Moderation in all things

Researchers studying 52 of the most famous depictions of the Jesus’ Last Supper with his twelve disciples have discovered that over the past millennia artists supersized the meal portions. The main dish increased in size by almost two-thirds, individual portions by over a fifth, and plate size by more than half. Ample and increasing food supplies reflect increased prosperity, a prosperity visible in the growing height and waistlines of contemporary humans. (Chris Smyth, “Artists reflect the course of obesity with expanding portions in the Last Supper,” Times Online, March 24, 2010)

If humans learned that availability does not necessitate consumption, they would live better. Delayed gratification – postponing satisfaction to achieve greater future satisfaction – is tangential to this analysis. Closer to the mark is the Confucian principle of moderation in all things, a principle that Christians have sometimes voiced in terms of the cardinal virtue of temperance.

Both the Old Testament and New Testament are silent with respect to moderation. However, in the Apocrypha, the Wisdom of Ben Sirach (37:27-31) provides this exhortation about moderation:

My child, test yourself while you live; see what is bad for you and do not give in to it. For not everything is good for everyone, and no one enjoys everything. Do not be greedy for every delicacy, and do not eat without restraint; for overeating brings sickness, and gluttony leads to nausea. Many have died of gluttony, but the one who guards against it prolongs his life.

Excess abounds. The United States now has more people in prison, per capita, than any other nation. California, strapped for cash, has released some inmates early and forces other to live in excessively and potentially explosively cramped conditions, e.g., 150 male prisoners in a prison gym. (Randal C. Archibold, “California, in Financial Crisis, Opens Prison Doors,” New York Times, March 23, 2010)

New house sizes, at least until the recession of 2008 began, were consistently growing bigger: taller ceilings, more square feet, etc. Owning more than one TV per household resident and more than one vehicle per driver in the household have become prevalent.

Rather than selling, donating to charity, or continuing to use items until the items are no serviceable, Americans fill their houses, garages, and rented storage areas with items they no longer use, perhaps have even replaced. Though more chaotic and diversified than Imelda Marcos’ infamous shoe collections, Americans seem to have adopted her acquisitiveness as their ideal. More is better. Never get rid of anything – you might someday, if you remember you have it and can find it – have a use for it. This problem has become so widespread that it has spawned new industries that promise to organize and to de-clutter people’s lives.

More than ever before, stuff tends to own people. One beneficial consequence of Lenten fasting might be discovering the empowering freedom that the virtue of temperance can provide.

Cutting healthcare costs

Leslie Alderman in a New York Times column (“Patient Money - How Doctors Would Cut Health Care Costs,” March 26, 2010) recommends nine ways to reduce the cost while improving the quality of healthcare in the United States. Those recommendations, from prominent physicians, merit careful consideration:

1. Insure catastrophes only. Comparable to auto insurance and other forms of insurance, require people to pay for routine issues themselves or to opt for additional healthcare insurance at their own expense.
2. Change malpractice law to make it harder to prove malpractice and reducing the size of settlements, diminishing the pervasive practice of healthcare providers ordering excessive tests to avoid any possibility of error.
3. Counsel nutrition. Good eating habits demonstrably improve health.
4. Rely on evidence-based medicine. Fund only those treatments for which scientific data exists that support the treatment’s efficacy.
5. Allow expertise to occasionally override the dictates of evidence-based medicine. This recognizes that human decision-making capabilities are superior to computerized algorithms.
6. Support integrative medicine, e.g., encourage patients to see the same provider consistently and to account for the effect of the non-medical on physical health.
7. Pay to treat childhood obesity. Childhood obesity causes multiple problems later in avoiding, making the cost of early intervention less than the cost of later treatment.
8. Stop overtreating. Excessive intervention occurs both for the dying (sometimes when the evidence shows no known treatment to be efficacious or the cost in suffering from treatment likely exceeds any improvement in quality or length of life) and for the well (defining new diseases when perhaps none exists, e.g., sleep disorders and sexual dysfunction).
9. Restore the humanity in the relationship between patient and healthcare provider.

These nine proposals are certainly not ukases that will fix the broken U.S. healthcare system. However, the proposals offer a starting point for a discussion about ways to reduce the costs of healthcare in the U.S. without risking diminishing the quality of care.

Given the violent – literally violent – reactions to recent healthcare legislation, any hope for a civilized debate about the immense costs of healthcare in the United States seems remote. Furthermore, although the new legislation moves the United States closer to universal coverage, approximately 5% of the populace will remain without healthcare coverage. One important contribution that people of faith – all faiths – can make to the ongoing controversies about healthcare is to encourage people to engage in rational conversation respecting the divergent views of those with whom they disagree.

Living in community entails living with other people. Given the individual uniqueness of humans, that means some, perhaps even most, people will inevitably disagree with me or with you, regardless of the passion with which we hold our position. Disrespecting the dignity and worth of others, verbally and particularly violently, has no place in public discourse. Indeed, we denounce terrorists because they introduce violence into the public square when they feel unable to prevail through rational discourse and non-violent means.

Optional healthcare coverage?

The outrage that some people feel at the prospect of the government mandating healthcare coverage for everybody surprises and baffles me. I cannot imagine that anybody would want medical treatment to exist that could significantly extend the length or substantially improve the quality of their life and not be able to access that care because of an inability to pay for it. Denial of treatment in such cases would provide (and has done in the past) great fodder for the news media. Such life altering treatment can often cost several hundred thousand dollars. Few Americans have the financial assets or earning power to pay such a bill personally. Yet refusing to carry healthcare coverage unfairly saddles those who do have coverage with the unpaid, unfunded bills from such individuals.

I do not want to live in a society that only provides healthcare to those who can afford to pay for it. Insisting that everybody have some form of healthcare coverage attempts to distribute the cost of medical care equitably. People rightly argue about how to achieve that goal, debating both method of distribution and the meaning of equitably.

But arguing that people should not have to have healthcare coverage seems asinine. On the one hand, refusing to continue to treat the person needing care who has expended all of his/her assets is morally wrong wrong. On the other hand, expecting that the person who has refused to obtain healthcare coverage will not want to receive lifesaving care seems incredibly naïve. The only commonsense answers insist that everybody have coverage, through either mandatory insurance or socialized medicine.

Clerical celibacy

The New York Times recently featured an article about Father Yuriy Volovetskiy, a priest in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is one of nine different rites associated with the Roman Catholic Church. The most familiar of those nine rites is the Latin rite, the dominant rite in both the Roman Catholic Church as a whole and in the United States.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church’s liturgy resembles of that of the Orthodox churches. However, perhaps its most important distinction in the early twenty-first century is that the Ukrainian Catholic Church allows its priests to marry. Father Yuriy Volovetskiy, for example, has a wife and six children. One of the boys, Roman, wants to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a Catholic priest.

Married clergy has helped the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church avoid two major problems that the Roman Catholic Church’s Latin rite faces: large numbers of pedophiles in the priesthood and a crippling shortage of priests. Indeed, Father Yuriy Volovetskiy has found that being married has actually enriched his ministry, enabling him to better appreciate the lives and struggles of his flock while finding personal fulfillment as a husband and father. (Clifford J. Levy, “A Flock Grows Right at Home for a Priest in Ukraine,” New York Times, March 22, 2010)

Celibacy of Latin rite priests dates back to the middle ages when the Church had problems with clergy behavior and the desire of clerical fathers to leave wealth to their sons. The latter was problematic because Roman Catholic bishops hold the Church’s property in trust for the Church as corporations sole rather than for the individual’s biological family. In other words, the Church faced a particular set of problems that demanded a particular discipline from its leaders.

