Inadvertent Obfuscation

The Supreme Court has ruled that the town of Greece, New York, did not violate the law by opening town meetings with Christian prayer. Constitutional questions about the role of religion in public spaces are as old as the nation, and all sides of the issue have been fervently litigated. But what is often obscured in these legal battles and the ensuing cultural dialogue is the question that, for Christians, ought to precede the legal debate: What does it do to our faith to insert prayer into public functions?

Many Christians maintain that prayer serves a guiding moral purpose. A recitation of faith is thought to arouse moral sensibilities, evoking a responsibility that extends beyond the mere words of the law and to the conscience of the assembly. Defenders of this view are correct that personal conscience and moral thinking are essential to good governance, and for many believers, faith plays a central role in ethics. But as much as Christian belief may guide political judgment, political corruption also infects Christian thinking.

We know that government and politics are often ugly. We hope to root out corruption and fraud, but even working at its best, politics requires sly thinking, wheeling and dealing, bitter compromise, and even deceit. Much of politics is figuring out how to handle scheming and dishonest people, and sometimes only fire can fight fire. Show me a leader incapable of vice and I’ll show you one incapable of action.

Those who would pray before public meetings hope that Christian reflection might bring more virtue and less vice to the practice of politics. What they overlook is the corruption that politics brings to faith. Many of the permanent qualities and practices of our political system are antithetical to Christian ideals. To make a rite of faith a public political act is to waft the noxious fumes of politics into the sacred space of religion. When we place our faith and our politics in the same arena, it is not our politics that improves but our faith that suffers.

Christians ought to seek moral and political guidance through our beliefs–in private life. The separation of church and state likely does more to protect the church than the state.

As we approach Holy Week and Easter, I’ve been re-reading the gospel accounts of the events surrounding Jesus’s crucifixion. At the climactic moment of his conviction and sentencing, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate offers a choice to the assembled crowd: spare one of the condemned from his fate, either Jesus or the criminal Barabbas. In the liturgy, when reading this part of the gospels on Good Friday, the congregation plays the role of the crowd, selecting Jesus to be crucified.

Fairly certain the mob is mistaken about the man-god’s guilt, Pilate fidgets. “Why, what evil hath he done?” The mob is more interested in retribution than a fair trial. Pilate buckles and the execution proceeds: “he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person.” (These quotations are from Matthew, though the accounts of Mark and Luke are similar.)

The governor’s unenviable situation resembles the moral challenge of all elected leaders in a representative democracy–though by this time Rome was of course an autocracy and Pilate a political appointee–to balance personal conviction against public demand. To satisfy the crowd’s demand would be profoundly unjust. To stand in their way would have been disastrous and perhaps impossible (Matthew says, “When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing…”).

Apart from Jesus and Mary, Pilate is the only man named in the Apostles’ Creed and its variants. We don’t mention the disciples, we don’t recognize any individual prophet–only Pilate, spokesman of Rome, civil servant, and pagan, appears in the basic statement of Catholic and Protestant faith. Creation is discussed without Adam, the incarnation without the apostles, prophecy without Elijah; why not the crucifixion without Pilate? This may be an accident of history, an effort by the early Christian leaders who developed the original “Old Roman Symbol” to establish canonical belief in the crucifixion as a definite historical event in contrast to the contemporaneous polytheistic landscape of myth and legend. It may serve as a reminder of the severity of Jesus’s suffering–not only did he “suffer death and was buried” but also endured hours of torture, which is useful to remember in order to emphasize the cosmic importance of his sacrifice. Still, two millennia of Christians intoning “crucified for us under Pontius Pilate” seems a heavy burden for a provincial governor’s soul.

Pilate is regularly castigated in Christian dialogue as not only a ruthless dictator but an impotent coward who sacrificed righteousness to placate the mob. It seems to me that his choice was more complex than that. Protecting Jesus would likely have jeopardized the precarious political order of Jerusalem and perhaps all of Judea, already a volatile and violent region. And there’s little reason to think Pilate could have stopped them that day had he tried. That doesn’t justify his decision to sanction a false prosecution–“it’s too hard” is never a convincing excuse for abandoning principle–but it does make it a curious thing that Pilate is so disparaged. Didn’t he, in the end, show a good deal more compassion and virtue than the crowd? And after all, isn’t the moral message of Good Friday that we all have the capacity to act as vindictively as those who forced Pilate’s hand?

In the end I’m less concerned with Pilate’s modern public image than the kind of political behavior it encourages among Christians. Fixating on Pilate’s responsibility is blame-shifting. It’s like raging at our own elected officials, who, faulty as they may be, are charged with the impossible task of mediating their own convictions and their constituents’ demands, in order to lessen our own perceived role and responsibility in maintaining civic health and promoting good governance. Imagine that.

I drop in at n+1 from time to time, but I would have missed this upsetting editorial were it not for the recommendation of a friend.

Let me save you the trouble of following that link. Here are the crucial points:

1. The value of advanced degrees is a “fiction” perpetuated by universities in order to preserve their cultural and financial status.
2. Universities essentially function as “guilds”, even “cartels”–gatekeepers of the elite echelons of society.
3. Professional credential requirements in many fields, particularly medicine and law, inflate prices for services that could be performed just as well with less training.
4. Similarly, public policy decisions do not benefit from academic training, as public policy is “rarely complex” in the sense “that you need a stack of degrees to figure it out”.
5. Therefore, all intellectuals have a moral responsibility to abandon their degrees, shred their diplomas, and never run for political office.

