russiainsider--2019-03-17--Christian Morals and Values Shaping the Future of the Russian World

While much of American and Western media dismiss him as an authoritarian and reactionary, a throwback, Putin may be seeing the future with more clarity than Americans still caught up in a Cold War paradigm  This article from our archives was first published on RI in March 2015  This article originally appeared at The Carnegie Council  Nicolai N. Petro is professor of politics at the University of Rhode Island. This paper was presented at the Interallied Confederation of Reserve Officers (CIOR) seminar on Russia in Koenigswinter, Germany, February 15-18, 2015. CIOR is one of the "independent" advisory bodies to the Military Committee of NATO.  For many analysts the term Russky mir, or Russian World, epitomizes an expansionist and messianic Russian foreign policy, the perverse intersection of the interests of the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church.  Little noted is that the term actually means something quite different for each party. For the state it is a tool for expanding Russia's cultural and political influence, while for the Russian Orthodox Church it is a spiritual concept, a reminder that through the baptism of Rus, God consecrated these people to the task of building a Holy Rus.  The close symphonic relationship between the Orthodox Church and state in Russia thus provides Russian foreign policy with a definable moral framework, one that, given its popularity, is likely to continue to shape the country's policies well into the future.  Foreign policy is about interests and values. But while Russia's interests are widely debated, her values are often overlooked, or treated simplistically as the antithesis of Western values.  But, as Professor Andrei Tsygankov points out in his book Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin, Russia's relations with the West go through cycles that reflect its notion of honor. By honor he means the basic moral principles that are popularly cited within a culture as the reason for its existence, and that inform its purpose when interacting with other nations.  Over the past two centuries, in pursuit of its honor, Russia has cooperated with its European neighbors, when they have acknowledged it as part of the West; responded defensively, when they have excluded Russia; and assertively, when they have been overtly hostile to Russia's sense of honor.  Sometimes a nation's sense of its honor overlaps with present-day interests; but it cannot be reduced to the national interest alone, because political leaders must respond to existential ideals and aspirations that are culturally embedded. A nation's sense of honor, therefore, serves as a baseline for what might be called the long-term national interest.  According to Tsygankov, in Russia's case the long-term national interest revolves around three constants: First, sovereignty or "spiritual freedom;" second, a strong and socially protective state that is capable of defending that sovereignty; and third, cultural loyalty to those who share Russia's sense of honor, wherever they may be. All three of these involve, to a greater or lesser extent, the defense of Orthodox Christianity, of the Russian Orthodox Church, and of Orthodox Christians around the world.  Russian President Vladimir Putin succinctly encapsulated Russia's sense of honor during his state visit to Mount Athos in 2005, when he referred to Russia as a pravoslavnaya derzhava, or simply, an Orthodox power.  Putin on the Moral Crisis of the West  Little noted at the time, in retrospect, the phrase seems to presage the turn toward Russian foreign policy assertiveness that Western analysts first noticed in his February 2007 remarks at the Munich Security Conference.  Since then, Putin has often returned to the dangers posed by American unilateralism, and even challenged the cherished notion of American exceptionalism. But, until his speech at the 2013 Valdai Club meeting, he did not explicitly say what values Russia stood for, what its sense of honor demanded. It was at this meeting that Putin first laid out his vision of Russia's mission as an Orthodox power in the 21st century.  Putin began his speech by noting that the world has become a place where decency is in increasingly short supply. Countries must therefore do everything in their power to preserve their own identities and values, for "without spiritual, cultural and national self-definition . . . . one cannot succeed globally."  Without a doubt, he said, the most important component of a country's success is the intellectual, spiritual, and moral quality of its people. Economic growth and geopolitical influence depend increasingly on whether a country's citizens feel they are one people sharing a common history, common values, and common traditions. All of these, said Putin, contribute to a nation's self-image, to its national ideal. Russia needs to cultivate the best examples from the past and filter them through its rich diversity of cultural, spiritual, and political perspectives. Diversity of perspectives is crucial for Russia because it was born a multinational and multiconfessional state, and remains so today.  Indeed, pluriculturalism is potentially one of Russia's main contributions to global development. "We have amassed a unique experience of interacting with, mutually enriching, and mutually respecting diverse cultures," he told his audience. "Polyculturalism and polyethnicity are in our consciousness, our spirit, our historical DNA."  Polyculturalism is also one of the driving factors behind the Eurasian Union, a project initiated by the president of Kazakstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, that Putin has wholeheartedly embraced.  Designed to move Eurasia from the periphery of global development to its center, it can only be successful, Putin says, if each nation retains its historical identity and develops it alongside the identity of the Eurasian region as a whole. Creating a culture of unity in diversity within this region, says Putin, would contribute greatly to both pluralism and stability in world affairs.  But, in a jab at the West, Putin notes that some aspects of pluriculturalism are no longer well received in the West. The values of traditional Christianity that once formed the very basis of Western civilization have come under fire there, and in their place Western leaders are promoting a unipolar and monolithic worldview. This, he says, is "a rejection . . . of the natural diversity of the world granted by God. . . . Without the values of Christianity and other world religions, without the norms of morality and ethics formed over the course of thousands of years, people inevitably lose their human dignity."  The abandonment of traditional Christian values has led to a moral crisis in the West. Russia, Putin says, intends to counter this trend by defending Christian moral principles both at home and abroad.  Putin's call for greater respect for traditional cultural and religious identities was either missed or ignored in the West. One reason, I suspect, is that it was couched in a language that Western elites no longer use.  For most of the 20th century, Western social science has insisted that modernization would render traditional cultural and religious values irrelevant. The modern alternative, which pioneer political scientists Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba labelled "civic culture," gravitates toward cultural homogeneity and secularism. These qualities lead to political stability and economic progress. The pattern is exemplified by Anglo-American societies which, they conclude, form the optimal model for a modern society.  Half a century later, with the rise of China and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it no longer seems so obvious that secularism and homogeneity are the only paths to national success. Scholars increasingly speak of multiple paths to modernity, and even a resurgence of religion.  Another reason why Putin's message was overlooked is that he is calling upon the West to re-connect with its Byzantine heritage, a heritage that it has often dismissed as non-Western. In Putin's mind, reincorporating Eastern Christianity into Western civilization reveals Russia as a vital part of Western civilization, and requires that Russia be part of any discussion of Western values.  Putin's speech in 2013 was an assertive and optimistic statement of Russian values, and the cultural and spiritual reasons why he felt that Russian influence in the world was bound to grow. By 2014, however, the world had changed. A major reason is the conflict within Ukraine, which many in the West define as a conflict over world order stemming from a profound values gap between Russia and the West.  Russia, by contrast, sees itself as defending not only vital strategic interests in Ukraine, but also its core values of honor, such as spiritual freedom, cultural loyalty, and pluralism. It may seem strange to many in the West, but Russia's attitude on the Ukrainian crisis is inflexible precisely because it sees itself as occupying the moral high ground in this dispute.  A key reason why Western moral criticisms of Russian actions have so little traction among Russians is that the Russia Orthodox Church has regained its traditional pre-eminence as the institution that defines the nation's moral vision and sense of honor. Looking beyond Russia's borders, that vision has come to be known as the Russky mir or Russian World.  Russian World or the Communities of Historical Rus?  It is important to distinguish how this term is used by the Russian state from how it is used by the Russian Orthodox Church.  The use of this term as a "community of Orthodox Christians living in unity of faith, traditions and customs," goes back to at least the beginning of the 19th century, but it was re-purposed as a political concept in the early 1990s by Pyotr Shedrovitsky, an influential political consultant interested in the role that cultural symbols could play in politics. He believed that creating a network of mutually reinforcing social structures in the former Soviet states among people who continue to think and speak in Russian—the "Russky mir"—could be politically advantageous to Russia. Its practical foreign policy appeal stemmed from the fact that, by claiming to speak on behalf of nearly 300 million Russian speakers, a weakened Russia would instantly become a key regional player, as well as an influential political force within the countries of the former Soviet Union.  This notion resonated within the Yeltsin administration which, in the mid-1990s was already searching for a "Russian Idea" around which to consolidate the nation and promote a new democratic consensus. Members of the Institute of Philosophy at the Russian Academy of Sciences were tasked to research this concept, but although it influenced sections of Russia's first foreign policy doctrine in 1996, it ultimately ran out of steam. As those involved in this project later explained to me, there were simply too many disparate "Russian Ideas" to choose from, and no consensus within the presidential administration or the Institute of Philosophy on which version to support.  More than a decade would pass before the term was used by the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill. This occurred in 2009 at the Third Assembly of the Russian World, when Patriarch Kirill spoke of how the Russky mir, or Holy Rus as he also called it, should respond to the challenges of globalization.  The Church, he said, emphasizes the importance of spiritual bonds over the divisions of national borders. It therefore uses the term russky not as a geographical, or ethnic concept, but as a spiritual identity that refers to the cradle civilization of the Eastern Slavs—Kievan Rus.  This common identity was forged when Kievan Rus adopted Christianity from Constantinople in 988. At that moment the Eastern Slavs were consecrated into a single civilization and given the task of constructing Holy Rus. That mission persisted through the Muscovite and Imperial eras. It survived the persecutions of the Soviet era, and continues today in democratic Russia. The core of this community today resides in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (at other times, Kirill has added Moldova and Kazakhstan), but can refer to anyone who shares the Orthodox faith, a reliance on Russian language, a common historical memory, and a common view of social development.  In June 2007, President Putin established the Russky mir Fund, tasked with support of the Russian language and cultural inheritance throughout the world. Much of this effort was clearly aimed at preserving the use of the Russian language in the former Soviet Union, and with it the popularization of Russia's image. But while there is clearly a great deal of overlap between the religious and political uses of this term, let me highlight several important differences.  