Personal Re-integration

In his wonderful book The Martial Spirit, accomplished martial artist and author Herman Kauz shares the Japanese concept hara 原隆浩 which

implies an acceptance of the idea that we are connected with the world and with each other. We are not separated from the rest of life.…when we attempt to become as rational as possible in our approach, we often become too narrow or restrictive in our assessment of the “relevant” factors that constitute a problem or its solution. We forget that the world is actually an interrelated and intermeshed whole. [MS p. 58]

Echoing the Pope’s call to live authentically, management consultant Henry Mintzberg tells us to actually interact with people, rather than live in the myths posed by theories:

I believe that the researcher who never goes near the water, who collects quantitative data from a distance, without anecdote to support them, will always have difficulty explaining interesting relationships (although he may uncover them). Those creative leaps seem to come from our subconscious mental processes, our intuition. And intuition apparently requires the “sense” of things—how they feel, smell, “seem.” We need to be “in touch.” Increasingly in our research, we are impressed by the importance of phenomena that cannot be measured—by the impact of an organization’s history and its ideology on its current strategy, by the role that personality and intuition play in decision-making. To miss this in research is to miss the very lifeblood of the organization. [Mintzberg, Admin Sci Qtrly, Dec 79, pp.587-588, see entry 125 on linked article listing]

The Pontifical Council for the Family counsels us to start with “the basics,” and move on to strive for perfection (“Be perfect as Your Father is perfect,” Mt 5:48).

…parents are urged to dare to ask for more and to propose more. They cannot be satisfied with avoiding the worst — that their children do not take drugs or commit crimes. They will have to be committed to educating them in the true values of the person, renewed by the virtues of faith, hope and love: the values of freedom, responsibility, fatherhood and motherhood, service, professional work, solidarity, honesty, art, sport, the joy of knowing they are children of God… Parents must find time to be with their children and take time to talk with them. [The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality 49, 51]

Live life in layers

It’s been said that there are two classes of people: “life is turbulent” people and “life is laminar” people. Understanding that we do live our life in layers, each with its own set of conditions and characteristics; we can discretely manage or direct virtually all of those layers or levels, to “minimize our wake” and move us out of the turbulent eddies into the slipstream mode of living. Letter to Families, Gratissimam Sane, weaves in splendidly here as we conclude:

The richest source for knowledge of the body is the Word made flesh. Christ reveals man to himself. In a certain sense this statement of the Second Vatican Council is the reply, so long awaited, which the Church has given to modern rationalism.…

When the human body, considered apart from spirit and thought, comes to be used as raw material in the same way that the bodies of animals are used—and this actually occurs for example in experimentation on embryos and fetuses—we will inevitably arrive at a dreadful ethical defeat.…  Man thus ceases to live as a person and a subject.… he becomes merely an object. …

Modern rationalism does not tolerate mystery. It does not accept the mystery of man as male and female, nor is it willing to admit that the full truth about man has been revealed in Jesus Christ. In particular, it does not accept the “great mystery” proclaimed in the Letter to the Ephesians, but radically opposes it.…it firmly rejects the idea of a God who became man in order to save man. For rationalism it is unthinkable that God should be the Redeemer, much less that he should be “the Bridegroom”, the primordial and unique source of the human love between spouses. [LF 19]

This seems to be most prevalent with the Western mind, but not universal. One of Rainer Maria Rilke’s most famous letters “to a Young Poet” Mr. Kappus, written in 1903 contains the passage:

And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, evolve some distant day into the answer. [Letters to a Young Poet, #4, 16 July 1903]

Until next time,

Keep the Faith!

Matthew

continued from Staggering Costs, Part II, 24 Oct 2011.

Economic

Redistributive economics has at its core a desire to re-order God’s plan that “those who don’t work, don’t eat.” [2Thes 3:10] It takes away the incentive to strive for achievement. Deprived of drive, man’s productivity drops, while business and social costs soar. Thomas Sowell’s Affirmative Action Around the World documents this second thrust of our thesis, that essentially every time and place that multi-cultural activists (MCA) have been given rein to reshape the world, the results have not lived up to the rhetoric:

The empirical consequences of affirmative action preferences and quotas have been paid remarkably little attention—with hard data being sparse to nonexistent in some countries—while controversies surrounding these policies have been discussed in terms of the vision and the rationale behind them and the counter-vision and counter-rationales of critics. Vague, emotional, confused, and dishonest words, which are incidental aspects of many controversial issues, are central to discussions of affirmative action in countries around the world. Few such programs could stand on the basis of their actual empirical consequences. Nor are their moral bases any more solid.

Some groups in some countries imagine themselves entitled to preferences and quotas just because they are indigenous “sons of the soil”—even when they are in fact not indigenous, as the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka and the Malays in Malaysia are not. Yet indigenousness has acquired a moral aura, not only among those claiming such status, but among observers and scholars as well. Why an accident of history and geography should have moral implications that last for centuries is a question seldom raised, much less answered. ~from the Hooover Institution’s Review

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch…

In The Two-Income Trap (TI), we learn that the two biggest expenses two-income families with children face are child-care and schooling. Over the past generation, as wave after wave of cultural revision has swept our land, we see widespread evidence of the fruits of original sin: “attempts to destroy fatherhood” (see chapter 35 of Crossing the Threshold of Hope), for Blessed JohnPaul II’s radical insight). This key to interpreting reality has simple solution: study the conventional wisdom (popular morés) and do the opposite. It’s been said that the most important distance in the world is the six inches between our ears. People’s attitudes shape their outcomes. In the span of a generation, we’ve normalized poor parenting:

In 1965 only 21 percent of working women were back at their jobs within 6 months of giving birth to their first child. Today that figure is higher than 70 percent. Similarly, a modern mother with a three-month-old infant is more likely to be working outside the home than was a 1960s woman with a five-year-old child. (55) As a claims adjuster with two children told us: “It never occurred to me not to work, even after Zachary was born. All the women that I know have a job.” [TI p. 30]

While “colleges have engaged in an arms race of expenditures triggered by the pursuit of prestige,” [TI p. 44] their grasping is driven by ego or pride, a deadly sin. In the Summa, St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that “inordinate self-love is the cause of every sin,” [Summa Theologica (STh), I, 77:4,1] while “the root of pride is found to consist in man not being, in some way, subject to God and His rule.” [STh, IIa, 162:5,1] Temperance marks a pathway from pride to servant-centered competence, with the “sincere gift of self” providing the milestones.

Courage and backbone, two aspects of the solution to the soaring costs of the two-income trap, (itself an artifact of the anti-family agenda), are not qualities typically associated with modern politicians. Warren and Tyagi contend:

In order to free families from the trap, it is necessary to go to the heart of the problem: public education.…A well-designed voucher program would fit the bill nicely.…We recognize that the term ‘voucher’ has become a dirty word in many education circles. The reason is straightforward: the current debate is framed as a public-versus-private rift…[which] misses the central point. The problem is not vouchers, the problem is parental choice. [TI 33-34]

Their logic is sound, and as reflected in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), supports the church’s position:

2229 As those first responsible for the education of their children, parents have the right to choose a school for them which corresponds to their own convictions. This right is fundamental. [CCC]

As for the school-prestige issue, writing in Forbes, Dan Seligman calls it “The Big Lie.” It’s your brains and effort, not the school that determines how well you do in your working career.

At the low end, we learn from NBER Working Paper 7450, “Schooling, Inequality, and the Impact of Government,” published [in] December [1999], that kids who do poorly in bad schools tend also to do poorly in schools with abundant resources.…

The Dale-Krueger paper [NBER Working Paper 7322, published August 1999, “Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College,” by Stacy Berg Dale and Alan B. Krueger] reports on studies indicating that even modest differences in SAT are associated with measurably higher lifetime incomes.…Were their postgraduate careers diminished because they had turned their backs on Harvard, or Princeton, or whatever?

Crisp answer: Not at all. The authors tell us: “Students who attended more selective colleges do not earn more than other students who were accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended less selective colleges.”

While this post is longer than the norm, I wanted to retain the continuity of thought. Hope you are enjoying these as much as I did in putting them together some time back for my Masters.

Until next time,

Carpe Diem!

Matthew

In this age of decisions based on “focus groups” and up-to-the-minute opinion polls, there is no doubt where both JohnPaul II and Benedict XVI stand on timeless issues. They deliver “crunchy” rather than “soggy” solutions. The terms crunchy and soggy come from a classic 1988 editorial in the Economist. “Crunchy systems,” Nico Colchester explained, “are those in which small changes have big effects—leaving those affected by them in no doubt whether they are up or down, rich or broke, winning or losing, dead or alive. … Sogginess is comfortable uncertainty.”

