YADA, YADA, YADA!

Jerry Harkins

It is not difficult to notice the spread of a mentality that reduces the generation of life to a variable of an individual’s or a couple’s plans. Economic factors sometimes have enough weight to contribute to the sharp drop in the birthrate which weakens the social fabric, compromising the relationship between generations and rendering the view of the future less certain. Being open to life is an intrinsic requirement of married love.

Probably here as well what is required is a realistic language that is able to start from listening to people and acknowledging the beauty and truth of an unconditional opening to life as that which human life requires to be lived to its fullest. It is on this base that we can rest an appropriate teaching regarding natural methods, which allow the living in a harmonious and aware way of the communication between spouses, in all its dimensions, along with generative responsibility. In this light, we should go back to the message of the Encyclical Humanae Vitae of Paul VI, which underlines the need to respect the dignity of the person in the moral evaluation of the methods of birth control. 

—Synod14 - Eleventh General Assembly: “Relatio post disceptationem” of the General Rapporteur, Paragraphs 53-54.

So it came to pass that Pope Francis called an elaborate synod to discuss ways of improving the church’s pastoral care of families.  The “synodal fathers” come up with a preliminary report that included a few Warm and Fuzzies about divorced people and gays that got the press all excited.  The church’s tone had changed!  Right on cue, some of the worst antediluvian bishops threw a temper tantrum about the decline of standards but they need not have worried.  Nothing had changed, not the dogma, not the discipline and not even the traditional Vatican Doublethink.  Still, it was interesting that so many prelates piled on.  In one section (Paragraph 50), the preliminary report asks whether the church is capable of “welcoming” homosexuals to a fraternal space.  The Italian verb is accogliere which can mean many things but whose principal meaning is welcome.  An anonymous bishop persuaded an anonymous bureaucrat to change “welcome” to “provide for.”  Ah, the mills of God grind exceedingly fine.

The Pope probably got a lot more push back than he anticipated.  Not that any document written in Vaticanspeak can ever be free of divine politics.  The coin of the realm is power and power requires obscurity rather than clarity.  The Relatio did not disappoint.  As always, the bullshit was piled high: "A sharp drop in the birthrate weakens the social fabric, compromising the relationship between generations and rendering the view of the future less certain.”  Poppycock!  They made that up without reference to real data about the real world.  In 2010, in the developed and relatively stable countries of OECD, the average birthrate was 11.5 per 1,000 people and the range was from 8.1 in Germany to 16.7 in Turkey.  In India, it was 21.8.  In Afghanistan, that paragon of social cohesion, it was 45.1.  Does the Vatican seriously believe that the view of the future is most certain in Niger (46.0)?  Unless, of course, they’re talking about a bleak outlook.

Lest you think the church has suddenly gotten religion, the prelates thought about what they had wrought for a few days and then watered down the language about gay and divorced people that had so excited the hopeful.  The Warm and Fuzzies could not muster a two-thirds vote although they did manage substantial majorities.  On the subject of contraception, a word that does not appear in either the Preliminary or the Final version, no changes were made.  One sentence appears to be clearer than most pronouncements of the Holy See:  “Being open to life is an intrinsic requirement of married love.”  This is the discredited but traditional teaching.  But with the Vatican you have to read carefully.  In this case, intrinsic is a poor choice of words even if it is the traditional formulation.  If, by their very nature, openness to life and married love are inseparable, then you can’t try to separate them using Vatican Roulette.  The latter with its complex measurements and calculations is thought to be “natural” by hierarchs who, presumably, have never tried it.  Of course, even Vatican Roulette does not free you from the obligation to  meet your “generative responsibility.”  You still have to “go back” to the moral criteria of Humanae Vitae.  In case you’ve forgotten it, the core ruling of that infamous encyclical is the last sentence of Section 11:

The Church, nevertheless, in urging men to the observance of the precepts of the natural law, which it interprets by its constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.

Humanae Vitae is a tough hurdle for the church to confront.  As contemptible, ignorant and self-destructive as it is, the Popes have taught it so tenaciously that to abandon it now would inevitably deliver a fatal blow to papal teaching authority.  Paul VI shied away from invoking infallibility but John Paul II and Benedict XVI invented a whole new category of “definitive” teachings.  In his letter Ad Tuendam Fidem of May 18, 1998, John Paul wrote:

Furthermore, each and every thing set forth definitively by the Magisterium of the Church regarding teaching on faith and morals must be firmly accepted and held; namely, those things required for the holy keeping and faithful exposition of the deposit of faith; therefore, anyone who rejects propositions which are to be held definitively sets himself against the teaching of the Catholic Church.

Since 1998, every substantive papal utterance on marriage and sexuality has invoked the authority of this new “definitive teaching” scam to the point that anyone who disagrees is a heretic.  The one saving grace is that virtually the entire world has definitively rejected the underlying teaching about contraception.  Even the late night comedians have moved on which is why divorce and homosexuality got all the ink in the world press.

It does not, however, explain why the media failed to notice that a 58-paragraph document on the family neglected to mention the most critical problem facing the church today, to wit, its relationship to women.  From the beginning, the leaders of the church, like the leaders of almost all churches, have feared women and shunned their company.  Women have been blamed for everything from the fall of Adam to the death of God.  In recent years, “holy mother the church” has denounced female altar servers, girl scouts and American nuns.  It has ruled that no woman will ever qualify for the priesthood and no woman has a right to control her own body.  For centuries it did not allow women to speak or sing in church.  Virtually every pope of the last two hundred years has held forth on the immorality of women’s fashions.  When it comes to the female half of the human race, the Roman Curia’s philosophy and that of the Taliban are indistinguishable.

