The theme/question for this quarters CoCR by our host at The Cross Reference is:
I guess I’d be interested in hearing perspectives on what obstacles are presented by the varying liturgies (high/low, sacramental/non-sacramental, rubrical/freeform) and how they might be possible to overcome. I don’t necessarily want to get too doctrinal (although the law of prayer and the law of belief go hand-in-hand, as far as Catholics are concerned). And the issue of liturgical reform would be open for discussion as well.
Much of American worship experience when compared to that 5 or 10 centuries earlier is very much less liturgically and bound in ritual and movement than it was then. Charles Tayler in A Secular Age
I will admit up front, that I have always been part of a liturgical worship environment. I grew up in a Lutheran church … and have now ended in a Eastern Orthodox church, which is arguably about as “high” liturgical as you can get in the modern church. So I have a definite bias on the place of liturgy in worship. But, I’d like to pose a question for the non-liturgical church members.
One of the things liturgy and liturgical cycles are good for is memory. Passover and Pascha (Easter) are memories of two very significant events in the Hebrew and Christian churches. These are marked liturgically. The rest of the church year is marked out with a variety of other liturgical events … which in part are to help us remember and mark those as important. These can also mark other historical events. Recently, the church I attend has added to its liturgical calendar a service to remember 9/11. Americans remember July 4th and certain other Presidential holidays. We remember Pearl Harbor a lot less well. Why? Because, there is no secular “holiday” or secular liturgical event (if you will) to mark that day. 9/11 currently also has no such secular liturgy remembering that day. In 50-75 years in the absence of such a marking, like Pearl Harbor, 9/11 will fade from our public consciousness. The point is, liturgy and ritual make a connection not just in our mind, but in our whole being, our nous if you will, between us and events which we … as a church, find significant.
My question is how do you non-liturgical churches hold precious and fast to the important events in Church history in the absence of liturgical remembrance?
Wacky ideas have been floating in my noggin.
In the latter chapters of Genesis we are told a tale of Joseph and the Pharaoh. I should note, in the interest of honest disclosure I am no fan of Joseph bar Israel. However, for this little tale the important thing to note is that Joseph found himself in a position of control with regard to his government and in a financial crises used that opportunity to centralize the Coptic economy.
Today we find ourselves in a banking crises and it seems one of the results is that the central bank is now no longer an independent government entity. Centralization is occurring. It is likely that this process will continue until the currency and bank are fully under control of the (elected) nitwits on the Hill.
Some generations later, it is unclear how many, the Israelites found themselves due to Joseph’s centralization … to be slaves.
If F.A Hayek is right, we too will discover to our dismay that we too are slaves.
How then will we find our Exodus from that slavery I wonder?
Personally I think a recession would be preferable to acceding government control of the Bank. They should not allow some of the collapse as they don’t hold the paper to take on the debt they plan to assume. A little pain now, will be far better than the bloody revolution our children will be required to shed in order to win our freedom back from slavery.
If one was to look at the tale of two crises and how our respective candidates reacted to them, the difference between them becomes clear.
In the Georgia/Russia scuffles, McCain immediately reacted speaking out against Russia’s aggression. Obama, in brief, did and said nothing of any note for quite some time, until the dust mostly settled and then … asked for a UN security resolution against the act (somehow overlooking the fact that any resolution would have to pass a Russian Federation veto).
In the current AIG/Merril/Banking crises, Mr McCain has asked for the retirement of the SEC head. He has suggested some regulatory mechanisms which he thinks might be helpful, and pointed out that he was warning about a upcoming crises of this sort for some time. Mr Obama has criticised everyone else, but has not actually suggested anything … yet. Like the above, it would be my bet that when a (liberal) consensus of “what to do” has arisen in his camp, he will put forward a relatively useless and vanilla proposal.
Mr Obama, I suggest, is not a leader. He may someday grow to be one after all he is young an inexperienced and has much learning and growth in the poitical process yet ahead of him. But he has not (ever?) demonstrated any leadership qualities. He may be able divise and find a consensus in within a party which has substantial agreement on the basics. But he has not demonstrated he can take the risks and gambles necessary to lead.
Mr McCain is a more instinctive leader, he may lead you astray sometimes, he may not. But he will lead. And that is an important quality in a leader.
One of the primary talking points of Mr Obama’s campaign is that what is needed (as a change) are “smart” policies. But there is a fundamental problem with that, it’s wrong. Let’s start with this quote which is in line with what I’m trying to say:
America’s regulatory structure is mostly the child of the Progressive Era, when well meaning, well educated protestants thought that they could save the world by putting bright technocrats from the right kind of families in charge of the messy, sprawling economy and make it clean and tidy and safe. That sounds sarcastic, but it wasn’t entirely unreasonable. The first great victory of the Progressive Era, the major revolutions in public health, did just that: made life safer and nicer for everyone, with minimal inconvenience, by putting experts in charge of things like sanitation and quarantine and the water supply. Before Hayek, we didn’t have all that much reason to think that this feat couldn’t be repeated elsewhere.
