The shooting two weeks ago of Rep. Giffords has once again, though in a convoluted way, focused national attention on illegal immigration. The connection supposedly lies in an association of ideas: just as violent rhetoric by conservatives led to the attempted assassination, so the generally violent rhetoric about defending our borders seems to have a particular place in the intemperate political atmosphere of Arizona. But if rhetoric on cable news shows housed in New York can animate response in the Southwest, repressive laws in the Southwest can suggest action elsewhere; the Mississippi State Senate, for example, passed just two days ago a law-enforcement bill very similar to the controversial law that went into effect last year in (where else?) Arizona.
To believe the arguments given above takes a great leap of blind faith: most obviously this argument about rhetoric and violence assumes that people act badly because of opinion they hear expressed in the media. (The even larger practical matter is that the shooter was, if anything, not conservative but left wing--but let that pass, since we are speaking theoretically here.) The liberals making this claim, however, are the same people who have for decades fervently asserted as a central pillar of their faith that offensive programming in media does not affect people's behavior. Despite the fact that children are more impressionable than the 23-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, hours and hours of Real World, Tila Tequila, Skins, and Jersey Shore have no effect at all on adolescent behavior. The inconsistency is startling; it casts great suspicion on those who now want to claim that a single phrase or electoral map by Sarah Palin would be responsible for an act of violence.
But since we are speaking of tenuous connections, we should look again at the matter of illegal immigration. (I should point out, with great modesty, that my second post at this blog outlines what I still think is the only reasonable solution to the problem of illegl immigration--a solution both just, sane, and compassionate.) In particular, I would like to look at the arguments made by the Catholic Church on the matter. It is possible that the Church has a practical vested interest in the matter, since so many American Catholics are now Hispanic: a large percentge of the local Catholic population in the neighborhood of Meridian Heat, for example, consists of illegal immigrants. (Once again, to illustrate the complexity of this blog's views of the matter, the writer of TMH is godfather to a child born here to parents who immigrated illegally.) At any rate, the Church speaks frequently on the matter, and it often speaks on the matter by saying that since Scripture commands us to be generous and hospitable, so the United States should be hospitable to illegal immigrants. At least in the local Catholic press, however, I have never seen such assumptions themselves examined.
Like all assumptions, however, they need to be examined carefully before we adopt them as principles of action. Many in the Catholic Church seem to argue that since the Bible commands a certain action, our nation should follow it. The New Testament, however, says little about what nations should do: what it commands, it commands of individuals, and it is not at all clear that what it commands of individuals it commands of nations. One example that springs readily to mind is the commandment in the Sermon on the Mount that we should turn the other cheek when someone has hurt us. Obviously Christ was talking at that point about relations between individuals: if someone has treated you unjustly, you shouldn't strive to retaliate but to diffuse the situation with kindness and model the same sacrifical love that Christ did when He died for us. But to lift that commandment out of its context and apply it to nations would obviously lead to preposterous results. Did the Japanese commit an immoral attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941? No matter: turn the other cheek. Perhaps if we refuse to retaliate, they will learn that they, too, should lay down their arms. Sadaam Hussein invade and take over an ally? I think that we should turn the other cheek. Certainly we shouldn't respond in kind to Al-Quaeda's attacks on 9-11.
Such a misapplication of the Scriptural principle is obviously inane; less obvious is an injunction of the type that Christ gave to the rich young ruler to sell all he had and give it to the poor. If the United States, as a nation, were to follow this injunction, there would be chaos in our streets. To take all the nation's wealth and transfer it to such poor nations as Zimbabwe or Tanzania would do nothing for the starving in those nations and would extinguish all the lights in that shining city on the hill that has done more to inspire human excellence and goodness than all the foreign aid in history. Nevertheless, such passages have been used in the past by Church officials to promote certain left-wing policies of a socialist nature. But do these passages apply to nations as a whole? Are they not rather directed at individuals who ask Christ such questions as "What must I do to be saved?" And is not Christ's response about what the individual must do to be saved? While the Old Testament sometimes suggests that nations can achieve salvation, the New Testament seems to teach much more clearly that salvation is a matter of individual, not national, standing. The Church Herself teaches that at the end of time individuals will be judged for their actions; it doesn't seem clear that nations as a whole can achieve salvation.
