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  • The "Cult" of China Experts is Hardly New

    Thorston Pattberg at Asia Times Online thinks he’s found something novel:

    There is a cult of Western evangelists and self-righteous crusaders who are determined to dislodge non-Western nations and usurp their governments.

    Unfortunately, Western “experts” have hung around China for a long time.

    In the years immediately after the start of the People’s Republic, same People’s Republic would bring in foreigners to help them in their economic and technical development.  Think the Soviet experts who came in until things froze between Moscow and Beijing; the Soviets pulled them from the country.  Others came to “help out” and get caught in upheavals such as the Cultural Revolution.

    After Mao’s death the experts became people who were basically self-proclaimed know-it-alls and marketed themselves accordingly.  As I noted in my series on doing business in China in the early 1980’s:

    One of the lessons we at Vulcan took from China is that “experts” seem to gravitate towards the country. We found these experts in the U.S., too. They’d appear at international trade events, going on at length about how to deal with this exotic Chinese culture and how different it was from ours, and how with their advice we would do business.

    The problem with many of these people is that they’ve never “done the deal.” Many of them have never sold or leased anything to the Chinese or anyone else for that matter. We found that such advice not to be as helpful as it looked. However, the one thing that those of us who have done the deal must avoid is to represent our specific experience as the only way to do business in China, then or now. But there are some useful lessons that can be learned.

    The experts that Pattberg is referring to, however, are those who have aimed their advice towards China itself.  Instead of marketing themselves to the West based on the “weirdness” of Chinese culture, they impose themselves on the Chinese based on Chinese “weirdness”.

    And the Chinese don’t always think much of Western opinion even when it’s well meaning, as I found out in this comment on my piece about the death of the Chinese author Mao Dun:

    I don’t understand why the interview surprised that journalist that much. For someone who really understands his literary theories and political ideology, one should not be surprised at all. I don’t think what he said there was a show or some effort by him to keep in power. It was what he truly believed, or at least that was what he envisioned after his life-time devotion to the revolutionary cause.

    American journalists tend to look at things from their own angle. They have a self-defined notion of correctness or ultimate truth, and if people do not agree with that, then there is a problem. This is very sad. They do not try to understand the path of other people’s development, neither do they respect others’ ideals, or if they do, they bluntly ignore it. They describe everything they disagree as “undemocratic”, “insincere” or “fake.”

    Disagreement is too common and it is good that people are open about it. But I think it is a disgrace of turn a disagreement into character bashing. This is what the journalist did here. But nonetheless, it was good information that he revealed.

    That’s pretty much Pattberg’s thesis in a nutshell.

    China is an old civilisation which has done things its way for a long time.  Although people are people, it has an inner logic that has to be understood to successfully deal with the Chinese. For Westerners to come in and lecture/impose stuff on the Chinese is neither helpful for the West nor the Chinese.  It sets up institutions in Chinese society that don’t work and blurs the Western understanding of the country.

    It also puts a new twist on this “white privilege” meme that we hear so much of these days.  Most propagators of that meme would like us to think that such is a purely right-wing phenomenon.  But this is not the case, as the list of experts Pattberg reels off shows.  It’s one thing to mouth a multicultural agenda; it’s quite another to actually do it successfully.  In the case of China, we’re nowhere near that point, and I’m not holding my breath on that changing any time soon.

  • Harriet's Secret…or Harriet's Revenge?

    Last Friday evening my wife and I got to do something that doesn’t happen very often around here: go to a movie première, in this case that of the documentary Harriet’s Secret.

    The film is produced and narrated by Dean Arnold, who is a well-known figure in this community.  As the trailer conveys, it’s an intriguing story.  For me personally, it’s especially intriguing for three reasons.

    The first is that both Dean and myself had to answer the same question: what do you do when you rummage through your own family stuff and realise that you’ve got an interesting story on your hands?  The answer is simple: you do a lot more research and then figure out a medium to convey that to the public.  In his case, the film is the result of the research.  In my case, I took to the internet here and here to get the job done.  Which to choose–or select another path, such as a book–depends upon many things, but they boil down to the resources you start with and where you want to go: the nature and abundance (or lack) of records, access to financing and other resources, and your long-term goals.  In my case, part of the reason I went to the internet with the material, say, surrounding the family business was to intertwine the history with keeping the product line alive, something which has worked out very well.

    The second is that, in watching the film, I think it’s pretty certain that his family and mine crossed paths along the way.  Harriet Thompson, the central character, was from Chicago, and until my great-grandfather moved to Washington just after the turn of the last century it was the centre of the family’s business and residence.  Chicago between the Civil War and World War I was the planet’s premier “new city,” at one point the fifth largest city in the world.  Only Berlin rivalled it.  Given its subsequent history, and the tendency of the media centres of New York and Los Angeles to talk about themselves endlessly, that’s easy to forget, but it shouldn’t be.  And of course some of my family made it out to Los Angeles as well.

    The last point relates more to the present: what do you do when you find out (or know going in) that the values of the family members are substantially different from yours? That’s a problem that both Dean (a well-known Orthodox Christian activist) and I had, although it played out differently.  Harriet’s husband Percy was a full-blown radical, especially after they moved to California, with friends such as Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, and Clarence Darrow.  With mine it was different: as I explained a long time ago, my people were practical people with little time for idealism.

    The answer to that is simple: you tell it like it is, or was.  It’s tempting to excessively editorialise, but it’s best to avoid it.  There is one thing that Dean and I both end up doing on a personal level: putting paid to the idea that this country was a seamless Christian country until the 1960’s showed up.  That puts the “culture war” in a new context, one which is badly needed these days.

    But yet…there is one interesting twist to both stories.  Dean does a more thorough job of documenting it than I do, but without doing a big spoiler I came away with the idea that twentieth-century modernity was more fun for the men than the women who had to live with them.  For Harriet it was a special agony with the radical version of the “girl next door” but while Chet was making aviation history my grandmother found herself stuck in neutral.  The term “martyr” has been applied to both; that kind of thing, as much as the usual religious meme beloved of the left, may have fuelled the feminist kick-back of the 1960’s and beyond.

    That kick-back may also have driven those who came after to seriously re-consider (or consider) Christianity, with its higher idea of monogamy and (for Evangelicals at least) endless marriage seminars.  Many on the left will laugh at this, but it’s time for people who just moved to the city (literally or conceptually) to stop dominating the agenda.  History is a more complicated than the simplistic memes of either side.  Perhaps the dutiful “martyrs” not only get their due recognition, but in the end they get even too.

  • Making Canterbury Portable

    Evidently Justin Welby stirred up more than this blog by his backhanded comments regarding the ACNA and the Anglican Communion.  It’s unsurprising that some of the provinces at least have taken offence to them.  In Australia, with their interesting system of provinces, dioceses and extraprovincial diocese (Tasmania) we have the Diocese of Northwest Australia warmly greeting the ACNA as part of the Anglican Communion.

    The whole concept of Northwest Australia upstaging Canterbury is a heartening concept to those of us who like to remind the Brits that their isles are such as wonderful place they filled two continents with the people who wanted or had to leave.  That said, not to be outdone by the western extreme of the country, the Diocese of Sydney’s Mark Thompson has weighed in on why ACNA is part of the Anglican Communion: because the Anglican Communion is confessional in nature, the ACNA confesses the faith (as opposed to some provinces that, ahem, don’t) therefore they are in the AC.

    Thompson’s idea is no stranger to this blog: he’s at the centre of his diocese’s musings over the subordination of the Son to the Father.  Like that theological adventure, his thesis that the AC is primarily confessional in nature is necessary but not sufficient; it needs some further thinking out to get Anglicans where they need to go and not to lead them once again to where they don’t need to go.

    There are many denominational fellowships in Christianity.  We think first of the National and World Councils of Churches, united in their unbelief.  More germane to the topic are groups of denominations which are similar in their beliefs but not institutionally unified; Baptist fellowships, Pentecostal fellowships and the like.  These have doctrinal statements and commitments of the organisations which are similar to their own statements; a kind of confessional unity can be seen in groupings such as these.

    The Anglican Communion, however, implies something stronger than that.  The obvious unity is communion itself, and we’ve seen that broken even at the primitial level for some time now.  Beyond that, any group of churches which claim the Apostolic Succession in one form or another (and I’ve been round and round on that topic too) need to have some kind of institutional unity that reflects their common origin.

    This is where things get tricky.  We get back to the question that has haunted Christianity for centuries: what do we do when those who can trace their institutional lineage to those who walked the Earth with Our Lord depart from his teachings?  In a sense the Reformation centres around this question, and the answers weren’t univocal then and aren’t now.  The Anglican Communion is, in a sense, the gathering of those churches who believe that the results of the English Reformation were, and are, the optimal result.

    Now we’ve seen further successors depart from the faith, and the same question comes back: what is to be done? Confessional unity is important, it’s something that Anglicans too often treat with benign neglect.  We’ve never really been able to afford that luxury, we really can’t now.   As things stand now, the Anglican Communion isn’t working, and pulling rank like Justin Welby is doing, with the state of the church in the Global North, will only put the Communion on hospice.

    What Orthodox Anglicans need to do is to find a way to make Canterbury portable, whether the current occupant of that see likes it or not.

  • Pulling Rank on Who's in the Anglican Communion and Who Isn't

    That’s apparently what Justin Welby is doing, or trying to do:

    At the start of his 3 October 2014 interview with the Church of Ireland Gazette Archbishop Welby noted that he was surprised to learn that “virtually everywhere I have gone the analysis is that the definition of being part of the Anglican Communion is being in Communion with Canterbury  …  I haven’t faulted that [view],” he said adding that “most provinces of the Anglican Communion valued their relationship with Canterbury …  [And that] there remains in the overwhelming parts of the Communion an attachment to Canterbury.”

    I don’t think it’s much of a news flash that being in Communion with the see of Canterbury is the most important piece of the puzzle in being in the Anglican Communion.  What Welby is doing is strengthening that relationship at the expense of the other pieces, i.e., the ACC and Lambeth (which has, for the moment at least, been cancelled).  That’s something one would expect a business executive like Welby to do: set up clear lines of authority.  And, if you’re at the centre of the spokes, all the better.

    As far as churches such as the Lutheran “Porvoo Agreement” churches, Canterbury has a long history of being in communion with churches which it does not regard as part of the Anglican Communion because they are not Anglican in doctrine or worship.  (For a slightly dated summary of that situation, click here).

    The real “slap in the face” here is at the ACNA.  Canterbury could extend communion in the same way it does with the Porvoo Agreement churches, but it won’t for two reasons.  The first is that the ACNA, as its name indicates, regards itself as Anglican, and thus would want to be in the Anglican Communion.  The second is not to antagonise TEC.

    The whole idea of the ACNA being a formal part of the Anglican Communion has been a pipe dream from the very start, but one that has driven many North American Anglicans to put it together in the first place.  As I’ve said before, it’s time to cultivate the relationships with the Global South and forget about Canterbury.

    In addition to centralising what it means to be in the Communion, Welby, for his part, is probably stalling for time until TEC elects a new Presiding Bishop to replace Katharine Jefferts-Schori next year.  While it’s unlikely that TEC will choose a less heterodox leader than KJS, their new choice may revert to a more traditionally Episcopalian mealy-mouth style and not KJS’s smash-mouth style.  If they do that, Welby may try to achieve a reconciliation while “holding the keys” to the communion.

    In addition to the doctrinal chasm that’s been ongoing in the AC, there’s another looming problem: the years of liberalism have run down the Global North churches (and that includes the CoE) to the point where their unfavourable demographics and financial woes will make communion with them progressively less valuable.  The ACNA, for example, has already surpassed the ACoC in ASA; if they repeat this process with TEC, it will be clear to everyone (including Welby himself) that Canterbury has backed the wrong horse in the “colonies”.

  • The People That Feel the Shame Finally Speak Up

    In France, no less:

    At today’s rally, Zohra Bouchiba, a French Muslim, was handing out fliers for a prevention group for youngsters tempted by jihadism. “We should have been out here a long time ago,” she says.

    No kidding…in any case, a couple of weeks ago I reposted my piece They Feel the Shame, about Muslims being actually embarrassed at the conduct of their co-religionists.  Well, finally we’re seeing signs that some of them have had enough, and are speaking out.

    I don’t think that it’s an accident that France is where this is happening.  It has Europe’s largest Muslim community.  The beheading of French tourist Hervé Gourdel in Algeria has put them on the spot.  You can be sure that the Algerians are tracking this knife-happy crew down; they have little patience with terrorists pulling stunts like this on their soil, as al-Qaeda in the Maghreb found out the hard way when they attacked a gas facility.  So, with cover from the old country, they probably feel more emboldened to articulate what they doubtless feel instinctively but hate to admit in public.

    There’s also an ethnic element to this.  France’s Muslim community is largely made up of people drawn from their old colonies, especially Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.  ISIS (and al-Qaeda as well) are largely Arab centred movements, and many Algerians are not too fond of the Arabs.

    Whether their counterparts in Britain and elsewhere (to say nothing of the U.S., where Muslims are really on the hot seat after the Oklahoma beheading) will follow suit remains to be seen.  It makes more sense to follow a religion whose founder told his first followers that he who lives by the sword will die by it, and more Algerians are coming to this realisation than you’d think.

    I told one of my commenters that the rise of ISIS is a defining moment for the West, and it looks like it’s one for the West’s Muslim community too.  This is a great opportunity for an establishment bogged down in politically correct multiculturalism to come to reality, perhaps with some help from parts of Islam itself.  Let’s hope they don’t blow it for all of us.

  • Dedication and Consecration of the Anglican Church of the Redeemer

    This evening I attended the dedication and consecration of this ACNA congregation in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  Archbishop Foley Beach presided along with the Rector, the Rev. Brice Ullman.

    The “new” building is an old Presbyterian church. The congregation is about ten years old; it is not a parish type of secession that has occupied this blog, but was started by a gathering of Episcopalians justifiably unhappy with the course of their denomination.

    The interior of the church, before the service started. The “Anglicanising” and remodelling process was really nice, although would probably sour an SNP fan (they’ve got a lot to be sour about these days.)

    Judge Sheridan Randolph prepares to operate the Provisional Belfry.

    Although many came first to the nave, it was necessary to move them outside. The concept behind a dedication is that the Archbishop will dedicate things and places which have not been used before, so the congregation will follow the procession in as he dedicates the nave. After that he proceeded to dedicate the other items in the church, including the baptistery, altar, lectern, pulpit, and organ.

    Archbishop Beach (in mitre,) the Rector and other clergy prepare to enter the nave and begin the dedication.

    The agenda was definitely full; it included the dedication, Confirmation and reception, the reception of clergy from another Anglican church and the Holy Communion.

    It’s been a long time since I’ve actually been to an Anglican service of any kind; some thoughts were as follows:

    1. I was surprised at the adult acolytes, both men and women.  This was traditionally the preoccupation of young people. Part of the reason for that is the demographics of the parish; it struck me as “gap graded,” i.e., with older people and young couples but few in the middle.  I think that time will remedy that.
    2. Having been raised in a 1928 BCP church and spent many years as a Roman Catholic in a 1970 NOM liturgy, getting used to yet another translation of the ancient antiphons is something of a chore.
    3. Speaking of prayer-book, I was surprised at the absence of same. They had hymnals and Bibles, but no Prayer Book.  The ACNA is still in transition on this, and the “missalette” concept Roman Catholics use is always an option. (That’s what they basically did for the composite liturgy they celebrated today).
    4. I see that Anglicans still do their psalms antiphonally instead of responsorily.
    5. The sign of peace was the exuberant business that I hoped it would be and wrote about earlier this year.
    6. The music is really eclectic, ranging from Healy Willan’s “Agnus Dei” (which I was raised on at Bethesda) to a decidedly Charismatic rendition of “I Am the Bread of Life” and a couple of contemporary praise and worship choruses. The church actually has two music groups, one folk and the other traditional with a digital organ. Churches struggle with the issue of music style but this parish seems to have struck a very nice balance.
    7. Archbishop Beach strikes me as an honourable man without the affected pomposity that has traditionally plagued so many Anglican divines.  That’s good; the down to earth approach will serve him well on the “Anglican frontier” he now presides over.

    We were invited by the organist, who is an old friend of ours and whose husband operated the Provisional Belfry.  They were in the Episcopal Church, and long ago I started to regale them with the strange doings of TEC. Now they are in the ACNA.

    I’ve been in the Anglican/Episcopal blogosphere for over a decade now.  If what I’ve done has helped to form, nurture and grow congregations like this, it’s all been worthwhile.

  • Beguiling the Left, One Charlatan and Crackpot Scheme at a Time

    imagesThere was a time with the writings of “Karl and Fred” (Marx and Engels) were prominent on my reading list.  During my growing up years, their followers controlled a third of the world’s population and most of its nuclear weapons.  During my career in the family business I spent a great deal of time in countries which were (in theory at least) built on their idea, or coming off same (you can see this here and here and here.

    So this piece from Philip Jenkins about Engels, Lucian and the danger of frauds and charlatans in movements caught my attention.  The Roman satirist Lucian told the tale of one Peregrinus, who had conned (among others) a Christian church, and in doing so gave us an outside view of Roman Empire Christianity in its early years.

    Engels, whose relationship with Christianity was more complicated than his professed atheism would admit, actually had a more sympathetic view of the Christian church than Lucian had. Why? Because he had seen the same types of con pulled on the left-wing movements of nineteenth century Europe. He and Marx laboured to keep the “main thing” (i.e., economics and the class struggle) the main thing, but even they fought an uphill battle.  As he ruefully noted:

    Today such extreme cases, at least in the large centers, have become impossible; but in remote districts where the movement has won new ground a small Peregrinus of this kind can still count on a temporary limited success. And just as all those who have nothing to look forward to from the official world or have come to the end of their tether with it — opponents of inoculation, supporters of abstemiousness, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, nature-healers, free-community preachers whose communities have fallen to pieces, authors of new theories on the origin of the universe, unsuccessful or unfortunate inventors, victims of real or imaginary injustice who are termed “good-for-nothing pettifoggers” by all bureaucracy, honest fools and dishonest swindlers — all throng to the working-class parties in all countries — so it was with the first Christians.

    Most all the movements Engels decried in his stay are still, in one form or another, with us, and many with honoured place in the American Left.  I used the “Obama socialism” poster at the start for a little fun, but the truth is that the communists, for all of their cruelty, built great industrial powers, even though their own theory in the end ran them down.  Our left can only run down without building up, and they can’t even fix income inequality while they’re at it.

    Comparing Obama and the American Left to communism is unfair. To the communists.

  • No, They're Not Scientists, Either

    And some will admit it:

    Many more in the Republican Party love using this line, “I’m not a scientist.” Marco Rubio, John Boehner, and Rick Scott, have all used versions of this line to dismiss climate change science or promote creationism. In 2012, asked how old Earth is, Rubio repeated, “I’m not a scientist,” twice. In May, Boehner said “I’m not qualified to debate the science,” when asked for his views on climate change. Scott’s answer to whether climate change is real and a problem was also, “I’m not a scientist.” That comment earned Scott enough criticism that he agreed to a 30-minute meeting with climate scientists. (In the energy policy he released on Wednesday, Jindal calls global warming “a religion for many on the Left,” which he accuses of lacking a “scientific way of approaching public policy.”)

    This election cycle, some Republicans are finally using their heads to defang their opponents.  One such extraction that has many upset is the proposal to make birth control pills over the counter, which would certainly widen their availability. It would also delegitimise their being paid for by the state (what about that government sponsored aspirin?) and that upsets those for whom that subsidy has been a fixation.

    In this case, the Republicans are using one of the sorrier aspects of American politics to sidetrack an equally unscientific media:  Americans, by and large, have an allergy of electing people with scientific backgrounds to higher office.  That is embodied in the concept that a Harvard law school product can become the “scientific” President.

    Same “scientific” President had a comeback, though:

    “…I’m not a doctor either, but if a bunch of doctors tell me that tobacco can cause lung cancer then I”ll say, ‘OK! It’s not that hard. I’m not a scientist, but I read the science.”

    Last I heard, he still sneaks a cigarette now and then.

    ,

  • The Relationship Between Faith and Works

    From St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theolgiae, Suppl., 89, 7:

     The judgment as regards the sentencing to punishment for sin concerns all the wicked, whereas the judgment as regards the discussion of merits concerns only believers. Because in unbelievers the foundation of faith is lacking, without which all subsequent works are deprived of the perfection of a right intention, so that in them there is no admixture of good and evil works or merits requiring discussion. But believers in whom the foundation of faith remains, have at least a praiseworthy act of faith, which though it is not meritorious without charity, yet is in itself directed to merit, and consequently they will be subjected to the discussion of merits. Consequently, believers who were at least counted as citizens of the City of God will be judged as citizens, and sentence of death will not be passed on them without a discussion of their merits; whereas unbelievers will be condemned as foes, who are wont among men to be exterminated without their merits being discussed.

    Roman Catholic teaching has been characterised as “works salvation” but this shows that isn’t the case.  Faith–and love (charity)–are necessary prerequisites for whatever we do to amount to anything.

    The problem with the medieval construct was that the Church–and to some extent Aquinas–got bogged down in the business of merits. Had they de-emphasised this, they would have avoided the business of indulgences, which in turn detonated the Reformation.

  • "Get Out of My Way!" Some Things Never Change

    When Joseph was put in charge of Egypt by Pharaoh, the following happened:

    He had him ride in the chariot of the second-in-command. Men ran ahead of him and shouted, “Make way!” Pharaoh put Joseph in charge of Egypt.  (Genesis 41:43 GW)

    This reminds me of the Canadian journalist John Fraser’s account of the departure of the Chinese author Mao Dun after an interview that fell flat:

    As I went out to my car, he (Mao Dun) was escorted with suitable fanfare to his waiting Red Flag limousine. The vast and sinister automobiles the Communist state makes available for its leaders are far larger than any equivalent vehicle a “feudal comprador capitalist exploiter” could have had in Shanghai during the thirties. Mao Dun got in and closed the door of the roomy back-seat passenger section. His chauffeur wheeled out of the entranceway with the blast of the car horn. The driver, as is usual in Peking, never stopped to see if there were any oncoming bicycle traffic: the horn blast was sufficient to alert the masses that greatness was descending upon them. Mao Dun set bolt upright in the back seat, holding his cane in front of him. One could just make out his image when a shaft of sun shone through the heavily curtained windows. As I followed him along the street for about half a mile, the limousine belched out loud honks while humble cyclists and pedestrians hurried to get out of the way.

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