But now we have had Hayek, and the failure of the Soviet Union, and a hundred other ways to learn that in any sizeable economy, the information problem is simply too big. Even leaving out the various incentive problems ably detailed by both Marxists and public choice economics, a well-intentioned bureaucrat cannot know enough about what’s going on in the world to thoroughly manage even a static economy, much less one that has to cope with millions of constant changes, from hurricanes to new babies.
In the context of the current financial kerfuffle, an oft noted claim has been that what is needed is “better smarter regulation.” As if that will somehow so fundamentally change the market structure so that risk will not be taken and occasionally those risk takers will overreach. Economic and social management cannot be done by “being smarter” as the complexity the problem means it is intractable. The only solution is to yield control. The setting of policy has to be done by the millions not by the hundreds of experts. Individually those experts may be nominally smarter than a great majority (but likely not all) of the millions for whom their decisions are replacing. But the complexity of modern society means the problems and issues cannot be comprehended by any single or group of experts no matter how smart they are.
What is not needed is an Executive who believes he can either by himself or a counciliar consensus of “experts” figure out the “solution” to the problems that will face him. This is exactly the opposite of what we need. We don’t need a smart leader who thinks (or knows) he’s smart and is seeking an inteligent solution. We need a wise leader who knows he isn’t smart and the best he can do is to suggest a direction and perceptive enough to notice which of us have figured out a “better way” and pass the word.
On fault I have with many progressive/liberals blogs. By and large they fence with the wrong parties. They comment on and discuss conservatism by arguing with the current proxies, such as Mr Bush, Mr McCain and the host of pundits. Who they don’t attack or discuss are the ideas and arguments of the actual conservative foundational thinkers, that is economists like Friedman, Mises, and Hayek, or the social theories of Nisbet or Solzhenitsyn or the political ideas of Jouvenel and so on. On this part, I’d like to make it a more general plea. Liberals (Progressives) and Conservatives alike mourn the fact that the “other side” is bereft of “ideas”. If any of you out there know of a liberal or progressive blog offering counter arguments to those like Friedman, Hayek, Solzhenitsyn and so on, please let know. I’m starving for that sort of encounter in the ’sphere.
It has been an assumption since the Nixon era that politicians lie. It is likely that this was just impressed on that generation more forcefully and politicians always have had an uneasy truce with fact. Mr Obama currently is making hay (apparently) piping the notion that the Bush administration (as I predicted he would) is at fault in the current banking kerfuffle. Read a little from a nominally unbiased economist like Ms McArdle (she’s says she’s voting for Obama on this one). Here for example, she points out that Mr Obama’s claim that GOP policies are “high test hooey”. Here is another and this and finally this. Read them, they are a cogent analysis of what happened by an trained economist.
The point is the political hay that Mr Obama is making is based on a lie. A fiction, a twisting of circumstance, which he is using to his advantage. This is not the only such example, there are many more and Mr Obama is not the only person in this race doing similar things. The point is Mr Obama claims to be different (and is thought to be smart). The other reason, of course, is that I am not an Obama partisan. However, he likely knows exactly what he is doing and is intentionally misleading the public.
Perception ultimately is more important in the election cycle than fact. Nobody is going to “call” Mr Obama on this particular fiction. Mr McCain can’t because to do so can’t be put in a 6 second sound bite. Nobody is going to read the links above in any detail.
PS. Where did all the hope/change nonsense go? Has Mr Obama stopped using it, or have people just stopped noting it?
The Corner today points out a interesting survey done by David Frum. The Corner poster, Jim Manzi does some additional statistical musing and comes to a similar conclusion. However, this should cause a lot of consternation and navel gazing by anyone considers right vs left or conservative vs liberal a straightforward set piece ideological struggle. Consider that post in the light of two additional pieces of data:
The problem is that the Democratic states have been espousing policies that value equality and should be normalizing that which divides us. The GOP is ostensibly the free market party and supports business more and therefore should one would expect would widen the divide between the haves and have-nots.
However, the demographic data contradicts this. The Democrats are stronger in areas that are more divided and the GOP in areas with more equality. If this is stable … then there is an essential problem here.
Which means one might conclude that GOP policies do more to reduce the divisions between us and the Democrats reinforce them. So either politicians of both parties are lying all the time of that everyone is wrong about policy. That is, the policies that are assumed to reduce division in fact acerbate them and which are assumed to divide, don’t.
To restate, if you the reason you are a Democrat is because of the stated desired results that the Democratic platform espouses, you should switch parties because the actual entrenched policies of the other side empirically do what you find desirable and the policies of your party are empirically harmful. If on the other hand, you are rich and you want to get richer (and if it’s at the “expense” of the other guy you don’t care) then you should vote Democratic, because it is their policies which have been most effective at achieving that goal.