Christ Himself on several occasions seems to say that He came to earth to deal with individuals, not nations. When he was asked about the payment of taxes, His response indicates that the things of God are directed more at individuals than they are at nations, which last fall under the rubric of the things of Caesar. And when brought before Pilate, who understandably worries that Christ's teaching may have a social dimension that would upset the tenuous political arrangement in first-century Palestine, Christ says, "Regnum meum non est de hoc mundo" ("My kingdom is not of this world"). Finally, when the crowd following Jesus wanted to institutionalize His teaching, as it were, and make Him a political ruler, He fled from them, presumably because reading His commandments in political terms would obscure the fact that they aren't supposed to be carried out for us vicariously by people on Capitol Hill but that they are meant to transform our lives, individually, by getting us to make the hard changes to our souls necessary to fulfill His will.
I don't, however, wish by any means in this post to repeat the old shibboleth of "separation of Church and State." What I mean to say is this: the argument that our nation must pursue a policy BECAUSE Christ enjoins that practice in the Gospels is fallacious. To call something a fallacy doesn't necessarily say of it that its conclusion is wrong. It does, however, say that the argument just given doesn't support the conclusion. In the case of illegal immigration, there may be very good reason to allow complete amnesty to all those who cross into the United States from Mexico, but if there is it will be for reasons other than Christ telling us individually to love our neighbors. Too many in the Church seem to think that if they can find in a passage of the Bible a keyword that belongs also to the compassionate side in a political debate then they have shown that we must also take that side of the political argument. But that isn't necessarily true at all. It is very likely that what Christ says in a given passage He says to individuals, and individuals, even all of them together in a particular place and time, are not the same thing as a nation, which is greater than the sum of its parts. As shown by the example of turning the other cheek, what is good for one is not necessarily good for all together, and to claim as a matter of course that it is can lead to something even worse than sloppy thinking.
Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Monday, December 27, 2010
Bays
As the winter nights come upon us early, descending on all around with chill and a darkness deepened by the cold, one thinks back to warmer days--especially those of the almost perfect autumn just past. Not just because of the vivid yellows and reds of the leaves, autumn was well-night perfect this year also because of news from Oslo that the Nobel Prize in literature had been awarded to the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa.
It was commonplace to decry last year's bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize upon Barack Obama, just as many had ridiculed the decision to give it to Al Gore in 2007, but it is well to remember that the Peace Prize occasionally goes to those who richly deserve it. One thinks, for instance, of Aung San Suu Kyii; and Liu Xiaobo, who won the award this year, certainly deserves the award if anyone does, since he, like Aung, has risked his life in his attempt to bring greater freedom to his countrymen (and thereby also to the world at large, which means, dear reader, to you and me). If the Peace Prize has has an ideologically spotty record, the Prize in Literature recently has been well bestowed. Despite what the fashionable critics say about the irrelevance of the writer's life to his work, it is good to see the occasional writer live out the principles he enjoins in his work--for this reason, it was gratifying that Orhan Pamuk, who has had to leave his native Turkey and beloved Istanbul because of remarks he has made about his countrymen's historic slaughter of Armenians, won the Prize in 2008. Not only does he write impressively, but he has had to pay a price for his views. And last year the prize went to Herta Mueller, a writer who suffered a great deal in her native Romania for speaking out, as much as was possible, against Nikolai Caucescu's brutal regime.
Although he has been to some extent ostracized for his lack of adherence to left-wing dogma, Vargas Llosa hasn't had to suffer as Mueller and perhaps Pamuk have. He does, however, certainly live his beliefs. Early on, he was a devoted Marxist, but as he has grown older his views have moved rightward, and while he is no George W. Bush or Sarah Palin (no one who thinks of himself as a citizen of the world can ever be that), he has felt the pressure because of his views from those among the international intelligentsia with whom he consorts. A number, particularly in Europe, have found his views so far beyond the pale that they have in very strong terms denounced his receiving the Nobel, but to show just how small their pale is, one need only remember that the supposedly reactionary Vargas Llosa espouses essentially unrestricted immigration from poor countries to wealthier ones. (See his essay "Los inmigrantes" in his volume of essays entitled El lenguaje de la pasion, an essay that begins, appropriately enough for so quixotic a thesis, by recounting an experience he had while visiting some friends in La Mancha.)
