(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.