What’s going wrong with healthcare and education?

SlateStarCodex has a blockbuster post (with a follow-up highlighting comments) on the topic. I posted the following comment:

What’s missing in these comments is the historical religious context of our educational and healthcare systems. In the Christian West, care for the sick and education of youth were traditionally under the purview of the Church and family. Thus, our hospitals generally had “Presbyterian” or “Jewish” in their names, or otherwise were named after some Catholic saint. Children went to either explicitly parochial schools, or to public schools which were essentially generic Protestant Christian, a legacy of our nerdy Puritan forebears.

This system was dismantled in America over the last century. In America this dismantling was mostly unintentional, while in Bismarck’s Germany this was an intentional front in the Kulturkampf (“culture war”). Instead, the now post-Christian West relies on the market and the state. In America, the replacement generally takes the form of a hybrid between the two, either as a “nonprofit” or a publicly-funded private corporation. This monstrous hybrid is the result of an unwitting collaboration between conservative liberals and progressive liberals. This basic story has repeated itself throughout all aspects of our secularizing society, but the shift has been most drastic in healthcare and education. To quote Patrick Deneen, “Both the left and the right effectively enact a pincer movement in which local associations and groups are engulfed by an expanding state and by the market, each moving toward singularity in each realm: one state and one market.”

The miserable results we are witnessing in healthcare and education should make us question whether this shift was justified. While the market and the state are sufficient for ensuring animal welfare, they are by their nature insufficient for the education and care of human beings. The education system must necessarily involve itself with instilling moral values in future generations. The instilling of moral values in future citizens and voters, besides being needed to maintain order in the classroom, is a primary justification for public education funding and truancy laws. (Vocational training for future units in the labor force is of course another purpose of our schools, but we rely on schools for much more than this.) This task is essentially a religious one, and so both the amoral market and ostensibly religiously-neutral state are poorly suited to it. Our public schools’ failures in English and mathematics betray deeper failures in moral education, especially among inner city schools where classroom order is precarious at best.

The healthcare system must also necessarily make decisions requiring moral calculus, in order to utilize scarce resources while honoring human dignity. For example, our society is at ease putting down pets with terminal illness, both to minimize their pain and our expenses. In contrast, most of us believe that human life, even if filled with pain and suffering, may be worth prolonging, even at taxpayers’ expense. This belief is fundamentally religious, following our moral intuitions that human life has value and meaningfulness beyond one’s ability to experience pleasure and avoid pain. Because our healthcare system’s basic task is to operationalize this religious belief, its objective cannot be implemented optimally by institutions that are blind to religious terms in any utility function. And because our current healthcare system lacks the language to discuss thorny moral issues, it limits itself to purely financial considerations (the market) or to political considerations (majority vote + lobbyists), both of which are deeply problematic.

The market and the state are not only unable to recognize the religious ends of healthcare and education, but also the religious means by which they ought to be provided. Teaching and healing are both labors of love, because they are directed at human persons who are worthy of love. These jobs are thus utterly unlike teaching computers via machine learning or fixing engines at the car shop. While most individual teachers, school counselors, nurses, and doctors are certainly motivated by love for those under their care, this is not enough. The entities they work for must also be institutionally bound by love. This is however very difficult for our impersonal corporate and state bureaucracies. Corporate bureaucracies are driven by shareholder profit, while state bureaucracies are driven by aversion to change and accountability. The empathic gap between those who deliver education and healthcare and those in charge of administration leads to frustration among the former. Well-administered schools and hospitals must have love-oriented administrators and administrative systems. Love necessarily depends upon a sense of binding. This sense of binding is nothing other than religion, derived from the Latin religare, which means “to bind fast.”

Inequality, inherited wealth, and the family

Material inequality is one of the great bugbears of the Left. While certain left-leaning economists claim that inequality damages the economy, the case against inequality is fundamentally a moral one. The unequal distribution of wealth is claimed to be unfair, the product of nepotism rather than merit. In its defense, libertarians argue that it is an inevitable outcome of individual liberty and property rights. They (and most economic conservatives) also oppose government efforts to eradicate inequality on more pragmatic grounds, such as the incompetence of government administrators or as a step towards totalitarianism. Many social conservatives, however, are more open to wealth redistribution, being less individualistic in spirit than their libertarian friends.

