Take a Vacation!

School starts today! I am always happy to see summer end. And, when it comes to schools, I have long been a believer in year-round schooling - for reasons both educational and social. I'll leave it to the experts to describe how much learning is lost while schools are closed during the summer. Suffice it to say I think the traditional school vacation is too long, too much of an interruption in the educational process and generally too disruptive. A more balanced calendar would, I believe, benefit both students and society as a whole.

That said, however, I do nonetheless really believe in the importance of taking vacations. There are, of course, all kinds of vacations - including so-called "working vacations," some of which hardly deserve to be called a vacation. Certainly sabbaticals and the like, which are intended to be learning experiences with some specifically productive purpose can also be restorative physically and emotionally. In my own life, my two summers abroad for language study in the 1970s and 1980s respectively, my summer program in Israel 20+ years ago, and my several months studying the canonization process in Rome, while certainly not vacations, were enormously enjoyable and incredibly restorative, as well as important study opportunities. 

Even so, I want to put in a good word for the plan old-fashioned restful vacation - something our workaholic culture increasingly denigrates. (Witness the silly media whining whenever a President takes a vacation - a "working vacation" if ever there was one!) In this past Sunday's NY Times "Sunday Review" section, Daniel J. Levitin - Director of the Laboratory for Music, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University and author of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload - advises against the guilt and worry increasingly associated with taking time off. He warns, "beware the false break. Make sure you have a real one. the summer vacation is more than a quaint tradition. along with family time, mealtimes and weekends, it is an important way that we can make the most of our beautiful brains."

I knew things were getting bad, but not until i read this article did I realize that "on a typical day, we take in the equivalent of 174 newspapers' worth of information, five times as much as we did in 1986." In one sense, certainly that is amazing. But it is also a little frightening!  No wonder we most of us feel overwhelmed so much of the time - even when we aren't actually physically straining ourselves!

Based on the way our brains appear to work, Levitin recommends taking breaks as being "biologically restorative." He recommends naps. "in several studies, a nap of even 10 minutes improved cognitive function and vigor, and decreased sleepiness and fatigue." and, of course, he recommends real vacations. "If we can train ourselves to take regular vacations - true vacations without work - and to set aside time for naps and contemplation, we will be in a more powerful position to start solving some of the world's big problems. and to be happier and well rested while we're doing it."

A hearty Amen to that!

What Next in Iraq?

Whatever the outcome of the current attempts to form a functioning government in Baghdad, the larger and more pressing questions concern Iraq's ability (or anyone's ability) to stop the military progress of the so-called "Islamic State" (ISIS), which obviously aspires to conquer as much territory as possible and poses a particularly acute humanitarian threat especially to Christian (and other) non-Muslim minorities in the region.. For better or for worse, this largely comes down to a question of what the United States is (1) able and (2) willing to do. That's the way it is when you are the world's one effective superpower!

Yesterday's NY Times Sunday Review featured an interesting column ("The Right War") by the persistently thoughtful Ross Douthat. As his title suggests, Douthat challenges what has become the dominant paradigm until now and argues that "this time, the case for war is much stronger, and the decision to intervene is almost certainly the right call."

As examples of what I am calling the presently dominant paradigm, Douthat cites three previous times when the Obama Administration had to make a decision about whether or not to intervene in a conflict in the Muslim world - Libya in 2011, Syria since 2011, and Iraq two months ago. As everyone knows, the UIS did intervene in Libya, but not in Syria nor (until this past week) in Iraq. "All three situations were hard calls, and the fact that intervention in Libya and inaction in Syria produced similar outcomes - rippling chaos and jihadi gains - has allowed both hawks and doves to claim vindication." That intervention and inaction could produce such similar outcomes ought indeed to five both sides in the intervention vs. inaction debate reason to pause. In fact, however, Douthat argues that "in all three debates, the noninterventionist position ultimately had the better of the argument." 

That said, however, he argues that the opposite is now the case in Iraq. whereas in those earlier cases the "humanitarian" case and the "strategic" realities were opposed, he sees the two as now "much more closely aligned" in the current crisis in Iraq. In other words, the US has both "a stronger moral obligation to act" and a clear enough military objective, a more tested ally in the Kurds and a plausible long-term strategy that could follow from intervening now."

The part of Douthat's argument that I personally find most intriguing is his view that "an independent, secure, well-armed Kurdistan could replace and unstable, perpetually fragmenting Iraq as the intended locus of American influence in the region."

While I find douthat's argument about the Kurds somewhat compelling, I am not sure that the Administration feels comparably compelled, and I am fairly certain the American public opinion is nowhere near there yet. And I suspect that public opinion in this matter weighs heavily with this Administration.

