Praxiteles

The taking of Christ part 4:

The taking of Christ part 2:

From the City Journal:

Benjamin A. Plotinsky
The Varieties of Liberal Enthusiasm
The Left’s political zealotry increasingly resembles religious experience.

Cast your mind back to January 2009, when Barack Obama became the president of the United States amid much rejoicing. The hosannas—covering the inauguration was “the honor of our lifetimes,” said MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews—by then seemed unsurprising. Over the course of a long campaign, hyperbolic rhetoric had become commonplace, so much so that online wags had started calling Obama “the One”—a reference to the spate of recent science-fiction movies, especially The Matrix, that used that term to designate a messiah.

It all seems so long ago now, as one contemplates President Obama’s plummeting approval ratings and a suddenly resurgent Republican Party. Yet it’s worth looking closely and seriously at the election-year enthusiasm of media elites and other Obamaphiles, much of which was indeed, as the wags recognized, quasi-religious. The surprising fact is that the American Left, for all its claims to being “reality-based” and secular, is often animated by the passions, motivations, and imagery that one normally associates with religion. The better we understand this religious impulse, the better we will understand liberal America’s likely trajectory in the years to come.

The first signs of the spiritual zeal that would eventually play a significant part in Obama’s election came not from Washington or Chicago but from Hollywood. Our moviemakers are adept at measuring the zeitgeist of the nation—of its liberal half, anyway—and are a powerful force in shaping it. And for more than a decade, they’ve been churning out what critics call “black-angel” movies. These films feature a white protagonist guided to enlightenment by a black character, usually of divine or supernatural origin or, at the very least, in touch with spiritual experiences that the main character lacks. With the black angel’s help, the white hero finds salvation.

The genre includes, to name just a few, The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), in which Will Smith—playing a caddie who is really, the film hints, God—restores Matt Damon’s golf game and love life; Bruce Almighty (2003), in which Morgan Freeman, as God, bestows his powers on a manic Jim Carrey; and the awful What Dreams May Come (1998), in which Cuba Gooding, Jr. is a wise soul guiding Robin Williams through the afterlife. These movies have been numerous enough, David Sterritt points out in the Christian Science Monitor, to confuse TV’s buffoonish Homer Simpson: in one episode, “Homer mistook a black man in a white suit for an angelic visitor, all because (according to his embarrassed wife) he’d been seeing too many movies lately.”

Far and away the best of the black-angel films is Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile (1999), based on a novel by Stephen King, whose knack for setting his finger on the cultural pulse has made him a multimillionaire. The basso profundo Michael Clarke Duncan plays John Coffey (note the initials), a gigantic black man wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of two little girls in Depression-era Louisiana and sentenced to death; Tom Hanks plays Paul Edgecomb, a prison guard who discovers that Coffey is not only innocent but also a Christlike miracle worker. Coffey’s laying-on of hands restores a dead mouse to life, cures Edgecomb of a bladder infection, and heals the warden’s wife’s brain cancer. Shortly before he is executed—the jeering of the girls’ anguished parents and the weeping of the prison guards who know the truth recall the account of the Crucifixion in Luke—Coffey has this exchange with a tortured Edgecomb:

Edgecomb. Tell me what you want me to do. You want me to take you out of here? Just let you run away? See how far you could get?

Coffey. Why would you do such a foolish thing?

Edgecomb. On the day of my judgment, when I stand before God, and He asks me why did I—did I kill one of His true miracles—what am I going to say? That it was my job? . . .

Coffey. You tell God the Father it was a kindness you done. . . . I want it to be over and done with. I do. . . . I’m tired of people being ugly to each other. I’m tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day.

The writer or director of a black-angel film recognizes the unspeakable injustices once perpetrated by his country on black people; he wants to be forgiven the sins of his fathers. If he is simply a comedian, he makes Bruce Almighty, casting a black man as God in a sort of lighthearted flattery. If his waters run deeper, he understands that no plum role can atone for the crimes that weigh on him. Instinctively, he realizes what thinkers from Aristotle to Marcel Mauss have known: that whenever a gift is given, the prestige of the giver increases and that of the recipient declines. So he tells a story in which a black man gives the greatest gift of all, suffering—like Jesus in Christian theology—for others’ sins, in fact demanding to suffer, and by demanding, forgiving. White America is pardoned its wrongs, while black America, by pardoning, is elevated to godhood.

