I recently read two articles in the same issue of the New Yorker (May 24, 2010) that seemed to uncannily reverberate with one another.
"Activism v. Restraint"
... Today, liberals applaud when the Supreme Court strikes down federal legislation restricting the rights of detainees at Guantánamo, or a state’s limitations on gay rights, and if the day comes when the Court jettisons Citizens United liberals will be too busy celebrating to remember the primacy of stare decisis. As is so often the case, in courtrooms and elsewhere, the battle between Obama and the Roberts Court is as much about power as it is about principle; neither side is as concerned with abstract concepts like activism and restraint as it is with winning. ...
"What Did Jesus Do?"
... The passion with which people argued over apparently trivial word choices was, Jenkins explains, not a sign that they were specially sensitive to theology. People argued that way because they were part of social institutions—cities, schools, clans, networks—in which words are banners and pennants: who pledged to whom was inseparable from who said what in what words. It wasn’t that they really cared about the conceptual difference between the claim that Jesus and the Father were homoousian (same in essence) and the claim that the two were homoiousian (same in substance); they cared about whether the Homoousians or the Homoiousians were going to run the Church. ...
After reading these and making the mental link between them, I also thought about YourMorals.org, where across cultures researchers found two clusters of peoples' answers to moral questions: those who emphasize loyalty and the group, and those who emphasize liberty and autonomy.
As I ponder all of these things, I alternately feel fascinated, dispirited, resigned, and curious about what to do given the apparent stability of these tensions among people.