No, Vargas Llosa's conservativism, which he with reason calls neo-liberalism--in the old nineteenth-century British sense of open trade and general democracy--is a generous thing, born of a large spirit that seems to relish the physical delights of daily existence and move with a genuine concern for the good of his fellow human beings, particularly those in Latin America who because of corruption and kleptocracy have been cheated of a standard of life that might otherwise have been theirs. Over time he has seen again and again how the seductive promises of one Messianic leader after another have deceived the poorly-educated Latin American voter into thinking that there is a short and easy way to national prosperity, with the result that everyone suffers, everyone, that is, except for the Messianic leader. Anyone who thinks that the caricature is a thing of a dimly-remembered past inhabited by Speedy Gonzales and the Frito Bandito need look no further than Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez is hardly more sophisticated than the Caudillo in the 1970s film The In-Laws. But the cast of extras in Venezuela doesn't get to go home at the end of the day--they get to live the movie week after week, month after month, as their economy implodes, their institutions crack up, and foreign investment slips away with the tide. This conviction that real people suffer for the sins of egomaniacs paving their own success with the misery of their countrymen is what seems to have motivated Vargas Llosa's growing conviction, and it certifies his humanity along with his integrity, since it is based not on concern for himself but on concern for those whose potential is often squandered by others who take the easy way to their own material success.
I see, however, that this present essay does what Vargas Llosa's never do, and that is stry much beyond the concrete and particular, so herewith some specific observations. Perhaps his longest essay is his magical memoir El Pez en El Agua, in which he recounts his early life and education in the Peru of the 1950s and, in alternating chapters, his run for the presidency of that country in 1990. Although the campaign was unsuccessful, the early life and education was spectacularly fruitful. It contains a wonderfully rich experience of life in Bolivia and Peru, as a student, a denizen of the bars of Lima, an occasion patron of brothels, as a student of distinguished Peruvian historians, as a cub reporter, aspiring playwright, and, most colorfully of all, husband of a woman sufficiently older and closely enough related to him to be called his "Aunt Julia." He writes about all this with the what he elsewhere attributes to the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz--the language of passion, a writing that clearly delights in the remembrance of the rich fabric as he turns it over in the image-house of memory. This delight comes out very well in the ironic detachment and good humor with which he writes about his own naivete and false steps. And he manages it all in a Spanish whose clarity is such that the beginner in Spanish can relish the entire pageant.
But delightful as this romantic narrative is, the other narrative, the one in which he recounts the presidential campaign of 1990, contains the essential political vision. The narrative glistens with veins of ore like those in the fabled Peruvian silver mines. There are his observations on the dangers of Alain Garcia's nationalization of the private sector over the course of the 1980s: perhaps the greatest cautionary tale is about what happened when the government nationalized the banks. Over time it apparently became difficult for those who didn't support the government to take out the large loans necessary to start businesses. (This produced a particularly striking impression when I read it in the early days of the Obama presidency as the Federal government was bailing out the investment banks. If they government would eventually become a major partner in a major bank, would it--because of separation of Church and State--begin to deny funds for, say, the construction of a large downtown church building? Never mind that now: as we learn this week, the government of New York City is actively engaged in making the controversial case for the construction of the mosque close to Ground Zero.) Another rich insight comes in the chapter entitled "El intelectual barato" ("The cheap intellectual") about those who congratulate themselves on their liberal credentials while being bought off by precisely those corrupt politicos who destroy the very freedoms that these writers claim to cherish. It is the best meditation I know on the subject, one with obvious relevance in our own day when we hear--rather, do not hear--everywhere those who claim to be the boldest for women's rights say nothing, nothing at all, about the almost unimaginable suffering of women in some of the Islamic regimes around the world, nay, some of the Islamic enclaves in Western Europe.