As used by the state, Russky mir is typically a political or a cultural concept. In both senses it is used by groups working for the Russian government to strengthen the country's domestic stability, restore Russia's status as a world power, and increase her influence in neighboring states. From the state's perspective, the Russian Orthodox Church can be a useful tool for these purposes.  As used by the Church, Russky mir is a religious concept. It is essential for reversing the secularization of society throughout the former Soviet Union, a task Patriarch Kirill has termed the "second Christianization" of Rus. The Russian Orthodox Church sees the Russian government, or for that matter, any government within its canonical territory, as tools for this purpose.  Reaction to the patriarch's use of the phrase Russky mir, which was familiar mainly in its Yeltsin-era political context, was mixed, both inside and outside of Russia. It aroused considerable controversy in Ukraine, where the Greek-Catholic church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kievan Patriarchate dismissed it outright. On the other hand, the autonomous Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, which serves approximately half of all Christians in Ukraine, has been cautiously receptive.  In light of this controversy, Kirill returned to the topic in 2010, to clarify his views of what the Russky mir meant specifically for Ukraine. He reiterated that the baptism of Kievan Rus was an instance of Divine Providence. The Russian Orthodox Church has defended the religious and cultural bonds established by this miraculous event for more than a thousand years, and will always continue to do so.  Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine are all equal successors to the inheritance of Kievan Rus, therefore all three should be coordinating centers in the development of the Russian World. To this end, Patriarch Kirill introduced the idea of "synodal capitals"—historical centers of Russian Orthodoxy which would regularly host meetings of the Holy Synod, the Church's chief decision-making body. One of these capitals is Kiev. It is interesting to note that archpriest Evgeny (Maksimenko), a cleric of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, has called upon the patriarch to take the next logical step and move the seat of the Patriarchate of Rus from Moscow back to Kiev.  Christianity, says the patriarch, does not seeks to destroy that which is unique in each nation, but rather to motivate local cultures toward greater appreciation of Christianity's transcendent meaning. Long ago, the ideal Orthodox society was the Byzantine Empire. Today, in the context of national sovereignty, however, Orthodoxy proposes itself as a spiritual complement to national sovereignty, and a harmonizing resource in a globalizing world. Kirill has said that this same principle can be found in the European Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States. But while the Church respects state sovereignty, it takes no position on its merits. Nation-states are neither good nor bad, but merely the current framework within which God intends the Church to accomplish the restoration of Holy Rus. It is therefore the Church's duty to make each nation, at least in part, "a carrier of Orthodox civilization."  Over the course of the past decade, the purely pragmatic, secular version of the Russky mir has slowly yielded to the growing influence of the Church in Russia's political life. Among the many examples, let me highlight just one—President Putin's address in Kiev on the occasion of the 1025th baptism of Rus in 2013. This was also Putin's most recent visit to Ukraine.  His remarks at the time reflected every one of the motifs of the Russky mir in its religious context, including: the decisive spiritual and cultural significance of the baptism of Rus; the uniqueness of Orthodox values in the modern world; deference to Kiev's historical significance (before the revolution, he says, it was known as "the second cultural and intellectual capital after St. Petersburg," even ahead of Moscow[!]); and public recognition of Ukraine's right to make any political choice it wishes which, however, "in no way erases our common historical past."  Having drawn a distinction between the objectives of the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church in promoting the Russky mir, it is important to stress that these two institutions are not in conflict, at least not in the near future. The classical formulation for Church-State relations in Eastern Orthodox Christianity was and remains symphonia, or harmony between Church and State, not the Protestant Western ideal of separation. The establishment of broadly harmonious and mutually supportive relations between Church and State in Russia, for the first time in more than a century, therefore has significant implications for Russian politics.  The first is that Vladimir Putin's high popularity ratings are neither transient nor personal. They reflect the popularity of his social and political agenda, which are popular precisely because they have the blessing of the Russian Orthodox Church. A few years ago, then president Medvedev referred to the Church as "the largest and most authoritative social institution in contemporary Russia," an assessment reinforced by more recent surveys showing that Patriarch Kirill is more often identified as the "spiritual leader [and] moral mentor" of the entire Russian nation, than he is as the head of a single religious confession.  The success of the Putin Plan, the Putin Model, or Putinism, is thus simple to explain. This Russian government understands that it derives enormous social capital from its public embrace of the Russian Orthodox Church. So long as Russia remains a broadly representative (not to be confused with liberal) democracy, there is little reason to expect this to change.  Some analysts, however, suggest that this embrace may lead to conflict between the state and other confessions. The potential for such conflict is widely recognized, especially by religious leaders, and led to the creation in 1998 of the Interreligious Council of Russia. Its purpose is two-fold: First, to defuse conflicts among the various religious communities. Second, to present a united religious agenda to politicians. It has been quite successful on both fronts, and its activities now cover not just Russia, but the entire CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States). If my assessment of the importance of the religious underpinnings for the current regime's popularity is correct, then it follows that attempts to undermine the unity of the Russky mir will be widely viewed as an attack on core values, not just in Russia but throughout the Russian World. Economic, political, cultural, and other sanctions will intensify this effect and sharply undermine intellectual and emotional sympathies for the West within this community. While this may not be permanent, I suspect that few in the current generation of Russian leaders retain much hope for the possibility of building a lasting partnership with the West.  Moreover, the Russian Orthodox Church will continue to shape Russia's foreign policy agenda in several ways.  First, it will use the influence of the state to advocate for the concerns of Orthodox Christians throughout the world, even if they are not Russian citizens. This is in keeping with the transnational character of the Russian Orthodox Church.  Second, it will promote Christian moral and social values in international fora, either by itself or in conjunction with other religions. Indeed, close ties on these issues have been forged with the Roman Catholic Church, and with Islamic clerics in Egypt and Iran. Where it does not have direct access to these, it will turn to the Russian media, and to popular international outlets like RT and Sputnik to promote this agenda.  Third, wherever Russian state and civic organizations promote Russian culture and language abroad, the Church will also seek to tack on its religious agenda. While the state promotes the national interests of the Russian Federation, the Russian Orthodox Church will promote the larger cultural identity it sees itself as having inherited from Kievan Rus.  For example, the Church sees the conflict in Ukraine as a civil war within the Russian World. From this perspective, it cannot be resolved by splitting up this community, thereby isolating Ukraine from Russia and destroying the unity of the Russky mir, or by permitting the forcible Ukrainianization of the predominantly Orthodox and Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, which would result in the destruction of the Russky mir within Ukraine. The only permanent solution is for the Ukrainian government to admit the pluricultural nature of Ukrainian society and, in effect, recognize Ukraine as part of the Russky mir. From the Church's perspective, this is the only way to achieve reconciliation among the Ukrainian people and harmony within the Russky mir.  Oddly enough, many moderate Ukrainian nationalists also ascribe to the notion that some sort of symbiotic cultural connection exists between Russia and Ukraine. The typical pro-Maidan Ukrainian intellectual believes that Putin is out to undermine Ukrainian democracy first and foremost because he fears it spreading to Russia. But they predict the inevitable resumption of fraternal ties with Russia, after the freedom-loving, pro-European values of the Maidan succeed in overturning Putin's authoritarian regime in Russia. It is hard not to see the similarity between their aspirations for close ties with Russia and those of Patriarch Kirill, only under a completely different set of cultural assumptions.  In conclusion, what impact will the rise of the Russky mir have on Russia's relations with other nations? I anticipate three responses.  In countries where the concept of Holy Rus has no historical context, there will be a tendency to fall back on the Cold War context they are most familiar with, as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did when she warned of efforts to "re-Sovietize the region." "It's going to be called customs union, it will be called Eurasian Union and all of that," she said, "but let's make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it."  Among Russia's immediate neighbors, the response will be mixed. While there are still many who view the Soviet era with nostalgia, and regard the breakup of the USSR as more harmful than beneficial (by 2:1 margins in Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, and Russia), it is not at all clear that the Orthodox Church's conservative social vision has a similarly broad appeal. In Ukraine the term Russky mir has become a rallying cry for both sides during this civil war, and is now so hopelessly politicized that its religious and spiritual content have all but disappeared. The unhappy result, as Nicholas E. Denysenko puts it, is "a religious narrative becoming altered against the will of its authors."  Even further from Russia, the popularity of the Russky mir will likely depend on whether Russia emerges as a global defender of traditional Christian and conservative values. The values gap that some in the West cite as justification for punishing and containing Russia does exist, but it is not the whole picture. The same values gap exists within the West itself. Only recently Russia has realized that, while its conservative agenda distances itself from some Europeans, it brings it closer to others. The list of Putinversteher probably now contains more politicians and opinion leaders on the right end of the European political spectrum, than it does on the left.  In the United States, Evangelical Christian social activists, and even a few noted political commentators, have begun to take note of these shared values. Two years ago, former Nixon aide and Republican presidential candidate, Patrick Buchanan, told fellow political conservatives that there is much in Putin's rhetoric that makes him "one of us."  "While much of American and Western media dismiss him as an authoritarian and reactionary, a throwback, Putin may be seeing the future with more clarity than Americans still caught up in a Cold War paradigm. As the decisive struggle in the second half of the 20th century was vertical, East vs. West, the 21st century struggle may be horizontal, with conservatives and traditionalists in every country arrayed against the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite."  The role of the Russian Orthodox Church in this struggle is crucial, because it calls for the creation of a common framework of Christian European values, in effect a new, pan-European civil religion. The Russian state, meanwhile, is only too happy to support these calls because it is only within the context of a common cultural and religious identity ("shared values") that Russia can become a full-fledged political part of the West. Intentionally or not, therefore, the Russian Orthodox Church and its Russky mir have emerged as the missing spiritual and intellectual component of Russia's soft power.  Someday it may even become like U.S. human rights policy, an awkward, but nevertheless defining aspect of national identity, that the government will apply selectively, but never be able to get rid of entirely.