Reclaiming the Market Square for Faith and Family

In “Reclaiming the Politics of the Family” from The Two-Income Trap, Warren and Tyagi discuss putting a face on individuals:

Ultimately, two strange bedfellows—a small group of socially conservative Republicans and a handful of progressive Democrats—gathered enough momentum to defeat the bankruptcy bill against the best-financed lobbying campaign in the 107th Congress.…

There is a lesson here. To put sound economic policies on the political agenda, families also need a face. So long as they are “debtors” or “bankrupts,” their needs can be dismissed. Instead they need to be seen as members of powerful constituencies, members of groups that command the respect—and the fear—of the political elite. [Warren & Tyagi, 158-159]

The Catechism puts it in a similar vein: “The neighbor is not a ‘unit’ in the human collective; he is ‘someone’ who by his known origins deserves particular attention and respect.” [CCC 2212]

This marks the first and most central tenet of our exposition or perhaps even exegesis of John Paul II’s masterwork: how and why Theology of the Body matters to men and women of business in transcending anti-family propaganda in the workforce. Whether it’s the so-called feminist agenda under the guise of “advancing women’s rights,” the same-sex-crowd under the guise of “promoting tolerance,” or the affirmative action proponents under the guise of “achieving diversity,” there is a whole slew of characters who strut about clucking to whomever will listen, that they know better for us than we know for ourselves.

Let’s be very clear about the word warping that this series examines. Reagan famously said, “the difference between a democracy and a people’s democracy is the same difference between a jacket and a straight-jacket.” If there is any confusion remaining, ask yourself three questions:

1. How many self-proclaimed feminists do you know who are pro-life?
2. How many self-proclaimed homosexuals do you know who are in favor of defining marriage as one-man, one-woman?
3. How many affirmative action advocates have ever studied the results of these programs globally as Thomas Sowell has so cogently?

Business leaders have a unique “bully pulpit” (in Teddy Roosevelt’s phrase) as opinion shapers, (not thought leaders, PUH-lease! We need a moratorium on that phrase), as job creators and those who direct the flow of money, materials and labor throughout the economy. From their positions of influence they can transparently convey the universal appeal of this timeless “adequate anthropology” and what it means to be fully human. By modeling and living authentic and mutually nourishing relationships, these leaders can through their witness, help restore a sense of personal responsibility to those in their charge, managerially or personally.

Foster Friess received Hillsdale College’s Adam Smith Award on May 11, 2002. Speaking on the Hillsdale campus he says:

Friends of mine who homeschool their five kids, ages 7 to 15 years, told me the following story: At one point Dad suggested issuing report cards like other schools. Mom replied, “Fine, but they’d all get As.” Classic maternal favoritism, the father thought at first—then was astounded when Mom added, “Because we don’t move them on until they get it.” Consider this mother’s radical common sense: If our entire education system were converted to learning levels based on real progress rather than grade levels determined by age—and if the pernicious concept of social promotion were eliminated—the door would be open to significant achievement in our education system.

Under this “radical” policy, a student would go over the multiplication tables or the important dates in U.S. history until he knows them. Age would be irrelevant. A ten-year old could be at level three in math, level six in history and level eight in science. No child would be left behind because no child would advance before he is ready. But in order for this policy to get off the ground, we must break the current and disastrous public school monopoly.…[Imprimis, Feb 2004]

Next up: Staggering Costs

Until then, Carpe Diem!

Matthew

It’s been a full week, so two quick thoughts on The Holy Father’s recent trip to Germany:

The depth & maturity of these seemingly simple observations is marvelous. They call to mind the information guru Ed Tufte, (paraphrased): to clarify, add data density while you reduce clutter. With a focus on the richness of faith that we share, there’s less energy to argue. Rather than gloss over differences, simply, practically and with charity, focus on the agreement and get on with the business of living.

…Faced with a new form of Christianity, which is spreading with overpowering missionary dynamism, sometimes in frightening ways, the mainstream Christian denominations often seem at a loss. This is a form of Christianity with little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content, and with little stability. This worldwide phenomenon – that bishops from all over the world are constantly telling me about…

…Are we to yield to the pressure of secularization, and become modern by watering down the faith? Naturally faith today has to be thought out afresh, and above all lived afresh, so that it is suited to the present day. Yet it is not by watering the faith down, but by living it today in its fullness that we achieve this.…
Address to Council Of The Evangelical Church In Germany, Benedict XVI

Recommended Reading:

Joint Catholic-Lutheran Declaration On The Doctrine Of Justification