I’m worried about an FBI team who contacts an isolated individual who’s failing to make contact with jihadist radicals, teaches him how to make a bomb, helps him to plan and carry out an attack, and chooses a large and public venue to arrest him.

I’m worried about an Attorney General who claims “that if Mohamud hadn’t come in contact with the FBI, he ‘would have made his plans tragically real.’”

And I’m worried about mass media outlets that just repeat the line that this is a plot that has been “thwarted” or “foiled.”

For the record, it sounds to me like this Mohamud fellow may actually have become a threat on his own someday. He very well may have warranted observation by the FBI. But the way the Bureau pursued this investigation sounds very much like entrapment for Mohamud and fear-mongering for the rest of us.

“Look!” says the FBI & co., “here’s a home-grown terrorist you should be afraid of! It could be anybody! What’s a little inappropriate pat-down compared to the risk of being bombed while lighting a Christmas Tree? What’s a little warrantless wiretapping or email surveillance next to, you know, a west coast 9-11?”

What would have been wrong with just watching this kid, and seeing what he does on his own? At least then, he might have actually led investigators to a real terrorist cell, and could have led to some genuine intelligence of real plots to commit terrorist acts. And, when arrested, he might have been guilty of a real crime.

As it is, he’s just become the solitary target of an FBI plot to … to what? boost their own ratings? I hope not. To foil and thwart terrorist attacks? Not very effectively.

I want good security and I want active intelligence gathering on terrorist activities. But that’s not what this was. At best, this was a colossal mistake. If anyone in the FBI is reading this, please, don’t make the same mistake again.

My mother, drunk or sober

Here in Washington State, we have a “Find Your Legislator” feature on the website, as well as contact info for our elected officials. I happen to live in north Seattle, which is Washington’s 46th Legislative District (for state offices) and 7th Congressional District (for federal offices). That means the people I’ll be looking up are:

• U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell
• U.S. Senator Patty Murray
• U.S. Representative Jim McDermott
• U.S. President Barack Obama
• Washington Senator Scott White
• Washington Representative David Frockt
• Washington Representative Phyllis Gutierrez Kenney
• Washington Governor Christine Gregoire

These are all Democrats, so I expect most of my comments will end up directed toward the Democratic Party’s platform. I expect to have plenty of criticism, both of the party and of these individuals’ particular votes and speeches. However, I hope that it is clear that my being against (or for) something held by Democrats is not to be taken as being for (or against) anything held by Republicans. I have seen plenty of reprehensible behavior from members of both major parties, and I do hope to discover at least some noble behavior from my own elected officials. I hope to have my native cynicism about politics softened by real encounters with real public officials.

I plan to post my letters here on the blog. Should I receive responses to my letters, I will post them in their entirety. I hope it will encourage others to also write regularly to their elected officials. If you like what I say, or how I say it, feel free to copy any of my language and use it in your own letters. If you think I’m off base, don’t hesitate to tell me so. A democratic republic requires open and lively dialogue to remain free and true to itself.

More than that, I hope that doing a little research every week will build a solid foundation of knowledge for being a better citizen. Then, when the next election comes around in a couple years, I won’t have to scramble so much to figure out who and what to vote for.

I’ve mentioned before some of the principles I wish were more prevalent in political conversation. Here’s the list again, for those who hate clicking on links:

• Common good
• Subsidiarity
• Interdependence, aka, Solidarity

Many more good things worth talking about certainly belong on the list, but this is as far as I’ve gotten in trying to articulate some essential political principles.

However, while I generally like to focus on the positive, it’s important to recognize the genuine evils out there which undermine any possibility of real human life, liberty, and community.

Recognizing evil

A quick reminder: evil is not any thing in itself. Evil is the distortion or destruction of something good. So when my anger starts rising up, I have to remind myself to look for the good that’s being distorted. I have to remind myself that whoever is committing or supporting evil is actually trying to accomplish something good, albeit in a twisted way.

In other words, if there’s a way to achieve the good without distortion, then I have made my enemy into my friend.

A good thing, like a virtue, can be distorted in at least two ways: too much (excess) or too little (defect). There may be other dimensions of distortion out there, but I’m not wise enough to talk about the much. In any case, a good always falls into the category of evil if either A) there’s just not enough to actually be the good it’s trying to be, or B) it so overextends itself that it ceases to actually be that good thing.