shareblue--2019-02-06--Stacey Abrams rebukes Trumps hateful speech with real family values

Stacey Abrams rebukes Trump’s hateful speech with real family values

Stacey Abrams’ Democratic response to the State of the Union was a powerful discussion of real family values and how Republicans, led by Trump, have repeatedly attacked them.  In his speech, Trump never mentioned the shutdown he engineered that negatively affected the lives of millions of Americans.  But Abrams called it out loud and clear.  “The shutdown was a stunt engineered by the President of the United States, one that defied every tenet of fairness and abandoned not just our people — but our values,” Abrams said.  Abrams also called out Trump and Republicans for their indifference to children, on everything from education to gun safety.  “Children deserve an excellent education, from cradle to career,” Abrams said. “We owe them safe schools and the highest standards, regardless of zip code. Yet this White House responds timidly, while first graders practice active shooter drills and the price of higher education grows ever steeper.”  Abrams called Republicans out for their disconnect from average Americans and their inexcusable favoring of the extremely wealthy.  “Families’ hopes are being crushed by Republican leadership that ignores real life, or just doesn’t understand it,” Abrams said.  She also took on Republicans for their repeated attacks on the right to vote, including Trump’s nomination of judges who have been instrumental in racist voter suppression schemes.  “The foundation of our moral leadership around the globe is free and fair elections,” Abram said. “We must reject the cynicism that says allowing every eligible vote to be cast and counted is a ‘power grab.'”  The “power grab” remark was a direct shot at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who whined that efforts to make it easier to vote were unfair to Republicans.  The vision Abrams articulated was 180 degrees from the divisive, hateful one offered by Trump.  Where Trump called for discrimination and abuse, Abrams pushed for the true, compassionate values that the vast majority of Americans prefer.  Published with permission of The American Independent.


sottnet--2019-02-15--BEST OF THE WEB FLASHBACK An Eccentric Tradition The Paradox of Western Values

BEST OF THE WEB FLASHBACK: An Eccentric Tradition: The Paradox of 'Western Values'