Those social conditions no longer exist. Indeed, the Roman Catholic now faces a particular set of problems that demand a different disciplinary response: the trust that married clergy engender in their flock as opposed to the suspicion that celibate clergy too often engender in the wake of widespread pedophile scandals and cover-ups.

Not only does the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church exist within the Roman Catholic Church, offering an in-house precedent for married clergy, the Latin rite now welcomes male Anglican priests, married or celibate, to become Roman Catholic priests (cf. Who cares? For more thoughts on this overture).

How long will the Roman Catholic Church persist in its self-destructive rigidity, insisting on a discipline that whatever its earlier value or justification seems completely out of place in the twenty-first century? Religious institutions, like other types of institutions, must discern when and how to change without losing their essential identity. Obviously, a celibate clergy is not that type of distinctive for the Roman Catholic Church or clerical celibacy would be a matter of belief rather than discipline.

Meaningful conversations

According to a recent study published in the journal Psychological Science by a University of Arizona psychologist, Mattias Mehl, deep conversations correlate with happiness, i.e., the more one engages in conversations that go deeper than chitchat or small talk, the more likely a person is to be happy. The research entailed recording the conversations of 79 volunteers and then analyzing the content of those conversations. Dr. Mehl did not find this result surprising:

But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people.

Indeed, interpersonal connection and integration is one of the foundations for personal happiness. (Roni Caryn Rabin, “Talk Deeply, Be Happy?,” New York Times, March 17, 2010)

Dr. Mehl hopes to conduct further research to determine if a causal relationship exists between happiness and deep conversations or if the relationship is simply correlative. Until then, people who want to be happy should follow the example of Jesus, Aristotle, and other great spiritual leaders by talking about the important issues in life with people about whom they care.

Sexual bigotry

The Episcopal Church’s Presiding Bishop has announced that the Rev. Canon Mary Glasspool has received the consents necessary for consecration as a bishop. She will become the first openly lesbian bishop. A relative handful of voices have objected but the response, especially in the Episcopal Church, has been as muted as I would expect. Most of those who find the move objectionable have either exited the Episcopal Church or decided to accept the reality of diversity.

Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s response was equally predictable and sadly out of touch with the apparent status of conflict over this issue in the Anglican Communion. Archbishop Williams’ office termed the decision to consecrate Glasspool as a bishop “regrettable,” fearing the consequences that the move would have for Anglican unity. (Ruth Gledhill, “Dr Rowan Williams criticises election of lesbian bishop, Mary Glasspool,” Times Online, March 19, 2010) Anglican unity shattered when the Nigerian bishops and others declared themselves out of communion, refusing to attend Lambeth 2008. Unless the Archbishop has privileged information about ultimatums provinces have issued regarding their actions should another province consecrate an openly gay bishop, any additional strain this places on the bonds of Anglican unity seems likely to be small. Those who define this as a litmus test of Christianity can no more tolerate one openly gay bishop living in a same sex committed relationship than they can tolerate two such bishops.

Meanwhile, sexual bigotry continues to live on in secular organizations. A retired U.S. Marine Corps general, John Sheehan, blames the historic United Nations failure to protect the Bosnian “safe haven” of Srebrenica on the fact that the Dutch forces seconded to the U.N. included openly gay soldiers. The Dutch remained embarrassed by the fact that their 400 peacekeepers could not prevent the murder of 8000 Muslim men and boys. (Phillippe Naughton, “Dutch outrage as US general blames gay soldiers for Srebrenica,” Times Online, March 19, 2010)

Having served with Dutch Navy personnel after they unionized and allowed openly gay personnel to serve, I know that those changes in no way reduced their professionalism or fighting capacity. The situation in Bosnia was far more complex and the relative handful of peacekeepers was tragically not in a position to stop the slaughter. My perspective on the Dutch Navy includes several lengthy conversations with a Dutch Vice Admiral whose next posting was as the Chief of Naval Operations for the Royal Dutch Navy.