What both libertarians and traditionalists have missed is that the defense of material inequality can and must be based on a defense of the family and its foundational role in society. For if society is ultimately composed of atomic individuals, then the Rawlesian case against material inequality has real merit. Suppose society were truly composed of individuals that are born into a world of individuals. Then society is arranged horizontally, like a ream of papers: individuals born in 1985, individuals born in 1986, and so on. Looking within each sheet of paper we see a great injustice: some individuals are born with privilege, and others without. All this lumpiness within sheets is arbitrary, without any regard to either earned merit or the likelihood that inherited wealth will be used optimally. This collides unhappily with the libertarian ideals of meritorious success and economic efficiency.

Now instead imagine society from the traditionalist perspective. A baby is not born into the group of babies born in 1985, but to a mother and father. Or more accurately, the baby is born into a family, composed not just of her parents, but to their parents, and so on. Society is thus not a heap of papers, but a rope composed of many separate threads passing through time. The goal of civilization is fundamentally not about achieving evenness within each sheet of paper, but about making the rope stronger by strengthening each of its component threads.

From this perspective, inheritance is one of the fibers that binds together different generations into one strand. In the era before industrialization and urbanization, this fiber was more concrete and visibly apparent, since the inheritance was most likely not some generic liquid investment, but a plot of land, a livelihood, and a location that was one’s (and one’s parents’) home in the world.

Opposition to material inequality is necessarily an argument against inherited wealth and privilege. And opposition to inherited wealth is predicated on an understanding of society directly contrary to the traditional perspective just described. From the leftist perspective, a society with inherited wealth makes no more sense than an imaginary society where the inheritances of all people who die in 2016 is randomly swapped among all their descendants. From this perspective, a uniform distribution among all people born in 1985 therefore makes better sense than any alternative. Thus, to oppose inherited wealth is to deny the legitimacy of the family as the basic, enduring unit of civilization.

In contrast, conservatives defend inherited wealth not merely because individuals have a right to choose on whom to pass their wealth. We do so because parents typically pass on their wealth to their children, in accord with the role of the family as the basic atomic unit of society. We are outraged when one individual robs another individual, cutting one strand in the rope of society. But we are even more opposed when the government weakens or abolishes inherited wealth, damaging or breaking all strands of the societal rope.

Thus, there is an underlying logic to the coalition between fiscal conservatives and social conservatives, a real unity between two of the legs of the conservatism’s “three-legged stool.” The converse is also true. Our friends on the left may not discern it themselves, but both their economic and cultural policies undermine the role of family in society.

In the words of Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism, society is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” This unity across generations exists because it has an internal structure: that of the family. To conserve society, we must conserve this internal structure, through conservative policies, both social and economic.

Same-sex civil unions and anti-discrimination laws

Consider the following beliefs, which are common even among conservative Christians:

1. The government should recognize civil unions which treat gay and straight couples equally.
2. The government may (or even should) punish discrimination on the basis of innate differences.
3. Sexual orientation is at least partially innate, beyond an individual’s control.

I will argue that if one accepts all three premises, then the following is implied:

• Wedding photographers and bakers should punished for only offering their services to straight weddings.

Premise 3 is a matter of scientific debate, but is commonly held and has some merit. Premise 2 is popular except among the most strident libertarians, and has been legally established since the 1960s. In contrast, Premise 1 is not a scientific hypothesis, but instead a philosophical/theological claim, and one that was until recently opposed by essentially all orthodox Christians.

The sudden recent acceptance of Premise 1 is reason alone to give us pause. But the argument I will make in this post should make us even more wary. Indeed, the sudden acceptance of same-sex civil unions is often an attempt for a truce between LGBT activists and Christians who oppose gay marriage and want to preserve their religious liberty. However, if my argument is valid, then accepting gay civil unions actually undermines the basis of religious liberty with respect to “anti-discrimination” laws.