The Eccentric Culture of "the West"  the chief agents of the Enlightenment actively sought to  and disguise the historical trail that showed that period's deep indebtedness to earlier religious and philosophical traditions  "The West" as the End of History  they are expressions that were framed with particular purposes in mind and come pre-loaded with political programmes  It is no secret that former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott is a fan of Western values.On more than one occasion he has lamented what he calls "the great Australian silence" - the neglect of "the Western canon, the literature, the poetry, the music, the history and above all the faith without which our culture and our civilisation is unimaginable."Abbott's predecessor, John Howard, is also known as a stout defender of the Western tradition and its values, and he too worries that we are losing our connection to it : "When we think of our civilisation, we lack an integrated understanding of the contribution of the early Romans and Greeks, the framework of what is frequently called the Judaeo-Christian ethic."Further afield, former UK Prime Minister David Cameron has preached the importance of Christian values for Britain.More recently, and perhaps unhelpfully for the cause, Donald Trump has jumped on the bandwagon. In a rare moment of coherence, Trump delivered a speech ahead of the 2017 G20 summit in Poland , urging the defence of "our values" and "our civilization."In this country, talk of Western or Judeo-Christian values has been backed by action. Abbott and Howard are both involved in the recently announced Ramsay Centre for Western Civilization - the result of an extraordinarily generous bequest of some billions of dollars from the late Paul Ramsay - whose mission is to promote the study of Western Civilization. That is a space that is being watched with great interest by indigent Arts Faculties and budget-conscious Vice-Chancellors.While there is certainly something to be said for taking pride in our values and institutions, a fundamental paradox lies at the heart of this advocacy. The phrase "Western values" calls to mind a long moral tradition dating back to classical antiquity - the thought of the ancient Greeks, the traditions of Roman law, New Testament moral ideals.The specific concept of "Western values" is not itself part of the tradition to which it putatively refers. In fact, no one ever thought there was such a thing as "Western values" until the middle decades of the last century.The relative novelty of the idea of Western values is attributable to two factors. First,. The expression "moral values" was not in use before the middle of the mid-nineteenth century. Second, and turning to the other component of our dual expression,Ironically, for much of its history Europe sought to define its identity by drawing upon cultural norms and traditions that lay beyond its own geographical boundaries. "The West" is not an idea that those now regarded as instantiating it ever had about themselves.The expression "Western values" does not appear in English until the middle of the twentieth century. Its entrance signals, at least partly, a significant soul-searching in the wake ofIts twin concept, "Judeo-Christian" values, has a similar trajectory, although its origins lie earlier in the nineteenth-century German "Tubingen School" of Protestant theology. The idea of a Jewish-Christian combination was subsequently adopted by nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900,) who deployed the descriptor "judenchristlich" to denigrate what he regarded as an undesirable "Jewish-Christian" form of morality. The negative valence of this amalgam was to change following World War II with the sober realization that a virulent and deadly anti-Semitism had been nurtured in the bosom of a supposedly civilized West.Like the idea of "Western values," the notion of "Judeo-Christian values" has enjoyed an increasing currency, and for much the same reason as the more generic expression.The emergence of the idea of Western or Judeo-Christian values is thus itself an historical event, one that represents a particular way of thinking about a tradition or, perhaps more accurately, a way of constructing a particular tradition. Like all historical constructions, we can ask the question of whether or not it maps well onto the phenomenon that it purports to represent.This late invention of Western values nicely illustrates the general paradox - the concept of a long tradition that arguably was never really a part of that tradition's own self-understanding.One fundamental reason that there could not have been a traditional idea of Western values has to do with the fact that. We search in vain in the utterances of ancient Greek philosophers, in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the church fathers, medieval scholastics and early modern moral philosophers for an explicit terminology of "values."In English, going back to the fourteenth century,. In the sixteenth century, this meaning was extended to particular measures of physical quantities., and bearing the connotations of measurable worth that attended the earlier senses of "value." Again, interestingly,This displacement of virtues by values is not an inconsequential matter of different words for the same thing.. This trend is exemplified most conspicuously in the utilitarian moral tradition, which in the nineteenth century first gave us the idea of a "hedonistic calculus" - a literal toting up of the projected good produced by some act, minus the bad, to arrive at a net value of utility.More generally the utilitarian idea was that ethics should not concern itself with the moral formation of the person, nor consider notions of duty or well-directed intentions, but focus instead on achieving particular outcomes. Consequences, ideally measurable ones, were elevated over character or intention.At the terminus of this development we encounter the contemporary mania for measurement of outcomes, along with declarations of "corporate values." Values in this mode are imagined to serve the specific goals of the organization, often quite independently of the question as to whether those goals themselves might be good.Needless to say, these public proclamations of values are not only different from the preceding practices of inculcating virtues, but are often antithetical to them.. Corporate values can thus be enumerated as dot points in glossy publications and on home pages. There are even websites designed to assist corporations in the enumeration of a marketable set of values. One of these helpfully suggests that all one needs to create a core values list is 50 post-it notes, a pen, and "the core values list."No requirement, then, for Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Aquinas's Treatise on Virtues, or Kant's second Critique.Unlike duties, to which one is in some sense already bound, or virtues, which represent the embodiment of a gradual process of a natural moral formation, values understood in this mode can be freely chosen. There is a values market. Curiously, then, the values adopted by an individual on a particular issue can now be a source of disapprobation on the part of others, because values are seen to be a matter of choice rather than irresistible conviction.This situation, needless to say, is at odds with the assumptions of many champions of Western values, for whom values are grounded in a particular tradition. The general point is thatIt is also relevant that it was the historical demise of the virtues - eloquently described in Alasdair MacIntyre's classic After Virtue - that occasioned the disintegration of Europe's common moral language, giving rise to different and arguably, incompatible, ways of grounding morality.A full account of the ascendancy of values talk would require a more comprehensive account of the history of modern moral philosophy than can be given here. For now, we can simply note that the very idea of "moral values" is historically recent and somewhat at odds with long-standing Western convictions about the good life and how to live it. The earlier tradition was to do with cultivating virtues that are aligned with a particular conception of the good.But one thing that clearly follows is that a disinterested history of the Western moral reflection is unlikely to promote the recovery of a set of core "values," but will rather show that Western ethical concerns have traditionally been conceived in quite different terms.In short,. And once values appear on the scene not only do we search in vain for agreement about what they should be, we also encounter increasingly incommensurable understandings about what it is that morality consists in.So much, then, for values. What about the second element of the conjunction: Western. Here, again, as a way of characterising Christendom or European culture, this term emerges relatively late, in the nineteenth century.Admittedly, there is a long-standing idea of a variously different, hostile, or exotic "East" that goes back a very long way. In the Persian Wars of the fifth century BC, when the Greeks achieved independence from Persia, we already have a conception of an agonistic and alien "East." But curiously this very early idea of the East does not seem to have given rise to any strong sense of a counterpart "West."From classical antiquity onwards, the "East" was itself understood in a variety of different ways. For the Greeks, the East was the area east of the Mediterranean basin. An East-West division, while not necessarily understood in the same geographical terms, was further consolidated with the administrative division of the Roman Empire in late antiquity under successive emperors from Diocletian (late third century) onwards. This division was followed by the Great Schism (1054) in Christianity, which produced the division of Catholic and Eastern Orthodox.Crucially, throughout the middle ages and into early modernity, Western European identity can be characterised in terms of its dependency upon, and perceived inferiority to, traditions that lay beyond its geographical and temporal borders. The French historian Remi Brague has thus advanced an intriguing argument to the effect that what was distinctive about Christian Europe for much of its history is the way in which it stands in a kind of secondary relation to previous cultures - in particular, those of ancient Palestine and Greece.In both cases, the Christian West was indebted to something both prior to and outside itself.This specific form of indebtedness becomes apparent when we contrast Western Europe with Islamic societies. At the risk of overgeneralization, we might say that medieval Islamic cultures, while open to outside influence, often completely absorbed what it required from preceding traditions - Greek, Hebrew and Christian - but discarded the remainder. Europe, however, never sought fully to incorporate the Greek or Jewish cultures that preceded it. A key marker of this difference is the way in which highly sophisticated Islamic cultures of the middle ages translated Greek and Latin texts into Arabic, but then showed little interest in preserving the originals.If we compare this to Christian attitudes, even going back to the first century, we see first of all an interest in preserving the Hebrew bible intact as a canonical document. Early Christian movements that sought to declare the Hebrew bible redundant were thus regarded as heretical. Again, by comparison, Islam incorporated elements of the other two "religions of the book" - Judaism and Christianity - into the Qur'an, but had no interest in preserving the Torah or the New Testament as such. This precluded any possibility within Islamic societies of an ongoing, albeit virtual, dialogue with the cultures that preceded it. Arguably, this deprived it of sources of revival and renewal. (I should make clear that am not arguing here that Islam needs "a reformation." That confused claim is motivated by a wholly different set of considerations.)By way of contrast, in Europe we see a series of renaissances, reformations and intellectual revolutions that drew upon sources outside itself. Europe was thus able to return again and again to the canonical texts of ancient Greece and Palestine - both of which lay beyond the historical boundaries of the Latin West - in order to fuel its own internal renewal. European intellectual culture was thus distinguished by ongoing conversations with cultures that preceded it and which for a considerable period of time it regarded as superior to itself. Again, crucially, these cultures were not absorbed into the West, but preserved intact as potential conversation partners.It follows that until the modern period, rather than representing an ossified conservative tradition, Western Europe had been something of a work in progress.No culture, according to Remi Brague, was so little centred on itself and so interested in others. Europe, in this sense, has an "eccentric" culture, because historically it found its centre outside itself. Rather than a repository of specific values it was an attitude: a resolution "to be a container, open to the universal."The specific episodes that mark Europe's periods of renewal are well known. The twelfth-century renaissance saw the European rediscovery of Aristotle (mediated by Arabic sources) and the rise of the medieval universities. If we take one of the leading thinkers of the medieval period, Thomas Aquinas, as an example, we observe that his works include eleven commentaries on Aristotle and five commentaries on books of the Hebrew bible. Even his most famous systematic work, the Summa theologiae, exemplifies an ongoing dialogue with the past, with topics set out as open questions, and various answers being provided by classical, biblical and patristic authorities.The High Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed a much more comprehensive recovery of ancient sources, including new literary and historical sources, often now in the original Greek, along with a renewed interest in classical forms of art and architecture. The Renaissance was followed by the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. Renaissance humanists shared with the Protestant reformation the motto ad fontes ("back to the sources"), again looking to the past to provide the resources for renewal. It would be difficult to overestimate how important textual and linguistic skills were to these transformations. Such skills remain crucial to the thriving of humanities, which in turn act as curators of the resources represented by the past.It is true that some reform movements in the West employed the rhetoric of a repudiation of the past. This makes for another potential paradox: a Western tradition based upon a rejection of tradition.Rene Descartes, whose work is often thought to mark the beginning of modern Western philosophy, thus claimed to abjure all traditions, turning away from the study of letters and resolving to derive knowledge only from "what can be found in myself or else in the great book of the world." But the inward turn to the self had long been part of the tradition he was supposedly disavowing, going back to the famous Greek motto "know thyself," with subsequent recommendations from Augustine and Petrarch. Descartes's famous Cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am") thus echoes Augustine's si fallor, sum ("if I am mistaken, I exist") and his arguments for the existence of God are indebted to the medieval scholastic thinker Anselm of Canterbury. Descartes's supposedly novel reorientation towards the natural world also drew strongly upon historical precedents.Surprising as it may seem, even the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century , which Descartes helped inaugurate, found inspiration in ancient scientific theories, resurrecting features of Epicurean natural philosophy and opposing them to a long-standing Aristotelianism. Before the appropriation of ancient atomism by such figures as Descartes and Pierre Gassendi, Copernicanism was understood as a revival of "Pythagoreanism." Platonist philosopher Henry More found Descartes's cosmology in the book of Genesis. Even Isaac Newton assumed that the laws of gravitation had been known and represented in ancient hermetic writings, and spent more time studying ancient texts than he devoted to his scientific pursuits.. The Enlightenment was partly responsible for this , with its exponents lauding the powers of instrumental reason and scientific experiment while at the same time assuming Europe to be the unique site of reason's ultimate triumph. Eighteenth-century French philosophes appropriated the success of the sciences as part of their story of the march of reason, although this progressive component had been at best incipient in the self-understandings of the progenitors of modern science.In present discussions of Western values, "the Enlightenment" is routinely invoked as a special period in our past, the ethos of which we urgently need to import into the present. But ironically, in relation to Western values projects,. Much present-day deference to the Enlightenment and adulation of its imagined ideals proceeds not from insight into the historical realities of the period, or any understanding of the plural forms of Enlightenment, butThe growing self-confidence of Europe can also be attributed to the rise of a new historical consciousness and the emergence of the social sciences. The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) exemplifies the former tendency in his Philosophy of World History, where. The nascent social sciences of the nineteenth century also enshrined the cultural superiority of Europe by proposing progressive stages of social evolution, typically beginning with primitive religious or magical phases, and moving ineluctably towards scientific, rational phases, best represented by an increasingly secularized Western Europe. The philosopher and social scientist Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who popularised the term "sociology," set out three stages of the development of human knowledge - theological, metaphysical and scientific. Similar tripartite schemas of social evolution were proposed by pioneering anthropologists James Fraser and E.B. Tylor.is doubly significant for our story, since heThe term was certainly in use before this time, but was typically used interchangeably with "Europe." As historian Georgio Varouxakis has recently shown, Comte sought to describe a new socio-political category that would take in the Americas and Australasia. Europe included nations that were not sufficiently in "the vanguard of Humanity," while Christendom had equally undesirable religious connotations: hence the new ideas of l'Occident and occidentalite.What Comte attempted to do with his new vision of the transnational "West" wasThis elite republic would serve as a model for the rest of the world, assisting less advanced nations to develop toward the scientific or "positive" end-goal at which it had already arrived.. But common to most understandings was a notional superiority of what the West represented.- an updated reification and refinement of the long-standing "Orient." Ironically, the currency of this notion was bolstered by Muslim intellectuals who, rather than refute the implausible construct of a unified Islamic civilization, embraced the idea with a view to arguing for its positive contributions to global progress and for its ultimate compatibility with modernity. In doing so they glossed over the plurality of practices and beliefs in this imagined Muslim world and de-emphasised what they believed to be its more backward features in the interests of promoting Muslim solidarity and resistance to Western assertions of Muslim inferiority. As Cemil Aydin has remarked:In this new context, "Judeo-Christian" takes on yet another meaning. In its twentieth-century Anglo-American uses it was intended to be inclusive of Jews. Now it is routinely used, implicitly or explicitly, to exclude Muslims. This contrasts with the alternative characterizations of "Abrahamic faiths" or "religions of the book," which stress the common features of the three monotheistic Western traditions."The West," although variously conceived, informs diagnoses about the present state of global affairs and proposals for how the values that it represents are to be preserved and promoted. More sanguine visions of the future imagine that, through some inexorable historical law, other cultures will eventually "catch up" to the West, through a natural progression towards the end-state that the West is thought to have accomplished. Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man represented a restatement of this position, which holds in essence that secular, capitalist, liberal democracy is the only game in town.On this model, the solution to cultural conflict is to accelerate the modernization and secularization of troublesome cultures that lag behind the West. This is the logic behind the classification of Islamic Fundamentalism as "medieval," or the observation that Islam needs to undergo its own "reformation."More pessimistic readings of the current stage of affairs imagine various threats to the integrity of the West. Whereas Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West suggested that all cultures have a natural life-span, the new harbingers of the West's demise point to dangers posed by internal deviations from an imagined tradition or external threats from competing cultural complexes. These tendencies are best represented by Samuel Huntington and his well-known Clash of Civilizations thesis. In this version of events, Western civilization is imperilled by civilizations with different values, either because of the external security threats they pose, or because the liberal West too readily welcomes immigration from populations that bring with them inimical values. While external threats comprised the main focus of the Clash of Civilizations book, Huntington articulates the internal threat in a subsequent book, Who Are We? . "The West" and its counterpart "the Muslim World" are not neutral analytical categories that offer disinterested descriptions of existing states of affairs:All of this suggests that a robust study of the history of "the Western tradition" should include careful scrutiny of the various ways in which, over the centuries, Western identity has been constructed and understood.European settlers in Australia are indeed heirs to a particular tradition (or related traditions). But that European heritage cannot simply be reduced to a core set of "Western values." For much of its history, Europe was focused on virtues rather than values, and was characterised by an openness to past cultures that were essentially non-European.Given the revolutionary potential of this outward and backward-looking perspective, it is curious that the invocation of a classical and Christian heritage these days is regarded as a hallmark of moral and political conservatism.When we look closely at the relevant history, this identification seems incongruous. Harvard Classicist Bernard Knox gets it exactly right when he tells us how strange it is to find classical Greeks "assailed as emblems of reactionary conservatism, of enforced conformity." In fact, as he points out, "their role in the history of the West has always been innovative, sometimes indeed subversive, even revolutionary." Something similar can be said of central elements of the Christian tradition which have provided the motivation for radical social and political reforms.I fully endorse the sentiment that we need a greater familiarity with our own cultural, religious and intellectual past. But the study of what we might call "the Western tradition" will not turn out to be as comforting to advocates of conservative moral and political values as they might imagine. We will see that there is no neat alignment of the study of tradition with traditionalism and political conservatism. Rather the relevant history will bear witness to an ongoing conversation and a continuous dialogue with other cultural traditions. That dialogue was as robust in the middle ages and early modern period as in the post-Enlightenment era.And it follows that it is not just long-gone cultures that can play this role, but also those that we encounter in the contemporary world. Knowledge of our own cultural traditions can be deeply enriched by perspectives gained from knowledge of other cultures. As the great comparative linguist and religionist Max Mueller succinctly put it (in the idiom of his time), "he who knows one, knows none."