Sheehan’s argument implies that using the military as an instrument of social change undercuts warfighting effectiveness. One must therefore ask: Did racial integration reduce the fighting effectiveness of the U.S. military? I suspect that both General Colin Powell, the forcer Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Barack Obama, the current Commander in Chief, would strongly disagree with that assessment.

On a different note, the first woman to command a U.S. Navy guided missile frigate, Captain Holly Graf, has been relieved for cause. (Michael Evans, “Captain Holly Graf faces ignominious end to her fast-track US Navy career,” Times Online, March 20, 2010) Questions invariably arise whether CAPT Graf was selected for command precisely because people expected her to fail, thereby proving that women do not make good warriors. That certainly happens in the business world, as a recent article about Erin Callan, former Chief Financial Officer of Lehman Brothers, suggests (Patricia Sellers, “The Fall of a Wall Street Highflier,” Fortune, March 22, 2010, pp. 140-148).

Proving such allegations is exceptionally difficult. Yet during my years of active duty I repeatedly observed women assigned to positions without having the credentials or experience that the Navy would require of a man filling the same billet. Needless to say, many of those women ran into trouble on the job, fueling talk that women were inherently unsuited for that type of role in a combat organization.

Neither the Church not the military is part of the sex industry. Gender and gender orientation are irrelevant. God created us, male and female, straight and gay. Anyone whom God created is worthy of dignity and respect. Ironically, even as senior military personnel fight a losing battle against gender equality and the full and open inclusion of gays in the military, those issues have ceased to be issues for the vast majority of junior military personnel. Times have changed.

Similarly, the vast majority of people who attend worship don’t care about the gender or gender orientation of the person leading the service. They do care that the leader loves them, appropriately. They want to know about God, not the leader’s personal intimate relationships. Furthermore, all faith communities should be safe places for all attendees. The same rules that keep a community safe from inappropriate heterosexual conduct will keep the community safe from inappropriate homosexual conduct.

Iraqi elections

The recent Iraqi election offers some hope that democracy may be taking root in Iraq. However, at least three facts cast some substantial doubt on that assessment.

First, the election sparked considerable allegations of violence and numerous allegations of fraud. Democracy does not, indeed cannot, flourish without the rule of law. The widespread violence and fraud both suggest that Iraq has not yet successfully instituted the rule of law.

Second, at least some participation in the election appears motivated primarily by a desire to expedite the departure of U.S. armed forces from Iraq. For example, the radical Shiite cleric, Moqtada al Sadr urged Sadrists to vote for that reason (Anthony Shadid, “Followers of Sadr Emerge Stronger After Iraq Elections,” New York Times, March 16, 2010). Sadr has twice engaged in open conflict with U.S. forces during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. His party’s increased strength and their religious ties to Iran do not bode well for democracy or stability in Iraq after the U.S. withdraws its armed forces.

Third, the sharp fault lines in Iraqi society between Arab Sunni, Arab Shiite, and Kurd remain largely unchanged after almost seven years of American occupation (Anthony Shadid, “Iraq Election Results Hint of Political Shift,” New York Times, March 15, 2010). Expecting that an unwelcome occupier change a centuries old culture, with its deeply entrenched and highly emotional divides in the matter of a few years is foolish.

Meanwhile, the death toll of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq continues to grow, reaching 4500 today. The time has come to end carnage of Americans and Iraqis that achieves nothing for country or God. War is never good, and at best the less of two evils. War that inherently cannot advance the cause of peace is immoral.

Physical exercise

This being Lent and confession being good for the spirit, I feel compelled to admit that for the past four months I have failed to exercise on a regular basis. That is a radical departure from a decades’ long habit of running at least several times a week.

In early November, I caught a bad cold. Very shortly after recovering from that, I caught a second cold after spending a night (thankfully, only one) in a hotel room without heat and hot water followed by a day on airplanes with lots of coughing and sneezing people. The weather had also turned, and remained, unusually cold and wet, destroying any meteorological incentive to exercise. Periodic travel comprised of over-scheduled days further complicated my return to exercise.