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Why is it illegal for McDonald’s to refuse service to black people? Why is it legal for McDonald’s to refuse to serve pizza to customers? In the former case, the same product is being served, and the business is discriminating among different customers. In the latter case, however, we consider pizza and hamburgers to be two different products. McDonald’s cannot be legally required to offer a product. However, if it offers a certain product, legally it must offer that product to everyone without exception.

This distinction requires a civil judgment on whether something is a “different product” or the “same product offered to only some people.” For example, the government would regard a restaurant selling a “whites-only eating experience” as merely cover for offering an eating experience only to white people.

How does this all relate to same-sex civil unions? Those who accept same-sex civil unions are admitting that in a public, civil sense, there is no difference between a man-woman union and a same-sex union. They may still maintain that the Bible treats the two differently and that Christians are only allowed one but not the other. Yet to accept same-sex civil unions is to confess that there is no publicly-recognizable ontological difference between a man-woman union and a same-sex union. The two types of partnerships should be treated by the government as really the same thing.

Now let us consider a wedding photographer in our world where there is (to the eyes of the government) only one type of civil union, encompassing both straight and gay partnerships. She (to the government) offers a single type of product: photographs of celebrations of unions. If she refuses to take pictures for a same-sex nuptial, she is really just refusing to offer her product to gay customers. Assuming Premise 3, she is discriminating against a class of people whose identity is at least partially beyond their control. Thus, according to Premise 2, her actions ought to be illegal.

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How do we respond to this? We must maintain that there is an ontological difference between a straight lifelong monogamous marriage and all other types of sexual partnerships, and that in fact the latter are not “unions” at all. We must argue that this distinction is not just spiritual, not just a moral requirement for Christian individuals or churches, but a real intrinsic difference that must be recognized by the government. We must hold that this difference is visible, and that our society can and should see it, if only we would open our eyes to the truth. A viable defense for religious liberty can be found only by reclaiming this lost ground.

Puritanism, Judaism, and Liberalism

The characterization of the Puritans as English Hebrews (for example by Max Weber) is fascinating. The parallels are incredible. Both Judaism and Puritanism played a major role in the development of capitalism and then socialism. Both religious movements were organized along similar lines. And most interestingly, both have had a long-term tendency towards theological liberalism. I wonder if this flows from the de-sacramentalized nature of both, the former by necessity and the latter by choice.

(Actually, the de-sacramentalization of Protestantism may also have been a necessity, due to their excommunication by the Roman Catholic Church. The Waldenses originally held to Catholic doctrines on the sacraments, and, like Protestants, only moved away after being declared heretical.)

The politics of fear in 2016

Stanley Hauerwas wrote this of America in 2013:

If I am right about the story that shapes the American self-understanding, I think we are in a position to better understand why after 11 September 2001 the self-proclaimed “most powerful nation in the world” runs on fear. It does so because the fear of death is necessary to insure a level of cooperation between people who otherwise share nothing in common. That is, they share nothing in common other than the presumption that death is to be avoided at all costs.

This is now true of both the GOP and Democratic parties in our 2-party system. The fracturing of America continues and each party’s coalition becomes more disunited. So their only option is to stoke people’s fears about their opponents.

Modern liberal democracy and unwinnable cause-wars

Nick Land in 2009:

As liberal decency has severed itself from intellectual integrity, and exiled harsh truths, these truths have found new allies, and become considerably harsher. The outcome is mechanically, and monotonously, predictable. Every liberal democratic ‘cause war’ strengthens and feralizes what it fights. The war on poverty creates a chronically dysfunctional underclass. The war on drugs creates crystallized super-drugs and mega-mafias.

In 2016, we can now add to his prophetic list the War on Terror and the War on Racism. But Land was actually wrong on one aspect. The un-winnability of our cause-wars is a feature not a bug of the current system. We need these never ending wars, because our society is kept together by fear.

