Calvin inKleinAtions

Kelly ponders in his latest, cleverly-named article, Calvin and Hobbes, if the views of sixteenth-century theologian Reformation leader John Calvin toward the poor have infested modern-day America's views of the poor. The implication is, I would think, that those who do not believe government welfare programs are (1) constitutional or (2) proper functions of government do not believe that the poor are worth helping, supporting, etc.

While this proposition is tidy, it is too clever by half and paints a view of the truth both too simple and one-sided. Calvin's theological positions on predestination cannot be used to suggest that Calvin generally blamed the poor for their own plight. While he was a staunch defender of private property as a means for Christians to provide for the needs of themselves and their families, he was just as adamant that Christians should use their earnings over and above their own needs to help the suffering and dispossessed.

In his commentary on Isaiah 58:7 Calvin writes,

Uprightness and righteousness are divided into two parts: first, that we should injury nobody, and second, that we should bestow our wealth and abundance on the poor and needy. And these two ought to be joined together, for it is not enough to abstain from acts of injustice, if you refuse your assistance to the needy, nor will it be of much avail to render your aid to the needy, if at the same time you rob some of that which you bestow on others….

By commanding them to ‘break bread to the hungry’ he intended to take away every excuse from covetous and greedy men, who allege that they have a right to keep possession of that which is their own. ‘This is mine, and therefore I may keep it for myself. Why should I make common property of that which God has given me?’ He replies, ‘It is indeed yours, but on this condition, that you share it with the hungry and thirsty, not that you eat it yourself alone. And indeed this is the dictate of common sense, that the hungry are deprived of their just right if their hunger is not relieved. That sad spectacle extorts compassion even from the cruel and barbarous.

I would submit that Kelly points to a strain in Christian (Protestant) ethics that brings to light a more nuanced difference between liberals and conservatives regarding the role of government in helping the poor. The difference between them is over how to help the poor, not whether to help the poor.

The conservative position draws forth from the old Protestant work ethic that work is a vital expression of service to God and the world and that a person cannot honor who they are in God if they do not contribute to the world through their work. When coupled with the ancient biblical mandate to God's people to make provisions for the poor, we are closer to understanding the conservative position that a man is only whole when he his working in his field of calling (what he was created to do, gifted to do, passionate about, etc) and that the social safety net is there for those who stumble as a temporary hand up to get back on his feet, not a hand out that consigns him to the downward spiral of dependence. This latter destroys a man's (and woman's) sense of self and short-circuits his or her ultimate potential contributions to society. Notice here the importance of the social safety net being provided by civil society, not civil government.

The liberal view that the only way to help the poor is through the government not only works over time to destroy the man and his sense of self and sense of obligation to the community, but it also works over time to destroy the community by creating a permanent underclass of dependence and by diverting the government from its own proper role in providing for the general welfare (the good of society as a whole) and the common defense. The fact that liberals suspect conservatives - or constitutionalists - of not caring for the poor unless they support a myriad of government welfare, wealth distribution programs betrays their own skewed view of government, community and what it means to be human.

On paradoxes: the mixing up of conservatives and liberals. Or Why the U.S. Can't deal with it's current debt crisis

Current uses of the words "conservative" and "liberal" have nothing to do with their traditional meaning. Well, that is not exactly true. They have, perhaps, too much to do with their traditional meaning given the fact that they seem to mean the same on the surface, but the animating spirit is completely different. Two hundred years ago, liberals believed in moving beyond personal government, in the form of the monarchy, to impersonal government, typically defined as what was then known as republican government. Conservatives sought to use the power of government to maintain the status quo and prop up existing power structures. There was not, however, any disagreement over the nature of man - that he needs restraint - or the proper role of that good government can play.

Over the course of the past one hundred years or so, these definitions were turned on their heads within the American context. Liberals became those who believed in the fundamental goodness of man for whom government could be used to advance the plight of man, and conservatives were those who, in the best spirit of the old Liberals, believed in the original sin of man who needed boundaries and hedges to keep an ordered society, those in government being no different (hence, separation of powers and checks and balances). The conservative commitment to republican values was, at heart, a commitment to the constitutional values that had made the experience of government a successful one, even if inefficient and unwieldy.

Over the past fifteen years, however, a phenomenal and dangerous blurring has occurred. The conservative paradigm has been petrified to the point that government itself is seen as the root of all problems. Rather than a properly-formed government being seen as a barrier against the more destructive inclinations of men, government of any kind is now seen as the barrier to all the good inclinations of men. It's some strange hibrid of the American-liberal vision in the goodness of men and the danger inherent in the original conservative perspective that the government that governs best is the one that rises the boat of the guilded interests. The rallying cry of the day is "No new taxes!"

On the other hand, the liberal paradigm has petrified to believe that government is the source of all goodness and the only savior of humanity. Because people are not to be trusted to conduct their affairs in honorable and virtuous ways, government regulates every possible area of life. Religion is banished from the public square, conviction is seen as the sign of a fanatic, so we are left with the only moral compass available to a society whose only remaining binding institution is the government: a thing must be deemed constitutional before it can be deemed moral. And since the ever-growing government has crowded out all room for virtue and compassion, welfare and social justice must be the business of federal agencies who, ironically, deliver the exact opposite of social security and medicare. It's some strange hibrid of the American-conservative vision in the evil of men and the danger inherent in the original liberal position that the government that governs best is impersonal. The plaintive cry of the day is "If we just spent more..."

These petrifications are racing toward each other over the current debate over whether to raise the federal debt limit and threaten to spectacularly collide with one another. The resulting wreck would have far-reaching consequences for us all, as the federal government's inability to pay its bills will lead to a default on the debt, the ruining of Treasury bills as a safe-haven for investments, and the meltdown of the financial sectors all around the world. This is serious business, and it is long past time for Congressional leaders and the President to come off their respective high-horses and do what is right for the country. A mixture of spending cuts, some tax increases, and more spending cuts will be necessary to fix the country's short-term debt problems. In the longer term, our fixation with debt will only be addressed through readdressing the boundaries of the federal government and reigning its activities back within its constitutionally-prescribed mandates.

The world indeed has been turned on its head.

Marriage: social order or individual freedom?

For hundreds of years, human society has ordered itself around the institution of marriage. Men provided safety, security and sustenance for women, women ordered the household so that men could work out in the community, and the home the man and woman built provided the place for children to be raised in accordance with the expectations and standards of the community. Marriage has not been first and foremost about the happiness of the spouses. That has been a byproduct of a husband and wife reaching for their better selves and working together to become more than the sum of their parts, but the primary purpose has been one of social order and securing the propagation of society.

This all started to change in the twentieth century when women in Europe and the United States went into the workforce and changed the balance and characteristic of the home. Then with the advent of birth control and the Supreme Court decisions of the 1960s that institutionalized the right to privacy in the U.S., the link between marriage and the propagation of society was irreparably broken. Marriage was no longer necessarily about social order. The individual happiness of the people in the marriage was the first order concern of the institution. No-fault divorces became the laws of the land in the states, and everyone accepted the new conventional wisdom without much thought as to the ultimate logical conclusion.

So we should not really be surprised that the definition of marriage has been increasingly challenged over the past twenty years, now to the point where it is a question of equality under the Constitution. Of course it has nothing to do with equality because everyone is perfectly free to marry anyone of the opposite sex. Yet the question remains - if marriage is first and foremost about the happiness of the individual and no longer the primary concern of society, then what right does society have to restrict who can and cannot be married? And there you have it - the competing values that are at play in contemporary debates over the definition of marriage.

Those who defend the traditional understanding of marriage between one man and one woman see marriage still as the fundamental bedrock and foundation of society. Social order is protected by marriage, so society has an obvious interest in ensuring its health. Nevertheless, proponents of traditional marriage lost the debate before it really started. Once the link between marriage and propagation was severed in our minds, the primary reason for marriage to serve as a societal institution was lost.

Those who advocate for the expansion of marriage for same sex couples see the purpose of marriage as serving the personal interests and happiness of the parties of the marriage. It is a contract that can be entered and exited when it no longer suits the needs or interests of one of the spouses. Society has no business getting involved; the government should "stay out of the bedroom," etc. Nevertheless, proponents of expanding the definition of marriage, along with all the rest of us, have lost the sense in which society is vested in the health of marriage. The future of humanity is bound up in the institution of marriage, and that fact can't be changed, no matter how hard we try to ignore it.

The currents of history feel like expanding the definition of marriage is inevitable, but even if that plays out, society needs to simultaneously find a way to reunite marriage with childbearing and childrearing. Children with two loving parents who are plugged in and responsible are the best cure to inner city crime and gang activity, suburban drug abuse, and substandard education across the board.