Are these movies ultimately condescending to blacks? After all, the white protagonist, the person who will be saved or damned according to his decisions, is invariably more interesting than the serene black angel hovering nearby. Indeed, the condescension, if such it is, is a cinematic version of affirmative action—a denial to blacks of Everyman’s struggle for salvation; a magnanimous extension to them of paradise.

And this brings us to Barack Obama’s liberal support during the campaign, which was decidedly different from the regular media bias that conservatives often complain about. “I haven’t seen a politician get this kind of walk-on-water coverage since Colin Powell a dozen years ago flirted with making a run for the White House,” said Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz on Meet the Press in February 2007, a day after Obama announced his candidacy. “I mean, it is amazing . . . a guy with all of two years’ experience in the United States Senate getting coverage that ranges from positive to glowing to even gushing.”

“Walk-on-water coverage” was exactly right, and though the media seldom framed their worship quite that explicitly, the exceptions were telling. Here’s San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford on June 6, 2008:

Many spiritually advanced people I know . . . identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.
San Francisco, you shrug. Consider, then, what Samantha Fennell, formerly an associate publisher of Elle, wrote on the magazine’s website a month later:

Barack Obama must be elected President of the United States. . . . I have thrown myself into a new world—one in which fluffy chatter and frivolous praise are replaced by a get-to-the-point directness and disciple-like devotion. It’s intense and intoxicating. . . . When I attended my second “Obama Live” fund-raiser last week at New York City’s Grand Hyatt, . . . I was on my feet as Senator Obama entered the room. Fate had blessed me in this moment. . . . In a moment of divine intervention, he saw me,
. . . grabbed my hand, and gave that brilliant smile of his. I literally said out loud to the woman next to me who witnessed my good fate, “I’ll never wash this hand again.”

Fashion writers, you say. But here is Evan Thomas, a Newsweek editor, on the show Hardball with Chris Matthews last June:

Thomas. Reagan was all about America. He talked about it. Obama is, “We are above that now, we are not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial, we stand for something.” I mean, in a way, Obama is standing above the country, above the world. He’s sort of God.

Matthews. Yeah.

Thomas. He’s going to bring all different sides together.

True, Thomas wasn’t so much evincing Morford’s and Fennell’s giddy devotion as describing, perhaps too admiringly, one of the ways Obama elicited it.

The deifications and hagiologies were particularly overt in the remarks of prominent black figures. Filmmaker Spike Lee, predicting an Obama victory, implicitly compared the candidate with Christ: “You’ll have to measure time by ‘Before Obama’ and ‘After Obama.’ . . . Everything’s going to be affected by this seismic change in the universe.” Jesse Jackson, Jr. called Obama’s securing the Democratic nomination “so extraordinary that another chapter could be added to the Bible to chronicle its significance.” Louis Farrakhan went one better, according to the website WorldNetDaily: “Barack has captured the youth. . . . That’s a sign. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking.”

The website ObamaMessiah.blogspot.com has diligently chronicled many more instances of such talk, which seems positively cringe-making in 2010. It seems unfair to blame Obama himself for most of it, though he surely set the tone with a brand of mystical campaign rhetoric unfamiliar to presidential politics—in this country, anyway. In February 2008, a concerned Joe Klein of Time noted: “There was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism—‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for’—of the Super Tuesday speech and the recent turn of the Obama campaign.” (The full quotation: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”) To this day, BarackObama.com displays at the top of its homepage the following words (attributed to Obama, though nobody seems to have been able to pinpoint the speech): “I’M ASKING YOU TO BELIEVE. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington . . . I’m asking you to believe in yours.”

Whether or not the Obama campaign realized it, that demand for faith was an updated echo of innumerable passages in the Gospels: “Everything is possible for him who believes”; “Whoever lives and believes in me will never die”; and so on. If the first component of the Obama creed was faith, though, the second was surely hope—the audacious hope whose name famously adorns one of the president’s two autobiographies. We need only add charity to have what Catholics call the three Theological Virtues, which Paul mentions in First Corinthians. Perhaps we should not have been surprised, then, when a day before his inauguration, Obama breathtakingly upended the meaning of Martin Luther King Day, transforming a holiday devoted to the memory of a civil rights leader—and perhaps also to such ideas as equality, tolerance, and the evils of racism—into a day of public service. “It’s not a day just to pause and reflect—it’s a day to act,” Obama announced. “Today, ordinary citizens will gather together all across the country to participate in the more than 11,000 service projects they’ve created using USAservice.org. And I ask the American people to turn today’s efforts into an ongoing commitment to enriching the lives of others in their communities, their cities, and their country.”

An astute moviegoer could have predicted the candidate’s manner: confident but calm, eloquent but modest. Obama wasn’t a loud race-baiter like Al Sharpton; he was a deep-voiced, serious, almost sad, observer, a black angel come to forgive the iniquity of guilt-racked liberal America.

How can we explain this sudden, brief eruption of messianic fervor into our politics? Perhaps by looking at the religious climate of the country and the world, which have been witnessing a religious revival over the past 30 years. Whether you call this phenomenon the “revenge of God,” as the French scholar Gilles Kepel does, or “resacralization,” as the sociologists do, or echo the title of the recent book by Economist editors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back, the evidence is hard to ignore. In the United States, as everyone knows, the Religious Right has made huge advances since the 1970s. During the same period, what Kepel calls “re-Islamization” movements have appeared in the Middle East and beyond, aiming “to propagate Islam everywhere until humanity was converted into ‘ummanity.’ ” All over the world, Christianity is growing—in particular, Pentecostalism, a denomination just a century old that, along with “related charismatic movements,” now claims a stunning 500 million adherents, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reports. To make a long story short, Peter Berger and Anton Zijderfeld’s In Praise of Doubt sees just one geographical exception to a “furiously religious world”—Western and Central Europe. And even there, Kepel tells us, a “significant re-Christianization movement” has appeared in France in the form of Pentecostal Catholicism.

In America, this revival is reflected in popular culture, too, and not just in black-angel movies. Recall the trend that the bloggers were referring to when they dubbed Obama “the One”: over the past few decades, a slew of science-fiction movies, from E.T. to the second Star Wars trilogy to Superman Returns, have drawn parts of their plots from the New Testament (see “How Science Fiction Found Religion,” Winter 2009). Or look at the recent tattoo craze, in which the most popular designs are not the working-class hearts and arrows of yesteryear but mystical, so-called tribal, patterns. During the seventies and eighties, writes Margo DeMello in Bodies of Inscription, “tattooing began, for the first time, to be connected with emerging issues like self-actualization, social and personal transformation, ecological awareness, and spiritual growth.”

On what Matthew Arnold famously called the “sea of faith,” then, it may be that a rising tide raises all ships. If reawakened religious feeling can prompt people to inject messiahs into their movies and dyes into their skin, why shouldn’t it prompt them to vote for a black angel? Perhaps we should simply identify Obamaism as one more manifestation of a wider resurgence of spiritual enthusiasm—a manifestation that differs from the others merely in having a political component—and stop worrying about it.

Yet the political component is of immense importance. If twentieth-century history teaches us anything, it’s that political religions spell trouble. Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism, and Nazism aren’t just called “political religions” by scholars today. In all three cases, observers at the time recognized and worried about the movements’ religious natures. Those natures were no accident; Mussolini, for instance, called his ideology “not only a faith, but a religion that is conquering the laboring masses of the Italian people.”

One reason that observers saw the great totalitarianisms as religious was that each had its idol: Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Lenin in Russia, followed by Stalin. Take Grigory Zinoviev’s description of Lenin: “He is really the chosen one of millions. He is the leader by the Grace of God. He is the authentic figure of a leader such as is born once in 500 years.” Stalin’s cult of personality was far more developed and sometimes explicitly idolatrous, as in the poem that addressed the despot as “O Thou mighty one, chief of the peoples, Who callest man to life, Who awakest the earth to fruitfulness.” And in Italy, writes the historian Michael Burleigh, “intellectual sycophants and propagandists characterised [Mussolini] as a prodigy of genius in terms that would not have embarrassed Stalin: messiah, saviour, man of destiny, latterday Caesar, Napoleon, and so forth.”

To point out these words’ uncomfortable similarity to the journalists’ praises of Obama is not to equate the throngs who bowed down to totalitarian dictators with even the most worshipful Obamaphiles. But the manner of worship is related, as perhaps it must be in any human society that chooses to adore a human being. The widespread renaming of villages, schools, and factories after Stalin, for example, finds its modern-day democratic parallel in a rash of schools that have already rechristened themselves after Obama, to say nothing of the hundreds of young sentimentalists who informally adopted the candidate’s middle name during the presidential race. Even the Obama campaign’s ubiquitous logo—the letter O framing a rising sun—would not have surprised the scholar Eric Voegelin. In The Political Religions (1938), Voegelin traced rulers who employed the image of the sun—a symbol of “the radiation of power along a hierarchy of rulers and offices that ranges from God at the top down to the subject at the bottom”—from the pharaoh Akhenaton to Louis XIV and eventually to Hitler.

The worship of a charismatic leader was just one reason that twentieth-century intellectuals regarded the great totalitarianisms as inherently religious. Another was their immense scope, which included not just matters traditionally considered public—war, taxes, even the offices of the welfare state—but also the private lives and practices of individuals. “The totalitarian movements which have arisen since World War I are fundamentally religious movements,” wrote the political scientist Waldemar Gurian in 1952, in part because they “cannot conceive of realms of life outside and beyond their control.” Sixteen years earlier, the legal scholar Marcel Prélot had commented that “the totalitarian state, naturally extending its field of action far beyond the recognized domain of the conventional state, claims to constitute both a political entity and an ethical and spiritual community, . . . the state itself being a church.”

Obamaism is far narrower, and far more benign, than that. But another strand of modern liberal politics encroaches so far on the private sphere that it begins to resemble the political religions. On the excellent webcast Uncommon Knowledge, Czech president Václav Klaus recently compared “two ideologies” that were “structurally very similar. They are against individual freedom. They are in favor of centralistic masterminding of our fates. They are both very similar in telling us what to do, how to live, how to behave, what to eat, how to travel, what we can do and what we cannot do.” The first of Klaus’s “two ideologies” was Communism—a system with which he was deeply familiar, having participated in the Velvet Revolution in 1989. The second was environmentalism.

Klaus could have expanded his list. Environmentalism does indeed tell its adherents “what to eat” (pesticide-free organic food, preferably grown nearby to cut down on trucking) and “how to travel” (by public transportation or, better yet, bicycle). But it also lays down rules on nearly every aspect of life in a consumer economy: how to wash your clothes (seldom); how to wash yourself (take a shower, not a bath, and use a low-flow showerhead); how to light your house (with fluorescent bulbs); how to choose your TV (look for the Energy Star logo!); how to go to the bathroom (with high-efficiency toilets and recycled paper); how to invest, clean, sleep, and dress (in environmentally friendly companies, with nontoxic chemicals, on sheets made of “sustainable fibers,” and in clothes made of the same); and even how to procreate (Greenpeace has issued a guide to “environmentally friendly sex”).

Think about the life that a truly conscientious environmentalist must lead! Compared with it, the devout Muslim’s five daily prayers and the pious Jew’s carefully regulated diet are a cakewalk. What the British historian Alfred Cobban wrote about totalitarianism—that it “takes the spiritual discipline of a religious order and imposes it on forty or sixty or a hundred million people”—applies perfectly to environmentalism, except for the part about imposition. And there, one might give Jonah Goldberg’s answer in Liberal Fascism: “You may trust that environmentalists have no desire to translate these voluntary suggestions into law, but I have no such confidence given the track record of similar campaigns in the past.” Recycling mandates come to mind, as does the federal law that will impose silly-looking spiral lightbulbs on us all by 2014.

There’s also a close resemblance between the environmental and biblical views of history, as the late novelist Michael Crichton pointed out in a widely reprinted speech. “Environmentalism is in fact a perfect twenty-first-century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths,” Crichton said. “There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all.” That judgment day currently assumes the form of various global-warming disasters that will happen unless we immediately perform still more rituals. Never mind that the science so urgently instructing us to reduce carbon emissions—thus hobbling economic growth and prosperity around the world—is so young, and so poorly understood, that it can’t explain why global warming seems to have stalled over the last decade. Far more persuasive is the argument from faith: we’d better repent, because the End is nigh.

Barack Obama doubtless tapped into environmentalists’ spiritual longings when he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination. “Generations from now,” he proclaimed, “we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.” Italics mine; grandiloquent prophecy his.

Religion has long been a powerful force in American politics, of course, for good and ill. The difference with the more traditional varieties of religion was the open acknowledgment that they were religious. The First Amendment promised that they could never become established churches; generations’ worth of jurisprudence closely regulated the way they could interact with government. And when a campaigning politician acknowledged forthrightly that he derived a policy from, say, his understanding of the Bible, his potential constituents understood that, however reasonable the policy might be, what underlay it was faith, not reason. The emerging liberal religions are very different: as emotionally captivating for some, at least for a time, as Christianity or Judaism, but untrammeled by any constitutional amendment; as grounded in faith, but pretending to dwell in the realms of reason and science.

Obama’s speedy fall from godhood since his election has been encouraging, perhaps a sign of America’s traditional reluctance to embrace a Great Leader. But it’s far too early in his administration to assume that the fall will be permanent. Radical environmentalism, moreover, will surely be around long after Obama has left the White House. And the threat of other charismatic leaders will remain as well—a troubling lesson that we can learn from no less a religious authority than the Bible. A nation that bends the knee once, as the book of Judges bleakly demonstrates, is all too likely to bend it again.

Benjamin A. Plotinsky is managing editor of City Journal.

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From the Financial Times (31 July 2010):

Tariq Ramadan’s ‘Quest for Meaning’
Review by Karen Armstrong

Published: July 31 2010 00:36 | Last updated: July 31 2010 00:36

The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism, by Tariq Ramadan, Allen Lane RRP£25, 224 pages

I was fully engaged with this book from the very first sentence – “This book is a journey and an initiation” – because an initiation is exactly what we need at this perilous moment in history. Like so many religious terms, the word initiation has lost much of its force in modern times. But in all the great spiritual traditions, initiation signified the creation, often painfully acquired, of a new self. Classical yoga, for example, was not an aerobic exercise but an initiation that consisted of a systematic dismantling of egotism. Those yogins who succeeded in extracting the “I” from their thinking found that, without the distorting filter of selfishness, they perceived the world quite differently.

Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University and author of The Quest for Meaning, is convinced that we are all experiencing a profound loss of confidence. “Fear, doubt and distrust are imperceptibly colonising our hearts and minds. And so the other becomes our negative mirror, and the other’s difference allows us to define ourselves, to ‘identify’ ourselves,” he writes. Ramadan has experienced this personally. A powerful voice for reform in the Muslim world, he is routinely vilified in the west – often by liberals who decry the absence of any such “reformation” in Islam. The suspicion and insecurity that have come to dominate our politics frequently prevents us from seeing others clearly; the “other” becomes our shadow-self: a projection of everything that we believe that we are not – or fear subliminally that we are.

The “toleration” that was the watchword of the Enlightenment philosophers is not enough, Ramadan argues. Toleration literally means “to suffer” or “to endure” the presence of others and implies a relationship of domination; the powerful are requested “to moderate their strength and to limit their ability to do harm”. But such grudging acceptance is detrimental to both the person who tolerates and the one whose presence is merely endured. What is required is respect, based on a relationship of equality. Tolerance can “reduce the other to a mere presence” but “respect opens up to us the complexity of his being”.

It is always a temptation to imagine that my truth is the only truth. But, Ramadan insists that there are universally shared truths that are arrived at differently in many systems of thought, secular and religious. If our choice of our own truth is at all meaningful, we must experience other truths as truthful: if our own truth is forced upon us by its uniqueness, it would lose its meaning. This perception of diversity is crucial to Hinduism, Buddhism, and the more profound forms of monotheism. The Koran, for example, endorses pluralism: “Had God so willed, he would have made you one single community.” (5.48).

This is a prophetic, passionate and insightful book. Ramadan’s message is urgent: our very survival depends upon our ability to build a harmonious, respectful global community. We have now entered the realm of emotional politics dominated by instantaneous public reactions. In this age of global communications, we are possessed by tidal waves of global emotions that inspired the mindless violence in the Muslim world after the publication of the Danish cartoons and the tearful ritual gatherings after the death of Princess Diana. Voters are now less interested in ideas and convictions but are mobilised instead “by their fears, their need for security, reassurance, comfort and clearly defined points of reference and identities”.

With populations kept in a constant state of alert, there is a mass feeling of victimisation, which erodes all sense of responsibility. Victims feel justified in blaming a “dangerous ‘other’ who is at once so far away, so close at hand and even among us that we no longer know who ‘we’ are”. The threat of terror is so great that ignoring human rights has become acceptable, so that surveillance, the loss of the right to privacy, summary extraditions and “civilised” torture camps are beginning to be taken for granted.

The remedy, Ramadan is convinced, is to reshape ourselves at a profound level. Time and again, he returns to this theme. The initiations devised by the religious, philosophers and the arts enabled practitioners to transcend the narrow confines of self-regarding, fearful egotism, in which “we” become the measure of all things. We need to understand what drives us, analyse our emotional blocks, wounds and anxieties and master them. Instead of blaming the other, we need to develop the critical ability to stand back and speak out against the abuses of “our” side, taking back full responsibility for our actions. We have to reacquaint ourselves with history, realising that there is no such thing as a “pure” personal or civilisational identity and that we have all been shaped by diverse influences.

But this, as Ramadan acknowledges, will not be easy. These days we expect instant transformation, instant makeovers, and the change wrought by conventional initiation is slow, incremental and imperceptible. We have lost the habit of inwardness and of open-hearted listening, and confuse emotion with spirituality. Ramadan is an important voice and his message could not be more relevant. But many will feel baffled by his eloquent plea for an empathy that makes room for the other in their minds and hearts: they would rather be right.

Initiation involves far more than an intellectual acceptance of a position; it has to reach a level deeper than the cerebral, so that we lay aside habitual modes of thought, abandon self-serving certainties, and realise how little we know about one another. If we cannot work assiduously to cultivate a profound sense of the unique sacredness of every single human being, we will enter a moral void. To begin their personal initiation, perhaps, readers should meditate on some of Ramadan’s words and make them their own. They would do well to start with his dedication of the book: “To the semi-colon”, which “in a world of simplified communications and simplistic binary judgments … reconciles us with the plurality of propositions, and with the welcome nuances of the sentence and of complex realities.”

Karen Armstrong is author of ‘The Case for God’ (Vintage)

Opicinus de Canistris (1296-1351)

Born in Pavia, ordained as a priest and trained in the arts of book illumination and cartography, Opicinus de Canistris served as a scribe in the Papal Curia in Avignon. In 1334, he suffered from a stroke-like illness that rendered his right arm nearly useless, but he still managed to draw. His illness, he felt, had brought him a vision from God, and thereafter he worked obsessively to develop and convey his unique understanding of the divine order through pictures. His labors yielded, among other works, a portfolio of fifty-two drawings on twenty-seven pieces of unbound parchment. Almost all of these strange and evocative works use complicated diagrammatic frames, medieval maps – both mappaemundi and portolan charts – and allegorized representations of the human figure to reveal the relationship between abstract cosmology and the human world. As a whole, they represent an extraordinary instance of drawing used in the Middle Ages as a medium of intensely personal self-expression, albeit one in service to the divine.