The irony of the church’s misogyny is, of course, the fact that, of the two sexes, women are by far the more religious.  Depending on the source, between 15% and 30% of Catholics will attend mass on any given Sunday.  Of these, two-thirds will be women.  In Europe, where a far smaller percentage of Catholics go to church, 90% of those who do are women.  Women account for 70% to 80% of participants in non-mass parish activities.  Women drive participation in the sacraments.  Between 1965 and 2014, Catholic marriages and baptisms fell by 50%.  The number of priests declined by 35% while the number of sisters fell by 75%.  The disconnect between these numbers and the issues the church thinks are important is staggering.

Poor Francis.  In some ways he reminds me of President Obama:  a decent, intelligent person who thinks he can reason together with those who oppose him.  In both cases, this is a tragic flaw.  Francis is not a bomb throwing radical.  What he seems to be aiming for is a couple of modest reforms, ministering to divorced and remarried Catholics and honoring the humanity and the contributions of gay people.  Maybe later he would try to find a way out of the contraception corner the church has painted itself into and thereby undo some of the vast damage its teachings have caused.  But before he does any of these things he must recognize that his opponents are right about one thing:  these are not issues amenable to compromise.  Each one has a right answer that is obvious.  No synod of bishops appointed by his two predecessors ever gave an inch.  In a crisis, leadership requires implacable determination.  It may have been unrealistic to begin the reform with the low hanging fruit.  Perhaps he should have begun a new Reformation by announcing that papal infallibility is a fraud.  Whatever!  But know this:  no matter what his spin doctors claim, Francis has lost the first round and is almost sure to lose the next  one.  Time is short and the river is rising.

MORALS, MONEY AND MARKETS

Jerry Harkins

In several of his early homilies, Pope Francis has denounced what he refers to as “savage capitalism.”  It is not clear whether he means that all capitalism is savage or that only a particular version is.  Nor is it perfectly clear that “capitalism” is not a Vatican code word for “Americanism.”  Finally, it is not even clear that the Pope knows what capitalism is beyond the money changers Jesus drove out of the temple.  No matter.  Since the 1880’s, the Holy See has routinely denounced both capitalism and socialism, leaving feudalism as the only alternative economic system.  Given the Vatican’s longstanding opposition to modernism in all its forms, it may be that, like most of his recent predecessors, Francis would indeed welcome a return to medieval social organization in which the Pope sat at the apex of the power structure. 

It is, of course, perfectly appropriate to criticize the shortcomings of capitalism which are many and varied.  But the critic should at least propose realistic alternatives which is a lot more difficult than might first appear.  For the Catholic Church, it is close to impossible because the church conflates economics with its own dogmatic morality and capitalism is only an economic system.  As such, it works fairly well to deliver the “greatest good to the greatest number” as long as “good” refers to material well being.  More importantly, no other system has ever come close to doing so without at least some element of private enterprise.[i] 

The evils the popes often ascribe to capitalism—poverty and its concomitants—are not essentially economic problems but rather poorly understood social pathologies that interact with one another in complex but poorly understood ways.  We refer to a “cycle of poverty” in two senses.  First, there seems to be a chain of elements whose links include economic, social, educational, political, employment and health disadvantages.  Second, the cycle seems to be self-perpetuating, repeating itself from generation to generation.  In the 1960’s, the United States waged a “War on Poverty” the purpose of which was to interrupt this cycle at the links which were most determinant in maintaining it.  Then and now, it was believed that early childhood education is the most promising target.  But it turned out that the links are closely interrelated. If education is to be successful, the students need to be fed and clothed properly, given good medical care, protected from lead poisoning and supported at home by parents fully engaged in the process.  It is a difficult and very expensive proposition.  It is one thing to decry poverty and quite another to end it.

Capitalism works as well as it does because it gives people an incentive to try for the brass ring by placing capital at risk.  Some few catch it thereby creating jobs for others, wealth for the community and motivation for others.  True, it results in an uneven distribution of wealth and it does not solve the problem of poverty.  No one thinks it is a perfect or even a particularly well-oiled system.  Periodically we experience the fruits of unbridled greed and stupidity in the form of anti-social individuals and companies.  Think of Enron, Bernie Madoff and the bankers who, in pursuit of obscene profits, tried to turn the pigs ears of subprime mortgages into silk purses of investment grade securities.  It is not only malefactors and sociopaths who bring about disaster.  In many cases it is merely the fact that human societies seem to be attracted to the foolishness caught in the title of Charles Mackay’s 1841 classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.  Think of the tulip mania of 1637 or the railroad panic of 1873.  The fact is that in a capitalist system occasionally people get hurt.  Still, capitalism has been a lot more moral, a lot more productive of human happiness and a lot less hypocritical than the Christian Churches.  Capitalists from Rockefeller and Carnegie to Gates, Buffett and Bloomberg have been extraordinarily generous and their philanthropy has made the world a better place.