sottnet--2019-12-17--'European values'? Czech think tank funded by NATO govt's calls for EU BLANKET BAN on Russian outlet

'European values'? Czech think tank funded by NATO govt's calls for EU BLANKET BAN on Russian outlets like RT

EV gets much of its funding from NATO governments - Dutch, British, German and American, as of 2018.  A pro-NATO Czech think tank has another piece of unsolicited advice for Western governments. Now they should refuse to give access or interviews to Russian media, who are "not real journalists", according to the "wise censor".There are some two dozen mentions of "funding," mostly in the context of urging the European Union to spend more money on "independent" NGOs - such as themselves, obviously - to battle "hostile Russian interference" the authors see under every bed. There is even a proposal for every EU government to conduct its own version of the Mueller probe - which famously found zero evidence of "collusion" between US President Donald Trump and Russia, and its evidence of Russian "meddling" amounted to unsubstantiated assertions from indictments, as its lawyers had to admit in court.Since 'Russians' are not free media, argues 'European Values,' the EU countries should "ban them from press conferences and not give access that is granted only to journalists, which they are not."A mere month later, the same outfit sponsored something called the "Prague Declaration," which was signed by a who's who of the most prominent Russiagate conspiracy-pushers, along with someone named "Bumfrey McDoogle."Far more sinister is that this "recommendation" has already been implemented to some extent. The US government withdrew RT America's credentials in 2017 , after forcing the outlet to register as a "foreign agent." French President Emmanuel Macron has refused to talk to or accredit RT or Sputnik. The British government canceled RT's credentials to a press freedom conference in July this year.In February, Canada refused Sputnik credentials to report from the Lima Group meeting on Venezuela, devoted to US-backed regime change in Caracas. RT Spanish has been taken off air in Ecuador , after reporting on anti-austerity protests - and soon thereafter in Bolivia , by the US-backed unelected government that had violently ousted elected president Evo Morales to praise from Washington Last month, Ukrainian activists tried to shout down RT's head of communications Anna Belkina as she spoke about freedom of the press in Strasbourg. Just like EV, they chanted "propaganda, not journalism."


theamericanconservative--2019-06-11--Are Abortion and Gay Rights Really American Values

Are Abortion and Gay Rights Really American Values?

“My religion defines who I am. And I’ve been a practicing Catholic my whole life,” said Vice President Joe Biden in 2012. “I accept my church’s position on abortion as…doctrine. Life begins at conception. …I just refuse to impose that on others.”  For four decades, Biden backed the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of the tax dollars of Joe’s fellow Catholics to pay for what they view as the killing of the innocent unborn.  Last week, Joe flipped. He now backs the repeal of the Hyde Amendment.  Ilyse Hogue of NARAL Pro-Choice America welcomed home the prodigal son: “We’re pleased that Joe Biden has joined the rest of the 2020 Democratic field in coalescing around the Party’s core values—support for abortion rights.”  But when did the right to an abortion—a crime in many states before 1973—become a “core value” of the Democratic Party?  And what are these “values” of which politicians incessantly talk?  Are they immutable? Or do they change with the changing times?  Last month, Disney CEO Bob Iger said his company may cease filming in Georgia if its new anti-abortion law takes effect: “If [the bill] becomes law, I don’t see how it’s practical for us to continue to shoot there.”  The Georgia law outlaws almost all abortions, once a heartbeat is detected, some six to eight weeks into pregnancy. It reflects the Christian conservative values of millions of Georgians.  To Iger and Hollywood, however, Georgia’s law radically restricts the “reproductive rights” of women, and is a moral outrage.  What we have here is a clash of values.  What one side believes is preserving the God-given right to life for the unborn, the other regards as an assault on the rights of women.  The clash raises questions that go beyond our culture war to ask what America should stand for in the world.  “American interests and American values are inseparable,” Pete Buttigieg told Rachel Maddow. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the Claremont Institute: “We have had too little courage to confront regimes squarely opposed to our interests and our values.”  Are Pompeo and Mayor Pete talking about the same values?  The mayor is proudly gay and in a same-sex marriage. Yet the right to same-sex marriage did not even exist in this country until the Supreme Court discovered it a few years ago.  In a 2011 speech to the U.N., Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “Gay rights are human rights.” She approved of U.S. embassies flying the rainbow flag during Pride Month.  This year, Mike Pompeo told the U.S. embassy in Brazil not to fly the rainbow flag. He explained his moral duty to the Christian Broadcasting Network: “The task I have is informed by my understanding of my faith, my belief in Jesus Christ as the Savior.”  The Christian values Pompeo espouses on abortion and gay rights are in conflict with what progressives now call human rights.  And the world mirrors the American divide.  There are gay pride parades in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but none in Riyadh and Mecca. In Brunei, homosexuality can get you killed.  To many Americans, diversity—racial, ethnic, cultural, religious—is our greatest strength.  Yet Poland and Hungary are proudly ethnonationalist. South Korea and Japan fiercely resist the racial and ethnic diversity immigration would bring. Catalans and Scots in this century, like Quebecois in the last, seek to secede from nations to which they have belonged for centuries.  Are ethnonationalist nations less righteous than diverse nations likes ours? And if diversity is an American value, is it really a universal value?  Consider the treasured rights of our First Amendment—freedom of speech, religion, and the press.  Saudi Arabia does not permit Christian preachers. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, converts to Christianity face savage reprisals. In Buddhist Myanmar, Muslims are ethnically cleansed.  These nations reject an equality of all faiths, believing instead in the primacy of their own majority faith. They reject our wall of separation between religion and state. Our values and their values conflict.  What makes ours right and theirs wrong? Why should our views and values prevail in what are, after all, their countries?  Some view our Constitution as protecting practices—abortion, blasphemy, pornography, flag-burning, trashing religious beliefs—that other nations regard as symptoms of a disintegrating society.  When Hillary Clinton said half of all Trump supporters could be put into a “basket of deplorables” for being “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,” she was conceding that many of them detest many progressive values.  True, but in the era of Trump, why should her liberal values be those America champions abroad?  With secularism’s triumph, we Americans have no common religion, no common faith, no common font of moral truth. We disagree on what is right and wrong, moral and immoral.  Without an agreed-upon higher authority, values become matters of opinion. And ours are in conflict and irreconcilable.  Understood. But how, then, do we remain one nation and one people?  Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.