Otto Georg von Simson:
The way in which the mediaeval imagination wrought the symbols of its visions appears, more clearly perhaps than in the conventional imagery of Christian iconography, in the strange designs by which an Avignon cleric, Opicinus de Canistris, sought to represent the Christian cosmos. While he represents the universal Church as edificium templi Dei, he blends the female allegory of Ecclesia into a geometrical pattern that looks much like the ground plan of a church and helps one understand how the mediaeval mind envisaged the symbolic relation between the temple and the shape of man. Opicinus was an eccentric; his drawings can hardly claim to be works of art. They are nevertheless characteristic of the mode by which the Middle Ages created its symbols.

From the City Journal

Nicole Gelinas
Eminent Domain as Central Planning
Wielding creative definitions of blight, New York runs roughshod over property rights and uproots viable neighborhoods.

Free markets are out of vogue. The unfortunate lesson that policymakers have learned over the past two years is that a big, brainy government that supposedly creates jobs is superior to irrational, faceless markets that just create catastrophic errors. So Washington has seized on the financial and economic crises to enlarge its role in managing the economy—controlling the insurance giant AIG, for example, and trying to maintain high housing prices through tax credits and “mortgage modification” programs.

But when it comes to central economic planning, New York City and State are way ahead of the feds. Empire State politicians from both parties already believe that it’s their responsibility to replace people and businesses in allocating the economy’s resources. They’re even confident that their duty to design a perfect economy trumps their constituents’ right to hold private property. Three current cases of eminent-domain abuse in New York show how serious they are—and how much damage such government intrusiveness can wreak.

Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights, industrial and forlorn for much of the late twentieth century, was looking better by 2003. Government was doing its proper job: crime was down, and the public-transit commute to midtown Manhattan, where many Brooklynites worked, was just 25 minutes. That meant that the private sector could do its job, too, rejuvenating the neighborhood after urban decay. Developers had bought 1920s-era factories and warehouses and converted them into condos for buyers like Daniel Goldstein, who paid $590,000 for a place in a former dry-goods warehouse in 2003. These new residents weren’t put off by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s railyards nearby, and they liked the hardwood floors and airy views typical of such refurbished buildings. They also settled in alongside longtime residents in little houses on quiet streets. Wealthier newcomers joined regulars at Freddy’s, a bar that predated Prohibition. Small businesses continued to employ skilled laborers in low-rise industrial buildings.

But Prospect Heights interested another investor: developer Bruce Ratner, who thought that the area would be perfect for high-rise apartments and office towers. Ratner didn’t want to do the piecemeal work of cajoling private owners into selling their properties, however. Instead, he appealed to the central-planning instincts of New York’s political class. Use the state’s power to seize the private property around the railyards, he told Governor George Pataki, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz. Transfer me the property, and let me buy the railyards themselves below the market price. I’ll build my development, Atlantic Yards, around a world-class basketball arena.

New York, in short, would give Ratner an unfair advantage, and he would return some of the profits reaped from that advantage by creating the “economic benefits” favored by the planning classes. Architecture critics loved Frank Gehry’s design for the arena. Race activist Al Sharpton loved the promise of thousands of minority jobs. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) loved the prospect of administering the more than 2,000 units of “affordable” housing planned for the development, as well as the $1.5 million in loans and grants that Ratner gave it outright. When the state held public hearings in 2006 to decide whether to approve Atlantic Yards, hundreds of supplicants, hoping for a good job or a cheap apartment, easily drowned out the voices of people like Goldstein, who wanted nothing from the government except the right to keep their homes.

Can New York legally seize private property and transfer it to a developer purely for economic development? The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution allows the government to take property for a “public use,” long understood to mean such things as roads and railways, so long as it makes “just compensation” for them. Starting around the 1930s, a number of court cases began to broaden “public use” to include more nebulous “public purposes,” such as slum clearance. And in 2005, in Kelo v. New London, the Supreme Court decided that these “public purposes” could even include economic development. But New York’s constitution theoretically holds the state to a higher standard. In 1967, Empire State voters voted not to add a “public purpose” clause to their constitution, preferring to stick with the stricter requirement of “public use.”

