Some Disturbing Aspects of CS Lewis' Version of a Christian Society -- Secular Associations

 

So, in discussing what appears to be C.S. Lewis concept of a Christian society, I have generally thought it not so bad.  A bit repressive in matters of sex and family, perhaps, but very respectful of individual differences and tolerant on morally neutral matters.  And he seems to see many things as morally neutral, or at least morally complex in a way that does not allow for simple rules.  

But there are a few things in The Screwtape Letters that, if taken at face value, seem rather disturbing. Granted, not everything in The Screwtape Letters can be taken at face value. The devil is a liar, after all, and many of these issues are not addressed, or much less addressed in Mere Christianity, so maybe I am over-interpreting.  But let me raise them anyhow.

Secular Associations

Clearly in a Christian society, churches will hold great sway and influence. To all appearances, Lewis's concept of a Christian society would give a wide scope of individual tastes and interests in morally neutral matters. His view appears to endorse a wide range of hobbies and artistic expression.  So far, so good.  

But the unstated assumption appears to be that people will pursue their interests individually and in isolation. But this does not seem like a realistic assumption.  People who like, say, stamp collecting or building model airplanes do not necessarily pursue these interests alone.  They form stamp collecting clubs and model airplane clubs and so forth. What does Lewis think of that?  I ask because in Letter 25, Lewis puts in a plug for his other work by having Screwtape complain that the "patient's" new associates are merely Christian.  "They all have individual interests, of course, the the bond remains Christianity."  What does Lewis think of other social bonds, such a common interests?

The Screwtape Letters talks on several occasions about Christian participation in social activism.  Lewis is ambivalent on the subject.  On the one hand, social reform can be invaluable in building an actual Christian society, a thing that the devil naturally abhors.  On the other hand, Lewis sees two dangers in Christian social activism.  

One is the danger of people using Christianity as a means of advancing social reform, rather than social reform as a means of advancing Christianity.  "Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing."  (Letter 7). Lewis discusses the same idea in more serious terms in Mere Christianity, arguing that Christian social reformers (such as abolitionists) have achieved many great things, but only when they kept their eyes on the next world instead of this. This does not seem like too much of a danger in mere hobby clubs.  It seems unlikely that people will seriously confuse stamp collecting with their faith, or see Christianity mostly as an argument for how to build model airplanes.*

The other danger is more serious.  Lewis appears to endorse individual interests and tastes both as part of one's God-given nature and as having a sort of "innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness" and see liking "any one this in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it" as a protection against vanity and snobbery.  (Letter 13).  But that assumes a solitary hobby.  Which leads to the other danger Lewis sees in social activism -- a general trust of institutionalized non-conformity:

Any small coterie, bound together by some interest which other men dislike or ignore, tend to develop inside itself a hothouse mutual admiration, and toward the outer world, a great deal of pride and hatred with is entertained without shame because the 'Cause' is its sponsor and it is thought to be impersonal. . . . We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men may know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique.**

(Letter 7).  Note that these two things are essentially opposed to each other.  One is an argument for non-conformity, the other for conformity.  Of course, it is not clear that unfashionable hobbies will acquire quite the same sort of self-righteous intensity as unpopular religious or political organizations.  (Unfashionable artistic tastes might).  And people meeting to pursue the same hobby may give an opportunity to replicate the sort of vanity or snobbery that are unlikely to happen in solitary hobby.  On the other hand, at least some hobbies and interests -- team sports, for instance, or music -- seem necessarily to require associates and not be solitary.

Ultimately, Lewis is silent on this subject.

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*Although certain football players who are sure that God roots for their team may make you wonder.

**That is, of course, exactly the form the Christian Church took for its first few hundred years before the time of Constantine.  Lewis does not address that.

A Brief Comment on the War in Ukraine

 

I do recall my views on the war in Ukraine about a year ago.  In late 2022, Ukraine launched a counter-offensive and rapidly took significant swaths of land from the Russians.  The Russians launched a brutal bombing of Ukrainian power infrastructure in the winter, intended to freeze the Ukrainians into submission.  Russia also withdrew from the Black Sea wheat deal, raising the threat of global food shortages, and started bombing grain storage facilities and blockading Ukrainian ports.