The Pope, however, casts his anathema into the very definition of capitalism which he says is, “…the logic of profit at all cost, of giving to get, of exploitation without looking at the persons.”  If we delete all the bias words and substitute terms preferred in Economics 101, this translates into the ideas that profit and the profit motive are essential to the general welfare, that one must invest assets to produce profit and that labor is an essential ingredient of production.  In attacking these fundamentals, I believe the Pope is displaying a fundamental ignorance of both economics and morality.  Stephen Schneck agrees with him and, in the process, sheds light on the nature of his error.  He writes, “In America, a very scary error confuses Adam Smith's invisible hands with God's plan.  Pope Francis powerfully rejects that error. An autonomous market can never be moral in itself.  Free market forces are faceless, are without conscience, are unrestrained by anything other than their own competitive materialist dynamics, and thus are incapable of bearing moral responsibility. Without regulation or guidance, market forces can easily work against the common good.”[iii]  He does not elucidate God’s plan for the economy.  He surely does not propose that unfree markets might be capable of bearing moral responsibility.  There is a fair amount of such careless logic in Schneck’s straw man rhetoric and an apparent ignorance of what Adam Smith meant by the invisible hand (singular).  Indeed, some nineteenth century laissez faire apologists did see the invisible hand as the hand of God.  But Adam Smith was not among them.

It is certainly true that conservatives tend to view markets as impersonal, mechanistic forces.  In one sense they are right: like a hammer, a market is a tool that can be used for good or evil.  But then they add that markets require little if any government regulation.  Such a conclusion is simplistic and self-serving.  Laissez faire was tried in the decades after the Civil War and very quickly resulted in massive social unrest and political rebellion.  In spite of the rhetoric of the far right, it is unlikely that any developed country in the world would opt to return to either the economics or the morality of David Ricardo and his Iron Law of Wages.  Fortunately, all versions of capitalism tend to evolve quickly to address new conditions and new understandings.  Thus, governments eventually came to prohibit child labor, insist on pure food and drugs, enforce transportation safety, prosecute insider trading and prohibit a wide range of practices considered anti-competitive.  The degree of oversight varies from time to time and place to place and the efficacy and fairness of regulatory and deregulatory actions are vigorously debated.  But, just as no athlete would want to play a sport without a rulebook, no rational person thinks markets are or should be “autonomous.”

Underlying all the different expressions of capitalism and all the evolutionary changes that occur in markets is the bedrock idea of Adam Smith that society grants businesses valuable rights and concessions in turn for being the economic engine of the community and an agent for social objectives.[iv]  Obviously, no one starts a business solely to create jobs or pay taxes but just as obviously no business can long survive unless society’s interests are served.  As the empiricist philosopher Ralph B. Perry wrote, “The fundamental idea of modern capitalism is not the right of the individual to possess and enjoy what he has earned, but the thesis that the exercise of this right redounds to the general good.”  It is precisely this thesis that is rejected by the critics from Karl Marx to Pope Francis.  Both correctly observe that the system is not perfect and both fail to distinguish between the baby and the bathwater.

Christian morality is directed principally at achieving eternal happiness in heaven.  “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear…But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.  Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.  Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”[v]  Taken literally, this is terrible advice even if it is, ironically, central to the strategies of many business executives and all politicians who love to use the future as a dumping ground for problems they would rather avoid today.  The church uses heaven in a similar way.

There is a sense of guilt lurking even in the souls of the heroes of capitalist labor who have done well but suspect that the system is a zero sum game.  A big part of the problem is the persistence of poverty.  Jesus may have been right about the poor being always with us.  In 2012, fully 16% of Americans lived below the government’s poverty threshold, roughly the average figure over the last fifty years.  According to the World Bank, 22% of the world’s population lives on $1.25 a day or less, the level it defines as “extreme poverty.”[vi]  Since capitalism in all of its various forms is close to universal, it is not surprising that it attracts criticism.  Several years ago, Barron’s, of all publications, thought it necessary to defend capitalism against the charge that it is little more than legalized greed. [vii]  It felt constrained to remind its readers that unbridled self-interest would very quickly end in “…flames of conflict, with losers seeking at all costs, to take the wealth of winners.”  Not that there are no avaricious people in the executive suite and elsewhere.  But excessive greed always ends as a competitive disadvantage whether the rapacity comes from Enron or Adam Smith’s butcher.  Barron’s being Barron’s, it took its argument several steps too far, arguing that, “…capitalism is ruled not by greed but by the Golden Rule” which, of course, is nonsense.

The Catholic Church has historically been uncomfortable with wealth but aloof from poverty.  When Pope Francis expresses his preference for a “poor church for the poor,” he projects a morality that insists on “the preferential option for the poor.”  This holds that a society is judged first by how well it addresses the needs of its most needy members.  This gives rise to an element of incongruity in its thinking about poverty.  On the one hand, there is no doubt that Jesus himself preached a preference for the poor.  On the other, with a few notable exceptions, the church has never felt itself called to poverty and its history has been one of collaboration with and service to the wealthiest classes.  In the Middle Ages, it burned heretics at the stake for criticizing the opulent lifestyles of the hierarchs.