An example: the dignity of the human person is perhaps the fundamental good that government exists to protect.

It is evil when the government fails to actually protect that good, in cases like physician assisted suicide or unjust war, or even in less clear cases like lack of enforcement of environmental or food health regulations.

It is also evil when the government extends the protections of human dignity beyond the human person, for example giving corporations “rights” under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, or giving teachers greater rights than parents over the education of children.

Support an imperfect good, but never support evil

Now, no law is perfect, just as no individual person is perfect. We all make mistakes. We disagree about what the best course of action is.

Thomas Aquinas notes that the moral obligation is to seek the good, not necessarily to seek the best. The best isn’t always possible, and the best isn’t always clear. But it usually is clear when a good is so minimized or so distorted that it ceases to be good anymore.

My friend Mark notes that “10% less evil than the other leading party” is still evil, and therefore not worthy of a vote or any other form of support. He writes in a candidate if both the major party candidates take positions in support of some evil: for example, a Democrat may support unlimited access to abortion while the Republican opponent may support the torture of prisoners. Both positions are distorted at their core: they reject the good of human dignity in favor of some lesser or dependent good – say, convenience or security; so these core distortions are called “intrinsic evils”. Therefore, he won’t consider voting for either of those candidates, and will seek someone who at least does not support some intrinsic evil, even if there’s not much else to agree on.

It’s the least we can ask of our public officials, that they do not promote anything intrinsically evil.

My evil list of evil

I’m putting out here a list of things that are absolute deal-breakers for me. These are things so obviously and intrinsically evil that, if a politician is in favor of them – or even not opposed to them – I cannot in good conscience lend them any support. Sadly, this leaves me with almost nobody in the major parties today that I can vote for. Like Mark, I fear I’ll be writing in most of the candidates I’m voting for this election.

• Abortion – it’s murder, and I can’t condone it; this includes IVF, and any research that takes a human life
• Physician-assisted suicide, aka, euthanasia – again, murder is unjustifiable, for any reason
• Unjust war – I follow the basic criteria laid out by Thomas Aquinas and others; the Iraq invasion was manifestly unjust; the current Afghanistan situation has only the slenderest chance of meeting Just War criteria
• Torture – they’re human beings, even if they’re our enemies

Again, this list is incomplete, but it’s as far as I’ve sorted out at this time. Feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments.

Land of the free? Home of the brave?

I’m trying to figure out who and what to vote for this November. I’m nowhere near being able to recommend particular candidates or ballot measures to other people, but I am getting closer to articulating some basic principles for making political decisions.

It seems to me that the American government has, for quite some time, been doing all sorts of things that a government has no business doing; meanwhile, it has neglected the very proper and necessary work of governing.

The purpose of government

It seems to me that government exists to defend and promote the common good of society.

What do I mean by “the common good”? I mean things that we all hold in common, things that belong to all of us and that cannot really belong to any of us except as a society. The common good involves symbols, such as standards of weights and measures, or the definition of money; it involves matters of law and morality, such as civil rights and justice; in a very few cases, it appears to involve physical goods, such as air or water – though I think what really is common in these things is our access, rather than the actual molecules or matter at hand. None of us “possesses” these things alone; we all possess them insofar as we are human, insofar as we are untied in a social community.

The government – any government, whether by king or by congress – exists to ensure that each individual continues to possess these common goods in the context of the community. A government which fails to protect and promote the common good fails in its fundamental task and in its very reason for existing.

Now, our current approach to government in the U.S.A. has lost sight of this basic mission. It still functions, and occasionally functions very well, but the idea of the common good seems to have been replaced by constituent interest, and the role of guaranteeing justice seems to have fallen to the zeal of promoting ideology.

The question at the front of most candidates minds appears to be, “How can I allocate resources to my constituents,” and by “constituents” they mean their contributors and supporters. This seems to me to be exactly backwards. Rather than an impartial administration, they are explicitly partial. Rather than pursuing the common good of the whole society, they chase after the particular good of the few who contribute to their campaigns.

What is to be done?

