Joe Krause for Congress

The Good, the bad and the ugly are all lining up to run for Congress from South Texas. I'm informed by someone who should know that Cameron County will pretty well have its own Congressional district, with the county intact and a little chunk of Willancy and Hidalgo in the district. This will come about for several reasons. The Republicans with about 2/3 of the House of Representatives seats will want it, because they can isolate a lot of the Democratic (their euphemism for Hispanic) votes in one district. The Cameron County movers and shakers want it because so many look in the mirror and see a Congressman, rather like looking at the picture of Dorian Gray.

Nueces voted almost completely on racist lines this election. Hispanics lost whether running as Democrats as Republicans with the Republicans voting in high numbers. Whether Farenthold can be elected again out of Corpus Christi is questionable (apparently he's even too weird for the teabaggers). But Cameron County will almost certainly elect someone besides Farenthold and in a presidential election year, almost certainly a Democrat.

As these things go, the worst rise to the top, because they are willing to do things, say things and accept money from groups that will nauseate the slightly less-awful candidate. It is to be accepted that the Democratic candidate will be semi-literate and wildly unqualified for the job, but cunning and ruthless in getting a vote or a contribution. We can expect someone with long experience in squeezing vendors for contributions and digging up and slinging the most mud, real or invented. The campaign will be slick and professional and the candidate will only be in public with air-brushing or on television with someone who can read reading the commercials.

Then, I'll almost inevitably vote for this cretin. If it looks like he could lose to a Republican, I might even give a little money if I happen to have some.

That is why I think Joe Krause should run for Congress as a Catholic Candidate to give me a choice. I would support Dorothy Day if she would move here and run, but since that won't happen, Joe is my next best choice.

Defining the Catholic platform is pretty easy because Leo XIII and others wrote it. Then Dorothy Day wrote a lot about it as it applies to United States issues of the 20th Century. (see the enclosure link for other links to the writings of Dorothy Day). Joe lives it. The quote by Pope Paul VI,"If you want peace, work for justice" is the theme of the campaign. Valley Interfaith is the kitchen cabinet. We look to GK Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc and John Ruskin for guidance.

Some of the positions:

No death penalty. In fact, pro-life from conception to the grave, so
no abortion and no euthanasia either. Prisons will become rare as well
because punishment will no longer be a moral or legal basis for regulating
society. Inmates, felons and illegal aliens should get the vote.

A living wage based on universal ownership of property, guilds and other
protections. Capitalism is replaced by Distributism. Every child
upon conception will be given his or her fair share of the national bounty, so
every child becomes a financial boon for the mother, who of course has her own
share of the national bounty.

Profit is made up of unfairly withheld wages. As Ruskin says, the responsibility of the businessman is to bring prosperity to the community. The responsibility of the lawyer is to bring justice to the community. The responsibility of the doctor is to bring health to the community.

Accumulated wealth is a form of violence. And shows a lack of faith. Anyone who accepts stewardship over wealth or power must also accept personal poverty and precarity.

No usury. All debts are cancelled every seven years. All property is redistributed equally every fifty years. (We're way overdue, so we can start that now).

No borders. Borders are a form of violence created to allow the
wealthy to protect their wealth. Strangers are welcome.

No wars, no nuclear weapons.

Quick, tell me Solomon Ortiz' and Blake Farenthold's campaign slogans. Now tell me Joe's wouldn't be better. Run Joe Run.

Political Corruption

Every corrupt politician's favorite rant is against political corruption. As a rule, the more corrupt the more ranting.

It is hard to imagine a political scene without corruption. Willie Stark (when setting up an opponent's suicide) in All the King's Men, said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something."

Politicians who steal are as common as junkies with bindles. Deuteronomy and Timothy both warn us not to muzzle the ox that grinds the grain. I've heard insiders use this as the justification for allowing a little corruption. A popular saying in Austin about Texas lobbyists, is that if you can't take their money, screw their women, drink their whiskey and still vote against them, you don't belong in the legislature.

One method is to get the million dollar cash bond from the drug dealer, knowing he will jump bond. The county gets the money, and this improves everyone's (politician's) living conditions and patronage, and who cares about the drug dealer anyway. He won't come back.

Another form of this corruption is to cruise the poor area of town and find cars that were too expensive for the house. Go ask the homeowner if anyone claims the car and often they'll say "no." Then the District Attorney's office has a lot of cool cars for undercover operations or resale. It is also a way to get houses, cash, heavy gold chains and Scarface posters.

I can't muster much outrage anymore. After a while, neither could Lincoln Steffens, who made it his career. I've often suspected that the small bribes in the Mexico I visited in the 1960's and 70's were less harmful than the high cost of entering the legal system in the United States that excluded so many people (then and now).

I don't believe Robert Penn Warren was much outraged either. Another quote from All the King's Men:

Process as process is neither morally good nor morally bad. We
may judge results, but not process. The morally bad agent may perform the
deed which is good. The morally good agent may perform the deed which is
bad. Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

More Ian Morris: It's not who wins, but whether the game matters.

Daniel Bell's book, the End of Ideology, was popular when I was young. The general idea was that prosperity and technilogical advances had made all this left-right ideology unnecessary and beside the point. Then, every one got excited about politics in the sixties and I decided that Bell must have been wrong.

Morris' book (which I have now finished) makes me wonder if maybe Bell was right, after all. I would miss celebrating the 19th Century radicals like Debs and Haywood, but if the pie is growing as fast as Morris believes, worrying about politics is a waste of everyone's time. We should all just make sure that as many of us as possible have the most advanced technology available and scarcities will disappear. The idea would not be to find a fair distribution of property for the poor, but just make sure everyone could get his or her hands on the lastest computer to be implanted in the brain or gene modifier or energy producer or super grains; then the meaning of "poor" evaporates.

Hey, I'm tired of politics anyway, so this will be fine with me.

Morris ends his book with a Kipling poem. Just like David Allen Coe's perfect country and western song with drunks and prisons and trains in it, a great history should end with a Kipling poem. Maybe it should have started with a poem by Robert Service, but I was thrilled to get to then end and find, "Oh, East is east and West is west..."

Ian Morris: Why the West Rules-for Now

Ian Morris gives little examples of alternative history. What if, the Chinese had burned the Royal Navy, killed Admiral Nelson, sacked every town along the south coast of England made Queen Victoria a subject?

He then goes on to show why this could not have happened.

I like alternative histories as science fiction. You know, what if the South had won the civil war? What if the Greeks had lost to the Persians at Thermopylae? What if, the Germans had killed Hitler early in the war?-- that sort of thing.

I also like Morris' explanations about why everything became what it had to become, because of "maps, not chaps." He says, "Once we recognize that chaps (in large groups and in the new broader sense of the word) are all much the same, I will argue, all that is left is maps." His larger sense of the word "chaps" includes women, lower-class men and children.

Morris is an archaelogist and ancient historian, specializing in the classical Mediterranean of the first millennium BCE, so he takes his discussion further back in time than the modern historians. He offers a broad approach, "combining the historian's focus on context, the archaelogist's awareness of the deep past, and the social scientist's comparative methods." He got help from botanists, zoologists, chemists, geologists and other specialists. I think he might have also tossed in a philosopher, say Derk Pereboom, and a Neuroscientist, maybe Antonio Damasio, but nonetheless the result is extraordinary.

I have not yet reached the punchline, that is the part about "for Now." The book appears to be about 600 pages long. I'm reading it on the Kindle, so I don't know for sure, but it must be a hefty tome in hardback. Morris makes a joke about the length by quoting Samuel Johnson on Paradise Lost, "None ever wished it longer than it is."

So far, his book is for me like those of Jared Diamond (who he discusses), I hope just keeps going on.

Dr. Pangloss and the best of all possible worlds.

I have been reading a book by Ian Morris called Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future. I would usually want to finish a book, before making a comment, but this one is long and it is a keeper. It is a wonderful book; every page causes me to wonder about something. And it may be one of those sea change books that causes everything to look different once it is read. (I know, that sea change metaphor is hackneyed. The phrase always brings to mind for me, "Full fathom five thy father lies/ of his bones are coral made/ Those are pearls that were his eyes/ Nothing of him does fade/ but doth suffer a sea-change/ Into something rich and strange." So I keep using it.)

Morris quotes Voltaire: "'All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds,' says Dr. Pangloss-again, and again, and again--in Voltaire's eighteenth-century comic classic Candide. Despite
contracting syphilis, losing an eye and an ear, and being enslaved, hanged, and caught in not one but two earthquakes, Pangloss sticks to his story. Pangloss, of course, was Voltaire's little joke, poking fun at the silliness of contemporary philosophy, but history has thrown up plenty of real-life versions."

I read an English translation of Candide, Or Optimism, I think as assigned reading, in high school and enjoyed the joke and was completely persuaded that Pangloss and Leibniz (who I did not, and have not, read) must have been complete idiots.

Now, because of Morris' book, it occurs to me that Dr. Pangloss may have been right, not about the optimism part, but because this is the best of all possible worlds, because it is the only possible world. This also, makes it the worst of all possible worlds, of course, but if everything had to turn out the way it does, there may be no reason with Dr. Pangloss to rejoice in the awful things going on around us, but there is little reason to be suprised or disappointed, either.

Free Will and St. Augustine: Liberum Arbitrium

I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words, "Man can indeed
do what he wants, but he cannot want what he wants," accompany me in
all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others,
even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free
will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and
judging individuals, and from losing good humor. Albert
Einstein 1932.

A great deal of my free-pondering time has been devoted to the question of free will. I know this may not seem a question that matters in every day life, but I think it does. If there is no free will, the criminal justice system is founded on a false premise. If no one, when we look hard enough, acts intentionally or knowingly, but only as they must based on determinism, there is no basis for the mens rea that is usually required for punishment. Punishment itself is undermined. The whole federal guideline scheme based on "just deserts" is wrong. Criminal defense work apart, rejection of free will impacts how we interact with other folks in day to day life.

An anonymous comment to my last blog on "free will" refers to a Catholic Encyclopedia entry that affirms "free will." I take this response seriously. A great deal of my understanding of "free will" comes from Augustine, Aquinas and other Scholastics, and Pascal. However, I am persuaded none of these would embrace the modern concept of "free will" as we use the term and as we wield the term, as if it were a bludgeon, to kill our fellows. I say this in a quite literal since; a juror to whom I spoke after the verdict, justified his decision to kill with the term "free will."

The usual translation of "LIBERUM ARBITRIUM" into English is "free will." However, when Augustine writes of liberum arbitrium, he describes something very different from the excuse we today use to imprison and execute each other in the penal system. Augustine discusses liberum arbitrium in the Book V of "The City of God." Augustine leaves no doubt that the will or power of God determines everything in the world and that God knows what the future will be before hand. Augustine even reconciles himself with those who call it "fate." "If anyone attributes their existence to fate, because he calls the will or the power of God itself by the name of fate, let him keep his opinion, but correct his language."

Augustine discusses the twins, Esau and Jacob, to show that astrology cannot be true. (My translation calls the astrologists "mathematicians.") They were born at the same time, but had completely different predetermined lives. Our question though is why one son was loved by his mother (and God), and the other was not, and whether either Esau or Jacob had any control over the outcome of their lives?

Augustine tells of those who believe in determinism, that is, those who believe those who believe fate is "the whole connection and train of causes which makes everything become what it does become" are not in disagreement with him, but merely in a verbal controversy, "since they attribute the s0-called order and connection of causes to the will and power of God most high, who is mostly rightly and most truly believed to know all things before they come to pass and to leave nothing unordained...."

Augustine qoutes verses of Annaeus Seneca, "The Fates do lead the man that follows willing: But the man that is unwilling, him they drag."

So then, if "the order and connection of causes" leaves nothing unordained, what room is there for Augustine for this thing, Liberum Arbitrium? To begin with, this word "will" which in Latin is "voluntas" and not "arbitrium" should probably be "decision" or "judgment" or "discernment." (Look at the franciscan-archive. org linked under the title).

God's will is something different, but in the Augustine writings regarding man, substitute the word "decision" for "will."

God creates the will of man. Augustine, says, "In His supreme will resides the power which acts on the wills of all created spirits, helping the good, judging the evil, controlling all, granting power to some, not granting it to others."

And, "Wherefore our wills also have just so much power as God willed and foreknew that they should have...."

Our decisions are ruled by necessity, according to Augustine. "But if we define necessity to be that according to which we say that it is necessary that anything be of such or such a nature, or be done in such and such a manner, I know not why we should have any dread of that necessity taking away the freedom of our will."

So, I don't believe Augustine or the Church embrace what we today call "free will." Pascal devotes "Provincial Letters" to this argument and makes it much better than I can.