In fact, capitalism is not a simple thing ruled by a single vice or a single virtue.  In  all its manifestations, it relies on a complex and delicate balance of competing forces:  savings and consumption, cooperation and competition, self-interest and what Adam Smith called “benevolence,” by which he meant a social conscience.  This complexity is the only thing that makes it different from any other social contrivance invented by human beings but the difference is significant.  Economists, politicians and moralists tend to see the system through the single lens of their special interest, very much like the blind philosophers trying to describe an elephant to the Rajah.  Thus, the Pope denounces “…the logic of profit at all cost” without understanding the necessity or the role of profit in the system or attempting to define criteria for distinguishing between reasonable and extortionate  profit levels.  “At all cost” is rhetoric, not logic.  Capitalism cannot exist without profit, in part as an incentive but in greater part as a source of new capital.  From the beginning, it has been profit that makes the world go around.

Consider Job.  He was not the first capitalist but the Bible tells us he owned 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, 500 asses and a large number of slaves.  That’s a lot of mouths to feed, and far more than even a wealthy patriarch needs for his own enjoyment.  What for example was Job doing with 3,000 camels?  In all probability, he was raising them for wool, milk, hides, and meat, almost all of which he was selling at a profit.  How do we know?  For one thing, had he not been selling most of what his animals produced, he would have gone bankrupt feeding them long before Satan noticed him.  Had he not been earning a profit, he could not have built the fences and sheds he needed or purchased the equipment to spin, card and weave the wool.  But the important point of the story is that Job, a slaveholder, was considered a highly moral person.  Even God concedes, “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”  Not that it does him much good;  God allows Satan to torment him anyway.

Not every capitalist measures up to the moral standards of Job just as not every priest measures up to those of Francis.  But complex issues such as poverty and income inequality cannot be ameliorated by sound bites.  Those who insist on treating them simplistically would do better for humanity by sighing with Job in resignation.  “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.  Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

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[i] In fact, there are only a few alternatives.  Socialism is a system in which there is little or no private enterprise and the means of production are “owned” by the people as represented by the state.  Feudalism is a system in which private enterprise and ownership are limited to the nobility which licensed rights to selected craftsperson’s and other entrepreneurs.  Various hybrid systems have been tried and some have been successful for short periods of time, especially for communities rich in natural resources.  But the essential elements of successful hybrids were all taken from the capitalist playbook.

[ii] Probably not.  McGlynn had run afoul of Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York who accused him of heresy.  He was ultimately absolved and re-admitted to the church and was buried in consecrated ground.  However, the church refused to allow his mostly Protestant admirers to erect a statue of him at Calvary Cemetery.  Undaunted, they bought a plot at non-denominational Woodlawn Cemetery and erected it there.

[iii] Quoted in Michael Sean Winters, “Pope Francis spotlights social teaching with blunt calls for ethical economy,” National Catholic Reporter, June 1, 2013.  Stephen Schneck, Ph.D. is Director of the Institute for Policy Research in the Catholic University of America.  It seems clear that neither he nor the Pope has ever actually read the works of Adam Smith but encountered only comic book versions promoted by ignorant rightists.  Smith was, first and foremost, a moral philosopher, arguably the most important of the modern era.  The Schneck quote is full of logical absurdities.  The idea that free markets are incapable of bearing moral responsibility is especially vacuous unless the same thing is true of all institutions including the church.

[iv] Among the rights granted by the state are:  legal personhood (the corporate fiction);  perpetuity;  the inviolability of contracts and limited liability of shareholders.  Without these protections, a corporation could not raise capital and would have to be dissolved on the death of a principal shareholder.

[v] Matthew 6: 25-34.  The idea that God will provide probably does not mean that the birds of the air can or should ignore the need for food or shelter.  Aesop had the better of it when he suggested that, “God helps those who help themselves.”

[vi] Among the developed countries of the OECD, an average of about 11% of the people live below its poverty level.  As would be expected, countries with stronger “safety nets” have less poverty and higher tax rates.  Historically, also, they have tended to post lower unemployment rates although this now seems to be changing under the impact of austerity programs.  Cause and effect is hard to tease out of such data but most politicians would rather borrow money than increase taxes.

[vii] Shlomo Maital, “More than greed:  goodness is at the heart of successful capitalism,” Editorial Comment, Barron’s, July 26, 2004.

WHOSE ART WAS IT ANYWAY?

Jerry Harkins

Nego in Sicilia tota, tam locupleti, tam vetere provincia, tot oppidis, tot familiis tam copiosis, ullum argenteum vas, ullum Corinthium aut Deliacum fuisse, ullam gemmam aut margaritam, quicquam ex auro aut ebore factum, signum ullum aeneum, marmoreum, eburneum, nego ullam picturam neque in tabula neque in textili, quin conquisierit, inspexerit, quod placitum sit, abstulerit.

                                                                                                —M. T. Cicero[i]

In 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art returned a large Greek bowl known as the Euphronios krater to Italy.  The Italian government alleged that it was illegally looted from an Etruscan tomb in 1971 and sold to the Roman art dealer Giacomo Medici, a  convicted smuggler of antiquities.  He sold it to a dealer named Robert Hecht who sold it to the Met for $1.2 million in 1972.  Mr. Hecht was tried in Italy for trafficking in antiquities.  Whether or not he was guilty, the trial, in typical Italian fashion, was opera buffa and was ultimately dismissed because the statue of limitations had expired.  This was in 2012, the same year Mr. Hecht died.  But the Met had already been done in by the PR.

