Human Depravity and Government Part 2

Upon reading my last post, I confess I was a bit dissatisfied with the connection I made between human depravity and the structure of the federal government. I made a good connection, but I didn't tease it out. So here's another take.

First, what if our government believed in and relied on the inherent goodness of people? If this were true, we'd have no reason for much of the laws we have. Why would we need to write more laws if everyone obeyed them without negative consequence? We wouldn't. Think of all the laws we wouldn't need: all criminal law, federal laws regarding immigration and gun control, and the government wouldn't tax people at all because out of their goodness they'd give to the big government cause. Of course this absurd.

Second, has there been any government in the modern era of the nation-state who exemplified the inherent goodness of humanity? Even communist governments founded upon the ideal of absolute equality always denigrated into totalitarian states bent on conforming people to the will of the state/party. It frankly, on top of being immoral, is impractial to structure a government based on human goodness.

Does this mean I believe humans don't have the capacity for good? No, it does not. Humans are also made in God's image (Gen. 1). But social and governmental standards are different than individual and personal ethics. I believe there are many decent, law-abiding citizens. But we must assume the depravity of humanity as a first principle in government.

So can the government be an instrument of that good? No it cannot. The government can only be an instrument of coercion. The government asks for taxes and goes to war. Even these modes of the government are established by the Christian thought (Romans 13). The government, by the very nature of its entity, cannot be an agent of compassion. Even in welfare, medicaid, or health insurance (seemingly compassionate acts of government), the government must get that money from somewhere and it must force its laws upon the populace. Note: the government can only be about force, then. Acts of compassion convolute the role of government and misconstrue the first principle of government: humans are deprave and therefore governments tend to abuse even attempted compassion.

So what's the good news? The good news is that we can be involved in a wonderful, albeit broken, democracy in this era of the United States. This means, from a Christian perspective, that we can and should be involved in the reform of government at every level. And should we decide to run for office, we should be very cautious about the role our own depravity can play as it hungers for power, fame, and success. They are universal human temptations after all.

In sum, be wary of any glowing or enlightened terms about the goodness of government. It's not a moral entity, it cannot be good or bad. It is only an agent of coercion, so let's make sure we give the coercion definite boundaries.

Human Depravity and the Role of Government

"The depravity of man is one Christian doctrine that is empirically provable." G.K. Chesterton

"They love him now, but they're all gonna hate him in 4 years, or 8." The old guy who watched Obama's inauguration with me

The government doesn't work. Old people are skeptical and hardened. Young people, particularly those who voted for Obama, are disillusioned. No wonder voting in national elections is always low, so the refrain goes. Conservatives are excited, because they can stall Obama and the Democrat's legislative agenda. Liberals are disappointed, constantly noting the disfunction of government. A brief survey of the landscape:

From a Time article, the cover story on broken government:

This revulsion toward the nation's capital is understandable. But it makes the problem worse. From health care to energy to the deficit, addressing the U.S.'s big challenges requires vigorous government action. When government doesn't take that action, it loses people's faith. And without public faith, government action is harder still. Call it Washington's vicious circle. Breaking this circle of public mistrust and government failure requires progress on solving big problems, which requires more cooperation between the parties.

From the Weekly Standard, regarding Evan Bayh's resignation:

Tough Choosers [like Bayh] always insist that the problems of the present era are unprecedented. The past, in contrast to the fallen world we face now, was idyllic, and the golden age always ended the day before yesterday. Bayh fondly recollected the years when his father Birch Bayh worked as a senator, in the 1970s, a prelapsarian era when legislators “worked together” and “got things done.” The voters at the time saw it differently. At the end of Birch Bayh’s third term, they voted him and 11 of his colleagues out of office in a mass turnover that was truly unprecedented—a kind of electoral upchuck. If the Senate was getting things done in the 1970s, they were evidently the wrong things.

And from Charles Krauthammer with the Washington Post:

The rage at the machine has produced the usual litany of systemic explanations. Special interests are too powerful. The Senate filibuster stymies social progress. A burdensome constitutional order prevents innovation... The better thinkers, bewildered and furious that their president has not gotten his way, have developed a sudden disdain for our inherently incremental constitutional system. Yet, what's new about any of these supposedly ruinous structural impediments? Special interests blocking policy changes? They have been around since the beginning of the republic -- and since the beginning of the republic, strong presidents, like the two Roosevelts, have rallied the citizenry and overcome them.

So where does this landscape leave us? I confess that it leaves me satisfied. And not because the Obama agenda is being stalled. I am satisfied because I live in a country that demands citizen participation (unlike communist China). I am satisfied that I live in a country where minority views are heard (unlike utilitarian social democracies who only value the most, not the least). I am satisfied that I live in a country that respects the spirit of human enterprise, while also not trusting the human spirit too much.

And that's where I leave you. The Founding Fathers believed in human depravity, so they set up a government not absent of power, but one where power was necessarily shared and split. The separation of powers meant that each branch of government- executive, legislative, and judicial- had certain checks on the others to prohibit rampant abuse of power and waste.

Thus, the problem isn't that the government can't get anything done. That's actually good, and it was designed that way on purpose. The problem is when one branch of the government assumes too much power and expects it. And that's exactly what the executive branch of the US Federal government is. Disillusionment with the goodness of humanity and the charisma of leaders is good for the soul.

More Chesterton

I haven't lacked inspiration for new posts lately, I've just lacked time. But in either instance, one must still keep the mind going. So I just found this, courtesy of the American Chesterton Society. It pretty much sums up why you should read G.K. Chesterton. The highlight:

This absent-minded, overgrown elf of a man, who laughed at his own jokes and amused children at birthday parties by catching buns in his mouth, this was the man who wrote a book called The Everlasting Man, which led a young atheist named C.S. Lewis to become a Christian. This was the man who wrote a novel called The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which inspired Michael Collins to lead a movement for Irish Independence. This was the man who wrote an essay in the Illustrated London News that inspired Mohandas Gandhi to lead a movement to end British colonial rule in India...

Chesterton debated many of the celebrated intellectuals of his time:
George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow. According to contemporary accounts, Chesterton usually emerged as the winner of these contests, however, the world has immortalized his opponents and forgotten Chesterton, and now we hear only one side of the argument, and we are enduring the legacies of socialism, relativism, materialism, and skepticism. Ironically,
all of his opponents regarded Chesterton with the greatest affection. And George Bernard Shaw said: "The world is not thankful enough for Chesterton."

Lloyd-Jones on Church History

"The modern man is very ignorant of history; he does not know that the hospitals originally came through the Church. It was Christian people who first, out of a sense of compassion for suffering and illness, began to do something about even physical diseases and illnesses. The first hospitals were founded by Christian people. The same thing is true of education; it was the Church that first saw this need and proceeded to do something about it. The same is true of Poor Law Relief and the mitigation of the sufferings of people who were enduring poverty. I argue that it is the Church that has really done this. Your trades unions and other such movements, you will find, if you go back to their beginnings, have almost invariably had Christian origins."

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, 1969

I found it interesting in this book on preaching by a Welshman that he comments on two major issues that we now consider to be the role of the government. Almost unthinkingly many Americans consider healthcare and education to be the role of the government. And not just any government: the federal government. I then began to wonder where most U.S. Senators got their degrees: from public universities or private ones? I then began to wonder about the U.S. Senate's healthcare plan, and how Americans pay for it. I haven't done this research, so someone could enlighten me here.

My point is that, implicitly, we all recognize that institutions with an investment in their own success do in fact do a better job fulfilling their purpose than institutions protected by government, which has no vested interest in its success.

Furthermore, Christian institutions have always done a better job at healthcare and education when removed from the influence of federal government. Let us not forget that the Establishment and Free Exercise (I refuse to say "separation of church and state" because the term has lost all meaning and has no Constitutional significance anyhow) of the 1st Amendment was written so that the government would stay out of influence in religious affairs.

That includes all areas of religious affairs, such as education and healthcare. Currently, states such as California have tried to outlaw homeschooling while the U.S. Senate plan will mandate that all Americans must buy health insurance.

So I've cloaked my argument in religious terms. I believe that these actions by the State are breaches of the first amendment, and thus my free exercise of religious belief. In short, these attempts by the government are unconstitutional. Besides, the Church, when unconstrained by the largesse of the Federal Government, does it better anyways.

Entralled by Beauty

Beauty itself is one of the few things that truly lasts. As humans are created in God's image, we cannot help but be creators ourselves. And we are at our finest when we are making something beautiful.

Furthermore, Christians have the strongest and best explanation of why some things are beautiful and others are not. To experience beauty is a unique human experience, and other worldviews have a hard time explaining why something is beautiful.

Beauty in science was born out of a Christian worldview: the idea that the world was created by an organized Creator who is rational and put things in their place. Because of this view, Christians believed the world was orderly, testable, rational, and that science could thus flourish in repeatable experiments. Naturalism, which results in chaos, and pantheim, which results in an impersonal uncertainty, could not have started the beauty of science.

Beauty in art was also, to some extent, born out of a Christian worldview. But in this vein humans have always created art, since our very beginnings. But the best art, the most beautiful art, is born out of a Christian worldview. Painting, dance, sculpture, music, and architecture are all at their finest when considering a Creator God. But the only reason I wrote all that was not so that you could disagree or agree, really. Normally that's what this blog is about.

Sometimes it's better just to enter in to the beauty. So I give you Bach: one of my favorite composers.