In any case, our fundamental misstep in this debate as a people was to allow the discussion to become federalized. Marriage and family have been regulated by the states since the inception of the Republic, and the federal Constitution delegates no authority to the federal government in the area of marriage. Allowing each state to decide for itself how to order and structure marriage would prevent the mistakes we have made with abortion -- politicizing the issue, removing any room for democracy to drive debate and compromise, and smothering presidential elections with social issues that should not be the concern or purview of the U.S. president.

Are we so afraid of losing control that we can't trust each other to come to the right answers? Is the constant, unending struggle for the political machinery in order to dictate and impose our own beliefs the only resolution to the question? God save us from ourselves if it is. The Founders, once again, knew better.

The plain-ness of it all

There is a series of little articles that G.K. Chesterton wrote bundled in the book All Things Considered. In the article "Patriotism and Sport," Chesterton writes:

But the real historic strength of England, physical and moral, has never had anything to do with this athletic specialism; it has been rather hindered by it. Somebody said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on Eton playing-fields. It was a particularly unfortunate remark, for the English contribution to the victory of Waterloo depended very much more than is common in victories upon the steadiness of the rank and file in an almost desperate situation. The Battle of Waterloo was won by the stubbornness of the common soldier—that is to say, it was won by the man who had never been to Eton. It was absurd to say that Waterloo was won on Eton cricket-fields. But it might have been fairly said that Waterloo was won on the village green, where clumsy boys played a very clumsy cricket. In a word, it was the average of the nation that was strong, and athletic glories do not indicate much about the average of a nation. Waterloo was not won by good cricket-players. But Waterloo was won by bad cricket-players, by a mass of men who had some minimum of athletic instincts and habits.

Chesterton often turns conventional wisdom on its head, and since today's conventional wisdom is typically only the wisdom of his day stretched out and taken to its logical (and oft times illogical) extremes, many of his insights are as insightful today as they were in his own time. It is fashionable today to bemoan the state of America - her politics, her job market, her "lost" liberties, her social inequality, her international reputation, her antiquated institutions, her professionalization of many aspects of society... the list can go on and on. In some ways, we are right to worry about these things, as constant evaluation of where you are helps with the mid-course corrections needed to get to where you are going. I think that, however, we sometimes lose sight of the winding road's long course for fear of the numerous potholes we are swerving to avoid. The state of the United States now looks a lot like Rome in its decline, they say.

For all I know, we might look a lot like Rome in decline. I wouldn't know; I never lived in Rome. But I have studied this country and lived with her people for almost four decades, and that experience does give me the ability to say a few things about the U.S. Americans are a hard-working, innovative people who are very engaged in their families and communities. States and the nation as a whole produce bright, energetic leaders and thinkers who work to make things better for the country. We know how to compromise to avoid extremes, and we have a uniquely American way of doing things. We've been stumbling about for over two hundred years, but somehow we continue to find a way to stumble forward.

By all rights, the United States should not be a great power - we are loosely organized and governed, we are not good at managing complex systems, we have multiple-layers of power and thousands of points of responsibility. Yet we have constantly risen to meet challenges that threaten us. Time and again, we have shown that we can come together and beat the odds. We reinvent ourselves and, somehow, end up on top - or at least among the leaders.

I attribute this to the grit of the average American. We live passionately and love our families, communities, and country, yet we fight constantly - among ourselves with words and too easily against other peoples with weapons. We believe in who we are, yet we find ways to treat each other as humans to tolerate dissent and conversation. We hate government, yet we continue to find creative ways to channel it to solve societal ills even as we turn around again to constrain and shackle it. We are full of paradox, yet we are guided by an everyday plain-ness, and average-ness, that is really not all that plain or average.

The United States is not perfect as a country. But Americans as a people are not Romans, and history does not repeat itself. At least not in the way most of the Talking Heads mean.

On Paradoxes: freedom that leads to bondage

If there is one thing that is sure about Western society, and American culture in particular as personified by the worst of Hollywood caricatures, it is that it is full of paradoxes. Chesterton pointed out a number of these that have only blossomed into full-orbed mind-benders since his day. To sample from the endless supply:

• Despite our conventional wisdom, man is the homemaker and woman is the ruler of the home, even if she is not its titular head.


• The modern matyr is discounted because their supposed sacrifices for their cause are nothing more than mere inconvenience that drunks take upon themselves for fun.


• Nothing is allowed to remain in secrecy except for those things that are too obvious to be named and those things that really are too important to bear telling.


• We look to our doctor for which well to pull water, rather than simply for the effects of drinking water to begin with.