Of course, in a democracy public opinion ought to have weight. but as we all know, presidential leadership is also about forming and leading public opinion - especially in foreign affairs. That. after all is one of the things many praise FDR for - his determined effort to educate and guide the American public to form and lead public opinion in a more pro-interventionist direction. On so many levels, however, Obama is obviously no FDR. On the other had, even FDR was unsuccessful in his effort. After all, it took the Japanese sneak attach on Pearl Harbor to wake America up to the reality of the Axis threat!

Speaking of FDR, right now I have been Nigel Hamilton's just newly published book, The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941-1942. Hamilton's is obviously a great admirer of FDR's governing style and how he effectively - and successfully - took command of the Allied war effort. It is a fascinating book in many respects. But again, with all due respect, Obama is not FDR (and 2014 is not 1941). If Hamilton's book is primarily a study of FDR's ascendancy to successful war-time leadership, it is also secondarily a study of British Prime Minister Churchill's limitations as leader and, even more fundamentally, the British Empire's process of decline from a position of leadership.

The story of the decline of the British Empire is a complicated one, but one component of it was the British elite's gradual loss of confidence in their imperial mission and the ordinary British public's loss of confidence in their political elite. This, Hamilton seems to be suggesting, had a lot to do with the abysmal performance of the British in the early period of the Pacific war.

Without overstretching the analogy, I have often wondered whether something similar has been happening to the US. Isolationism has always been a danger at the door in our international relations.  American failure in Vietnam enabled isolationism to make inroads on the left - inroads further exacerbated by the failure of the second Iraq War. Moral loss of nerve and diminished capacity to make an effective difference seem to go hand in had when a Great Power declines. Each reinforces the other in an increasingly unbreakable vicious circle

I don't know whether Douthat is right about intervention with the Kurds as an effective ally. I honestly have no idea what the President should do or how to persuade the American public to go along. But I doworry that American society in general and much of the political class seem to have reached a dramatic loss of faith in America's role in the world - not unlike what happened to Britain and its empire in the 20th century. For Churchill and the British in general, having to accept a severely diminished role was made more palatable by being replaced as principal world power by the United States.  Who is there to make America's abdication palatable?

A "Libertarian Moment"?

Today's NY Times Magazine has an interesting article, whose title asks "Has the 'Libertarian Moment' Finally Arrived?" In any hierarchy of morally harmful ideologies, I think that Libertarianism surely ranks among the worst. Yet anyone at all alert to today's currents can sense that certain libertarian or at least libertarian-like sentiments are on the upswing in our society - especially among younger people. So I was quite curious to read what the article's author (Robert Draper, a contributing writer for the magazine) has to say about this problematic development. Draper focus particular attention on the young - "the age group most responsible for delivering Obama his two terms," a group, Draper suggests, that "may well become a  political wild card over time, in large part because of its libertarian leanings."

Of course, some of newly popular policy positions that contribute to the supposed upsurge in libertarianism are, considered in themselves, really quite tangential to libertarian ideology, in that one could just as easily come at some of those positions from a different perspective. Obviously, isolationism is on the rise, as Americans have become even more than customarily dubious about foreign interventions. And some of the "libertarian" ideas widely supported in our society nowadays also could be interpreted in terms of growing social liberalism - conceptually different from libertarianism even if many of the outcomes are similar. That a majority of Americans now favor marriage equality, for example, and that decriminalizing marijuana and reducing sentences for minor drug offenders has become a more mainstream view (as Draper shows) are policy shifts of major import, but such developments remain susceptible of more than one ideological interpretation - including liberal and communitarian ones.

Still, something that is increasingly evident especially among younger Americans is an increasing suspicion of and disdain for government. Libertarianism as an ideology is premised on such suspicion of and disdain for community - the supposedly 'Thatcherite" view that "there is no such thing as society." Even liberals seem increasingly disillusioned with government's effectiveness, on the one hand, and have largely embraced a neo-libertarian approach to personal and family life, on the other.  This problematic development risks sapping the moral concept of community that has long been American political liberalism's greatest strength and so opening the way for increased inroads by libertarianism.

Draper quotes libertarian "applause lines," like "any tax rate above zero percent is immoral" and "there are no good cops out there." Such extremes are obviously unsustainable, short of a Hobbesian "war of all against all." On the other hand, it is easy to see how a libertarian attack on social security as a form of "generational theft," for example, could conceivably attain traction  with some younger voters.

There are still many obstacles to the full mainstreaming of libertarian values. But our society's significant failures - especially as regards an attractive future for younger generations of Americans - have not gone unnoticed. The damage already done by foreign policy failures in re-legitimizing isolationism could be replicated in other areas as well - with catastrophic consequences for whatever may be left of the fraying communal bonds of American society.

Escalation in Iraq

After an apparent lull, the Islamic State seems to be on the march again, conquering more of Iraq's territory. That means that the expulsion and persecution of Christian communities in northern Iraq is increasing (along with the persecution of Iraq's Yazidi community - an Iraqi minority I had never heard of, but who apparently are Kurdish-speaking adherents of an ancient, long-standing, pre-Islamic syncretistic religion retaining elements of Zoroastrianism). Yesterday, President Obama authorized limited airstrikes against the Islamic State, but that will likely have only a modest effect; and any serious on-the-ground intervention remains as unlikely as ever.