But we are back to where we started. Although he is a first-rate novelist, essayist, and literary critic (his study of Les Miserables is one of the best pieces of criticism I know), he will live enduringly in part because all of this writing flows from the hand and mind of one who believes enough in what he says to have lived the ideals he presses, however self-effacingly, on others.
It was commonplace to decry last year's bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize upon Barack Obama, just as many had ridiculed the decision to give it to Al Gore in 2007, but it is well to remember that the Peace Prize occasionally goes to those who richly deserve it. One thinks, for instance, of Aung San Suu Kyii; and Liu Xiaobo, who won the award this year, certainly deserves the award if anyone does, since he, like Aung, has risked his life in his attempt to bring greater freedom to his countrymen (and thereby also to the world at large, which means, dear reader, to you and me). If the Peace Prize has has an ideologically spotty record, the Prize in Literature recently has been well bestowed. Despite what the fashionable critics say about the irrelevance of the writer's life to his work, it is good to see the occasional writer live out the principles he enjoins in his work--for this reason, it was gratifying that Orhan Pamuk, who has had to leave his native Turkey and beloved Istanbul because of remarks he has made about his countrymen's historic slaughter of Armenians, won the Prize in 2008. Not only does he write impressively, but he has had to pay a price for his views. And last year the prize went to Herta Mueller, a writer who suffered a great deal in her native Romania for speaking out, as much as was possible, against Nikolai Caucescu's brutal regime.
Although he has been to some extent ostracized for his lack of adherence to left-wing dogma, Vargas Llosa hasn't had to suffer as Mueller and perhaps Pamuk have. He does, however, certainly live his beliefs. Early on, he was a devoted Marxist, but as he has grown older his views have moved rightward, and while he is no George W. Bush or Sarah Palin (no one who thinks of himself as a citizen of the world can ever be that), he has felt the pressure because of his views from those among the international intelligentsia with whom he consorts. A number, particularly in Europe, have found his views so far beyond the pale that they have in very strong terms denounced his receiving the Nobel, but to show just how small their pale is, one need only remember that the supposedly reactionary Vargas Llosa espouses essentially unrestricted immigration from poor countries to wealthier ones. (See his essay "Los inmigrantes" in his volume of essays entitled El lenguaje de la pasion, an essay that begins, appropriately enough for so quixotic a thesis, by recounting an experience he had while visiting some friends in La Mancha.)
No, Vargas Llosa's conservativism, which he with reason calls neo-liberalism--in the old nineteenth-century British sense of open trade and general democracy--is a generous thing, born of a large spirit that seems to relish the physical delights of daily existence and move with a genuine concern for the good of his fellow human beings, particularly those in Latin America who because of corruption and kleptocracy have been cheated of a standard of life that might otherwise have been theirs. Over time he has seen again and again how the seductive promises of one Messianic leader after another have deceived the poorly-educated Latin American voter into thinking that there is a short and easy way to national prosperity, with the result that everyone suffers, everyone, that is, except for the Messianic leader. Anyone who thinks that the caricature is a thing of a dimly-remembered past inhabited by Speedy Gonzales and the Frito Bandito need look no further than Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez is hardly more sophisticated than the Caudillo in the 1970s film The In-Laws. But the cast of extras in Venezuela doesn't get to go home at the end of the day--they get to live the movie week after week, month after month, as their economy implodes, their institutions crack up, and foreign investment slips away with the tide. This conviction that real people suffer for the sins of egomaniacs paving their own success with the misery of their countrymen is what seems to have motivated Vargas Llosa's growing conviction, and it certifies his humanity along with his integrity, since it is based not on concern for himself but on concern for those whose potential is often squandered by others who take the easy way to their own material success.