I could go on and on, for Chesterton's essays in All Things Considered are treasure troves of insight and whit. But for this day, I want to look at a more recent paradox that has started to form on the dark horizon, one more recent (at least in its more malevolent form) than Mr. Chesterton's day. Namely, that our worship of human rights and freedom leads to debased and dehumanized bondage.

The Supreme Court yesterday in its case United States v. Stevens overturned a ten year old congressional statute that outlawed videos depicting animal cruelty. This continues a general trajectory that is at least fifty years old to analyze the morality (or, to use the terminology of our modern Republic, constitutionality) of a thing based on the most extreme case imaginable (which is usually in a different category of case anyway). Whether it really would ever happen that hunting videos would be prosecuted in Washington, D.C., where hunting is illegal, I do not have the foggiest of notions. To even ponder the scenario in the context of this case shows how far we've drifted from the vision of federalism, localism, and juries employed by the Founding Fathers. But I do have a clear notion that many pit bull and cock-fighting rings suddenly have new streams of legal revenue opened to them by virtue of this ruling.

In all our concern over whether the government ought to be able to tell someone whether they can record this or do that, we have lost all ability to know whether this or that should even be done in the first place. We protect the right of the pornographer to distribute his videos without even thinking of the dehumanization and objectification of the women he used to make the video. We concede control over to a woman to the point where a baby in the womb is not a human, but a fetus or, more sinister, a mistake. We have freed people married to each other from the "contract" of marriage in the name of privacy and they proceed to privately rip apart the lives of their children, leaving the public to help the kids pick up the pieces to their lives.

The seeds of analysis of this paradox are picked up in this excellent article by Weekend Fisher: The missing superego: removing religion from the public square. She writes:

So what happens when cultural expectations for ethical behavior are largely removed? What happens when a number of leading voices say that the ideas of "right" and "wrong" are meaningless or even destructive? What happens when prevailing voices say that morality is solely a private matter? In terms of our inner struggles, it means that the person can no longer enlist the help of the culture in taming his lower instincts. It means that the person develops a less-controlled animal side than would have developed otherwise. It leads to a stunted conscience.

The part of us that makes us communal or relational creatures - the superego, to use the Freudian term employed by Weekend Fisher - does not have the boundaries once erected by society, so we easily wander off into areas that are not safe for us. All men and women are slaves to something - jealousy, greed, passion, righteousness, demons, God. It is not an accident that we call a dastardly thing that disturbs us (even when we are not quite sure of the source of the disturbance) everything except what it truly is - wrong. In our commitment to be free, we do not recognize the shackles in which freedom binds us. Nor the binders that blind us.

For centuries, mankind struggled to overcome the license of tyranny that kings and emperors and governments claimed in order to wield arbitrary power over people. That's why the American Revolution was fought and why the Bill of Rights added to the Constitution. But never knowing when to stop, we have exchanged the license of tyranny for the tyranny of license. The sin of rulers in the distant past was their arbitrary application of power. At least they moved with purpose. In the name of freedom from control and power, we wander about aimlessly, content to have power (which abhors a vacuum afterall) applied to us arbitrarily.

The connection between evil acts of a country and the responsibilities of its leaders

Revered computer scientist Donald Knuth has a page on "Infrequently Asked Questions". (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/iaq.html) and questions #4 and #5 do a good job of bringing up the issue of the moral responsibility a country's leaders have to its citizens.

I don't have any answers to his questions but would to avoid discussing them can't help but to implicitly spread the guilt around among the willfully silent.

It's a question for the ages, what does a society do when its leadership commits hubris? 

Things are not always as they seem

When I first heard of the Honduran military's disposition of Honduras' President Manuel Zelaya, I assumed it was a typical, Third World-style coup d'etat and that the reaction of President Obama and the OAS calling for immediate reinstatement of President Zelaya was the right and proper response. However, after having researched the chain of events behind the removal of Zelaya, it is obvious that the Honduran governmental institutions and civil society were actually defending the Honduran constitution from the hatchet-work of Zelaya.

Many Americans do not realize that in Latin American countries, the military is the national police force. U.S. law does not allow the military to enforce laws. This is why we have civilian organizations like the Coast Guard and the FBI. Whereas the FBI in the U.S. would arrest officials accused of a crime, the military performs those actions in South America. If it was the military acting under its own initiative in disposing the President, then that is obviously unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court of Honduras and the Congress both approved this action and followed Honduran constitutional procedures in appointing a presidential successor.