thedailycaller--2019-10-12--Bill Barr Flames ‘Unremitting Assault’ On Religion, Traditional Values During Notre Dame Visit

Concerted attacks on religious liberty have triggered a moral upheaval that contributes to deadly social pathologies, Attorney General William Barr said Friday at the University of Notre Dame.  “The imperative of protecting religious freedom was not just a nod in the direction of piety,” Barr said. “It reflects the framers’ belief that religion was indispensable to sustaining our free system of government.”  The attorney general said numerous measures of social decline are rising as religion recedes from public life, citing higher instances of drug addiction, mental illness, and suicide. Those outcomes are not random, but the fruit of a dedicated campaign against orthodox religious belief, Barr added.  “This is not decay,” Barr said. “This is organized destruction. Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.”  Barr said state governments and municipal agencies have been at the vanguard of that effort, noting the board of education in Orange County, California, recently decided religious dissenters may not excuse their children from portions of the school curriculum broaching LGBT issues. Schools are the usual forum for attacks on religious liberty, Barr said.  In that connection, the attorney general noted the Department of Justice recently intervened in a dispute between a gay teacher and a Catholic high school near Notre Dame. The case arose when the Archdiocese of Indianapolis directed Cathedral High School to dismiss a teacher in a public, same-sex marriage or forfeit its Catholic affiliation. The high school did so. The teacher, Joshua Payne-Elliott, sued the school in turn.  The Justice Department filed a statement of interest in the case Sept. 27, arguing that the lawsuit suppresses the archdiocese’s First Amendment right to expressive association, and impermissibly asks the court to interfere with internal church matters.  “The First Amendment precludes this court, a state actor, from cooperating in plaintiff’s attempt to stifle the archdiocese’s First Amendment right to expressive association,” the filing reads. “The First Amendment also precludes the court from entangling itself in a quintessentially ecclesiastical question: whether the archdiocese properly interpreted and applied Catholic doctrine. The First Amendment commits that question exclusively to the ecclesiastical tribunals of the church.” (RELATED: Grassley Seeks Update After Referring Swetnick, Avenatti To Justice Department For Kavanaugh Claims)  Anti-Barr demonstrators picketed near the Notre Dame campus during the attorney general’s visit, according to the South Bend Tribune. Some protesters blew whistles in reference to a whistleblower complaint from the intelligence community concerning President Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.  Trump asked Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden’s business interests in Ukraine, and suggested Barr could support that effort. Hunter, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma Holdings.  “Notre Dame Law School will neither endorse nor condemn invited speakers,” Cole said. “An institution of higher education must be a place where controversial ideas and points of view are expressed, heard, and discussed. This is such a place.”  Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.


theguardianuk--2019-03-17--Lets continue to resist Brexit Our economy and values are at stake Will Hutton

Let’s continue to resist Brexit. Our economy and values are at stake | Will Hutton

Three years ago, 48% of us voted Remain. If another vote were taken in the near future, the figure would probably top 50%. But perish the current leading politician or businessperson who makes the case for ongoing membership of this remarkable international organisation on our doorstep. Apart from a few outliers, it is taken as a political given that Britain must leave the EU; the divisive question is in what form.  For although the focus is largely on the undoubted deleterious economic impact – the worse the harder the [Brexit](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/eu- referendum) – the bigger question is what country do we want to be. The EU has rightly become the talismanic issue of our times.  For if you support EU membership, you will tend to own a cluster of other values and principles. You recognise that today’s economies and societies are interdependent and that it’s imperative to have institutions to manage those interdependencies, whether on climate change or the overarching power of the new technopolists. You are not instinctively distrustful, even hostile, to other cultures, languages and peoples: you find diversity attractive and enriching. You are for openness and tolerance. While proud of your country, you do not see that pride compromised by working with and alongside other countries and peoples.  You do not believe in capitalism red in tooth and claw; you see the case for stakeholder capitalism, for the regulation of finance and for using state power to promote competition and innovation. You celebrate the role of trade unions in giving employees voice and vital countervailing power. You do not regard low taxation as the be-all and end-all of public policy. You uphold the values behind a social contract in which members of society accept mutual rights and obligations, so sustaining strong public health and education and social insurance that supplies income in adversity or old age. You believe in strong public institutions, ranging from the BBC to museums, which so enrich our country.  Propounding EU membership is thus a civilisational proposition. It does not mean that you regard every aspect of the EU – its unsigned-off accounts or the intricacies of the common agricultural policy – as perfect. But then neither is every aspect of the UK. But it does mean that you sign up for a set of interlocking propositions, shared by other Europeans, which better allow people to live lives they have reason to value.  Brexit: Jess Phillips says she is ‘not scared’ of the people who voted leave – video  Standing in opposition is a very different set of values and principles. To want to leave is to deny international interdependencies in order to assert national “control”. You reject mutuality of international obligation and the necessary pooling of sovereignty and sharing of law and resource to achieve common ends that would otherwise be impossible. Rather, the moral injunction for state and individual alike is to stand alone and act solely in your own interests. The EU is a hostile “other”: it spends our money and sets objectionable regulations, although when challenged, no regulation can be cited whose aim can reasonably be contested. Small wonder; they reflect the will not just of the British parliament, but of the parliaments of Europe.  You object to the EU’s openness – to trade, ideas and people – especially to European citizens who can live and work in Britain as of right. It matters not that the [British have equal rights](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/01/eu-citizenship- brexit-ecj-netherlands): who would want to have the right to leave their homeland to become a citizen of anywhere? At the limit, you can only trust your own, who share the “indigenous” culture and love of home; those from other cultures, who speak other languages and worship other religions, are the alien other whose presence is necessarily the principal cause of your own and wider society’s ills.  Brexit is thus a parallel civilisational proposition – to create a world of closure, intolerance and suspicion of the other. Economically, this will express itself as less trade, less inward investment and less growth – and reduced capacity to work with other countries to confront common challenges. But that is less the point than the impact on our civilisation. We will become more intolerant, more mean spirited, accelerating the trends already clear since the referendum. We will be ever more suspicious and hostile to people of colour, the European, the Jew and the Muslim. We will contract and be diminished.  Thus the “vox pop” calls from the bluff Yorkshire pensioner or Essex white-van driver to [get on with Brexit](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/26/theresa-may- brexit-plan-disaster-letter) or parallel calls from their MPS to respect the “will of the people” cannot be tamely and mutely accepted. I don’t believe that the mass of the British want to embrace the choice Brexit represents or that those who voted Leave hold views that are immutable. They are fellow Brits and fellow Europeans who have fallen prey to callow leaders and trash populist argument. It may be that Theresa May gets a [narrow majority](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/13/theresa-may- deal-vote-mps-brexit) on the third or fourth time of asking for her “ deal”. But while trying to limit the economic damage, this will end up with Britain having the worst of all worlds – tracking the EU without influencing it, while embracing closure.  But whatever the deal, the civilisational challenge cannot be dodged. I do not want to live in the kind of country that Brexit is creating and I believe a majority share that view. If we leave, millions of us will seek to convert our fellow citizens and remind them that so much of what goes to make us British has roots in very different values from those feeding Brexit.  Above all, we will look to leaders, so sadly absent in our two main political parties, who lead and form public opinion, instead of following what they imagine it to be. We did not want or choose this battle. But now it is upon us, we have to take up the peaceful arms of persuasion, words and argument – and fight to win it.  • Will Hutton is an Observer columnist


theguardianuk--2019-07-07--If Jeremy Hunt supports family values why is his party cutting school funding Jess Phillips

