Saturday roundup

 I've come across a lot of gems lately.

Clara Piano's review of The Economics of the Parables by Acton Institute founder Fr. Robert Sirico at Law & Liberty is one of those that compels me to put the book in question on my gotta-read-soon list. 

Piano has chosen to focus on one of the themes Sirico explores: the nonsensical nature of envy. (There are others, such as usury and interest, government debt, and business cycles.) As Piano explains:

To quote the great Peter Kreeft: “Envy, though not the greatest sin, is the only one that gives the sinner no pleasure at all, not even fake and temporary satisfaction.” Once it becomes clear where prices (and wages) come from, the role of private property plays in society, and what profit and loss signals mean, envy is uncovered as the irrationality that it is. Economists have understood the mechanisms behind these market phenomena since the 16th-century priests of the School of Salamanca, but it is up to each generation not to forget these lessons. This latest book by Fr. Sirico is evidence that he is doing his part.

The pearl-of-great-price parable nicely illustrates the subjective nature of value, and what, therefore, a fine thing it is when buyer and seller agree on the value of something and a transaction of mutual benefit occurs:

One common frustration with economics, capitalism, or “the market” concerns how things are valued. Economists adhere to the subjective theory of value, which simply means that goods and services have value in the market because subjects—you and I–give them value. Jesus also assumes this in his Parable of the Pearl of Great Price, as Fr. Sirico recognizes in his chapter on the subject:

The pearl was a luxury good and is presented with no condemnation in the parable. Instead, Jesus portrays the merchant as wise for having his priorities right in selling what must have been a substantial amount of property in order to obtain it. What might be seen as a pointless material good, may be seen by others as something wonderful, even a reflection of the beauty of Creation itself. People’s perspectives, and thus the value they place on objects, differ.

If high prices tempt us to view all businesspeople as greedy, or if we are angry because teachers and nurses aren’t paid as much as CEOs, we would do well to recognize that the only sustainable way to change market outcomes is by changing what people value. Valuations can be mistaken (and often are), and incomes say nothing about the objective value of persons as such. The important moral question is not where economic value and prices come from, but what we ought to value.

What would be required for a shift in how we value various occupations? Sirico suggests, by examining the Parable of the Rock, a greater emphasis on the cultivation of virtue:

the lesson is that many unjust market outcomes are the result of fundamental institutions like families, churches, and schools, not fulfilling their responsibility to form characters oriented toward the good, true, and beautiful. Much of what economists refer to as “transaction costs” would be eliminated in an economy consisting entirely of saints, but that is unfortunately not the world we inhabit. Economics reveals how we depend on God and man for our everyday needs.

Anton Barba-Kay's essay "The Once and Vital Center" at The Hedgehog Review is a right-between-the-eyes examination of a frequent theme of my own: the increasing brittleness of society as polarization worsens. 

His writing style is worth the price of admission:

[F]or a culture as besotted with what is fresh, radical, innovative, and revolutionary as ours, the election of the oldest president in US history remains just remarkably uncool. Nostalgia, left and right, is one of our most powerful political motivations, and Biden is our vinyl president, an anachronism panic-purchased from an AARP catalogue to remind us of a simpler time when Congress legislated and the president was a decent, PG-rated man abiding by the laws of meteorology and object permanence. Biden expresses our collective wishful thinking that we might return to the old normal, or to the kinds of principles redolent of nowstalgic normality: bipartisan negotiation, basic technocratic competence, appeals to truths in common, deliberative persuasion—in sum, the unum part of the Great Seal, or, politically speaking, those characteristics making up the myth known as “The Center”—that thing Americans love to love and hate to hate, but are doing their best to keep unraveling.

Don't go yearning for this center to re-emerge, though:

It seems clear at this point, during this breathing space between Trump 45 and 47, that the center is not coming back. The new normal consists not in a new pattern but in the inability of a new pattern to settle into place. Even at his best, even when not precariously rifling his mind’s file cabinet for the mot juste, wobbling on the brink of a very senior moment, there has ever been an unsettling undertone to Biden’s moderate words—suppressed exasperation, a strained note of if-you-don’t-knock-it-off-back-there-I’m-going-to-turn-this-car-around, a grimace of worry, as if some part of him knows he is trying to force the convictions we would like to be convinced of, but no longer can be. The recently enacted Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was garlanded with the adjective “bipartisan” by all the friendly press, while the headline on Fox News (motto: “We keep your eyes on the Squad”) was “Biden, Democrats celebrate after $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill passes—despite some ‘no’ votes.” Nor was it a given that the bill would pass at all, with its compromises decried as failure and capitulation up to the last moment. Far from demonstrating the continuing viability of the political center, it showed only that one can still motivate the party strays through fear of a new electoral whacking—and that a lot of pork can still buy a little love.

The mythic bipartisan center was never a matter of niceness; it was not a norm of comity, civility, deference, or bonhomie. People used to have more formal manners, but they did not necessarily exercise them in their dealings with one another. The aspersions cast on Lincoln, Hoover, Nixon, or Clinton are no different in zeal or degree from those cast on Trump and Biden—if anything, they were nastier.1 Nor was the center a golden-mean position occupied by high-minded people forbearing from the fray. Politicians appealed to the center because it remained the best way to win the most votes—not because most people wanted to avoid taking extreme sides on any given issue. If Tom Daschle befriended Bob Dole, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia attended the opera together, that was an effect of the comparatively genteel 1990s rather than a cause.