The Obama Administration needs to wake up and begin to defend principled positions on the world stage. Dialogue with tin-pot dictators is fine, but actively supporting their positions only serves to degrade our own moral authority. As we have said on this blog in the past in the context of the excesses of the Bush Administration, constitutional fidelity is more than just blindly following your leaders, even if those leaders were duly elected. Extra-constitutional maneuvering can never be allowed to stand, especially on the part of a President, who is charged to faithfully execute the duly-enacted laws.

UPDATE 10/12/2009: Negotiations on Honduras Continue

Voices from the Past

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

- Barry Goldwater


Remember, ignoring torture for the sake of security is not a defense of liberty. And ignoring crimes committed by the previous administration, for the sake of not rocking a political boat, is not justice.

Thinking About Torture

Damon Linker at The New Republic has an insightful piece entitled Thinking About Torture. He gives expression to many of the thoughts that I have been struggling with around this topic - the fundamental belief that torture is wrong, but burdened with a nagging wonder about the extreme case of existential threat. Over the past seven years, the debate has been overly simplistic and polemic on both sides.

I've pondered for years what to say about the Bush administration's use of torture in the years after 9/11. So far I've remained quiet about the issue because I'm so uneasy about it -- not just about what the United States has done, but also about the reactions of nearly everyone who has commented on it.

Linker looks for guidance in this issue from Leo Strauss, author of Natural Rights and History, as the thinker who "is strongest in discussing what he called the 'permanent problems' of politics."

Under normal circumstances, the two parts of political morality cohere enough that the tensions between them rarely show themselves. But in extreme situations -- situations in which (in Strauss's words) "the very existence or independence of a society is at stake" -- there may be "conflicts between what the self-preservation of society requires and the requirements of commutative and distributive justice. In such situations, and only in such situations, it can justly be said that the public safety is the highest law."

I think, however, that the Bush Administration's downfall, and the inherent danger their course of action posed, was in its secrecy. "Executive privilege" and making decisions behind closed doors for reasons of "national security" are the watch words and cloak of every tyrant and imperial power in world history. Liberty and freedom flourish in the fresh air of the open daylight, so if a policy of torture is required for the self-preservation of society, then that is a discussion that the Bush Administration should have taken to Congress so that an open debate could have ensued. The few are not competent to decide for society if such extreme measures are required. The society in whose name the Government is asking to be able to commit such acts should have the right and obligation to authorize their use.

Everyone could have taken part in the conversation and we could have avoided all of the the Monday-morning quarterbacking we see going on now on "a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009" -- as Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, has put it. After the proper hearings and investigations, Congress could have made an informed decision to amend the law. The CIA could have then remained in the bounds of the law as they did what they needed to do, and field agents would now not be worrying if politics will drive their prosecution, after previous OLC assurances that they were acting legally. In addition, if walking into such dark territory is required, leaders are less apt to let the power go to their heads if they are being watched by society and Congress.

Bush Administration defenders will undoubtedly say that we would have had no time for a debate in the aftermath of 9/11 or that such a discussion would have tipped our hand to our enemies. But according to reports, the Government did not begin exploring "harsh interrogations techniques" until well into 2002. That would have given us several weeks (or months) to have this conversation. And even is the Administration needed to have more latitude more quickly, constitutional principles do not change just because they become inconvenient. Besides, Congress has shown it can work with speed in cases of national emergency. FDR received a declaration of war against Japan on the same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor. After 9/11, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Force Resolution within three days. And if the United States had published such a policy change with the full support of the U.S. Congress (the representatives of the American people), then it would have undoubtedly worked to our advantage to strike fear in the hearts of al-Qaeda.

In the end, such an approach would have allowed America to head into the ugly days ahead with our eyes wide open, and no one would have been able to claim innocence or ignorance. It is all too easy to cry for the hides of those who kept us safe when we can claim blissful ignorance, even if that ignorance was willful at the time.

The Great Debate: liberty or death?

I have been listening to a course from The Teaching Company on the debate over the proposed Constitution between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. Professsor Thomas L. Pangle (University of Texas at Austin) teaches the course, The Great Debate: Advocates and Opponents of the American Constitution , which does an outstanding job of framing the debate between the two sides in its historical context and presenting the give-and-take discussion. The Federalist Papers are often presented as a self-contained treatise on the Constitution, but they were, in reality, part of a broader conversation, reacting to accusations and questions from the Anti-Federalists and lodging accusations and questions on behalf of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay (their authors).