If Jeremy Hunt supports family values, why is his party cutting school funding? | Jess Phillips

The man who would be (but won’t be) king, [Jeremy Hunt](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/jeremy-hunt) took to the stage in the first Tory leadership hustings in my home town of Birmingham and declared that the Conservatives were the party of family values.  This used to be said a lot in the 80s but has fallen out of the lexicon of Tory politicians in more progressive times. Hunt was using it to have a dig at his competitor [Boris Johnson](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/boris) a day after the police were called to the flat Johnson shares with the girlfriend for whom he recently unceremoniously left his second wife. The idea that the Tories are the party of family values used to get thrown around a lot more when I was a kid – back then it was code for “we don’t like single parents, homosexuals and babies born out of wedlock”.  The family of a politician has, for as long as I can remember, been used as a tableau of statesman-like stability; and Downing Street, the most prolific site of this image of a leader with wife and children. Some focus group somewhere must have reported that we like our leaders to have regular-shaped families. It has always made me balk, to be honest. I’m not usually one to heap praise on Jeremy Corbyn but I love that he doesn’t drag his wife on stage for awkward snogs after his annual speech at the party conference. She isn’t his prop.  In short, that politicians do or don’t have families should no longer have any bearing on their abilities to hold office or to care more or less about the future of the country.  So why then did I lean on my family last week to make [quite a different tableau outside Downing Street](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jul/05/labour-mp-jess- phillips-son-leads-schools-protest-outside-no-10)? I left my son Danny alone on the steps of Downing Street doing sums in an exercise book on a Friday afternoon, in a protest against education cuts that have left his [school no longer able to stay open](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/feb/28 /school-stockport-close-early-fridays-lack-funding) for five days a week.  I don’t want to sound like Andrea Leadsom, but as a mother I am as angry as every other parent at my son’s school and the hundreds of other schools around the country that will now shut at midday on Fridays. As a mother, I will have to arrange extra childcare and support that will make up the 20 days a year of school my son will now miss. As a mother, I want the very best for my children. As a politician, I want what is best for all children.  My son is not a prop for me to use to make a personal point about my morality, wholesomeness and ability, but he is a symbol of a political point about how austerity is not just affecting the “have nots” in our country but is literally changing the fabric of what we will all accept as the norm. Five days of school a week is as fundamental to our society as fish and chips, the May Day bank holiday and NHS free at the point of delivery. My family is just like most other families – we rise and fall on good and bad government policy. Politics affects us all. My status as a mother doesn’t make me a good politician or an empathetic person, it makes me subject without control to government education policy. My status as a politician and a public figure meant I could try to take back some of that control with my little boy happily by my side.  Perhaps this wasn’t the Downing Street picture of a politician’s family we are used to but it says more about our politicians’ ability to care about the future of our country than what we are usually served up. Politics is personal, my son knows that; he can feel it changing his life.  • __ Jess Phillips is the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley


thehuffingtonpost--2019-06-04--Nikki Haley Backers Of Abortion Rights Are Forcing Their Values On America

Nikki Haley: Backers Of Abortion Rights Are Forcing Their Values On America

Nikki Haley took the stage as the keynote speaker Monday night at an anti-abortion group’s annual gala, saying that allowing women to have autonomy over their bodies “is not real feminism.”  Speaking from the Susan B. Anthony List’s Campaign for Life Gala in Washington, D.C., the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations asserted that groups supporting abortion rights were creating hostility among women and trying to force their values on others.  “Unfortunately, many on the left use the abortion debate to divide women and demand conformity,” she said. “They do this in the name of feminism. But that is not real feminism.”  Reproductive rights groups believe women should have a choice about abortion and not be forced to conform, as Haley put it, with those who have moral objections to the procedure.  Haley, intentionally or not, reinforced that fundamental ethos of the pro-choice movement in her speech.  “The idea that women must adhere to a particular set of values is one of the most anti-women ideas in today’s culture,” she said. “It is a rejection of the ideas of equality and tolerance that the women’s movement is supposed to be about.”  The former South Carolina governor’s speech comes as several states have passed highly restrictive abortion legislation, all of which face legal challenges that could make their way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The most far-reaching of those laws is in Alabama, where Republican Gov. Kay Ivey recently signed a bill making it a felony in the state for a doctor to perform an abortion in nearly all cases. Haley herself signed a 20-week limit on abortions while she was governor.  Since leaving the Trump administration at the end of 2018, Haley has served on the board of directors at Boeing and launched a group that pushes for more conservative policies both in the U.S. and internationally.


thesun--2019-01-04--Militarys safe space recruitment campaign is ignoring core values of service and simply patronisi

Military’s ‘safe space’ recruitment campaign is ignoring core values of service and simply patronising youth

FOR some time now, the British Army has struggled to embody military values, to present itself as a robust, risk-taking, flexible military institution.  Instead of upholding what were once key values of the military — service, duty, courage, discipline, loyalty — it has taken to promoting itself as just another normal civilian institution.  So last year it launched its “Belonging” recruitment campaign, which assured would-be soldiers that the Army is an emotionally correct outfit that provides psychological validation to its recruits.  One ad showed a tearful soldier in a jungle opening a letter from a loved one while his comrades offered him a cup of tea.  This depiction of the Army as a safe space where everyone is made to feel comfortable did not motivate young people to sign up.  In October, the deputy chief of the defence staff, Sir Mark Poffley, revealed that in the three months to August 2018, the Army recruited just ten per cent of the officers and seven per cent of the other ranks it needs for 2018/19.  And yet instead of learning from the failures of the campaign, the Army has decided to go even further down the road of presenting itself as a cuddly, non-challenging, soppy institution.  Its new posters and TV ads call on “snowflakes”, “selfie addicts”, “class clowns”, “phone zombies” and “me me me millennials” to sign up.  One poster says: “Snowflakes — your Army needs YOU and your compassion.”  Other posters reframe forms of behaviour that are usually seen as self-indulgent, anti-social or attention-seeking in a positive light.  The posters suggest that video game and selfie addicts possess admirable levels of drive and confidence. The campaign also praises the “focus” of  “phone zombies” —  people who stare at their phones for long periods.  Possibly the most grotesque message is the one saying it is OK to be self-obsessed and narcissistic.  One poster says: “Your Army needs YOU and your self-belief.”  This reveals the intellectual and emotional illiteracy of the people behind this recruitment campaign. They are confusing the insecure sensibility of the “me me me” outlook with self-belief.  Similarly, praising snow-flakes for their compassion is wrong. Compassion is a by-product of an altruistic sense of service, not moral flakiness and being easily offended.  The Army’s snowflake campaign actually patronises the young. Most young people understand that self-obsession is not a positive thing.  Indeed, many young people are idealistic and prepared to serve their communities.  Yet instead of trying to harness the positive attributes of the young, this campaign infantilises would-be recruits.  Late last year, General Sir Nick Carter, the chief of the defence staff, said he was worried about whether young people understood “the notion of service”.  He seemed far from certain whether the young could be relied upon to support the military in the future.  He was suggesting that something has gone seriously wrong in the way the young are educated and socialised.  No doubt something has gone wrong when society cannot cultivate in the young a sense of loyalty and duty.  But General Carter needs to ask some serious questions about the signals sent by his own Army and its childish recruitment campaigns.


activistpost--2019-02-06--Self-Driving Cars Will Never Be Moral Lets Stop Pretending Otherwise