This is a problem endemic to both major parties, so far as I can tell. The Tea Party movement seems to have given focus to a great deal of the anger and frustration people feel, but seems much more of a negative movement – saying what they don’t like – rather than a positive movement – saying what can be done.

I can sympathize. It’s not hard to spot a problem, but it’s often very hard to solve it. And often I don’t know if my solution will work till I try it out. Sometimes, my solution just makes the problem worse, despite my best efforts.

I’ve noted in a previous post that the idea of subsidiarity is part of the solution. That is, working with problems at the local level where the problem exists, with higher level organization acting as support for the local problem-solvers. This is a principle I think should be applied both in business and government.

I’m also reading up on Distributism, which proposes to avoid the centralizing and collectivizing tendencies of both the “right” and the “left”: it proposes that the independent ownership of property – especially ownership of productive property, like farmland or construction tools or other objects that allow a person to make or trade goods – is essential both to a healthy economy and a democratic government.

I find the Distributist argument to be compelling in many ways. But it seems to me, essentially, to be an economic system rather than a political system. In other words, something more than independent ownership of property is needed to reform our government.

The principle I think is missing is interdependence, or solidarity. This, it seems to me, is the proper goal of government: to promote a society in which each citizen recognizes his or her unique place in the whole. This is an organic vision, not a mechanical one: citizens are not cogs in a machine; they are not interchangeable. Rather, each has an irreplaceable contribution to make to the world, and the role of a government is to remove the obstacles and protect the forum for each to give his or her gift.

I’m still far too vague about what this would look like, practically – to say nothing of how to get from here to there. But I would like to start talking about the following three principles, at the very least:

• Common Good
• Subsidiarity
• Interdependence

Love puts all the pieces together

I’m a big-picture kind of guy. I like to know where things are headed, and why. Only then can I really focus on the particular parts or steps.

So, in looking at living a virtuous life, a fully human and humane life, my first question is, “What makes an action or a habit to be virtuous?”

As far as I can see, there are three contenders for the title of “form of the virtues,” or, to put it another way, “foundation of morality.” They are:

1. Duty
2. Interest
3. Love

Now, before I go any further, I think it’s clear that any coherent approach to human action has to take account of all three of these aspects of morality. But the question of priority, of which one governs the others, is critical. I’m convinced that most ethical problems – both personally and in the public square – would become much more manageable if we had the big picture straight.

Duty and interest: how we think and how we act

When I ask a moral question, I tend to phrase it something like this: “What should I do?” or “What’s the right thing to do?” And the thing that makes me worry or question my decisions is usually a conflict between what I think I ought to do and what I want to do. I want another beer, but I promised to be the designated driver; I ought to treat my boss with respect, but I want to tell everybody what a jerk he/she is; I want that new smart phone, but I know I can’t afford the monthly payments; that sort of conflict.

That sense of duty is strongest (for me, at least,) in the little everyday decisions. I’ll ignore the duty to eat healthy food and get exercise, but I’ll feel guilty about it. When I’m in the checkout line, I don’t even think about not paying for the food or clothes or whatever I’ve bought. It’s a duty, after all.

But whenever I’m not strictly bound by duty, the sense of my own interest becomes more important. I ask, things like: “Do I want to marry this person?” or, “Do I want to take this job?” rather than, “Should I marry so-and-so?” or “Should I work for Mom & Pop Inc.?” The question of desire, of what is in my “best interest” seems to dominate in those kinds of decisions.

Duty is a category of justice: it tells us what we owe (what is due) to each other or, in a reflexive way, even to ourselves. It looks at the world in terms of what is required or necessary in any given situation.

Interest is more personal: it is focused on how to get what is best for me. My will, my desire, is the only standard it recognizes. It looks at the world in terms of what is desirable and possible.

In other words, duty doesn’t know how to deal with optional or free choices; and interest doesn’t know how to deal with obligations, seeing laws or rules merely as obstacles to be overcome. Stated this baldly, it’s pretty clear that neither duty nor interest works as a basis for moral life. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking in terms of duty and from acting in terms of my interests.

Love: forming and shaping desire

This is where the virtue of love shows its ability to support every aspect of human life. I’m not talking about the emotion of love, or affection, or being in love. Love as a virtue shows us the big picture of what is good in life.