The Anti-Federalists also presented some salient concerns in their opposition to the proposed Constitution. Among them:

• the proposed Constitution would lead to the establishment of a military industrial complex (not their words, of course), which would lead to America drawing unto itself the trappings of empire and shedding her commitment to republican virtue;


• juries would lose their right to interpret the law under the proposed Constitution and the federal judiciary would become an unaccountable aristocracy; and


• the states would eventually become mere administrative subdivisions of the federal government because states do not have an effective constitutional check against the federal government (Madison pointed to the fact that the states appointed senators under the design of the proposed Constitution, but this effective check was removed with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment).

The Federalists consistently seek to recast Anti-Federalist concerns by focusing on the need for a strong central government to protect the national security of the United States. Whereas the Anti-Federalists were concerned to protect the classical republican freedom of the United States, which called for small communities governed by like-minded, virtuous citizens, the Federalists called for society to include a broader, more diverse territory whose sheer size would draw in competing interests (factions, to use Madison's term) to protect republican freedom at home and from attack from abroad.

I will spend a few upcoming blog posts looking at these debates in more detail, but what intrigues me from a birds'-eye view is the same basic question that we still deal with today, most recently in the days since 9/11. The Bush Administration thought it was necessary to engage in torture to protect America from further terrorist attacks after 9/11. While there is some circumstantial evidence that this policy protected the U.S. from further attacks, the brutality and dehumanizing consequences of these "enhanced interrogation techniques" are highlighted by Mark Danner in his piece US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites. Now the Obama Administration has prohibited these techniques from being used by U.S. governmental agencies because, as the new president has said, they violate America's core principles of liberty and commitment to human rights. But the President has said he'll do what is necessary to protect the United States, so one wonders what that would mean if another terrorist attack should befall the U.S.

So the question becomes - can a love and commitment of freedom and liberty coexist with institutions required to defend and make war? In the spirit of the Governance Imperative, these are two competing principles that must be balanced, but can the balance truly be maintained without detriment to either principle? Peace and security can be easily maintained through the use of excessive force, but freedom and liberty will suffer and be snuffed out. Witness Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Iran and North Korea. Liberty and openness can flourish, but society is then left vulnerable to attack and domination from the outside. Witness the classical Greek city-states, the Roman Republic, and the medieval Italian cities. In the latter cases, the republics were only able to save themselves by giving up liberty for ever more powerful militaries and dictators. Patrick Henry insisted on being given liberty or death, but most people will take security and peace over anything.

Whatever the prescient warnings of the Anti-Federalists, the Constitution has enabled the United States to strike an uneasy, if ever-correcting, balance between liberty and security. The ability of Americans to maintain this balance will be directly dependent on our continued fidelity to republican principles and the constitutional order.

Bonhoeffer on Bush

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his writings published as "Letters and Papers From Prison", provides mankind with a strong statement on morality and the relationship between a citizen and the State. While Germany was under Hitler's grip, there were well educated men who understood that their duty was to follow orders, unlike Bonhoeffer who understood that to allow an evil to be committed was morally the same as to commit the evil yourself. We can't blame this divide on education or its lack. Otto Thorbeck, the judge over Bonhoeffer's trial, had the same classical education as Bonhoeffer; studying Antigone, Iliad, The Oddyssy, and The Bible. Works which provide guidance as to the meaning of good vs evil, justice, wisdom, and duty. If you don't believe in absolute good or evil, you could easily make the case that it is permissible to act in a normally unjust manner when the circumstances permit, that enacting the injustice on the orders of others does not sully ones own soul, or in other words sometimes it's ok to kill.

Bonhoeffer suffered the punishment of the State rather than acquiesce to the idea that the State is the arbiter of what is Absolutely Good or Absolutely Evil. If the State says that a prisoner is a traitor and needs to be sentenced to death, it isn't the individual's place to disagree. That is what Thorbeck believed, he was just doing his duty. Bonhoeffer didn't have to be imprisoned but faced certain persecution with the conviction that what Germany was doing was wrong and to not speak or act out would be equally wrong of him, a sin of omission.

So, what questions does this pose?

- Whose place is it to determine what is good or evil?
- Does a State have a soul? a conscience?
- If a State is soulless, upon whose soul falls the burden of evil acts done in the State name?
- If an action is evil when committed by an individual, can a State, on its own authority, declare that act to be just and legal when done in the State's name?
- When is it the duty of a Citizen to disobey the State?
- How should we feel about a society that allows the State to commit evil acts?

I expect to follow this piece with others where the lessons of various books that have made history can teach us about life in the modern age. Next would be Homer's Iliad.