I see, however, that this present essay does what Vargas Llosa's never do, and that is stry much beyond the concrete and particular, so herewith some specific observations. Perhaps his longest essay is his magical memoir El Pez en El Agua, in which he recounts his early life and education in the Peru of the 1950s and, in alternating chapters, his run for the presidency of that country in 1990. Although the campaign was unsuccessful, the early life and education was spectacularly fruitful. It contains a wonderfully rich experience of life in Bolivia and Peru, as a student, a denizen of the bars of Lima, an occasion patron of brothels, as a student of distinguished Peruvian historians, as a cub reporter, aspiring playwright, and, most colorfully of all, husband of a woman sufficiently older and closely enough related to him to be called his "Aunt Julia." He writes about all this with the what he elsewhere attributes to the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz--the language of passion, a writing that clearly delights in the remembrance of the rich fabric as he turns it over in the image-house of memory. This delight comes out very well in the ironic detachment and good humor with which he writes about his own naivete and false steps. And he manages it all in a Spanish whose clarity is such that the beginner in Spanish can relish the entire pageant.
But delightful as this romantic narrative is, the other narrative, the one in which he recounts the presidential campaign of 1990, contains the essential political vision. The narrative glistens with veins of ore like those in the fabled Peruvian silver mines. There are his observations on the dangers of Alain Garcia's nationalization of the private sector over the course of the 1980s: perhaps the greatest cautionary tale is about what happened when the government nationalized the banks. Over time it apparently became difficult for those who didn't support the government to take out the large loans necessary to start businesses. (This produced a particularly striking impression when I read it in the early days of the Obama presidency as the Federal government was bailing out the investment banks. If they government would eventually become a major partner in a major bank, would it--because of separation of Church and State--begin to deny funds for, say, the construction of a large downtown church building? Never mind that now: as we learn this week, the government of New York City is actively engaged in making the controversial case for the construction of the mosque close to Ground Zero.) Another rich insight comes in the chapter entitled "El intelectual barato" ("The cheap intellectual") about those who congratulate themselves on their liberal credentials while being bought off by precisely those corrupt politicos who destroy the very freedoms that these writers claim to cherish. It is the best meditation I know on the subject, one with obvious relevance in our own day when we hear--rather, do not hear--everywhere those who claim to be the boldest for women's rights say nothing, nothing at all, about the almost unimaginable suffering of women in some of the Islamic regimes around the world, nay, some of the Islamic enclaves in Western Europe.
But we are back to where we started. Although he is a first-rate novelist, essayist, and literary critic (his study of Les Miserables is one of the best pieces of criticism I know), he will live enduringly in part because all of this writing flows from the hand and mind of one who believes enough in what he says to have lived the ideals he presses, however self-effacingly, on others.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
The Law of the Border
It is a story much underreported in the American press, which perhaps adds another bit of evidence to the Meridian Law of Prominence in Journalism: the importance of a story is in inverse proportion to its appearance in the mainstream press. The Spanish daily El Pais reported two days ago on an attack by drug cartel assassins on a rehab center in the city of Chihuahua in northern Meixco. About this incident two facts immediately stand out. The first is the brutality of it: 19 patients were killed in the attack, carried out with the help of large-caliber weapons; police recovered over 150 shell casings at the scene. (In 2009, 17 people lost their lives in a similar attack in Ciudad Juarez, which abuts the U.S. border, and a total of 40 were killed in this fashion over the course of the past year.) The second salient point is the location. The rehabilitation center exists as a symbol of healing generally, of institutions which tap deep into the springs of what makes us human--compassion for others. More particularly, a rehabilitation center represents life independent of the control of the drug bosses, the decision to overcome one's past and exist as a rational human being exercising one's power to make one's own choices in life. Finally, the rehabilitation center symbolizes those institutions of normal, civic life that contribute to the improvement of society and stand apart from the desires of those who seek for themselves power and wealth by any means possible.
In attacking these places, then, the drug cartels serve notice that they are willing to employ maximum lawless force in order to destroy institutions that would exist apart from their control. The sheer wanton force they use serves not only to punish but also to intimidate anyone who might think in future of trying to live as a free human being.