A bit of background color:  At the outset of World War II, the Fascist government of Italy amended its antiquity laws to assert state ownership of all antiquities discovered anywhere in Italy.  It also limited the rights of owners of any cultural material that had been in Italy for 50 years or more regardless of its origin.  The Fascists were not socialists so this assertion of state ownership was an exception to the general law of found objects at the time.  The basis for it was the further assertion that all such material was part of the “patrimony of the fatherland.”  Come again?  The krater was made by a Greek potter and a Greek painter working in Athens.  The fatherland called Italy was (and is) a jerrybuilt mosaic comprised of seven independent states cobbled together by force and violence between 1792 and 1870.  There was no “Italy” until 1861 and unification—the Risorgimento—has never been happy or successful.  There is a “standard” Italian language derived from Latin and spoken in Tuscany but, for the most part, people speak fifteen regional dialects and 12 minority languages, all of them mostly mutually incomprehensible.  In other words, Italy is an idea more than a nation or a single ethnicity.  Not that this makes any legal difference:  today, as in 1939, Italy is a sovereign state and can make any property laws it wants.  And since hypocrisy is not illegal, it can even make such laws while simultaneously engaging in its own looting of Ethiopian treasures.  But the notion that the krater is part of an “Italian patrimony” is, at a minimum, eccentric. 

It must be noted that the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Property of 1970 specifically states that any cultural property found in a particular country, regardless of its origin, is part of the cultural heritage of that country.  This is a breathtaking assertion of Diplomatic Doublethink but it expresses both Italian and international law even while it is a perfect proof of Mr. Bumble’s contention that the law is an ass.  A relic of the Andrea Doria washed up on Nantucket is simply not part of America’s cultural heritage.  But we must not dwell on this because the krater was undoubtedly dug up in Italy and exported illegally.

Thomas P. Hoving, the colorful and acquisitive Director of the Met who did the acquiring, suspected as much.  On first seeing it, he thought it was, “…the single most perfect work of art I had ever encountered.”  Almost immediately, though, The New York Times ran a series of articles claiming fraud[ii] and the New York District Attorney’s Racket Bureau took a conspiracy case to a grand jury which promptly dismissed it.[iii]  But the title of the chapter Hoving devotes to it in his 1993 memoirs is “The Hot Pot.”  Not surprisingly, the sobriquet stuck which did not help the museum’s PR problem.  Much later, on the website ArtNet, Dr. Hoving addressed himself to the question of whether it should be returned.  “Hell no.” he wrote, “Despite our suspicions, we bought it in good faith and it arrived legally to U.S. Customs.  There’s nothing the Italians can do about it or should.”  One can sympathize with this view without endorsing its logic.  The same can be said of the position of the Italian government.  The weakness of Hoving’s position is that it involves receiving property he knew or should have known was, under Italian law, stolen.  The weakness of the Italian case though lies in two entirely different problems.  First, the pot was not stolen in any rational sense of the word.  Second, its return created an enormously dangerous precedent.

According to my dictionary, the basic meaning of the word “steal” is “to take something that belongs to somebody else, illegally or without the owner’s permission.”  It’s the belonging to somebody else that poses a problem.  To whom did the krater belong if not to the person who dug it up?  The Italian government says it belonged to Italy because it was found there.  It belonged to the state only because the state said so.  Neither the potter nor the painter had ever traveled outside Athens so it seems fair to ask how it got to Italy and why, if it had to be returned, it was not returned to Greece.  Textbooks generally claim it had been “exported” to Tuscany but this is a conclusion without evidence and seems unlikely.  Little is known about the Etruscans but it is widely believed they practiced a fair amount of piracy.  So maybe the krater was stolen in the first place.  Maybe not.  More Greek pottery has been unearthed in Tuscany than in Greece so it could have been acquired in a legitimate trade transaction and no one will ever know for sure.  Indeed, the point is that we can never know who owned the pot before it was dug up and, after that, ‘finders keepers’ is as good a basis for moral judgments as any other guideline.

Those outraged by the Met’s original acquisition are mainly archeologists and other professionals who think they should have a monopoly on such objects, in the interests, of course, of humanity and the progress of archeology.  Control, they seem to think, should be vested in a tiny group of academics who will be free to use cultural artifacts as fuel for their priestly debates. The krater now rests comfortably in the National Etruscan Museum in the Via Vecchia, an outlying area of Rome.  The Wall Street Journal described it as:

The 16^th century house of Pope Julius III…a tranquil refuge from Rome’s noise and summer heat.  On a recent Saturday afternoon, the loudest sounds in the empty courtyard were the singing of cicadas and the soft gurgle of water in the Nymphaeum fountain.

The museum receives about 10,000 visitors a month during the high tourist season, about 4,000 fewer than visit the Met on an average day.

Patrimony is a tricky subject.  Literally, it refers to something one inherits from his or her father and, thus, by extension, something a people inherit from their ancestors or predecessors. But there is a difference.  A nation is not a person and its “ownership” is limited at best.  Nor does a government personify the people of a nation unless one accepts the theory of divine right.  A government may be the custodian of national property but the rights and obligations of custodians are not the same as those of owners.  Thus, when the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, it did not “own” the Bamiyan Buddhas and had no legal or moral right to destroy them.  The present Greek government argues that the Ottoman Sultan had no right to sell the Parthenon marbles to Lord Elgin even though Greece was, at the time, part of the Ottoman Empire.  In this belief, they are right.  And in the same way the present Greek government has no substantive claim to ownership of the marbles either.  It is not, of course, without standing in the matter.  Unlike the Italians and the krater, the Elgin marbles are the product of Greek genius, made by Greek artists in Greece.