In Middle Eastern terms, perhaps an apt analogy might be what happened to the Armenian Christian community in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Writing today in ncronline, Drew Christiansen invokes the even more familiar World War II analogy: "Not since the Nazis' war on the Jews has there been such complete depredation of a people. They walk into exile alongside other minorities with no vehicles, no baggage, no jewelry, no money, no papers." How apt any such analogies are may be debated. Where such analogies are applicable is in the evident fact that once more there seems to be little that the rest of the world will or can do. Certainly the American and European lack of appetite for serious military intervention in Iraq is by now evident to all.

There are obviously good reasons for that lack of appetite. Recent experience is not encouraging, when it comes to anticipating the long-term consequences of such interventions. And American public opinion remains, I suspect, unwilling setiously to contemplate that prospect. That said,what can be done?  In the absence of effective military intervention, it is hard to see any hope at all for Iraq's persecuted Christians. The farther the Islamic State expands, the more territory it conquers, the farther the Iraqi Christians (and other persecuted minorities) will have to try to flee from their ancestral homes, with all the dangers that such displacement entails. The best that might be hoped for under such circumstances would be that someone (the Kurds?) can forcibly stop the Islamic State's expansion at some point and that sufficient humanitarian aid will be provided by others to assist the displaced Christians to survive this immediate crisis and eventually resettle somewhere where they will be welcome.

Who in the neighborhood has the military strength actually to stop - and hopefully at some point to turn back - the Islamic State? Suffice it to say that military action by someone is the only possible solution. In this at least, Christiansen's World War II analogy applies. As I have often observed, usually the only solution to war crimes is war. What stopped the Nazis' crimes against the Jews and other conquered peoples was the complete defeat of Germany by the Allies, and it is impossible to imagine anything short of that having had any comparable effect. Clearly the only thing likely stop the Islamic State would be a military defeat. so it all always comes back to the same question. Who can do it?

The Cure of Ars and the New Evangelization

At Mass today, I began by saying Saint John Vianney lived from 1886 to 1759. The congregation kindly pretended not to notice my mistake! (His correct dates, of course, are 1786-1889). 

In preparation for today's feast, I re-read what I wrote on this site four years ago - http://rfrancocsp.blogspot.com/2010/08/patron-of-parish-priests.html. I have little to add to what I wrote then. I am, however, maybe even more struck by the warning Saint John Vianney got from his bishop when he was first sent to Ars as pastor in 1817: "There is little love of God in that parish." What a discouraging assignment that bishop made Ars out to be! And what an indictment!

But an indictment of whom exactly? Of the parishioners, presumably! But surely also of the circumstances, of the times they had just been living through - the French Revolution and its aftermath! The Revolution and all that followed it are all complicated historical phenomena, of course, involving multiple causes and consequences. But one crucial component of the movement of the time was an intense hatred for the Church, the likes of which Europe had not seen since the worst of the Roman Emperors! All that took its toll, intensely amplifying the recognizably routine coolness and indifference of so many toward religion even in supposedly more religious times.

But surely it was also an indictment (perhaps unconsciously so on the bishop's part) of the clergy's and of the clergy's failures - especially in the decisive period before the Revolution. Of course, there had been good and holy priests before the Revolution too - even in the rationalistic 18th century! But certainly Saint John Vianney stood out as an alternative to a good deal of what had passed for pastoral care prior to the Revolution. By the end of his life, he had acquired quite a reputation, as penitents flocked to Ars from all over France to confess to him. But at least as important, I think, was the extent to which the love of God had grown right there in that remote parish. That it wasn't easy for him we know. The fact that four times during his tenure there he was tempted to escape tells us a lot about the challenges he faced!

Saint John Vianney is already the patron saint of priests and parish clergy. And that's certainly enough for any one saint! Still, I think he would also make an excellent patron for the New Evangelization. What makes the "New Evangelization" new, after all, is the challenge to re-evangelize a society which was once publicly committed to Christian faith. Even were it possible simply to go back in time to, say, 50 or 60 years ago, however, that would not be sufficient to meet the challenge. Of course, one cannot go back in any case. That type of traditionalism is just a fantasy. For better or for worse, the social, cultural, and political changes of recent decades are here to stay, at least insofar as their consequences are concerned - just as the consequences of the French Revolution continued to transform French society long after Robespierre and even under the restored Bourbons! The New Evangelization certainly requires some serious analysis of and confrontation with the secularizing forces that have been empowered by the changes of the recent decades.  But any New Evangelization also requires a comparably serious analysis of and confrontation with what was lacking before - what was lacking and so failed to prepare for the assaults that were so imminent.