Consequently, I gained about seven pounds, lost some of my energy, and found myself less focused. Exercise, as I’ve known and counseled for years, is good for one’s physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Last week, thanks be to God, I resumed exercising and already feel the benefits.

The Bible does not say anything about exercise. However, in Scripture we read that God created humans as physical beings, that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and that people are to eat and drink in moderation. My guess is that several thousand years ago nobody gave much though to the need for regular exercise as part of a healthy lifestyle because simply surviving placed much greater physical demands on people. Transportation, for example, entailed considerable physical exertion except for the privileged very few who traveled by sedan chair. Everyday household and occupational tasks similarly involved significant physical effort.

I’m a fan of progress. I enjoy modern comforts and have no real desire to live in a previous era. In fact, I find daydreaming about what life may be like in another hundred or two years more interesting than romanticizing about the past. However, progress has multiple costs. One of the implicit costs – though sometimes also one of the joys – of modern conveniences is the need for regular physical exercise to care for body, mind, and self.

Courage - part 3

Lord Moran wrote:

Courage can be judged apart from danger only if the social significance and meaning of courage is known to us, namely that a man of character in peae becomes a man of courage in war. He cannot be selfish in peace and yet be unselfish in war. Character as Aristotle taught is a habit, the daily choice of right instead of wrong; it is a moral quality which grows to maturity in peace is not suddenly developed on the outbreak of war. For war, in spite of much that we have heard to the contrary, has no power to transform, it merely exaggerates the good and evil that are in us, till it is plain for all to read; it cannot change, it exposes. (The Anatomy of Courage (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2007), p. 170.)

Moran based that assessment on his service as a medical officer with British infantry during the trench warfare of WWI and as Churchill’s physician during WWII. His intentional use of exclusionary masculine nouns and pronouns strike a discordant note in an era when women fight alongside men. Nevertheless, two of Moran’s points particularly intrigue me.

First, he appears to equate moral and physical courage, not only on the basis of this passage but a reading of his complete text. Is the courage to demand the best of one’s self in an athletic contest such as a marathon equivalent to the courage to speak the truth in a court of law at great cost to one’s self or a good friend? To the extent that courage involves emotion, the answer is clearly affirmative; humans only have a single physiology that produces emotion. Similarly, thoughts are in large measure a result of physical processes in the brain, processes that do not differentiate between the physical responses of speaking and running. Perhaps, the distinctions that some modern commentators make between various types of courage reflect differences in context more than differences in a person’s interior response to the demand for courage.

Second, Moran contends that courage is a habit that people can cultivate. To some extent this contention builds on Moran’s idea that courage is courage, regardless of whether the demand is for physical courage, moral courage or yet another type of courage. Militaries do not prepare for war by waging an actual war. If Moran is correct, a society can develop citizens with more courage by cultivating the habit of courage in youths in school. Parents can achieve the same result by cultivating courage in their children at home.

Unfortunately, much of what I observe in the United States today seems intended to have the opposite result. For example, developing courage requires that a person push him or herself to the very limit of their endurance, an endeavor that requires risking failure. Yet the United States is risk and failure averse. Too often a young person matures without having experienced the real possibility of failure, let alone failure. How can we expect that person to develop courage?

Conversely, some children are born into a world of high demands and an excessive intolerance for failure. Such an environment can result in the child developing an insecure personality and stress related problems.

Obviously, the capacity for success, for coping with stress, and, by implication, for developing courage, varies greatly from person to person. Individualized learning plans in the public schools are an effort to tailor education to the unique needs of each child. As well intended as the requirement for individualized learning plans may be, the formal requirement frequently produces more paperwork than actual results. Teaching children is inherently a profession that calls for the use of judgment by the teacher, a necessity that no amount of paperwork can codify or assure. Recruiting the best possible teachers, then honoring and compensating those teachers appropriately, represents the most promising option for creating the best possible school system.

