on the most wonderful time of the year

Originally published at Faith Seeking Understanding. You can comment here or there.

In a perhaps vain effort to stave off my Sherlock addiction yesterday night I played a House DVD while I did some baking. Specifically I watched the season one Christmas episode, “Damned if You Do.” Nice solid episode doing a good job with the ambiguities of faith without reducing everything to a religion vs. science false dilemma.

Anyway, there’s this nice scene toward the end where Dr. Wilson invites Dr. House over for Christmas dinner. Wilson is a Jew, a thoroughly secular Jew as far as we’ve seen so far (though later there are hints of some kind of spirituality from him), and House is famously atheistic. So House questions this Christmas thing, to which Wilson replies: “What do you care? It’s food, it’s people.” And the conversation ends with Lisa Cuddy, another more-or-less secular Jewish doctor wishing them both a Merry Christmas.

I think this experience of Christmas resonates with a lot of people, particularly people I know here in New York. I’ve gone to Christmas concerts (usually a mass with a more polished than normal musical program) with a Hindi neighbor in tow, and though she wasn’t familiar with the mass she loved the music and the coffee afterwards. New York is actually a fairly religious city, but even among your regular church-goers (meaning weekly attendance and other devotional practices – we’re not talking just Easter and Christmas Christians), Christmas is mostly about family and friends and food, with religious observance almost tacked on. I’m not talking about their personal spirituality, the things they read and think about during the season; but when it comes to the things they do, the majority could be done just as easily by people who weren’t Christian.

And to my mind, there’s not a thing wrong with this. Those things they are celebrating, love and joy and peace and friendship, are pretty universal human values and are worth celebrating whether you’re religious or not. If making a word a little more elastic than I would naturally do helps people make time for those kinds of things, I’m cool with that. As a Christian I do think there’s a liturgical, almost sacramental, value in the religious Christmas – but I’m not naive enough to think that’s what everyone or even most people mean when they talk about Christmas. And while I sometimes wish we as a society reserved the word Christmas for the uniquely Christian religious holiday and used a different expression (“Happy Holidays,” “Season’s Greetings,” etc.) for all the festivities going on in December, religious and otherwise… well, if we did that I wouldn’t expect everyone to use that expression, Merry Christmas, as the default. If Christmas is really the name for something unique to Christians (and even within that, the particularly devout members of that religion) and it’s not what’s being celebrated by society in general, then that changes the way we use language.

I’m thinking about the famous War on Christmas here. I saw Bill O’Reilly’s name today on a completely different topic and that, combined with holiday displays in the stores, got me thinking about this question. And I get that there are some people who want everyone, stores and so on, to say Merry Christmas this time of year rather than Happy Holidays. But I’m not sure those greetings ever worked the way they want. It strikes me that when the stores say “Merry Christmas,” for the most part they mean it as the kind of inoffensive greeting any two Americans could share – more Bob Cratchett and Macy’s Santa Claus than creches and angels and shepherds. The kind of thing a nominally Jewish doctor could share with another slightly-less-nominal-but-still-not-exactly-frum Jew and an atheist, and have it be interpreted as “sweet.” Which is… well, maybe not my preference (I like Christmas being a more religious thing in its own way), but nothing I’m going to get upset over or anything. I certainly like to think of my friends taking a beat and enjoying the good things in life. But my point is: this whole idea that the world isn’t as Christian-centric as it once was? I’m not sure that was ever true.

Also: I really kind of like that House scene. It’s so sweet, it makes me smile a little.

**********************************

Speaking of Sherlock (because it always comes back to that), earlier today I shared this video at Pinterest, with the comment that it was entirely too accurate a description of the fans waiting on series three. Which it kind of is. Several hours later a friend introduced me to a few Tumblr sites and I found them making memes about that video and series three, which as far as I could tell popped up today. I flatter myself that I made my first ripples in this fandom. Which made me smile.

is the shutdown rational?

Originally published at Faith Seeking Understanding. You can comment here or there.

Over at his NYTimes blog, Ross Douthat is talking about the government shutdown and whether it just might be a reasonable move on the GOP’s part.