Nothing is ever simple except for the assertion that a sovereign state can enact any damn fool law its politicians want.  That does not prevent rational people from analyzing the wisdom and justice of such dicta.  The context of the 1939 Italian antiquities law was the desire of the Fascists to forge a collective mythology and destiny for Italy based on the glory of imperial Rome much as their cousins in Germany were forging the Thousand Year Reich on the foundation of Teutonic folklore.  Benito Mussolini understood that the government he took over in 1922 was ineffective and its citizens demoralized in spite of having been on the winning side of World War I.  Victory had cost the Italians dearly in both human and economic terms and the Versailles Peace Treaty gave them virtually nothing.  In its aftermath, Mussolini promoted the rather eccentric idea that modern Italy was the rightful heir to the glories of the ancient Roman Empire which, in an even more eccentric twist, was supposed to be the rightful heir of the Golden Age of Greece.[iv]

For a country still struggling to create a sense of nationhood, it was an outrageous, grandiose simplification of history.  But Italy had been hemorrhaging art and other cultural materials for centuries.  Some of this traffic had been the result of perfectly legal transactions but much also had been looted.[v]  Napoleon Bonaparte was a master looter of Italian treasure which he used to endow the Louvre.  Following his defeat of the Papal States in 1796, he forced Pope Pius VI to cede hundreds of paintings, sculptures and manuscripts and to pay for their shipment to Paris.  About half of these items were ordered returned by the Duke of Wellington following the Battle of Waterloo.  The Pope could no longer afford the shipping which was paid for by the British government.  Our sympathy for the Italians is tempered by the knowledge that, historically, they were victimizers as often as victims.  Rome systematically looted the Empire and the city-states of the Renaissance were avid collectors and looters.  In fact, Napoleon justified his own looting by claiming that France was the successor to ancient Rome, the same argument that was later advanced by Mussolini.  The Napoleonic precedent was also invoked during and after World War II by Hitler and Stalin.

It is axiomatic that hypocrisy is no stranger to international dealings of all kinds.  Nor is it news that there are many problems and controversies that have no good solution and, in some cases, no obvious compromise.  In the grand scheme of the world’s problems, the case of the Euphronios krater is trivial and, in a saner world, its location would not occasion jingoistic saber rattling.  Of course in a sane world, an organization like UNESCO would not assert in the preamble to the 1970 convention that, “…cultural institutions, museums, libraries and archives should ensure that their collections are built up in accordance with universally recognized moral principles.”  If such principles existed outside the Wonderland of diplomacy, there would not be and never would have been a single cultural institution of any kind.  There would be no museum three thousand years from now when some enterprising farmer digs up a Jeff Koons “Balloon Dog” and tries to sell it for scrap in spite of the cries of archeologists about the despoliation of the American patrimony.

The real problem is a matter of drawing the line between things that really do cry out for repatriation and things that may as well stay where they are.  Obviously human remains and objects of sacred significance should be returned whenever possible.  In the United States, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 has proven to be a productive way of dealing with these issues at least on an ad hoc basis and has been remarkably free of controversy in practice.  There is, however, no clear line between sacred and profane objects. For example, Jan Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece has been stolen on multiple occasions and was looted by both Napoleon and the Nazis.  It is widely regarded as an artistic masterpiece but is also clearly a work of sacred significance.

No one knows how many objects of cultural significance were looted during World War II but the total must be in the millions.  One widely quoted source claims that 20% of all such objects in European hands were stolen.  In addition, Germany destroyed hundreds of thousands of works of confiscated modern art which the Nazis considered “degenerate.”  The Soviets forcibly took millions of items after the war as “reparations.”  Much of this horde was taken from Germany and Poland and included objects that had previously been looted by the Germans from Italy and France.  The Western allies repatriated more than 700,000 works from the Wiesbaden Collection Point alone.[vi] 

Ultimately, looting, whether in war or by common thieves, is little more than ordinary human failure and the ranting and raving of the political class and other elitists will hardly put a dent in the problem.  The Euphronios krater and its kin have no real nationality but are the better side of the same human condition.  We can count ourselves fortunate that there are museums that collect and preserve the human heritage and make it available to all of us.  We can hope they will “return” what should be returned and to act in good faith without being instructed by those who would appoint themselves our official moralists.

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[i] In Verrem (Oration Against Verres), Book 4, Chapter 1.  “I say that in all Sicily, in that entire wealthy and ancient province, in all those wealthy towns and families, there was no silver vessel, no Corinthian or Delian plate, no jewel or pearl, nothing made of gold or ivory, no statue of marble or bronze or ivory, no painted or embroidered picture, that he did not seek out and examine and that, if he liked it, he did not take away.”  Looting is as ancient as art itself and all the world’s great museums are full of objects whose provenance is less than pristine.  Verres was the Roman Governor of Sicily and was a notorious thief and scoundrel.  Eventually he copped a plea which sent him into exile in Messina where he was outlawed by Mark Antony who wanted to loot some of his loot.

[ii] The Times loves this kind of story as does the American public.  There are hundreds of books on the subject, many of them carefully researched and well written.  Art theft and art forgery are the subject of more crime fiction than anything but murder.  But the interest of the Times seems distinctive and, perhaps, disproportionate.  Anything that offers it a chance to occupy the moral high ground and demonstrate its high minded and high browed superiority is sure to land on the front page.  If the offender happens to be a local cultural institution the temptation to anathematize it becomes irresistible.