Says Stanley Hauerwas:

If I am right about the story that shapes the American self-understanding, I think we are in a position to better understand why after 11 September 2001 the self-proclaimed “most powerful nation in the world” runs on fear. It does so because the fear of death is necessary to insure a level of cooperation between people who otherwise share nothing in common. That is, they share nothing in common other than the presumption that death is to be avoided at all costs.

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The American desire to use medicine in an attempt to get out of life alive is but the domestic form of American foreign policy. 11 September 2001 gave America exactly what she so desperately needed after the end of the cold war, for it is unclear if America can live without a war. Otherwise, what would give us a moral compass? So we got a “war against terrorism,” which is a war without end.

Brock Turner

The Brock Turner case is a travesty of justice. The statement of the victim is worth reading in its entirety here. How did we get to this point? The media / social media narrative is that this is just further evidence of the continuing oppression of the patriarchy. There is certainly some truth to that, given that we generally see this type of violence being perpetrated by men on women. It’s also true that crimes of this sort seem to have decreased in recent decades, and feminism can take some credit for this improvement. Still, a few points are worth making:

• It sometimes seems like the one aspect of the patriarchy that progressive feminists have succeeded in destroying is its one virtue: the notion of male chivalry. It is simply a biological fact that male bodies withstand the effects of alcohol better than female bodies, which exacerbates female vulnerability in frat party settings. The proper response is to be honest about this difference, and to therefore emphasize that men must treat women and their bodies with respect. We can change the culture, but we can’t make men and women equally alcohol tolerant. In the words of Horace, “You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she still will hurry back.” Does Brock represent the future of a feral patriarchy without the religious and cultural restraints of the past?

“As liberal decency has severed itself from intellectual integrity, and exiled harsh truths, these truths have found new allies, and become considerably harsher. The outcome is mechanically, and monotonously, predictable. Every liberal democratic ‘cause war’ strengthens and feralizes what it fights.” – Nick Land

• Progressives have been pushing to eliminate minimum sentencing guidelines. But is there any conceivable situation where 6 months is a sufficient punishment for rape? This push is of course about reducing incarceration rates among black men. Will social media erupt the next time a poor black girl sees this happen to her rapist, or will we only react when it happens to rhetorically gifted white girls who aren’t tainted with “slut” prejudices? (FWIW I’m in favor of the death penalty as a minimum sentence…)
• The way we frame punishments as a learning experience (thus, as doing a favor to) the perpetrator leads to this sort of unjust leniency. From both the Judeo-Christian and social contract perspectives, Brock has voided all his rights, and thus society owes him nothing — not even the incarceration length that we or some judge believe is optimal as a learning experience.
• Much discussion has focused on the culture of Oakwood,  Ohio — Brock’s hometown. However, discussion about alcohol-fueled party culture is off-limits. Why? The excuse that he was inadequately educated presumes that humans are not equipped with consciences that make us all morally responsible, regardless of our parenting etc. Blaming intoxication is of course equally inexcusable, because 1) Brock chose to drink the alcohol and 2) alcohol removes inhibitions, revealing his true character.
• Still, as a society we are responsible for creating an environment where young women are safe and young men are virtuous. Thus, both issues must be discussed. Further, we must examine whether other enshrined dogmas will encourage or discourage future crimes. Here are some examples:”It’s just bodies.” “Sexual inhibitions are bad.” “To thine own self be true.” “Live each day as if it were your last.”Was Brock Turner perhaps just taking those quotes to their logical conclusion? He treated his victim as if she were just a body, and he certainly was sexually uninhibited and true to himself as he raped his victim. And as documented in heartbreaking fashion by the victim’s statement, Brock’s actions have continued their devastating impact, showing that we must treat our actions with the recognition that they have long-term, even eternal impacts.

A flexible chain

Hello World!

We are all bound to the throne of the Supreme Being by a flexible chain which restrains without enslaving us. The most wonderful aspect of the universal scheme of things is the action of free beings under divine guidance.

– Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France

Here’s the pretty picture that WordPress thought would be a good fit for a first post: