generations will have good economic opportunities only if Grandma and Grandpa make the proper sacrifices from their accumulated surpluses.
What to do? The Catholic bishops have nobly offered their descendants for martyrdom while preferring to imagine that Obamacare can be baptized once it’s magically stripped of `prejudice’ against Christians. As for me, I’m forced to anticipate some sort of martyr’s future because I can’t imagine a program, healthcare in this case, can be properly implemented if it involves moral issues upon which Christians differ in their own ranks and upon which Christians differ greatly with most pagans especially those of a post-Christian variety.
So it is that I a conservative Catholic will align myself with morally well-ordered libertarian thinkers such as Matthew May whose declaration of independence, Guest Post: I Will Not Comply, was reposted at a financial commentary blog of strong libertarian leanings. In political terms, his statement climaxes in his statement: “I will not comply because I am a free citizen of the United States, not a subject of its government.”
True enough, for a libertarian or for a Catholic trying to update traditional understandings of the Body of Christ: we would be free citizens of a true and morally well-ordered political entity, but we find ourselves as target subjects of a bloated government inhabited by rent-seekers of a variety which would amaze even Mark Twain and may well have amazed Gore Vidal during his last years. There are substantial differences between my understanding of human being and that of libertarians: I consider our social natures to be true created being, communal human being, and not just some tendency for our individual selves to form external relationships. In other words, I consider the Body of Christ to be real and not just a way of speaking of a gathering of individuals bound by a particularly important contract. I find my belief in human being, individual and communal, to be more compatible with the findings of evolutionary biologists than are the beliefs of any version of modern liberalism, libertarian or collectivist.
Yet, there is a point where respect for reality, however understood, leads all men who would be morally well-ordered and who would live in a a society morally well-ordered to stand up and say, “No,” when any part of the greater human community—ecclesiastical hierarchy or government, oversteps its realm of competence, its realm of moral operation. My difference with libertarians, including those who claim to be Christian, is my strong belief in the reality of human communities, the reality of human communal being, and ultimately the reality of the Body of Christ.