Self-Driving Cars Will Never Be Moral. Let’s Stop Pretending Otherwise

Ever since companies began developing self-driving cars, people have asked how designers will address the moral question of who a self-driving car should kill if a fatal crash is unavoidable. Recent research suggests this question may be even more difficult for car makers to answer than previously thought, because the moral preferences people have vary so much between countries.  The researchers, based at Harvard University and MIT, developed an online game simulating situations where a fatal car accident was inevitable. They asked around 40 million people from over 200 countries to choose between various accident outcomes, such as killing pedestrians rather than the car’s passengers.  The results revealed three cultural clusters where there were significant differences in what ethical preferences people had. For example, in the Southern cluster (which included most of Latin America and some former French colonies), there was a strong preference for sparing women over men. The Eastern cluster (which included many Islamic countries as well as China, Japan and Korea) had a lower preference for sparing younger people over older people.  The researchers concluded by saying that this information should influence self-driving car developers. But is that really the case? While this paper highlights an interesting discovery about global variations in moral preferences, it also highlights a persistent misunderstanding about AI, and what it can actually do. Given the current AI technology used in self-driving cars, the idea that a vehicle could make a moral decision is actually impossible.  Self-driving cars are trained to make decisions about where to steer or when to brake, using specific (or weak) AI (artificial intelligence that is focused on completing one narrow task). They’re designed with a range of sensors, cameras, and distance-measuring lasers (lidar) that give information to a central computer. The computer then uses the AI to analyze these inputs and make a decision.  Though the technology is currently relatively simple, cars will eventually outperform humans in these basic driving tasks. However, it’s unrealistic to think that self-driving cars should also be capable of making an ethical decision that even the most moral of human beings wouldn’t have time to make in an accident scenario. A car would need to be programmed with general AI if it were expected to do this.  General AI is the equivalent of what makes us human. It’s the ability to converse, enjoy music, find things funny, or make moral judgments. Producing general AI is currently impossible because of the complexity of human thought and emotions. If we require moral autonomous vehicles, we will not get there for several decades, if ever.  Another problem with the new research was that many of the situations that participants were asked to judge were unrealistic. In one scenario echoing the famous “trolley problem,” participants were asked who the car should kill if its brakes failed: its three passengers (an adult man, an adult woman, and a boy) or three elderly pedestrians (two men and one woman).  People can carefully consider these kinds of problems when answering a questionnaire. But in most real-life accidents, a driver wouldn’t have time to make such judgements in the split second before it happens. This means the comparison is invalid. And given the current AI technology of self-driving cars, these vehicles won’t be able to make these judgments, either.  Current self-driving cars have sophisticated sensing abilities and can distinguish pedestrians from other objects, such as lamp posts or road signs. However, the research authors suggest that self-driving cars can, will, and perhaps should be able to make more advanced distinctions. For example, they could recognize people deemed more desirable to society, such as doctors or athletes, and choose to save them in a crash scenario.  The reality is that designing cars to make such advanced judgements would involve producing general AI, which is currently impossible. There is also the question of whether this is even desirable. If it is ever possible to program a car to decide which life should be saved, it is not something I believe we should allow. The value of a life should not be determined by the preferences identified in research, no matter how large the sample size.  In their most basic form, self-driving cars are being designed to avoid accidents if they can, and minimize speed at impact if they can’t. Like humans, they aren’t able to make a moral decision before an unavoidable accident. But self-driving cars will be safer than human drivers, as they’re more attentive, can react quicker, and will use braking-system capabilities to the full in an accident scenario. Currently, the biggest ethical challenge that self-driving car designers face is determining when there’s enough evidence of safe behavior from simulations and controlled on-road testing to introduce self-driving cars to the road. But this doesn’t mean that they are “moral,” or will be anytime soon. To say that is to confuse the specific AI of doing driving tasks with general AI, which likely won’t exist in our lifetime. Ultimately, self-driving cars will be safer than humans. They will achieve this through design and avoiding accidents wherever possible, and reducing damage where not. However, the cars won’t be able to make moral decisions that even we couldn’t. This notion remains a far-fetched fantasy, and not one we should hold out hope for. Instead, let’s concentrate on safety: something we will be able to have justified confidence in. John McDermid is professor of software engineering at the University of York. This article was republished from the Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here. This article was sourced from Fast Company.


cnn--2019-10-12--Barr slams attacks on religious values, says 'moral upheaval' leading to societal ills

Speaking to an audience at the University of Notre Dame Law School, Barr outlined a grim vision of cultural trends, saying a "moral upheaval" and decades of efforts to undermine religion had given way to growing illegitimacy rates, drug use, and "angry, alienated young males" -- a population associated recently with a spate of domestic attacks.  "The campaign to destroy the traditional moral order has coincided and I believe has brought with it immense suffering and misery. And yet the forces of secularism, ignoring these tragic results, press on with even greater militancy," Barr said.  The speech highlighted the efforts by the Justice Department to bolster faith-based organizations fighting for religious liberty in the courts.  That policy push, engineered by Barr's predecessor, Jeff Sessions, has resulted in a number of legal briefs and lawsuits from DOJ attorneys in Washington defending the rights of religious schools and businesses.  But Barr's remarks Friday afternoon appeared aimed above policy prescriptions and at detractors of religion generally, adherents to what he called a "new secular religion." And among their ranks, Barr singled out progressives. "Among the militant secularists are many so-called progressives. But where is the progress?" Barr asked. "Those who defy the creed risk a figurative burning at the stake: social, educational and professional ostracism and exclusion waged through lawsuits and savage social media campaigns."


cnsnews--2019-01-24--Ben Shapiro Factually Incorrect Cannot Be Morally Correct

Ben Shapiro: Factually Incorrect Cannot Be Morally Correct

A few weeks ago, the Fresh Face of the Democratic Party, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., gave one of the great defenses in the history of politics. Accused of fibbing and twisting facts to meet her radical agenda, Ocasio-Cortez explained, "I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually and semantically correct than about being morally right." Her statement was widely derided. But it is indeed the mantra of today's politics. The narrative must be preserved at all costs — even the cost of the truth.  Take, for example, Ocasio-Cortez's ridiculous statements this week on the state of modern America. She explained that her plan to radically restructure the American economy is necessitated by the fact that "the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don't address climate change." She added: "And your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it? And like, this is the war — this is our World War II." Now, put aside her Nostradamus-like assertion regarding the incoming apocalypse. The important part followed: "How are we saying, 'Take it easy,' when the America that we're living in today is so dystopian with people sleeping in their cars so they can work a second job without health care and we're told to settle down."  Now, when President Trump describes America as a dystopia rife with crime and suffering, the media point out that America is hardly a hellhole — we're the most prosperous country in the history of the world. But when the charming AOC uses her false depiction of America to press for higher marginal tax rates, we're supposed to buy her story.  This gap between the facts and the narrative dominates our politics. Here's how the narrative chain works: Somebody makes a fact-free accusation of X, which supports the more general narrative, Y, supported by the political left or right. Opponents debunk X. That attempt to debunk X is taken as evidence that opponents don't take the problem of Y seriously enough. Facts are marshaled to show that Y is true, even if X isn't. In a peculiar way, the lack of facts to back X lends passion to those who defend Y — it allows them to malign the motives of those who don't defend Y.  Let's take an example. The students of Covington Catholic High School are accused of mobbing and mocking a Native American veteran. This incident supports the broader narrative that Trump supporters, religious Americans and young white men are emissaries of racism and toxic masculinity. Then it turns out that the video has been taken wildly out of context and deliberately misinterpreted. Many advocates of the narrative immediately declare that while this incident is a poor example, the overall narrative is true — and that leaping to conclusions will be justified next time, in order to prove that the overall narrative ought to be taken seriously. The only price: whomever is next maligned without facts.  This pattern will continue to dominate our politics so long as we ascribe malign motives to those who wait for the facts to emerge — and so long as we reward those who jump to conclusions in taking Y seriously. Waiting must become the order of the day. If it doesn't, politics is going to get a lot worse, and quickly.  Ben Shapiro, 35, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of "The Ben Shapiro Show" and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is The New York Times best-selling author of "Bullies." He lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles.


cnsnews--2019-01-31--Rev Franklin Graham Calls on Cardinal Dolan to Take Moral Stand and Excommunicate Cuomo

Rev. Franklin Graham Calls on Cardinal Dolan to Take 'Moral Stand' and Excommunicate Cuomo

Although Cardinal Timothy Dolan, head of the Archdiocese of New York, claims it would be counterproductive to excommunicate N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) for signing an aboriton law that effectively allows infanticide, evangelical leader Franklin Graham called on Dolan to take a "moral stand" against evil and excommunicate Cuomo.  "[I]f the church loses their moral voice, then what's the use?" said Rev. Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham. We must take a stand "for right over wrong, good over evil," said Graham.  On Jan. 22, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Gov. Cuomo, a Catholic, signed the Reproductive Health Act into law. The legislation expands abortion in the state and even allows for babies to be killed by abortion at the day of their birth. In addition, if a baby survives an abortion, he can be left to die on a table -- doctors or paramedics do not have to be summoned. Also, nurses and physician assistants may perform abortions.  Despite calls from many Catholics in New York and nationwide for Cuomo to be formally excommunicated, Cardinal Dolan refuses, arguing it would be counterproductive and useless because the governor is a liberal who rejects several Catholic teachings. "What would be the use?" claims Dolan.  In a Jan. 29 post on Facebook, Rev. Graham said, "There have been discussions within the Catholic Church as to whether New York Governor Cuomo should be excommunicated from the church for signing the state’s new abortion bill. What the governor signed into law allows for the murder of unborn children up until the day of their birth."  "Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York told Fox News on Monday that the governor is 'not going to be moved by this, so what’s the use?'" said Graham.  He continued, "I call on my friend Cardinal Dolan to take a moral stand. Whether it moves the governor’s calloused heart or not, it will have a great impact on not only the church in New York, but on the church worldwide."  "My question would be—if the church loses their moral voice, then what’s the use?" said Rev. Graham.  "It’s about standing for right over wrong, good over evil."  On Tuesday, apparently frustrated with demands from the laity that something publicly be done about Cuomo, Cardinal Dolan fired back, "You do something! Okay? I don’t have much clout--some fat, balding, Irish bishop."  "Don’t yell at me!" said Dolan.  "Look at yourselves!"