So when 2023 rolled around and there was talk of another Ukrainian counter-offensive, I expected the ground offensive to be a success, just as it had been the previous year.  I had no idea if Ukraine would push the Russian forces all the way back to the 2014 borders, but I expected them to free vast swaths of territory.  But I did not expect even liberating all the territory back to the 1991 borders to mean peace, because the Russians would still have the ability to bomb Ukraine at will, and to blockade their exports.

Well, the exact opposite happened  The ground offensive failed to take any significant territory, and Ukrainians are facing the prospect of significant territorial losses.  But they have been highly successful in the air and sea wars, sinking about a third of the Russian's Black Sea Fleet,* breaking the blockade, and now doing significant damage in the air as well.

No real point here, just that things can be surprising.

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*Most of Russian's navy remains intact, but barred passage through the Straits of Bosporus.

When Did it All Go Wrong?

 

A healthy democracy does not choose Donald Trump as its President. And certainly, once he tries to overturn an election, a healthy democracy recognizes that he is a menace and bars him from office.

Which means that it didn't start with Trump.  America's slide from a healthy democracy has been going on for a long time.  So when did it start?  I have heard various candidates.  Once is the rise of Fox News, which distorted people's viewpoints.  Others point to Rush Limbaugh and talk radio, or Newt Gingrich and the new class of Republicans he brought to Congress.

Others have gone back further, to the passage of the Civil Rights Act.  The US has had at least two illiberal strains for a long time.  Both can be considered right wing, but they did not used to be partisan.  One was the the right wing illiberalism of Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society, mostly a Republican phenomenon.  The other were Southern segregationists, who were Democrats.  Each party had an illiberal faction, but its chances on a national scale were best if each party held its illiberal wing in check.  With Democrats embracing the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's, southern racists migrated over to the Republicans, allowing the illiberal forces to capture a party.  

But if that is so, it didn't happen over night.  When did the rot begin?

I do not claim to know, but I can say that the first hint I got of it was in the 1988 election.*  Ronald Reagan had won two successive landslides, but he was term limited out and showing signs of mental decline.  Democrats were feeling hopeful that it was their turn. And then Bush, Senior got nasty.  There was an ugliness to the election that I (admittedly quite young at the time) had not seen before, as if the prospect of a Democrat winning were some sort of outrage against the natural order.

Well, Bush Senior won, by a landslide, though not so wide a landslide as either Reagan election. His government was quite reasonable and moderate. And then in 1992, Bill Clinton ran and won. The election had not of the nastiness of 1988.  (Bush's campaign manager, Lee Atwater, author of the 1988 campaign, had died in the interim).  

But no sooner did Clinton take office that Republicans began their freak out that has not ended since.  Led by Gingrich, Republicans won control of Congress during the midterms and made clear that a Democrat in the White House was an outrage that could not be allowed to stand.  The investigated everything from the use of White House personnel to answer letters to the White House cat to rumors of a Clinton body count.  They shut down the government and threatened a default on the national debt.  They appointed a special counsel to find grounds for impeach and ended up with nothing worse than an attempt to cover up an affair.  They impeached anyhow.  And paramilitary groups trained in the woods for violent revolution.

All of this during a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity, with steadily falling crime rate, and even a successful balanced budget.

My conclusion was that somewhere along the time Republicans had developed what all conservatives claim to hate most -- a sense of entitlement.  In this case, entitlement to hold the Presidency.  And maybe other offices as well.  Republican reactions to an Obama or Biden presidency has been part and parcel of the same, except with serious problems on a national scale.

But looking back on it, even that may not be the whole story.  Looking back on it, there were signs of something very wrong in the late Bush, Sr. presidency.  Again, I first noticed in 1989 when a man in Stockton, California aimed an AK-47 semi-automatic, modified to by fully automatic, at a school yard full of children and started gunning them down.  To me, it was obvious that something so lethal had no place on the street.  I soon found that not everyone shared my view.  In fact, it was then that I first started hearing the argument that the whole point of the Second Amendment was to make military firearms widely available so that the people could engage in violent revolution against their government, and that taking military-style firearms off the streets was "idiotic" and the work of "lunatics."  The in 1992, Randy Weaver, a white supremecist in Idaho with a large arsenal, had an armed standoff with the FBI.  An alarming number of people turned out to express their support for Weaver.  The FBI and ATF badly mishandled the situation and ended up killing Weaver's unarmed wife and son.  Dealing with fanatics with military style weaponry who considered armed resistance to government as their constitutional right was unfamiliar at the time. And the rise of Rush Limbaugh and all sorts of paranoia about the United Nations also got started at this time.