Thomas Aquinas notes that “good” has two aspects: “One, the ultimate and universal good, the other proximate and particular.” Love is what shows us the ultimate good, and puts everything else in context. It’s like looking at the picture of a puzzle: it shows where each piece belongs.

If I love the environment, that shapes the kind of transportation I use and how I dispose of my trash and the kinds of things I eat and so on. If I love my spouse, then I look for things we can enjoy together and for ways I can contribute to his/her comfort and happiness.

Duty and interest are both important to help us make choices about particular goods. But Love knows when to call on them, how to balance them, how to choose in optional matters and how to accept obligations and requirements. Love shows us how to be fully ourselves, and fully human. That is why love is the form of all the other virtues.

Perhaps a start would be the argument that there is a natural order to the world, and things work better when we cooperate with it. Plants die without life. Cows were made to eat grass. We live longer if we exercise and eat our veggies than if we sit in front of the TV and eat cookies all day every day. Men’s and women’s bodies each operate in ways that the other cannot.

If you were able to argue that following the natural order is a moral obligation, you could argue that….

This touches on, I think, the different moral roles of virtue and law.

Virtue enables us to realize the full potential of our nature and, according to Catholic teaching, of our supernatural gifts. Law, on the other hand, prevents us from (or at least warns us against) acting contrary to our nature. Virtue motivates us to reach for excellence, but places no obligations, strictly speaking, on us. Law places obligations on us, both positive and negative ones, but only obliges us to a bare minimum.

Law does not ask us to fulfill our nature; it only demands that we not act contrary to it. It does not strive for excellence. It is a stop-gap against excessive vice.

Now, ever since the so-called “Enlightenment” (if I understand my history correctly) western culture has been obsessed with the notion of law, and has largely forgotten the idea of virtue. This is why “morality” immediately brings to mind the idea of obligation.

But virtue sets a higher standard. Or, to put it another way, it opens up a broader field of possibility. Morality is not just about jumping through hoop X and avoiding pitfall Q. Morality is about living my life in a way that fulfills its potential, that brings to reality the potential good that is within me.

And that good is both for me and from me. It is good for me to be healthy. It is also good for me to serve my neighbor with whatever gifts I have. Indeed, serving my neighbor with my gifts is good for me as well, because it exercises and brings to greater perfection those gifts themselves. And it feels good to do so, which is a sign of health in using those gifts.

When we’re focused on obligation, feeling good is taken as a sign of not meeting an obligation. But when we’re focused on excellence, feeling good is a sign of health, of growth.

So much more to say, but I also want to prepare a reply to bob. So, till soon…!

On Virtue Quest, I’ve been blogging about my reading of Alisdair MacIntyre’s “classic,” After Virtue. At the Coalition, I’ve raised the question of what the basis is for actions permitted to agents of the State that are forbidden to private citizens, such as capital punishment and war. So, toward the end of After Virtue, I ran across this passage:

But my present point is not that patriotism is good or bad as a sentiment, but that the practice of patriotism is in advanced societies no longer possible in the way that it once was. In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear. Patriotism is or was a virtue founded on attachment primarily to a political and moral community and only secondarily to the government of that community; but it is characteristically exercised in discharging responsibility to and in such government. … Loyalty to my country, to my community – which remains unalterably a central virtue – becomes detached from obedience to the government which happens to rule me.

Now, I’m far from being in easy agreement with everything that MacIntyre says – or even with most of it. But his distinction between “political community” and “government” struck me as exactly the sort of thing that I have argued in saying that the State as embodied in modern nation-states is not necessarily the same kind of beast as the State as embodied in the variety of forms known to, e.g., Thomas Aquinas.

Here is how the very modern Catechism of the Catholic Church (#1910) describes the role of the State:

It is the role of the state to defend and promote the common good of civil society, its citizens, and intermediate bodies.

I’m still reading through what Thomas has to say about the State, but my impression thus far is that the power of the State derives from its responsibility for goods that are common to society and therefore beyond the power of any single person as such. And the Catechism agrees, at least insofar as its authority is bound to the common good and does not bind whenever an agent of the State acts against the common good. Or, in a saying at least as old as Augustine of Hippo, an unjust law is no law at all.