I don't mean to suggest that such attacks are a daily occurrence in Mexico, but the fact that they happen with some frequency indicates severe pressure on anything that can be called Mexican civil society. The nation that produced Frida Kahlo, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, Octavio Paz, Miguel Jimenez, and Carlos Fuentes is perhaps in danger of losing to violent, lawless erosion those institutions that ensure stability and freedom in a democratic society. As the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa never tires of reminding us, those institutions--an independent judiciary, a military ultimately controlled by civilians, a banking system independent of government control--are absolutely essential for any nation whose citizens are to be free and live lives independent of government control. All dictatorships and failed states around the globe, from the Zimbabwean bush to the near-famine conditions in Somalia, to the sophisticated streets of Moscow, lack the independent institutions that can check the power of the few that would pillage their countries for their own ends.
As many others have pointed out many times, the power of these lawless elements south of the border is an important reason for sealing that international boundary, as we have called for in our second post. That same post shows that we are not anti-immigrant: indeed, we believe that those now here illegally ought to be allowed to stay as guests, without citizenship, but that beginning now we vigilantly try to keep out any others coming here illegally. If we do not, if we continue to refuse to dam the waters, the flood will carry along with the majority of decent, hard-working migrants the jetsam of those who would bring with them the type of violent disregard for the lives of others that can at best cause severe suffering to Americans and at worst destabilize our society.
We hope that the Mexican government--Federal and local--will be able to gain the upper hand and eventually break the power of the narcotrafficers. Until they do, we can only view conditions in Mexico with increasing alarm and insist on containing the situation lest it begin to cause serious problems within our borders. Again: let me clarify that I do not mean that most Mexicans living in the United States are dangerous. What I hope to make clear is that the currently powerful drug cartels are ruthless in a way rarely seen in the past and that if we do not control our borders they may very possibly bring their standard business model of intimidation and violence to our nation.
**************
In a completely unrelated matter, a staffer here at Meridian Heat suggests that the woman Al Gore might have had as paramour was the female robot that famously married a Japanese couple last month.
In attacking these places, then, the drug cartels serve notice that they are willing to employ maximum lawless force in order to destroy institutions that would exist apart from their control. The sheer wanton force they use serves not only to punish but also to intimidate anyone who might think in future of trying to live as a free human being.
I don't mean to suggest that such attacks are a daily occurrence in Mexico, but the fact that they happen with some frequency indicates severe pressure on anything that can be called Mexican civil society. The nation that produced Frida Kahlo, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, Octavio Paz, Miguel Jimenez, and Carlos Fuentes is perhaps in danger of losing to violent, lawless erosion those institutions that ensure stability and freedom in a democratic society. As the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa never tires of reminding us, those institutions--an independent judiciary, a military ultimately controlled by civilians, a banking system independent of government control--are absolutely essential for any nation whose citizens are to be free and live lives independent of government control. All dictatorships and failed states around the globe, from the Zimbabwean bush to the near-famine conditions in Somalia, to the sophisticated streets of Moscow, lack the independent institutions that can check the power of the few that would pillage their countries for their own ends.
As many others have pointed out many times, the power of these lawless elements south of the border is an important reason for sealing that international boundary, as we have called for in our second post. That same post shows that we are not anti-immigrant: indeed, we believe that those now here illegally ought to be allowed to stay as guests, without citizenship, but that beginning now we vigilantly try to keep out any others coming here illegally. If we do not, if we continue to refuse to dam the waters, the flood will carry along with the majority of decent, hard-working migrants the jetsam of those who would bring with them the type of violent disregard for the lives of others that can at best cause severe suffering to Americans and at worst destabilize our society.
We hope that the Mexican government--Federal and local--will be able to gain the upper hand and eventually break the power of the narcotrafficers. Until they do, we can only view conditions in Mexico with increasing alarm and insist on containing the situation lest it begin to cause serious problems within our borders. Again: let me clarify that I do not mean that most Mexicans living in the United States are dangerous. What I hope to make clear is that the currently powerful drug cartels are ruthless in a way rarely seen in the past and that if we do not control our borders they may very possibly bring their standard business model of intimidation and violence to our nation.
**************
In a completely unrelated matter, a staffer here at Meridian Heat suggests that the woman Al Gore might have had as paramour was the female robot that famously married a Japanese couple last month.
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