Evidence for these hypotheses is in short supply, which doesn’t matter because the n+1 editors are making an emotional argument rather than an analytic one. The Tea Party’s dismay at the alien oligarchy of the intellectual elite aligns with Occupy Wall Street’s vexation at the moral bankruptcy of the financial and corporate elite and a broader, politically neutral general frustration with the quality of leadership, brewing a perfect storm of outrage against the institutions which appear to uphold these various dynasties. Even the old guard are losing faith. Guillotine blueprints are being unshelved and dusted off, and it’s hardly surprising to see a magazine that aspires to intellectual iconoclasm doing its best to surf the populist crowd.

But this editorial seriously misdiagnoses the problem in a way that, were it taken seriously, could do real damage to social progress. As my friend observed, “it’s weird that [the authors] would look around and decide that what people in our society need is less education.” In fact, the very elite institutions they critique, including my alma mater, are among those leading the charge for accessible higher education. Though the authors are correct in noting that tuition increases present a challenge for lower- and middle-class students, they fail to acknowledge that at the most elite of colleges, effective tuition rates for the middle class have stabilized if not fallen in recent decades thanks to generous financial aid programs. There is no elite cadre maliciously pricing out the disadvantaged; the problem is that public universities, the ostensible regents of the equal opportunity promise, have lost much of their support from state governments, raised tuition to compensate, and forced millions of students into unbearable debt.

It’s impossible to take seriously the authors’ suggestion that we abolish the system of academic credentials which constitutes the foundation of higher education:

Che Guevara once declared that the duty of intellectuals was to commit suicide as a class; a more modest suggestion along the same lines is for the credentialed to join the uncredentialed in shredding the diplomas that paper over the undemocratic infrastructure of American life.

Their position seems to be that there is no distinction of quality between the best university and the worst university, that the workforce does not benefit from advanced education, and that tuition inflation is an artifact solely of greed and insularity rather than of a precipitous drop in government support. I would be very interested to read an article presenting evidence to defend these assertions–arguing, for example, that the American higher education system has nothing to do with our technological supremacy, that law graduates of Harvard and Yale are no more skilled than those of any other law school, and that declining state funding and federal student loan support are not responsible for increasing student debt–but of course such an article could only be a farce.

If the authors’ attitude toward university education is wildly speculative, their evaluation of public policy is downright zany:

The President — a meritocrat himself — has succumbed to what might be called the “complexity complex,” which leads us to assume that public policy is so complicated that you need a stack of degrees to figure it out. But major political questions are rarely complex in that sense. They are much more likely to be complicated, in the Avril Lavigne sense, meaning that they involve reconciling disagreements among competing stakeholders — or, as the situation may demand, ratcheting them up.

Perhaps this passage explains the absurdity of the authors’ statements about education, law, and medicine–they simply believe that disciplines they don’t practice are not complex. Now, it’s true that “million-dollar medical training isn’t necessary to perform an abortion, [and] routine legal matters could easily, and cheaply, be handled by noninitiates.” But easing up on professional licensing requirements is quite a different thing from burning diplomas en masse while discrediting the legal and medical professions. And do the authors genuinely believe that solving our pressing public policy issues doesn’t require specialized expertise? I challenge them to devise a solution to health insurance inflation, or carbon emissions, or unemployment, without meticulous research and years of specialized study–precisely the kind of work for which educational institutions are designed. I’m reminded of Mencken’s popular observation that, “For every complex problem there is a simple solution. And it’s always wrong.” In truth, our elites are too uneducated to devise proper solutions and adjudicate competing reform ideas. We complain that our representatives haven’t read the text of the Affordable Care Act, for example, but the truth is they wouldn’t understand it if they did–the problems it addresses are, in fact, extremely complex, which is why the bill was drawn up by an army of experts with advanced degrees. That is also why the public supports nearly every individual component of the bill when they’re explained, yet a plurality opposes the bill as a whole. If we listened more carefully to those experts sufficiently educated to explain legislation, we would have a much better shot at enacting desirable reforms.

One might feel that this article, written by staff at n+1, whose five founding editors together boast four degrees from Harvard, two from Columbia, one from Yale, and one from Oxford, smacks of hypocrisy. One would be correct. Social commentary is an elite occupation. Ignorant social commentary is a bourgeois pastime. The authors, perhaps because of their own privilege and education, feel qualified to evaluate broad spectra of society of which they have little knowledge and less experience. They peddle ersatz expertise to condemn genuine competence.

                                  Palindromes
                                 aren’t
                                just
                               letters
                              jumbled
                             randomly
                            together.
                           Working
                          letters
                         mirror
                        themselves.
                       Sometimes
                      words
                     function
                    also.
                   Are
                  they
                 as
                hard
               as
              paragraphs?
             Occasionally.
            Practice
           encourages
          improvement.
         For
        desire,
       pursue
      willpower.
     Wise
    answers
   come
  after
 Mercer:
“A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.”
 –Mercer.
  After
   come
    answers.
     Wise
      power
       will
        pursue
         desire,
          for
           improvement
            encourages
             practice.
              Occasionally
               paragraphs,
                as
                 hard
                  as
                   they
                    are,
                     also
                      function.
                       Words
                        sometimes
                         themselves
                          mirror
                           letters,
                            working
                             together
                              randomly.
                               Jumbled
                                letters
                                 just
                                  aren’t
                                   palindromes.

Extra points if you identify why it isn’t symmetrical. Extra extra points if you come up with the most permutations of meaning in the title.

My friend and colleague Liz Moody recently launched a blog about Kool-Aid and dead fish. It’s worth a visit. One of the blog’s features is a series called Point of Writing, wherein Liz asks people what, in a few sentences, is the purpose of writing. I was delighted to be her first respondent:

I don’t know if these words are wise enough to deserve being rendered as an image. But the question is worth considering from time to time, I think, particularly for young “writers” like myself who might not yet have satisfactorily examined their reasons for embracing the medium of written word.

There’s irony in publishing this response on a blog, the form of writing which typically entails the least rehearsal, refinement, and correction.