This was the reaction to having a moderate Republican in the White House.  So, looking back with the clear light of hindsight, I can only conclude that sometime beneath the surface, not only did Republicans develop a sense of entitlement to the White House, but MAGA Republicans (not that the word existed yet) developed a sense of entitlement to control of their party.

The country has not recovered yet.

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*Though not related, 1988 was also the first time Joe Biden sought the presidential nomination.

The Trouble with Man Bites Dog Stories

 

One of the reasons that stories about how dangerous Trump is are not getting any attention is that he was President once, after all, nothing disastrous happened (not counting 2020, but everyone seems willing to give him a pass on that and say it was not his fault).  So it can be hard to convince people that this time will be different.

The other reason is basically that our news media see Trump's worst antics as a dog bites man story. Everyone knows that Trump is a vindictive lunatic, so announcing that is not news.  Of course, everyone knows that Biden is old and that Hillary sent State Department e-mails on a private server, and somehow that managed to get regular coverage.

But OK, Trump is crazy is old news, it is dog-bites-man, whereas the latest criticism of Biden can be portrayed as man-bites-dog.

And I understand why the news prefers to focus on man-bites-dog stories.  They are rare and exciting.  But if all you get in the news is man-bites-dog and never dog-bites-man, it can give people a distorted idea of what is going on in the world.  It can make people fear to let their dogs out in the yard or take them walking because of all those crazed dog-biting men out there.

And it can make people lose their healthy fear of vicious dogs. After all, who ever heard about a dog biting a man?

How Democracies End

 

I don't usually do a blog post based entirely on quotes, and I don't approve of the practice, but this one from Bulwark is too good to pass up. (Much of it paywalled).

The author believes that most Republicans really do support liberal democracy and do not want to live in a dictatorship, not even a mild, Orban-style dictatorship.  Part of me thinks that is giving Republicans too much credit.  On the other hand, the performance of most Republicans in this regard has pleasantly surprised me. Since the 2021 insurrection, all defeated Republicans, with the exceptions of Kari Lake and Solomon Pena have accepted the results.  

So maybe Trump really is an aberration, and maybe if he can be kept out of the White House, our democracy can recover after he dies or becomes incapacitated.  But right here and now in the real world, he is knocking on the White House door and all polling suggests he will be admitted.  Republicans have not been able to stop him so far and won't be able to stop him in the future.  Jonathan Last, the author, explains:

I absolutely believe that a majority of Republican/conservative elites have no interest in authoritarianism.  The don't want to live in an Orbanist illiberal democracy.

It's just that they have other incentives that they want much more than they want *not* to live in an Orbanist illiberal democracy.

. . . . . .

It's just a matter of incentives.  If your highest incentive is something other than the survival of liberal democracy, then you will eventually become a tool for authoritarianism, because the aspiring authoritarian will align your incentives with his own.

I agree with the premise that when an authoritarian menaces democracy, the only way to save it is for the democratic forces all across the spectrum to set aside their differences and  join forces for the sake of democracy.  Such statesmanship has been all too uncommon.

And I see no sign of such statesmanship in the US today.  We are sleepwalking our way toward dictatorship and I have no idea how to stop us.

Back to Reality

Well, that was fun while it lasted, but back to reality.  The reality is poll after poll shows Donald Trump winning.  This is usually attributed to Biden being too old or maybe a general sense of discontent.  If the issue is simply Biden being too old, then the response is to find someone younger, who would easily defeat the unpopular Trump.  Or, if it is Biden's association with a specific issue, such as inflation or the war in Gaza, find an alternative without that baggage.

The trouble is that none of the alternatives seem to do any better.  All of them have their own weakness.  Biden is too old.  Gavin Newsome is from California.  Kamala Harris is not seen as up to to the job.  And so forth. 

All of this makes me think that the real problem is not with Joe Biden or any particular candidate.  It is a basic sense of discontent.  Republicans are outraged at a Democrat in the White House and will never be happy until the travesty is ended.  Democrats are hopelessly split on what they want and any attempt to please one wing of the party will end up alienating another.  

By contrast, I think Trump has the advantage of nostalgia.  Ex-presidents are invariably more popular out of office than they were while in office.  (GW Bush is a notable exception).  We have problems these days.  We had problems when Trump was in office, too, but people tend to view the past through a rosy haze and idealize it.  Look how popular Obama is now, compared to when he was in office.  Thus I think nostalgia is a major factor in his favor.