Commenting on the public schools may seem a far cry from battlefield courage. Yet society rightly attempts to control very little of what happens in the home. Society also has a vested interest in have a courageous citizenry. The military, first responders, legal system, and most aspects of everyday life are better when peopled with courageous individuals. To some substantial although unknown extent, courage is a habit that we can cultivate in future generations.

Courage - part 2

Recently, I came across The Anatomy of Courage by Lord Moran. Moran was a physician with a British infantry regiment that saw extensive action in the trench warfare of WWI. He then became Churchill’s physician during WWII, for which he received a peerage. The three sections of his book speak to the discovery of fear, the consumption of courage, and the care and management of courage.

Moran constructs a taxonomy of courage that stretches through four stages from the person who is unaware of fear to the person immobilized by fear. Persons move down through the levels of courage as they spend their courage. He rightly contends that one responsibility of military leaders is to identify when a soldier has consumed her or his supply of courage. For example, after he reported to his regiment that was stationed in France manning trenches during WWI, he faults himself for not identifying one of the first soldiers to consult him as a soldier who had exhausted his supply of courage. Having returned the soldier to duty, the soldier committed suicide that night by shooting himself. Moran forthrightly cites other examples of the ignorance and mistakes that pushed him to better understand courage.

I know of no comparable work that speaks to the need for courage in the face of the unrelenting threat and stress that characterizes what many troops experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wonder to what extent post-traumatic stress is the twenty-first century analogue to the battle fatigue of previous generations. If so, then updating Moran’s book on courage may offer one constructive step forward in preventing post-traumatic stress instead of reactively attempting to treat the problem, a problem of growing magnitude.

I also wonder about the possibility of research that addresses ways in which military personnel (and others) might cultivate their supply of courage, perhaps even finding ways to restock their supply of courage after expending much of it. An Episcopal priest, still on active duty as a Navy chaplain, CDR Steve Pike, tells of a Marine who found a way to replenish his supply of courage:

It was small white piece of paper. I didn't think anything of it the first couple to times I saw it, but every time I visited, he had it in his hand. I asked him one time about the piece of paper. He showed it to me. It was a picture of his grandfather taken at the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir when he was a young Marine during the Korean War. The young man told me about his grandfather. His eyes welled with tears as he told me how much he loved him. He said that had always looked up to his grandfather, that along with everything else that grandfathers are to their grandsons, that his grandfather was an example of bravery and courage for him. (Stephen P. Pike, CDR, CHC, USN writing in “The Bishop's Notebook,” 23 July 2004, accessed at http://www.ecusa-chaplain.org/bishword.html.)

Religious faith can similarly function as the source of courage. For Christians, Jesus accepting death on the cross rather than engaging in armed rebellion against Rome provides a moral example of courage. Carefully meditating on Jesus’ death, as forms part of the Good Friday observances in many Christian traditions and an element of more frequent devotions in other Christian traditions, can help to increase the individual Christian’s personal supply of courage.

Another obvious example, too often ridiculed by secular westerners, is the deep belief that most Islamicist suicide bombers hold, that when they die fighting infidels they will immediately go to a wonderful, everlasting life in paradise. However, Moran’s analysis of courage and its link to fear suggests that blind belief in the reality of an unseen, unknowable afterlife either attracts the mentally immature and unstable (a conclusion that some research supports as being true for at least some suicide bombers) or the temporarily persuaded (a conclusion that Saudi success with reeducating Islamicist radicals supports). In sum, suicide bombings will only occur in relatively small numbers and counterterrorism efforts designed to prevent suicide bombings should focus on the mentally immature/unstable and on communicating that suicide, even suicide attacks, violates a basic Muslim ethic and, from a Muslim perspective, will send the bomber to hell rather than to paradise.