Is the government us?

In the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling on the health care reform law, there will be plenty of debates over the role of the government vis-a-vis our health.  But I think there's a more important metaphysical problem that the debate over healthcare illuminates. It's the theme that Matthew J. Franck talks about in his post about the Christian response to the ruling at the Washington Post today.  He points out that "Some will claim that the responsibility for 'the least of these' necessarily falls chiefly on government, because government really is all of us." In the rest of the essay, he articulates and endorses the opposite claim.  My gut tends to agree with him.  I've always thought that there was something Hobbesian about the claim that the government's actions are my own, or that the government was some sort of incarnation of the will of the people.  Anyone with eyes could see that that is not true in practice. 

So what about the idea?  If the government is not an incarnation of the people's will in practice, is it that in theory?  This, I think, is one of the most pressing metaphysical political questions of our age.  If a government performs an act of mercy, if they heal they "sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, and comfort the afflicted," (Matt. 24:45) who gets credit for that act? Is it the whole society? Is it me or you? Does anyone get credit for it?  Is an act of mercy at all? These are rather important questions, and their implications go far beyond health care.  I fear, however, that these questions will be either skimmed over or ignored in the coming political rabble.

Whatever happened to (small-r) republicanism?

One of the most engaging essays of GK Chesterton's classic, What I Saw in America, "The Republican in the Ruins" addresses the fall and failure of the hopes of the Age of Reason.  He notes that America is the embodiment and the product of ideas of a certain age, an age that has long gone.  The other products of the age, the other experiments, such as Fredrick's Prussia and Peter's Russia, have gone the way of the age that spawned them.  Only America still stands, a living fossil of the Age of Reason.  But America itself is only has a shell of the ideals of the age that spawned it, the content of the American political culture has long since left its roots.

Some of the things that has been lost, such as the Enlightenment Deism of many of our founders, I will not take the time to mourn.  There are other ideas, however, who's loss is something rather sorrowful.  One of these ideas is the heart and soul of 18th century republicanism: the idea of the citizen.  The citizen was supposed to be an active participant in, and responsible for, the actions of the state.  He would be educated in the classical sense, and from his own realm of expertise help shape and form the state he lived in.  In Continental Europe, his obligations to the state were mandatory education, followed by mandatory military service, followed by a lifetime of political involvement.  That man (unfortunately only men at this point) was a full and equal citizen under the law, and rightfully so.

This sense of citizenship is almost completely gone in America's current political climate.  Both sides of the political divide talk about the citizen as if he were an entirely autonomous individual who's only considerations and obligations are to himself.  They only differ in how and where this autonomy should be curbed.  The result is maddening, as if a bunch of self-interested gluttons tried to govern themselves, a description which may be too close to the truth than we know.  The idea of a citizen is one that we have unfortunately shelved, and it is an idea that would help us greatly today.  I know that we are rather impoverished without it.

The Focus of Science Books

I think I discovered something while searching for said books in the previous post.  The focus of popular science literature has completely shifted within my lifetime.  This shift is rather glaring with children's books.  When I was younger, at least for the media I got my hands on, the focus was very much on the subject matter.  These books showed the facts, and more importantly tried to covey the wonder of their subject matter.  Scientists were in the background, their role was the role of a servant, to understand and explore these wonders so that they can bring them to us, their audience.  It wasn't just knowledge, it was beauty they were after and that they were conveying.

The books I found today were different.  There were tons of books who's focus was Charles Darwin himself.  A plethora of books like "What Darwin Saw" seemed to have as a focus the idolization of the man himself. I don't doubt that there's plenty of knowledge conveyed in the books, but the focus has surely changed.  The same is true with non-biographical biology books, whose focus tends to be more on the triumph of the theory of Evolution than the facts or the wonder. The focus is on the scientist and what he can do, rather than on the subject matter and how it can be understood.

This is an important shift, I think. It moves us from contemplation of the world to self-congratulation regard ourselves and our accomplishments, or at least scientists and their accomplishments.  In the process, scientists are moved from a place of humility to a place of pride.  This mini-Baconian shift, as I will call it (after Francis Bacon, the most influential of the early moderns who moved the focus of science from the contemplation of creation to the act of conquering Nature by the scientist), is a bad sign for our culture, and one that will succeed only in alienating people from science.  I certainly hope the trend can be reversed.

Science Books!

When I was a young boy, there was an illustrated book series about the history of life that I loved.  It had wonderful pictures, and went pretty in depth-- identifying reproduction as the main line of whether something lives or not, detailing the problems of animals moving from sea to land, showing the causes of great extinctions. The books probably are not still up to date, but they were fantastic and they really put a sense of wonder about creation in you.  The books were separated out in sections-- I believe they roughly correlated to geologic eras. There must have been about 6 or 7 in the series.  I, however, cannot find these books, even after a ton of internet searching.  It certainly doesn't help that I have no idea what the book series is called.  The last place I remember seeing one of these books is at the Urbandale public library... like in 1998.  I would love to get my hands on them, however. If anyone has any leads...