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To Lexington Green and James Bennett, for finishing their new book, America 3.0 – due out (I think) in 2013 published by Encounter Books.

A political vision for an era desperately short on imagination and needing statecraft of inspiration.

Just saw the Steven Spielberg epic Lincoln.  

The performance of Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln was titanic; all the anger and villainous darkness he channeled into his earlier memorable characters Bill “the Butcher” and Daniel Plainview are eclipsed in his Lincoln by wisdom and a transcendent, melancholic grace. The supporting cast was equally strong, with Sally Fields alluding in word and deed to the shrewish madness that troubled First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln; Tommy Lee Jones humanized – probably more than is historical – the implacable political ferocity of Radical Republican leader Representative Thaddeus Stevens; and James Spader added lighthearted realism as Secretary of State Seward’s cagey political fixer and bagman, William N. Bilboe.

Spielberg has done a magnificent storytelling of the passage of the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery in the United States and he has done even better at capturing Lincoln’s towering stature as a statesman. Day-Lewis’ Lincoln is Periclean – in possession of heroic, historical vision and mastery of grand strategy along with an intimate grasp of the granular, grubby mechanics of political deal making and a humane tolerance of other’s frailties needed to make things happen.  The scene where Day-Lewis explains to his squabbling Cabinet Lincoln’s coup d’oeil –  the real Constitutional, moral, military and political exigencies of emancipation governing the imperative questions of the 13th Amendment –  is one of the most brilliant expositions of strategy in the fusion of policy, politics and war that I have ever seen on screen.

In a sense, that was the genius of Abraham Lincoln – surpassing his own humble origins to solve herculean problems without ever losing sight that lasting resolution of Civil War and slavery were going to have to occur on Earth with fallible human beings, operating in a political reality that would never be ideal. The limits of vision of Lincoln’s contemporaries, copperhead and abolitionist, is marked but the comparison between Abraham Lincoln and politicians of our own day is yet for the worse.  Our problems are so much smaller, our resources and capabilities infinitely vaster than the severe test the Republic faced in Lincoln’s time, yet our leaders are grossly inadequate even to these.

Martyrdom naturally magnified the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, but even without the assassination he would have still been reckoned our greatest president, one of the rare individuals whose leadership made an irreplaceable mark upon history. If one of Lincoln’s rivals for the Republican nomination had become president in 1860 instead, or had Lincoln not been re-elected in 1864, the Union cause would have failed.  We would not be who we are nor the world what it is without a United States in the 20th century to stem the tide of  first German domination, then Fascism and then Soviet Communism. The world would be a poorer, darker place and we would be lesser peoples of lesser nations of the former United States.

Lincoln’s shadow is not merely long, it is deep.

[ by Charles Cameron — now the election dust has settled, let’s hear it for Nate Silver, Megyn Kelly, Zeynep Tufekci and xkcd ]
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I’m about as Qualit as you can get on the Qualit vs Quant side of things, and if I had a bête grise, it might well be statistics. Why? As Albert Einstein once said, or is said to have said:

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts

Look, it’s even on his blackboard:

But look: votes can be counted, and what can be counted is Quant territory. So here’s a little hommage from a Qualit to a Quant — Nate Silver, in this case — with a bow to Megyn Kelly for calling out Karl Rove like that (upper panel, above), and a tip of the hat to xkcd (lower panel) for the usual spot-on commentary from his “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”.

Quality work, Quants!

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Ah — but then, what should we do with Colbert‘s comment?

Math has a liberal bias

Joking aside, one reading I’d add to Zen‘s post-election list would be Zeynep Tufekci‘s In Defense of Nate Silver, Election Pollsters, and Statistical Predictions.

Generally, I eschew writing about partisan politics, but like everyone else in America – and possibly a plurality of the planet – today the election was a topic of discussion, deconstruction and debate for me.  President Obama and his supporters are reveling in their victory, Republicans and conservatives are organizing circular firing squads, but the good news for America is that the election was fair, free and unmarred by the kind of bitter partisan dispute we saw in 2000. The country has sufficient serious problems and is deeply divided enough without having that cross to bear again.

Some Democrats seem to believe the President has won, if not a “landslide’, at least a crushing victory in squeaking by Governor Mitt Romney. While that belief may be delusional, it is the GOP that is clearly in trouble despite winning nearly half the popular vote and is positioning itself to implode in an ideological civil war.

Some of the more intelligent or interesting reactions I read came from historian Ron Radosh, political scientist Dan Nexon,  conservative wonk Bruno Behrend,  blogger Dave Schuler and the NRO Corner, which had a mixture of teeth-gnashing and cold-eyed realism.

What should the once great Republican Party do?

Admit they have a problem – that a majority of Americans find the GOP to be angry, scary and a little bit nuts:

Chris Christie is not why Romney lost. MSM liberal bias, though real enough and sometimes nasty, did not stop the elections of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush (including the two greatest electoral landslides in American history). Even Romney, though he carries his share of blame as standard bearer for an unsuccessful campaign, is not the whole reason millions of Hispanics and women who previously voted for George W. Bush and John McCain, voted to re-elect Barack Obama.

It wasn’t Mitt Romney (who incidentally, I am no fan of) who decided to spout off  in the midst of a national campaign season about idiocies like “legitimate rape”, the Big Bang theory being from ” the pit of Hell”, that Obama is secretly a Muslim or advocating laws where the government can forcibly ram an ultrasound wand into a woman’s vagina. Really, where did that last bright idea come from – Communist China?

The problem is the Republican Party and mainstream conservatives tolerate and support the presence of angry, misogynistic, ignorant crackpots who scare away normal people. The GOP needs to recall  a lesson from Bill Buckley instead of letting the nuts set themselves up as the arbiters of what is “conservative”.

Focus on the key numbers of American democracy – 51%, 60 % and 270:

Sectarian purity is something best left for Church – at the polling booth you need a majority.

While it is the duty of the opposition party to oppose and Obama is going to give Republicans many ideas or actions worth fervent opposition in his second term, being against something is only part of the equation if the goal is to “win”. The other part is offering a positive alternative or constructive vision that diminishes your opponent while advancing your own cause – a “noble philosophy” that attracts the uncommitted, pumps of the resolve of your allies and demoralizes and daunts your adversaries. A philosophy that builds expanding, winning, governing, coalitions
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[ by Charles Cameron — Christian theology on two-fold logic, and its crucial importance in understanding the role of evil and the question of theodicy, with an aside concerning Islamic theology on the breath of life in utero, hence also abortion ]
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As I shall say more than once, my own interest here is not in discussing the merits or demerits of a recent political debate, but to add a couple of theological nuances for our consideration.
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Richard Moursock is reported to have said:

I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize life is that gift from God, and I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.

Joe Donnelly is reported to have responded:

The God I believe in and the God I know most Hoosiers believe in, does not intend for rape to happen — ever. What Mr. Mourdock said is shocking, and it is stunning that he would be so disrespectful to survivors of rape.

Mourdock then apparently responded:

What I said was, in answering the question form my position of faith, I said I believe that God creates life. I believe that as wholly and as fully as I can believe it. That God creates life. Are you trying to suggest that somehow I think that God pre-ordained rape? No, I don’t think that. That’s sick. Twisted. That’s not even close to what I said. What I said is that God creates life.

Similarly, Rick Santorum is reported to have said:

I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. We have to make the best of a bad situation.

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My sole intention here is to add in a note or two about theology — I explicitly do not address the moral, political, legal and gender ramifications of this issue.

We are accustomed to think in terms of what I’d call “single-track” logic: the logic of Aristotle’s excluded middle. Christianity however, in its gospel-based forms, on occasion uses a “two-track” logic, in which something can be both timeless and temporal, or both the will of God and a clear defiance of that will.

An example of the first can be found in Christ saying of himself, “Before Abraham was, I am.” (John 8.58).

On the face of it, that’s ridiculous – Christ appears to be claiming to have preceded Abraham, who is commonly called “our father Abraham” (Avraham Avinu, Rab in Yoma 28b cf. Genesis 26.3, cf. also Abeena Ibraheem in the Qur’an, 22.78). If single-track logic obtains, that’s a fair and reasonable critique.