Nonetheless, and I know I repeat myself here, if anyone actually does find that mythical Democrat who can beat Trump, I don't see the point in all these elaborate plans for a brokered convention or stepping down or whatever are necessary.  The approach is simple.  Biden should:

1. Find the mythical Democrat who polls better than Trump;
2. Name him or her as candidate for Vice President;
3. Pledge to step down in his/her favor if he reaches the point of being unable to do the job;
4. Let the vice presidential candidate get out and have more visibility until people almost forget who the real candidate is.  This would actually use the age issue to Biden's advantage.  It would let people believe he was a mere figurehead and the vice presidential candidate was the real power.

As a matter of fact, I can even think of a new candidate.  She is a woman of color with real executive experience, federal experience, and even national security experience.  She is conservative enough to reach across the aisle to disaffected Republicans, and she is out of office now, so she will not have to step down from anything to take the job.

I refer, of course, to Nikki Haley.

Of course, it won't happen.  But I can dream.

The House Judiciary Committee Interview of Scott Brady

So, I took my own advice and read over the transcript of the House Judiciary Committee's interview of former West District of Pennsylvania (WDP) US Attorney Scott Brady.  What did I find out?

Well, for one, it got rather redundant in places as Democrats and Republicans kept harping on the same information over and over. But in general, the WDP was tasked with reviewing tips from "the public" about goings on in Ukraine. Brady and five other attorneys at the office took on the task, in addition to their usual work.  They did not have any compulsory tools of a grand jury investigation, such as subpoenas, so they were limited to checking open sources, looking through their files, and voluntary interviews of US witnesses.  (They did not talk to Ukrainian witnesses, pp. 136-137).  They threw out tips they considered disproven and passed other ones on the the relevant grand jury.  

Brady was at some pains to point out that this investigation was not unusual, and that it took tips from the general public, not just Rudy Giuliani.  Democrats established that Giuliani was the first witness the WDP spoke to, and that Brady personally attended the interview.  Besides taking tips from the "public," Brady's team looked through FBI files for relevant information, which is how they found Smirnov's report from 2017 that made a "brief, non-relevant" mention of Hunter Biden.  Because of the sensitive nature of the investigation, it required renewal every 30 days from 17 different people.  (Brady was emphatic that the number was literally 17 and he was not just being hyperbolic).  The investigation came to a temporary stop several times as they awaited approval, and was further hampered by COVID restrictions.  Brady also sensed a resistance from the District of Delaware (which was the district investigating Hunter).  In October, 2020, both districts received a directive from above to give a briefing to Delaware, including providing Smirnov's report.  Delaware made clear that they were accepting the briefing only because of orders from above.

The discussion of the FD 2023 report is . . . interesting.

Q And can you tell us about the process that your office went through to vet the information that's now contained in this FD-1023? 

 Mr. Lelling. You can speak generally to that. I would not get into details.  

Mr. Brady. So we attempted to use open-source material to check against what was stated in the 1023. We also interfaced with the CHS' handler about certain statements relating to travel and meetings to see if they were consistent with his or her understanding.  

Q And did you determine if the information was consistent with the handler's understanding? 

A What we were able to identify, we found that it was consistent. And so we felt that there were sufficient indicia of credibility in this 1023 to pass it on to an office that had a predicated grand jury investigation. 

Q And did you determine that the CHS had traveled to the different countries listed in the 1023? 

Mr. Lelling. I would decline to answer that.

Mr. Lelling is Brady's lawyer.  The reason he gave was for refusing to answer was that the question was too detailed.  The same issue came up again later:

Q The ... Pittsburgh FBI Office obtained travel records for the CHS, and those records confirmed the CHS had traveled to the locales detailed in the FD-1023 during the relevant time period. The trips included a late 2015 or early 2016 visit to Kiev, Ukraine, a trip a couple months later to Vienna, Austria, and travel to London in 2019.Does this kind of match your recollection of what actions the Pittsburgh FBI Office was taking in regards to this. 

Mr. Lelling. Don't answer that. Too specific a level of detail.

Q You had mentioned last hour about travel records. Did your office obtain travel records, or did you have knowledge that the Pittsburgh FBI Office obtained travel  records? 