Now, the first thing that almost everything I’ve read says about the authority of the State is that is “orders” things to the common good. That is, it resolves what is otherwise disordered and chaotic when left to individual persons or families. This is clearly the source of authority for laws and lawmaking. It also is fairly clearly the source of authority to tax or conscript, that is, to call individuals to a duty owed to society.

Now, I myself have to this point held the opinion that war and capital punishment are simply “public” forms of self-defense. In other words, I’ve assumed that the State does not have any “rights” or authority that is essentially beyond what is given to individuals; the authority of the State is simply exercised on a larger scale, with broader consequences. Yet almost everything I am reading implies or assumes that the State’s role of ordering things to the common good extends to acts that are different in kind from the moral responsibilities of individuals.

So I’m left with a couple questions at the end of this rather rambling post:

First, does a radical difference in the structure of government make a real difference in the relationship of individual persons to the State (such that Patriotism is no longer the same thing, for example), and in the role or authority of the State itself?

Second, does responsibility for the common good extend to acts that are beyond the normal scope of morality as applied to persons taken singly?

The view from the top makes it look so easy!

More goodness from Pinckaers’ The Sources of Christian Ethics!

Following St. Thomas Aquinas, Pinckaers gives three basic stages of growth in virtue:

1. Beginner / childhood
2. Proficient / adolescent
3. Perfect / mature adult

Each of these stages essentially follows the growth in freedom of a person, and challenges the person to become more free in his or her life. Here’s how each stage works:

Beginning in virtue

The beginner needs to learn how the world works. This is the stage of getting to know – to know oneself, to know one’s abilities, and to know the world and the moral basis of one’s life in the world. The primary work of this stage is learning or, to use a more traditional word, discipline.

Now, it strikes us that discipline is something opposed to freedom, but when the freedom we seek is to live a fully human life, we start out in need of knowledge and in need of practice. Human beings need to be raised and trained and taught.

The goal of education is to lead the child to understand (and the educator must first understand this himself) that discipline, law, and rules are not meant to destroy his freedom, still less to crush or enslave him. Their purpose is rather to develop his ability to perform actions of real excellence by removing dangerous excesses, which can proliferate in the human person like weeds stifling good grain, and by guarding him against unhealthy errors that could turn him aside and jeopardize his interior freedom.

Moreover, this is only the initial stage of growth, just as practicing scales is the beginning and not the end of playing the piano.

Progress in virtue

The second stage involves internalizing the rules by seeing and acting on the reason the rules exist in the first place. It involves a certain testing of the rules – not to destroy them, but to understand them, just as a pianist might try out different formations of a chord or ask what happens when you add this note to it. This is the stage where virtues become, not actions that one follows because they’re imposed, but a kind of “second nature,” an ability that really is one’s own.

Virtue is not a habitual way of acting, formed by the repetition of material acts and engendering in us a psychological mechanism. It is a personal capacity for action, the fruit of a series of fine cations, a power for progress and perfection.

In other words, freedom and goodness cease to be mechanical exercises and become organic parts of us.

Perfect virtue

First off, Pinckaers warns (and I warn with him) that “perfect” here doesn’t mean the end of the road; rather, it means the fulfillment, and the completion of development. Probably a better word for today would be “mature” but St. Thomas used “perfect” so Pinckaers explains what he meant by it.

We can characterize this stage by two features: mastery of excellent actions and creative fruitfulness.

This is the ultimate goal: to be able to do whatever we do well, and to do it creatively. This is what Thomas Edison meant by saying that “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” The virtuous person has gained the freedom and the ability to bring inspiration to reality in spite of the difficulty or obstacles in the way.

This does not mean the end of learning or of growth; rather it means that learning and growth continue almost naturally, without great effort – because the virtuous person has learned how to learn, and has rooted him- or herself in good soil for growth. Virtue has become a stable foundation for the freedom to do what really leads to happiness.

And that’s a goal worth striving for!

"But I shot a man in Reno..." or did I?

Have I mentioned how much I love the book I’m reading? The Sources of Christian Ethics by Servais Pinckaers. And it’s not just because the author’s last name sounds just like “pink hairs,” either!