The heart of Douthat’s argument:

At bottom, this theory depends on the belief that even though voters say they don’t want the government shut down to defund Obamacare, what they’ll actually remember from this debate a year from now is that Republicans were really, really against the law and Democrats were really, really for it. And if, as many conservatives believe, the law will be even more unpopular after a year of implementation than it is today, that contrast will trump any residual irritation at G.O.P. brinksmanship, and voters will reward Republicans for their position rather than punishing them for their tactics.

This theory does find some support in recent political events. The 2010 election really did tip more toward the G.O.P. than the economic fundamentals predicted, and the role of grassroots zeal in making that election a referendum on Obamacare probably helped Republicans more than it cost them (outside of certain Senate races, that is). Democrats and liberals mock the House’s repeated anti-Obamacare votes, but – even allowing for the complexities and vagaries of public opinion — it really is one of the few major domestic policy issues where the country has been consistently on the Republican Party’s side. And depending on how things turn out with Year One of its implementation, it isn’t entirely crazy to to imagine that the country will be thinking much more about where the parties stand, and how firmly, on health care next fall than about whether the G.O.P. went a little too far over the brink in its budgetary tactics the year before.

Mr. Douthat is a full-time professional, incredibly intelligent journalist. He knows more about politics and in particular conservative politics than I could ever hope to claim, and I won’t even pretend to have his policy chops. So I’m not going to challenge these facts, though some of them do seem a little challengeable to me.

But there’s this word he uses repeatedly throughout this post, reasonable. He says that shutting down the government over this issue is good tactics, that you could at least see the line of thought where it helps them come 2014, and so that makes it a good, reasonable thing to do.

I’ll grant him that it may be useful. If Douthat’s right about Obamacare being so hated, at least among possible GOP voters, then painting your side as the people willing to make a final brave stand against a totalitarian law is probably good strategy. The thing is, I don’t think that’s all you need for an action to be rational. Maybe I’ve been thinking too much about Kant, but that’s actually one of his main points: that not all goals are equally moral, and while it may be okay to go after what tickles your fancy, what’s useful to some personal goal you may have if it doesn’t keep you from doing some genuine duty, that’s not what we’re talking about in morality.

As an example, here’s a scene from Up in the Air that I’ll be discussing with my class next week.

In this clip, Ryan (George Clooney)’s character talks about how all his actions are geared toward acquiring frequent flyer miles. So he orders whatever his expense will pay for, even if it’s much more than he needs, because he can put it on his credit card and get miles out of that. These actions make a lot of sense, they’re useful steps toward getting more miles. And there is some logic to this goal: it puts him in an elite class, he gets his name on the side of an airplane, the kind of things that most of us want. But I think Natalie (Anna Kendrick) is ultimately right in her reaction: his focus does seem more on the level of “we all need a hobby” than “wow, that’s a truly moral decision.” Even if he gets the perks and fame, I can’t help thinking that if Ryan meets his goal, it would still feel like a first-class waste of effort. I mean, really? Frequent flyer miles? If it makes him happy, if it isn’t making him act unethically, then good for him, we all need a hobby – but is this really what we would call a rational course of action?

For Kant, rationality starts by looking at the motive behind our action. It involves the kind of motive that we can see everyone following and we’d still choose to live in such a world – if there’s a contradiction, or if the world would be so awful it would be irrational to choose to live there, then we have a duty not to do that kind of thing. So looking at the current situation: would the GOP really choose to live in a world where they passed a substantial law through the normal legislative process, had it vetted by the court, and then the other party refused to let the government function if they didn’t arrange a do-over? The only way this kind of goal makes sense is if you expect the other side to not do what you’re doing.

And, at the risk of actually giving Jar-Jar Binks some pop culture creds: that smells stinkowif.

I actually have some respect for people who are so outraged by the healthcare law that they think a shutdown would be preferable. I don’t mean the folks who think it would be bad for them, but for everybody? The people who think a month without government services is better than a new entitlement (which the ACA isn’t, but moving on…) I think they’re wrong in a big way, both on the facts of the law and in how awful the consequences will be, but at least they’re fighting against something they think is dangerous and flat-out wrong. At least they have a principle. But honestly? If the point is that this will make it easier to do get elected or will situate you better for some other political fight down the road?

Just… no.

Do. Your. Damn. Jobs.

And in case that’s a little too subtle: