Good for the poor

(This is a response to a fairly trenchant comment from the post Obama's dented van.)

Matt,

Please do not claim any untoward bluntness and disrespect, for there is none of that business in your good words.

You have presented a number of points in your critique. I will start with some of your ontological remarks, especially about Metropolitan John's notions on "authentic personhood." I am wary of doing so, especially because I harbor a complicated (and probably inadequate) response to him. I admire his duty toward the Fathers, Sts. Irenaeus and Maximos, but I worry that he (and others) have engendered a replicating viral distortion of dogma by the importation of Heidegger and other existentialist paradigms into Orthodox conversations. I worry when hierarchs use the language of existentialism, especially Heidegger's.

I will say, briefly, that personhood is itself a concept that is fraught with peril (witness the fourth century travail over persona and hypostasis): it is especially perilous when it is linked to praxis.

Our Lord commanded us to obey, simply. I do not think that we are to worry about authenticity, or the ontological context of our obedience. That is like trying to define (and delimit) the "make this bread the Body of Thy Christ" as "transubstantiation."

I will also say, too briefly and simplistically, that the State is not at all my concern or my worry when I think about personhood and deification. I worry about culture, yes, and the de-personalizing passions that this culture engenders. But the State is always there as a potential persecutor, just as the poor will always be with us. Herod will always go after the Christ Child and inflict collateral damage. The servant cannot be greater than his Master.

This brings me to your second assumption. GK said that coercion was an essential, though not noble, element of Government. Of course this is true, simply because of the meaning inherent in the term "govern." Government is ordained by God to impose a minimal order upon "biological" human life (to borrow Zizioulas' terminology). St. Paul's description of government goes so far as to predicate this power of coercion on the threat of death (I remember this fact upsetting Stringfellow, advocate of the Berrigan brothers, in the past, but it is a fact nonetheless). Government uses coercion, to be sure, but it is not defined, or confined, by such. More to the point, GK specifically discussed coercion in the context of punishment of crime: because we have no king, then when a criminal is executed, then we all execute him. If I wanted to take your application to its logical end, then if one poor person does not have to go to the ER for basic needs, then we have all participated in this good.

I take your point as a complaint that in nationalizing health care, government would somehow coerce me and you to distribute healthcare to everyone. Such coercion would at the least remove the laudability of the action, and, as you rightly point out, deprive me and you of the "radical volitional freedom" that is necessary for any commendation (or, as we would understand it in our trans-western idiom, "participation in deification").

(Before we go much further, I should note that the package that will finally make it out of Congress will not at all be the universal package for which I was hoping, so you shouldn't worry. I despair, but you don't have to.)

You should understand, Matt, that I share your dislike of the state and Leviathan. I think that 1984 has become essentially non-fiction.

But where we might part company is that I see little difference between the state and the corporate culture of high finance – a culture which has very little to do with the small marketplace freedom extolled by agrarians, red tories, and non-libertarian true conservatives. You are correct in your reference to Dostoevsky, but we already live and breathe in a socialism that is engineered not only by the government, but by Wall Street: there are now only two estates in the State -- the Church has been long kicked out; the press has been denatured into a functionary mouthpiece little more conscientious than Barney the Dinosaur; the proletariat were never, never consulted; and the aristocracy has been shorn of its noblesse oblige and its sacred commitment to land and people, and it has now become ragingly uncouth, uneducated, and undisciplined (think Rupert Murdoch).

Leviathan – the removal of property away from the common man and the inflation of the State – is being advanced by high financiers. There is a feeling of variety in personal taste and libertinism in thrill-acquisition. But this feeling amounts to the usual bait-and-switch of the Pied Piper.

I would rather there be a state mandate for healthcare, rather than healthcare reserved for those who are affiliated with some corporate tribe. I understand that my personal good will not benefit from either scheme, but more poor people will benefit from the former than from the latter. I struggle to see any -- and I mean any -- advantage of the present system over a state-run system. The present is healthcare mediated by for-profit faceless corporations.

In this consideration of healthcare, I am not at all concerned for my own goodness. I am certain that the poor gaining better access to the system will in no way accrue to my virtue. If I wanted to do that, I should myself visit the sick in the hospitals and the homes: and even then, I should not care at all about the virtue of it, but rather the person who is sick. Heavens, I should not even need to replace the sick person's face with an icon of Jesus: I am deliriously happy that Jesus, of course, says that my care for the poor ends up being care for Him -- but that ministration to my Lord cannot be my first motivation. That is not the love called for by Christ: it is almost a false piety if I have to trade out direct kindness for pretended recognition before I stoop to shake hands with the down-and-out.

I am only concerned that more poor people get access to doctors and hospitals. Too many of them are getting even poorer and sicker, and there is no way in this dispensation that the Church is ever going to be able to take care of enough of these poor. The Church was never able to do what the state-run welfare programs have done. Neither was the Church ever able to do what Social Security has been able to do. We would like to say otherwise, but in so saying, we are foolish and naively ignorant of the complexities of this age.

The Church will not take care of all the poor. Some of the poor it will, and thus it should in ways that state-run systems cannot. The Church should develop its own systems for taking care of the insane, since this secular culture seems to be doing so well at producing such. The state/corporate system wants technogeeks who can think in C++ but not real men who can think real ideas and govern their emotions and actions. The culture of Leviathan wraps the brains of functionaries and geeks in the opiate gauze of entertainment: but still, ghosts of the reality of the abyss seep through cracks of modern consciousness, and so modern men go nuts, and their little inhumane mentalities fall to pieces.

Besides the insane, the Church will have many to care for whom the State/Corporate combine will reject: children saved from infanticide … children rejected by boutique genetic pre-selection … people whose genetic profile disqualifies them from treatment … people who are lost in some persistent vegetative state: a ghastly diagnosis not dreamt up by the State, but by insurance companies, if you must know … people who require longterm care, but are warehoused miserably in some nursing "homes" that only a Dickens/Huxley partnership could describe (if not Lovecraft) ... people who have been poorly managed, poorly placed, bullied into college education but meant to work with their hands, and thus dispossessed and disenfranchised and pretty crazy.

Do not imagine that cesspool cult of libertarian "greed-is-good" insurance-run healthcare system would do any better: it does not, and has proven so in spades. Americans are dead now because "greed is good."

We will have more than enough of the poor and the sick left over from the Combine (or "Leviathan," take your pick).

Of course, there will be no such thing as a nationalized healthcare plan, where the poor are really dealt with.

And of course, there will be no such preparation forthcoming from the Church, as mixed up as we are about jurisdiction and how we are to function in culture. The very segments of the Christian community who are most likely to give a damn about the marginalized are those who are also most likely to swallow crap about abortion being a "right" and about homosexuality being a "civil right" and how fetal stem cells must be used for the salvation of others (I cannot believe how many of these are climbing, or have climbed, on the gay marriage wagon).

I should think that a strong fidelity to the Rule of Faith and a brief immersion, even, in asceticism should produce tidal waves of Amos-like prophecies against Leviathan, of Jesus-like pity for the widow, the orphan and the alien. How is it possible that in Orthodoxy, religious fidelity could ever produce right wingism or left wingism?

Thanks for your patience, Matt, as I reach the cadence of this, another stanza in my customary Delphic rant. 

I think all this will be moot. Port au Prince is in ruins this morning, and really, surely, they are poorer than we.

Comments

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[Fr. Jonathan]

Dear Matt,

Thank you for your comments, which are perspicacious at the very least.

I will surely not do justice to them in this response.

First of all, our understanding of personhood is predicated completely upon the meaning of "person" in Trinitarian dogma. However, I am nervous about the application of hypostasis/ousia to individual/community. I am sure there is a relation, but I do not know if I understand it enough to talk about it.

I think you and I will have to digress in our view of government. I am sure that some social gospel and secularist liberal visionaries wish, through the expansion of the State, that the Church can be replaced. It is probably under this programme of American "disestablishment of the Church that some people may even go so far as to believe the tripe that government can provide a locus for the "communitarian impulse of human nature."

Perhaps some Statists, benighted as they are, believe this. I don't. You don't. And I think most people who have a nodding acquaintance with reality don't. The denizens of liberalism's virtual reality camp can believe this, I'm sure. But I cannot.

Governments cannot create community. Neither can they create civilization.

I do not know what you mean exactly by obedience as "the context of our ontology." Obedience as action? Obedience as belief? Obedience as repentance and prayer? I would rather discuss theosis in the context of ontology, and theoria in the context of epistemology. Or perhaps the other way around.

Well, we are of one accord on Leviathan and its Hydra-like appendages. I have very little patience for doctors who threaten to leave their professions: they who do so prove that they have no "ontological" vocation.

I take your point, with some chagrin, about the fact that the debate is distorted profoundly by the predication upon coverage rather than provision of healthcare.

Thank you for your kindness. It is good to converse long with a symposiast.

Blessings,

Fr. Jonathan

[Matt Johnson]

I share your relative unease with freedom as Heideggerian “thrownness,” but not your suspicion and agnosticism regarding discussions of ontology. Is not the Patristic synthesis arrived at through the Trinitarian and Christological controversies instructive to our understanding of the Imago Dei in encompassing conceptually hypostasis and ousia as roughly correlate to the dual nature of the human person as being at once both individual and communitarian? This, it seems to me, brings us to the crux of the issue. The individuality constituent to our nature expresses the singularity and volitional sovereignty that assumes a necessary logical priority over the communitarian. While this point may appear straightaway as being abstruse and irrelevant, it has immense import for a proper understanding of a truly Christian view of the role of government. The delusion we labor under in 21rst Century America is that government can somehow creatively fulfill the communitarian constituent of our nature. In other words, government has displaced God and the Church as the instigator and architect of community. I find the whole idea of community as understood and expressed socially and politically to be an inherent corruption of the word in particular and a degradation of the language in general. In light of the Judeo-Christian origins of the concept, it is impossible for government to create such, as it is inexorably wed to the Covenant that has all the nations of the earth as its end. It is simply something different from, and other than, a social contract. Government cannot create community, it can, at best, create conditions that are propitious for human flourishing. It is a great irony that we are at once social collectivists and cultural individualists, though it should hardly be surprising that duplicity is the rule of the day.
I concur that our thoughts about such things are never a substitute for the simplicity you implore, but I might humbly suggest that our obedience may be the context of our ontology, and our discussions of such, given the dynamism of our life with the Triune God (II Cor. 3:18). This is what makes orthodoxy so “perilous and exciting,” as our friend GK says.
Please know that I am no apologist for the insurance companies. In fact, I tend to sympathize with Teddy Roosevelt’s remonstrations against the whole idea as being un-American, and it is perhaps also destructive of Christian stewardship. I have no love for the “greed is good” crowd either. I happen to believe with George Gilder that free markets are built upon faith and donation rather than greed. But don’t for a second think that we have a choice between the lesser of evils. That is a ruse – big business is itself merely an appendage of Leviathan. Deals are being struck behind closed doors between the two as we carry on this conversation. And of this unholy alliance, no good can come.

As for “good for the poor,” I wish I could bring myself to believe that. The facts simply don’t bear it out. If the current bill passes, millions of the uninsured will be uninsured still. Of those who are given access via the Gov’t option (or Co-op, or whatever they end up with), their baseline coverage will be modeled after the Medicare system. The 2009 Health Insurer Report Card from the American Medical Association reveals that when compared with private insurance companies Medicare has the highest percentage of claim lines denied. In the municipality in which I live, of 300K residents there are only 13 doctors that will even take a new Medicare patient because of low reimbursement rates. In a poll conducted by the largest health care provider in the state, more than 50% of the doctors said that if the bill passed they would consider a career change, or retire. In another national(?) poll conducted by Investor’s Business Daily 45% of doctors said they would consider walking away from their profession. If even a fraction of them actually did, and that was coupled with an influx of 30M or more patients into a primary care system that is already strained, the system could collapse under its own weight.
Let’s not forget that the moral imperative that is being pitched is predicated not upon lack of medical care, but upon lack of insurance coverage. It is already against the law for a hospital to deny treatment through the emergency room. Procedures denied will not be affected by the bill at all(in a positive way); things will go on as they always have.
There are a number of things that chagrin me surrounding the discourse coming out of Washington. The debate has been fundamentally dishonest. The bill was originally pitched under the pretext of skyrocketing health care/insurance costs. Nothing has been done to address the issue. Placing massive new mandates on insurance companies can only result in higher premiums faster. Higher taxes and stiffer penalties on small business (while exempting big business via big labor) are not likely to result in better benefits for most employees. And then there is the spectacle of pretended fiscal responsibility by shifting costs to the States through Medicaid expansions. But enough of that.
I would love to discuss some of your other ruminations, but I won’t inflict any more of my confused ramblings on you now.
Thanks for indulging me; God Bless!

Matt