A history lesson

The middle section of the book gives a quick history of major ideas in morality from Plato to the present. The very short version is that in the fourteenth century (that’s AD 1301-1400) an English Franciscan named William of Ockham (famous for “Ockham’s razor”) began pushing the theory that the will was more important than the intellect, and that freedom was the greatest of all goods – greater even than truth.

Ockham’s ideas caught on, and in the next couple hundred years transformed the way people thought about ethics and morality.

Instead of being about the pursuit of goodness, happiness, and excellence, morality became a struggle between freedom and law, between choice and obligation.

Don’t impose your morality on me!

There’s a lot packed into that history, but something that struck me very personally was that law is something imposed on me from outside, whereas virtue is something I develop from within myself.

Now, being a basically lazy man, I’ve spent vast portions of my life waiting for somebody else to make me do things. I’d put off homework till the teacher sat me down and watched me do it. At work, I would only get things done if the boss was around to make me look busy. Heck, even at home, I only bother to pick the place up if there’s company coming over.

In other words, I’ve been defining my freedom as avoiding the imposition of law – and I associated doing anything at all with the obligation of law. Even things I know are good for me, I need someone to “make” me do them.

The approach of virtue is altogether different. It recognizes that freedom is at the service of a person’s ability to act, to do stuff. And it is a person’s mind that figures out what’s good to do. The will follows the mind and moves us into action.

Right, totally abstract. Let me see if I can give an example.

An example

So I’m sitting on my bed looking at the mess that is my bedroom. Papers piling up on the desk. Clothes strewn all over the chairs and the corner of the bed – not yet on the floor, but that’ll come soon if I don’t do anything about it. A bowl and a glass from when I ate lunch in my room a week and a half ago.

But something in me says, I don’t have to clean my room. Nobody’s going to make me. You’re not the mom of me!

So, instead of cleaning my room, I read a book. Yep, The Sources of Christian Ethics. And it occured to me that I could choose to clean my room – not because someone was forcing me to, but because it was good to. I could clean my room simply because I enjoy having a clean room.

So I stood up and started clearing off my desk.

Those who cling to freedom will lose it

It’s ironic that, by clinging to a false freedom – refusing to let anybody “make” me clean my room – I actually lost a true freedom: the ability to clean my room and to enjoy it. But that’s what happens when a good thing gets put in the wrong place.

Freedom is not the highest good, and is not something to be grasped with both hands. If we hold it lightly, and use it to grow in virtue, then it blossoms itself and makes everything we do truly free.

What seems to be the problem?

A cop pulled me over the other evening as I was driving home from work.

I had to move into a turn lane so that I could make it to the freeway onramp, and there were a couple cars in the lane with just enough room for me to squeeze in between them. So I flicked my turn signal, checked my blind spot, and moved over.

Immediately, the car behind me – a black, unmarked sedan – flashed police lights and a spotlight right in my rear-view mirror. There was no shoulder, so I turned into a parking lot and the police car pulls behind me.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?” he asked. “You failed to signal for one hundred feet before changing lanes, and you cut me off so that I had to apply my brake to avoid a collision.”

After he let me go, I cruised on home. Driving along the freeway, I kept thinking how I’ve done the same maneuver a thousand times without an accident, and I was pretty sure he was actually accelerating to close the gap I had moved into, and didn’t this guy have anything better to do than pull me over?

But at some point it occurred to me that the officer was in fact correct. I had broken the traffic law. And he had every right, even an obligation, to pull me over.

For the record – or, thankfully, the lack of one – he let me off with a warning.

Now, this didn’t stop me from driving about five over the speed limit on my way home. And it didn’t make me call the police station to confess my every traffic violation. But it did remind me that I am not the standard by which the law should be set. I’m an ordinary schmoe, and I make mistakes, and I cut corners when I think I can get away with it.

Even so, the law reminded me that the road is a dangerous place, where I’m skimming the concrete at sixty-five, surrounded by two-ton juggernauts of aluminum and steel that are flying by at least as fast as I’m going. So I did drive a little more carefully.

And, meanwhile, I’m trying to be more open to correction in every part of my life. Because, just as on the road, I’m not always right. I make mistakes. I cut corners. I don’t always get away with it – and thank God! If there were never any consequences, I’d never learn from my mistakes, and I would hurt my friends much more often than I already do.