Why did the center disappear? We decided it was boring:

The center’s greatest virtue was also its greatest liability: It was an insipid notion, not uplifting in itself. Yet, precisely by virtue of being preferred by no one in particular, it also moderated all positions by resolving them into a form in which they could communicate with each other. Only to the extent that there was a center could there be a principled difference between right and left at all. (It no more makes sense to think of Stalin as a figure of “the left” than Hitler as of “the right.”) Absent the center, there can be no two “sides” to any argument, only splintered confrontations between friend and enemy.

That point makes for a nice segue into a recommendation of Andy Smarick's piece at The Dispatch entitled "In Defense of Norms and Institutions." Grownups undertaking the mundane work of actually governing is not often particularly sexy, but it's how civil society has kept going:

 [T]hose warning about Armageddon and peddling a fix almost always live in the world of abstractions. The direst assessments and predictions and most radical proposals typically come from those with little to no experience in the actual work of public leadership. Often this is because the business model of the commentary world rewards overstatement. But it’s also the case that public service generally leads the servant toward prudence. The practical wisdom that comes from facing real-world problems, teaming with others to develop workable solutions, and being held accountable for results reduces the urge to catastrophize. Those shaped by experience are likelier to think in terms of specifics instead of concepts, to see concrete choices instead of memes, to appreciate opponents as people instead of avatars.

I can only nod my head so far in agreement, though. As I've pointed out here at LITD, even at the local level, governance has shown itself to be decidedly not immune to the diversity-equity-and-inclusion infection. And no, I have no fix to peddle. I will say, though, that those who see it have a duty to point it out.

At The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan does just that, and in fact demonstrates that Critical Race Theory and Great Replacement Theory have more common characteristics than proponents of either would care to admit:

A liberalism that believes that racial identity is the core identity for an American, that “whiteness” is a definable American characteristic that needs to be “dismantled,” and that the central political struggle in the US is between older whites and younger non-whites, is a liberalism helpless in the face of white nationalism.

In fact, it is a liberalism that fuels and empowers, legitimizes and provokes white nationalism. It sees race first; it sees groups rather than individuals; it denies the possibility of color-blind citizenship; and it sees white people as a “problem” — in Jon Stewart’s formula — bigoted until proven otherwise, inherently oppressive, a race to be stigmatized and diluted as quickly and as broadly as possible. And this form of racial essentialism — this anti-white racism — is now propagated by every major cultural, corporate and educational institution as if it were God’s own truth.

And this is the trap we are in. CRT and GRT are in a deadly and poisonous dance in our culture. They foster ever-increasing levels of racial identity in each other; they demonize whole populations because of skin color; they both believe liberal democracy is rigged against them; and the logic of their mutual, absolutist racial politics is civil conflict, not democratic deliberation.

Paul Rossi, a New York high school teacher, guest posts at Common Sense (Bari Weiss's Substack), telling a harrowing tale of how precarious his employment situation is, due to his refusal to buckle under to DEI:

Last fall, juniors and seniors in my Art of Persuasion class expressed dismay with the “Grace bubble” and sought to engage with a wider range of political viewpoints. Since the BLM protests often came up in our discussions, I thought of assigning Glenn Loury, a Brown University professor and public intellectual whose writings express a nuanced, center-right position on racial issues in America. Unfortunately, my administration put the kibosh on my proposal.

The head of the high school responded to me that “people like Loury’s lived experience—and therefore his derived social philosophy” made him an exception to the rule that black thinkers acknowledge structural racism as the paramount impediment in society. He added that “the moment we are in institutionally and culturally, does not lend itself to dispassionate discussion and debate,” and discussing Loury’s ideas would “only confuse and/or enflame students, both those in the class and others that hear about it outside of the class.” He preferred I assign “mainstream white conservatives,” effectively denying black students the opportunity to hear from a black professor who holds views that diverge from the orthodoxy pushed on them.

I find it self-evidently racist to filter the dissemination of an idea based on the race of the person who espouses it. I find the claim that exposing 11th and 12th graders to diverse views on an important societal issue will only “confuse” them to be characteristic of a fundamentalist religion, not an educational philosophy. 

My administration says that these constraints on discourse are necessary to shield students from harm. But it is clear to me that these constraints serve primarily to shield their ideology from harm — at the cost of students’ psychological and intellectual development. 

It was out of concern for my students that I spoke out in the “self-care” meeting, and it is out of that same concern that I write today. I am concerned for students who crave a broader range of viewpoints in class. I am concerned for students trained in “race explicit” seminars to accept some opinions as gospel, while discarding as immoral disconfirming evidence. I am concerned for the dozens of students during my time at Grace who shared with me that they have been reproached by teachers for expressing views that are not aligned with the new ideology.

One current student paid me a visit a few weeks ago. He tapped faintly on my office door, anxiously looking both ways before entering. He said he had come to offer me words of support for speaking up at the meeting. 

I thanked him for his comments, but asked him why he seemed so nervous. He told me he was worried that a particular teacher might notice this visit and “it would mean that I would get in trouble.” He reported to me that this teacher once gave him a lengthy “talking to” for voicing a conservative opinion in class. He then remembered with a sigh of relief that this teacher was absent that day. I looked him in the eyes. I told him he was a brave young man for coming to see me, and that he should be proud of that. 

Then I sent him on his way. And I resolved to write this piece.

And finally, there's "Frogs In Boiling Water," my latest at Precipice. It delves into the same basic theme as many of the pieces I'm recommending above. I daresay I have an original contribution to make, though.