The clashing tenses of the two verbs, however, gives us the clue that a two-track logic is at work: that Christ is claiming to be in eternal presence, in a manner that logically “precedes” Abraham’s admittedly prior place when considered in terms of a purely temporal sequence.

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That piece of two-track logic doesn’t have any direct bearing on the politics of abortion in today’s USA, although it was a scandalous enough paradox to the Jews Jesus was addressing that the next verse states:

Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by…

I have quoted it first to make the point that two-track logic is at work in the sayings of Christ in the New Testament – but the key reference point illuminating what Moursock and those of like mind might say concerning an act both being in flagrant defiance of God’s will and also in some way partaking of it would be the betrayal of Christ, resulting directly in his arrest and crucifixion – the hideously cruel form of capital punishment used in that time and place.

Matthew 26.24 indicates that the betrayal and death of Jesus are the means by which a sacrifice is made, in fulfillment of prophecy, and then goes on to point up a double moral:

The Son of man goeth as it is written of him: but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.

Reading that, it’s clear that within Christian two-track logic, an outcome (in our contemporary case, fertilization) can fall within the will of God, while there is “woe unto that man by whom” that outcome was brought willfully and sinfully effect.

Thus considering a child born of rape a blessing in its own right may — from a strictly theological standpoint — coexist with the idea that the rape should be abhorred and the rapist subject to whatever punishment the law may provide.

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I should briefly note here two other pieces that address parts of the same issue:

Sarah Sentilles, Rape and Richard Mourdock’s Semi-Omnipotent God, posted at Religion Dispatches

G. Jeffrey MacDonald, Richard Mourdock: the theology behind his rape comments, posted at the Christian Science Monitor

Obviously, I am not impressed with Christian theological commentaries that miss the “twofold logic” at work wherever evil is encountered in a good creation.

The case of the betrayal of Christ is the clearest possible indication that God can will the outcome of an act which is in flagrant opposition to his will. The gospels state and Christians believe that Christ’s betrayal itself, not just the consequential salvation of the world by virtue of his sacrifice, was foretold in prophecy: in this sense, even the betrayal was part of the divine will, though as we have seen, that in no way excuses Judas from his complicity in deicide.

To be perfectly clear: it is my opinion that only the twofold logic I have pointed to satisfactorily approaches the age-long question of theodicy or the problem of evil, which I hope to return to in an upcoming post.

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It is perhaps worth also noting here that the Qur’an suggests that life enters the developing body of a child in the middle of the second trimester, 120 days after conception — although we should also remember that “40 days” can mean “quite a while” in Semitic cultures, if Hebrew figurative usage us anything to go by.

Thus we read in the Qur’an, 5.12-14:

And verily We did create man from a quintessence (of clay). Then We placed him (as a drop of sperm) in a place of rest, firmly fixed. Then We made the sperm into a clot of congealed blood. Then of that clot We made a (foetus) lump. Then We made out of that lump bones and clothed the bones with flesh. Then We developed out of it another creature (by breathing life into it). So blessed be Allah, the most marvellous Creator.

Expanding on this, in the premier hadith collection, Sahih al-Bukhari (# 3036), we read:

Sayyiduna Abd Allah ibn Mas’ud (Allah be pleased with him) narrates that the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him & give him peace) said:

Each one of you is constituted in the womb of the mother for forty days, and then he becomes a clot of thick blood for a similar period, and then a piece of flesh for a similar period. Then Allah sends an angel who is ordered to write four things. He is ordered to write down his deeds, his livelihood, his (date of) death, and whether he will be blessed or wretched (in religion). Then the soul is breathed into him…

I am indebted to commenters on Juan Cole‘s post Mourdock, Rape as a Gift of God, and Islamic Sharia on his informed Comment blog for the impetus to research the question of life in utero from an Islamic perspective.

Wisdom traditions may differ across centuries and cultures…

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In closing, let me repeat: this posts presents footnotes on points in theologies, and is not intended to make a statement or give any indication of a political opinion.

My personal keen interest is in how our valuation of our human situation would change if more of us had an acute sense of two-track logic as it applies to “eternity within the temporal” and its corollary, the mutual interdependence of all that is.