Mr. Lelling. That you can answer yes or no. 

Mr. Brady. Yes. (p. 93)

Scott Brady

It is clear from the indictment that as soon as the Delaware office looked at the travel records that the handler had, it became obvious that the source was lying because he was not in the places at the times that he said.  Another interesting note -- the handler operated out of Seattle.  It is not know whether the handler turned the travel records over to Brady.  If so, the lie would have been obvious.  As for closing the investigation into the 1023, Brady said that it was closed only in the sense that they were not able to investigate any further.  They forwarded the lead to Delaware (pp. 102-103).

The interview did not establish what percentage of the tips the WDP received were from Giuliani.  Democrats did quote the lawyer managing the Hunter Biden prosecution in Delaware as saying she did not want a briefing from the WDP because none of their information was credible, since it all came from Giuliani.  Brady responded that "some of the information" including the 1023 did not come from Giuliani (pp. 95-96), which I take as significant.  In describing sources of information, Brady said:

We had the information from Mr. Giuliani, and then we had developed work streams through discussions with other, either components within DOJ or other Federal agencies to run certain things to ground. But it wasn't limited to just Mr. Giuliani's information, yes. (p. 172).

This seems to suggest that the whole discussion of tips from the "public" was mostly a smoke screen, and that their actual information came from either Giuliani or in investigation of government files.  However, no one clarified this matter.  Another remark that seems rather startling, but that no one followed up on was Brady's statement that the only office that received "a" 1023 was Delaware (p. 150)*.  Note here that he does not say "the" 1023, i.e. the one from Smirnov that was under discussion.  Taken at face value, this would mean no one else received any 1023.  But no one followed up on this, and I should probably not leap to too many conclusions based simply on the use of an indefinite article. As for the information received from Giuliani:

There were a lot of names, which included details allegedly derived from those people, including, as I mentioned before, possible bank account records -- or I'm sorry, bank account numbers, email addresses, cell phones that would purportedly point towards evidence. There were a lot of -- there was information about a variety of schemes and accusations not limited to Burisma and Mr. Biden. 

In general, Republicans focused on the institutional resistance to the investigation.  Presumably their point was an effort to portray a "deep state" plot to protect the Bidens.  I suppose that is one possible interpretation.  I can think of others.  The FBI and DOJ may have been generally resistant because of the sensitive nature of the investigation.  Or they may have disliked the bureaucratic constraints on the sensitive investigation. (Republicans portrayed, and Brady agreed, that these restraints were extraordinary, even for a highly sensitive investigation).  Or they may have regarded Giuliani's leads as felgercarb and resented having to chase them.  There appears to be at least some confirmation of that last in the interview.

Democrats did not directly attack the credibility of the confidential informant, but focused on attacking Zlochevsky's credibility with open source statements such as interviews and news articles in which the participants denied any improper contacts with the Bidens.  I don't know.  I do not think if I were investigating I would give such things much weight for the simple reason that I would take for granted the participants were liars, and that what they said in a private conversation with a business associated would probably be more reliable than what they said on the record.  Probably the most worthwhile such public statement (pp. 141-142) was from the incoming Ukrainian Prosecutor General, who said he investigated the files and found no evidence to support the allegations.  

Democrats did not ask why, if  the confidential informant heard such explosive allegations in 2015-2019 and did not report them until 2020. Brady said that he asked for a follow up interview on the innocuous 2017 comments on the theory that Hunter Biden might not be relevant to the inquiry underway.  And yes, certainly it is possible that something that might not seem significant at the time might turn out to be significant later. But to me it just surpasses belief that an informant would hear anything so explosive as that and not report it until years later.  Even if it was not relevant to the immediate investigation, I would expect the handler to pass on the lead for a new investigation.

Other questions that seem significant but were not raised:

What percentage of your information came from Giuliani?

Did you get any tips from any other member of the "public?"  If so, how did the volume compare?

What percentage of your leads came from external tips versus search of internal files?

Did you activate any other confidential informants?

Did it concern you that all the information in the 1023 was unverifiable?

And, yes, didn't it seem strange to you that anyone would have a lead this explosive and sit on it for so many years?

Maybe the Inspector General can look into those questions.

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*The WDP was also in communications with New York City prosecutors about Giuliani and his associates being unauthorized foreign agents.  Brady was clarifying that the New York offices did not receive "a" or "the" 1023 report.