Terry Eagleton, the Marxist literary critic, is not a religious believer, but he has no time for atheists who praise religion for its social utility. Excerpt:

God may be dead, but Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists is a sign that the tradition from Voltaire to Arnold lives on. The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence. One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn’t be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised. De Botton claims that one can be an atheist while still finding religion “sporadically useful, interesting and consoling”, which makes it sound rather like knocking up a bookcase when you are feeling a bit low. Since Christianity requires one, if need be, to lay down one’s life for a stranger, he must have a strange idea of consolation. Like many an atheist, his theology is rather conservative and old-fashioned.

De Botton does not want people literally to believe, but he remains a latter-day Matthew Arnold, as his high Victorian language makes plain. Religion “teaches us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober”, as well as instructing us in “the charms of community”. It all sounds tediously neat and civilised. This is not quite the gospel of a preacher who was tortured and executed for speaking up for justice, and who warned his comrades that if they followed his example they would meet with the same fate. In De Botton’s well-manicured hands, this bloody business becomes a soothing form of spiritual therapy, able to “promote morality (and) engender a spirit of community”. It is really a version of the Big Society.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend with whom I have congenially sparred about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism in the past sent me a link to the “Creed of a Savoyard Priest,” excerpted from Rousseau’s “Emile.” He described it as a perfect description of MTD, two centuries ahead of its time. Excerpt from the Rousseau:

The morality of our actions consists entirely in the judgments we ourselves form with regard to them. If good is good, it must be good in the depth of our heart as well as in our actions; and tho first reward of justice is the consciousness that we are acting justly. If moral goodness is in accordance with our nature, man can only be healthy in mind and body when he is good. If it is not so, and if man is by nature evil, he cannot cease to be evil without corrupting his nature, and goodness in him is a crime against nature. If he is made to do harm to his fellow-creatures, as the wolf is made to devour his prey, a humane man would be as depraved a creature as pitiful wolf, and virtue alone would cause remorse.

My young friend, let us look within, let us set aside all personal prejudices and see whither our inclinations lead us. Do we take more pleasure in the sight of the sufferings of others or their joys? Is it pleasanter to do a kind action or an unkind action, and which leaves the more delightful memory behind it? Why do you enjoy the theatre? Do you delight in the crimes you behold? Do you weep over the punishment which overtakes the criminal? They say we are indifferent to everything but self-interest; yet we find our consolation in our sufferings in the charms of friendship and humanity, and even in our pleasures we should be too lonely and miserable if we had no one to share them with us. If there is no such thing as morality in man’s heart, what is the source of his rapturous admiration of noble deeds, his passionate devotion to great merit What connection is there between self-interest and this enthusiasm for virtue? Why should I choose to be Cato dying by his own hand, rather than Caesar in his triumphs? Take from our hearts this love of what is noble and you rob us of the joy of life. The mean-spirited man in whom these delicious feelings have been stifled among vile passions, who by thinking of no one but himself comes at last to love no one but himself, this man feels no raptures, bis cold heart no longer throbs with joy, and his eyes no longer fill with the sweet tears of sympathy, he delights in nothing; the wretch has neither life nor feeling, he is already dead.

It is remarkable to see how Rousseau anticipated MTD so far ahead of its debut. As my friend writes, there is an “inner logic” to the ideas put forth by the Savoyard priest, and the West is living, and has lived, them out. What the Savoyard priest said in “Emile” got the book condemned in its own place and time, but I bet you would struggle to find people today, even devout Christians, who disagreed with much of it.

Anyway, I particularly like this observation of Eagleton’s:

Like Comte, De Botton believes in the need for a host of “consoling, subtle or just charming rituals” to restore a sense of community in a fractured society. He even envisages a new kind of restaurant in which strangers would be forced to sit together and open up their hearts to one another. There would be a Book of Agape on hand, which would instruct diners to speak to each other for prescribed lengths of time on prescribed topics. Quite how this will prevent looting and rioting is not entirely clear. [Emphasis mine — RD]

Only what Rieff called “holy terror” — that is, fear of the Lord — can do that. By “fear of the Lord,” Rieff meant a sense that there is such a thing as a transcendent power and order, and that we will ultimately be held accountable for our actions. See Rusty Reno’s essay on Rieff’s “Charisma.”  Excerpt:

By Rieff’s analysis, the central and defining purpose of culture is to regulate the always-troublesome relation between the No-imposing voice of commandment and the Yes-seeking desires of the individual. According to Rieff, the traditional approach to the felt difficulties of bringing personality into coordination with authority involves internalizing and intensifying cultural norms. Religious at their core, traditional cultures stamp our inner lives with their creeds and, in so doing, deliver the human animal from its slavery to instinct. Charisma, then, describes the gift of what Rieff calls a “high” and “holy terror,” which installs the power of divine command so deeply in the soul that we can bear the thought “of evil in oneself and in the world.” A charismatic gives this gift with special force. He or she is an exemplar and virtuoso of personality fully governed by creedal authority.

UPDATE: My friend (who originally sent me the link to the Savoyard Priest essay), writes:

For me, the most interesting thing about the passage is that Rousseau doesn’t propose it in his own name — it’s the character of the priest who does it, showing, I think, that Rousseau doesn’t really endorse its view of piety. Rather, he sees it (in my interpretation) as one way of trying to grant a measure of wholeness and happiness to modern, overly civilized human beings, whose souls are rent asunder by self- love (amour-propre), which leads them to think of others when they should be thinking of themselves, and to think of themselves when they should be thinking of others. I’m a huge fan of Rousseau as a diagnostician of human unhappiness. Even though his “second-best” proposals for happiness under civilized conditions all fail. (The revolutionary politics of the Social Contract is another failed experiment in recovering happiness.)

The power of pardon is an important one, giving executives the opportunity to show mercy in extraordinary cases, or to right perceived legal injustices against the convicted. It must not be abused. After what former Miss. Governor Haley Barbour did, pardoning 200 inmates on his way out the door, the present governor and his successors will find it all but impossible to pardon a soul. Excerpt:

“These convicts got out and hit the road,” says Hood. “This is probably gonna end up in some attempt by us to have fugitive warrants issued for these people. There’s gonna be a national search for some of them.”

The pardons granted to David Gatlin, Joseph Ozment, Anthony McCray and Charles Hooker release them from any responsibility to check in with prison officials or parole officers. Their basic civil rights have been restored and the pardons wipe their criminal records clean.

“These are the people the victims’ family members are terrified of,” says CNN correspondent Martin Savidge. “If they were paroled, [the families] knew the state would be keeping tabs on them. Because they were pardoned, it’s [the families’] worst nightmare. They don’t know where they are.”

Wouldn’t you have hit the road too? What if you were a family member of one of these killers’ victims? How well would you be sleeping these days? Thanks Boss Hogg Gov. Barbour.

Please make it stop:

The North Texas pastor who once challenged his congregation to have 7 days of sex will now spend 24 hours in bed with his wife and stream it live on the Internet.

Fellowship Church Pastor Ed Young and his wife Lisa, who have in the past garnered national attention for their innovative and frank approach to discussing sex and religion in marriage,including infidelity, are launching a 24-hour “Sexperiment” to help promote a biblical view of sex to show people “how sex done God’s way can lead to a life punctuated by exclamation marks—a life full of passion, purpose, and pleasure,” according to a statement on the church’s website.

The experiment will place the couple in a bed on top of Fellowship Church where, for 24 hours, they will not only eat and sleep, but they will conduct bedside interviews, talk via Skype with friends from around the world and discuss the biblical view of sex in a marriage.

Frank Beckwith asks: “First known case of pastorbation?” Heh.

Are they going to, you know, do it? On the roof? In front of everybody? Is the threat that the pastor and his lady might get it on part of the, um, allure here?

Seriously, though, who in the world finds trivial stunts like this anything but humiliating? It’s not exactly St. Paul in the Agora, is it?

That’s the anti-Mitt Romney movie released on the web by a Super PAC affiliated with Newt Gingrich. I think Entertainment Weekly is correct in calling it a “pulverizing piece of propaganda.”  It could have been made by Oliver Stone or Michael Moore, and anybody who wondered if Newt cared more about the GOP winning this fall than destroying Romney has their answer right here. It’s incredibly crude — right down to exploiting footage of Romney speaking French, and having contact with “Latin American investors” — but emotionally devastating. Leaving aside the fairness or unfairness of the accusations — please understand that I’m neither supporting nor contesting them, not in this post — as political rhetoric it’s highly potent stuff.

Why? Because a) it plays directly to a widespread opinion that Wall Street (that is, firms like Romney’s Bain Capital) have done a spectacular number on ordinary Americans, and have gotten very rich at the expense of the common good; b) ties Romney personally to this hated phenomenon; and c) debuts in a political culture in which there is little pro-Romney passion among the people.

Andrew Sullivan highlights the biggest reason why this ad could be effective:

But what makes it so dangerous to Romney, it seems to me, is that the Bain Brahmin didn’t just fire thousands of working class people in restructuring and in closing companies. He made a fuc*ing unimaginable fortune doing it. That’s the issue. Other Republicans can speak about the need for free markets in a sluggish economy. But with Romney, we have a singular example of someone who made a quarter of a billion dollars by firing the white middle and working class in droves in ways that do not seem designed to promote growth or efficiency, but merely to enrich Bain.

Sully cites a writer in that notable left-wing rag the New York Post, criticizing Bain’s way of doing business. Fox News host Mike Huckabee denounces such attacks on Romney, but his thrust seems pro forma GOP boilerplate, and therefore unconvincing. Andy McCarthy at The Corner goes nuclear on Newt and the ad, calling it “shameful” and “a disgrace,” and saying he’s now “embarrassed” to have stood up for Gingrich in this campaign.

The ad is useful to Romney in one way: it forces him to address right now, in January, the main thrust of what will be the Democrats’ attack on him this fall, should he be the nominee. If he can’t effectively rebut Gingrich’s assault now, he’ll be hopeless against Obama this fall.

It’s absolutely astonishing that a raw-meat populist film like this is coming from a Republican presidential candidate, because it radically calls into question the conventional right-wing (and New Democrat) wisdom about the virtues of contemporary capitalism. To be sure, I think this is a good thing in principle, though this particular instance is like sending a drunken butcher in to do the work of a surgeon. The idea that Newt Gingrich, of all people, would be making this kind of attack on Romney is risible. Since when did Newt Gingrich ever lift a fat finger to fight the kind of predatory capitalism he faults Romney for in this film?

UPDATE: Megan McArdle says the WSJ story examining the fate of companies taken over by Bain provides equal evidence for those who think Bain was predatory and harmful, and those who think it served a positive role by re-energizing dysfunctional firms. She’s suspending judgment until she sees more information. As am I.

UPDATE.2: Elias Isquith (@eliasisquith) tweets:

A little less than half-way through 2 thoughts: 1. no way a swing voter votes Romney after seeing this 2. Gingrich will never be forgiven

The other day I met and talked to a teacher from another parish who teaches in public school. Her students are almost all poor and black. She said she has learned a hell of a lot in the classroom that they don’t teach you in education programs — mostly about the mind-forg’d manacles of the culture of poverty. For example, she said the kids are almost all on free or subsidized lunches, but nearly all of them have new iPhones, fancy sneakers, and so forth. The kids are conditioned by families and local cultures that do not value learning, and that are marked by all kinds of severe dysfunction. The obstacles in the way of classroom achievement have very little to do with an absence of financial resources in the school, she indicated, and everything to do with a culture that works powerfully against the self-discipline and vision required for academic achievement.

I keep saying that there is no constituency for blaming parents and communities for their own failures on these points, so politicians instead blame teachers, or racism, or fill-in-the-blank. And they are certain the way to boost achievement is through more testing, or more money, or more “accountability” for teachers. You can’t come up with a government program that makes bad parents quit drinking and partying, and take care of their kids.

All of which is prelude to linking to (liberal) Joe Klein’s call (in Time magazine) for Head Start to end.  We’ve spend $7 billion on the thing, says Klein, and there’s now conclusive evidence that it doesn’t work. Says Klein:

“The argument that Head Start opponents make is that it is a jobs program,” a senior Obama Administration official told me, “and sadly, there is something to that.”

This is criminal, every bit as outrageous as tax breaks for oil companies — perhaps even more outrageous, since we are talking about the lives of children.

Adds Walter Russell Mead:

[T]he fundamental assumptions behind decades of government policy in education are coming unglued. The tools we’ve been using to address some of our most serious social problems don’t work. The money we’ve spent has been wasted.

It isn’t the just the Tea Party and Ayn Rand acolytes saying these things. It’s President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services. It’s Time magazine.

A paradigm is falling apart.

The idea that families exist in deep relation to one another is not merely a metaphor, or as biologically cut-and-dried as we may think:

How many people have left their DNA in us? Any baby we’ve ever conceived, even ones we’ve miscarried unknowingly. Sons leave their Y chromosome genes in their mothers. The fetal cells from each pregnancy, flowing in a mother’s bloodstream, can be passed on to her successive kids. If we have an older sibling, that older sibling’s cells may be in us. The baby in a large family may harbor the genes of many brothers and sisters. My mother’s cells are in my body, and so are my daughter’s cells, and half my daughter’s DNA comes from her dad. Some of those cells may be in my brain. This is squirm-worthy.

But there’s something beautiful about this too. Long post postpartum, we mothers continue to carry our children, at least in a sense. Our babies become part of us, just as we are a part of them. The barriers have broken down; the lines are no longer fixed. Moms must be many in one.

(H/T: Ellen.)

Brilliant Twitter feed repeating things overheard in the elevator at Goldman Sachs, though now it’s expanded to include conversation heard all around Wall Street (investment banks, bars, etc.). Really funny stuff. For example:

 I don’t care how into the environment she says she is. No chick wants to be picked up in a Chevy Volt.

True! More:

Can we please stop calling them ‘hipsters’ and go back to calling them ‘pu*sies?’

Subscribe to the Twitter feed here.

I’ve been transcribing tapes of interviews for my book, and I’m amused to observe how much thicker my accent has become in the past month of living back here in south Louisiana. I just said something to one of my children, and caught myself so thick in gumbo-mud mushmouthery that I started the sentence over, and articulated the words as if I were navigating a bog atop stepping stones. Funny how this is happening; I’m not aware of it, consciously, but the tale of the tape tells otherwise. I had not been aware that I’d spent most of my life code-switching; I thought my accent had changed permanently. Glad to learn otherwise.

I never did lose the Southern thing entirely, thank goodness. My wife says that when we first started dating, she thought I came from “Wesley Shannon Parish,” because of the way I pronounced “West Feliciana” (wessleySHANNA, all slurred together).

An interesting variation in area accents. I notice that people who are originally from here, or one of the other Florida parishes, tend to pronounce the word “on” as oan. People who are from Baton Rouge, or one of the parishes in Acadiana, tend to say owun. My neighbor is a linguist. Must make an inquiry.

I had to explain to my son the other day what a “podna” is, and why his grandfather calls him that.

I had hoped that the Supreme Court would rule on behalf of religious liberty in the Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC case, but I did not expect a unanimous decision!:

In what may be its most significant religious liberty decision in two decades, the Supreme Court on Wednesday for the first time recognized a “ministerial exception” to employment discrimination laws, saying that churches and other religious groups must be free to choose and dismiss their leaders without government interference.

“The interest of society in the enforcement of employment discrimination statutes is undoubtedly important,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.wrote in a decision that was surprising in both its sweep and its unanimity. “But so, too, is the interest of religious groups in choosing who will preach their beliefs, teach their faith and carry out their mission.”

The decision gave only limited guidance about how courts should decide who counts as a minister, saying the court was “reluctant to adopt a rigid formula.” Two concurring opinions offered contrasting proposals.

Whatever its precise scope, the ruling will have concrete consequences for countless people employed by religious groups to perform religious work. In addition to ministers, priests, rabbis and other religious leaders, the decision appears to encompass, for instance, at least those teachers in religious schools with formal religious training who are charged with instructing students about religious matters.

This is a stunning rebuke to the Obama administration. Which deserved it. Matthew Franck looks forward:

One question now is whether Hosanna-Tabor can be squared with the 1990Employment Division v. Smith decision, in which the Court held that the First Amendment does not mandate that religious exceptions be made to generally applicable laws. The chief justice said that the Americans With Disabilities Act, at issue here, “like Oregon’s prohibition on peyote use [at issue in Smith], is a valid and neutral law of general applicability.” He went on:

But a church’s selection of its ministers is unlike an individual’s ingestion of peyote. Smith involved government regulation of only outward physical acts. The present case, in contrast, concerns government interference with an internal church decision that affects the faith and mission of the church itself. . . . The contention that Smithforecloses recognition of a ministerial exception rooted in the Religion Clauses has no merit.What Roberts suggests here is an important qualification of Smith. Quoting a nineteenth century ruling, Justice Scalia (who silently joined yesterday’s ruling) said in Smith that a blanket rule that religious claims nearly always trigger exemptions to generally applicable laws would “in effect permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.” Yesterday, in Hosanna-Tabor, Chief Justice Roberts said, in effect, that when it comes to the right to govern themselves in the choice of their clergy, ministers, leaders, and others whose functions and duties are distinctly religious, churches and other religious organizations are indeed a law unto themselves. This is an important recognition of the communal nature of religious life, but it does leaveSmith largely intact in the context that gave rise to it two decades ago.