[iii] The original investigation was undertaken at the behest of the Italian government and involved both the FBI and the New York City Police.  The grand jury investigation came later and was instigated by DA Robert M. Morgenthau, widely regarded as a saintly public servant but one whose favorite activity was to hold a press conference.  Be that as it may.  Like The Times, Mr. Morgenthau never shied away from any allegation that made him look holier than thou.  In this case, Hoving asserts, and I believe, he was conducting a vendetta because he despised Hoving’s “popularization” of the Met.

[iv] The foundation myth of the ancient Romans had the founding twins Romulus and Remus as descendants on their mother’s side of Aeneas of Troy.  The family of Julius Caesar regarded him as one of their ancestors.  The Trojans or Dardanians were the deadly enemies of Greece although their elite at the time of the Trojan War, including Aeneas, may have had Greek roots.

[v] The Louvre, arguably the world’s greatest art museum, was  built on the looted patrimony of other nations, notably Italy.  At one time, its collection included the Medici Venus, the Venus de Milo and Winged Victory, “acquired” in 1803, 1820 and 1863 respectively, all of them Greek masterpieces looted from Italy.  In 1815, the French were forced to return the Medici to Florence which, at the time, was ruled by Archduke Karl Ludwig of Austria.  Austria had been embarrassed by Napoleon on many occasions and was a member of the Seventh Coalition although its army had not participated in the Battle of Waterloo.  Actually, Austria  effectively ruled Tuscany between 1735 and 1860 so perhaps the krater might have been considered part of the Austrian patrimony. 

[vi] These numbers are educated guesses only but it should be borne in mind that German looting included ordinary furniture meant to be distributed to German citizens whose homes had been bombed and the Russian total may include factories and machinery.  In this politically correct age, virtually every source says that American soldiers also engaged in looting, obviously on a much reduced scale and with no known precious works of art involved.  Some, however, no doubt participated in the illegal trading of precious material that was rampant after VE Day and some such material was later sold to American collectors.

GOD’S UNLISTED PHONE NUMBER

Jerry Harkins

There is no God.  Maybe there once was.  I have this vision of a two-year-old boy named God Almighty playing with matches in the kitchen.  Just possibly there was an accident and the Big Bang got ignited.  There are other scenarios.  For example, maybe it wasn’t an accident.  In any case, there was a perfect explosion.  It wiped out everything that preceded it so poor little G.A. did not survive.  Whatever may have been or not been on the other side of Point Alpha, the truth is that right now there is no uncaused first cause acting in history.  While I’m at it, there is no Santa Claus, no tooth fairy and, while there was a Saint Patrick, he did not expel the snakes from Ireland.   If any of this comes to you as depressing news, I apologize.

Thomas Aquinas disagrees with me and devotes the first 43 questions of the Summa Theologica to the existence and nature of God.  He begins by telling us that the statement “God is” is not self-evident but that it can be demonstrated by unaided reason or logic.  He then proceeds to attempt such a demonstration at excruciating length.  Now this is the elaborately defined God of the Christians he is dealing with, so his job is not an easy one and it is not surprising that he fails.  What is surprising is that his failure involves a logical train wreck.  Logic, after all, was his forte.  But he commits a basic fallacy when he sets out to prove something that he already believes is beyond dispute and to do so by proving a negative—that is by inferring God from what cannot be.  He says that, given the world as he sees it, God cannot not exist.  Where some see chaos, Thomas sees order and he thinks order can only come about through design.  This is known as begging the question.  If you already believe that the earth is flat or that it is 6,000 years old or that the moon is made of green cheese, you can easily prove it to your own satisfaction and that of your fellow believers by saying it cannot be otherwise.  Your logic, unlike that of Thomas, may be elegant and even valid but it still won’t hold water.[i]

The angelic doctor makes another error which is even more interesting.  If the existence of God is, as he says, not self-evident, no amount of logical pettifoggery can prove that God does exist.  When Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” in effect he was saying that he would not debate them.  Of course he wouldn’t.  The entire history of the human race up to and including his own little piece of it at Monticello argues persuasively that those “truths” were anything but true, never mind self-evident.  All men may have been created equal but throughout history, some men owned other men known as slaves.  Tom himself owned slaves, 130 of whom were auctioned off by his estate to pay his debts.  What he had meant to say in 1776 was these truths should be self-evident.  Why?  Because I say so.  That, my dear King George, is the way I define the universe.  It is an appeal to authority, to do-as-I-say, not to logic, evidence or reasoning.

But, you say, practically everyone who has ever lived has believed in God so it must be true even if it is not self-evident.  Indeed Aquinas himself uses “universal acclamation” as one of his arguments for the existence of God.  But belief, however widespread, is not evidence of truth and believing something does not make it so.  Sophie Tucker to the contrary notwithstanding, fifty million Frenchmen can be wrong and frequently are.

Then there are all those miracles.  Didn’t Jesus feed the multitudes with five loaves of bread and two fishes?  All four evangelists claim he did.  Didn’t he raise Lazarus from the dead?  Well, so says John.  We have actual testimony.  The problem is that eyewitness testimony is evidence of the least reliable kind and the authors of the gospels were not eyewitnesses.  They were reporting hearsay decades after the event.

Or to take a more recent example, over a period of months in 1917, the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to three shepherds, ages 7, 8 and 10 years old, six times near the town of Fatima, Portugal.[ii]  The testimony of these uneducated youngsters about the lady’s prophecies, threats and demands was extensive, detailed, consistent and persuasive.  It caused a media frenzy and a firestorm of public piety.  On the last occasion, the sun “whirled around” and gave colorful emanations.  A crowd of 70,000 persons witnessed this and some number of them swore to it.  Pope John Paul II was convinced that this same “Lady of Fatima” intervened to save him from an assassin’s bullet in 1981.  He recovered the bullet and had it placed in the crown on the head of the Fatima statue.  Can 70,000 Portuguese possibly be wrong?

Yes.  Easily.  Bear in mind that only three of them actually saw the Virgin.  Bear in mind also that some of the other 69,997 apparently saw a large coronal mass ejection during a solar storm.  Of course, it is hard to look directly at the sun and, for most of the audience, the event was only a rumor.  The audience wanted to believe and it comes as no surprise that their desire was accommodated by their imagination.  There was no Lady of Fatima no matter what three impressionable children said they saw and heard.  Indeed, there has never been a virgin who gave birth to a child, barring such mortal sins as in vitro fertilization.  I regret this because the Virgin Mary is an elegant, brilliant metaphor speaking to the unity of the human and the divine.  But virgins do not produce offspring.

An awful lot of people will disagree with the foregoing which is okay with me but probably not so okay with them.  These people would rather believe the latter day prophets who claim to have God’s unlisted phone number, people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Osama bin Laden and the Roman Popes.  One of these clowns (it happened to be Robertson but it could have been any or all of them) recently challenged an audience with the notion that, since the existence of God cannot be disproved, the non-believer has an obligation to be humble in the face of faith, that is, to hedge one’s bets.  I agree.  The belief in the sacred shared by billions of people throughout history is indeed an awesome force if for no other reason than when people believe something it doesn’t make any difference whether or not it happens to be true.  Reverend Robertson is right.  I cannot prove that God does not exist.  What’s more, I don’t want to.  In fact, I’m ready to admit that the idea of God is God, and that human society as we know it could not exist without that idea.  This is not so far from John’s claim, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word.”  The Greek logos means the word but can also be read as the idea.  Words and ideas are powerful but they have no independent existence.  Santa Claus and the tooth fairy are ideas that influence our culture and our values but, as Jean Paul Sartre might say, they have no thingness.    And there’s where we get into trouble.  If you base public policy on the existence of the Tooth Fairy, your policies will be embraced by many six year old children because it is in their pecuniary interest to do so.  The policies may be good and wise and productive on their own merits but if they are derived solely from the will of God, they cannot be right legally, technically or morally and you have no business making such a claim or forcing me to accept it.  “What would Jesus do?” is no way to run a railroad.

Or a nation.  Which brings me to the point of this essay.  We are told by many devout believers that freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion.  In America, we hear this from Christian fundamentalists in the context of their understanding of the First Amendment.  They are often joined by Roman Catholic bishops and other traditionalists who still oppose the landmark 1965 declaration of Vatican II known as Dignitatis Humanae.  In Israel, we hear a similar argument from the Haredim and, in the Muslim world, from Islamists and other conservative Muslims.  The agitation is always passionate because advocates are promoting what they claim to be attitudes and  rules of conduct dictated directly by God.

In America, the Constitution says in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”  The second part is clear enough:  I can worship however I want and follow whatever religious precepts I deem appropriate as long as they do not impinge seriously on the rights of others.  If I believe what I wrote in the first paragraph of this essay, these same words also mean freedom from religion.  Free exercise means freedom not to exercise;  no other construction is possible.

Suppose for a moment that there was a verse in 1 Corinthians that said “You must never abort a fetus because it is a human being from the moment of conception and sacred in the eyes of God.”  There isn’t, of course, but only because Paul didn’t know a lot about reproductive biology.  If, however, on the basis of such a command the United States Congress passed a law against abortion, it could not survive a first amendment challenge.  Might it do so on some other basis?  Perhaps.  There is no telling how the Supreme Court might view the issues but it has been receptive to a variety of state laws limiting access to abortion.  In virtually all such cases, it seems obvious that the state legislatures were applying a thin veneer of legal respectability over their basic religious motivations.  Well, perhaps not so obvious to the majority of the current Supreme Court.

On one thing, everyone can agree:  all over the world, religion is losing ground.  Ironically, it is this slippage that is largely responsible for the rise of religious extremism.  The extremists will ultimately lose the battle, perhaps at great cost.  It is difficult and a little frightening to imagine a world without the divine or to speculate as to how humanity might replace it.  It will surely seem like the end times to some who will no doubt refer to it as The Apocalypse.  To others it will seem like the Birthday of Freedom.

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Notes

[i] Valid means formally correct, but not necessarily true.  For example:  All pine trees speak French.  This is a pine tree.  Therefore this tree speaks French.  A perfectly valid syllogism but don’t try it on your botany final.

[ii] 1917 was the mid-point of 16 years of severe political instability in Portugal, an era in which it had a Provisional Government, a Republic and a constitutional Junta, 8 Presidents and 38 Prime Ministers.  At the time of the apparitions, there was the civil war that substituted one right wing dictatorship for another, that of Sidónio Pais a traditionalist who came to power with the support of the church two months after the final appearance of the Virgin.