The state hasn’t let this inconvenience derail its plans for Prospect Heights, however. For seven decades, courts have let New York seize and demolish slum housing if it’s blighted—which New York State defines as “substandard” and “unsanitary.” So the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), a public entity of New York State, decided that the “public use” of Atlantic Yards would be blight removal. The city had already designated part of the neighborhood as “blighted” 40 years earlier, long before its resurgence. As for the rest, the UDC commissioned consultants—previously employed by Ratner—who soon returned the requisite blight finding.

But wait, you say: people don’t buy half-million-dollar apartments in “substandard” or “unsanitary” neighborhoods. You’re right; that’s why the consultants had to stretch. In the 1930s, as Goldstein’s attorney, Matthew Brinckerhoff, pointed out, “substandard” and “unsanitary” meant “families and children dying from rampant fires and pestilence” in tuberculosis-ridden firetraps. In 2006, by contrast, the UDC’s consultants found “substandard” conditions in isolated graffiti, cracked sidewalks, and “underutilization”—that is, when property owners weren’t using their land to generate the social and economic benefits that the government desired.

In New York, this creative definition of blight is the new central-planning model. Consultants have also cited “underutilization” in West Harlem, where the city’s Economic Development Corporation wants to take land from private owners and hand it to Columbia University for an expansion project. Says Norman Siegel, who represents the owners: “A private property owner has the right to determine the best productive use of his property. It’s not a right to be ceded to any government.”

And in Queens, the Bloomberg administration is preparing a similar argument to grab swaths of Willets Point, an area adjacent to Citi Field that’s populated with auto-repair shops. The city’s recent “request for qualifications” from would-be developers drew a sharp response from the people who owned the land: “We . . . hold the most significant qualification of all: we own the properties. We are motivated to improve and use our own properties, consistent with the American free market system. We would have done so in spectacular fashion already, had the city upheld its end of the bargain by providing our neighborhood with essential services and infrastructure.” Instead, the city has done the opposite, letting streets disintegrate into ditches to bolster its blight finding. The perversity is astonishing: rather than doing its own job of maintaining public infrastructure and public safety, the government wants to do the private sector’s job—and is going about it by starving that private sector of public resources.

Property owners have looked to the judiciary to check the overweening grasp of the legislative and executive branches. But courts can be wrong for longer than it takes to save a neighborhood. In Brooklyn, Goldstein and his neighbors have lost their lawsuits—most recently, in New York’s highest court, the court of appeals. In November, the court decided 6–1 that “all that is at issue is a reasonable difference of opinion as to whether the area in question is in fact substandard and insanitary. This is not a sufficient predicate for us to supplant [the state’s] determination.” The court essentially abdicated its duty to protect property owners from the governor and the Legislature.

Nine days later, the West Harlem owners fared better in a lower court. The first department of the state supreme court’s appellate division found, 3–2, that the blight studies that the city and state had commissioned to justify their rapacity were “bereft of facts”—and further tainted by the fact that one blight consultant also worked for Columbia. The blight designation “is mere sophistry,” the majority concluded, “hatched to justify the employment of eminent domain.” The court further noted that “even a cursory examination of the study reveals the idiocy of considering things like unpainted block walls or loose awning supports as evidence of a blighted neighborhood. Virtually every neighborhood in the five boroughs will yield similar instances of disrepair.”

The selective and arbitrary process that deems one neighborhood blighted while leaving a similar neighborhood alone also violates due process, the justices went on, as “one is compelled to guess what subjective factors will be employed in each claim of blight.” Another violation: the government responded poorly to property owners’ document requests under the state’s freedom of information law, hampering their right to mount a solid case. Such requests are particularly important in eminent-domain cases because New York property owners don’t enjoy the right to a trial with a discovery phase, but must go straight to appeals court—a seventies-era “reform” meant to speed up development projects.

The Harlem owners were able to convince the lower court partly because they had commissioned their own “no-blight” study. “We said, ‘Let’s create our own record . . . as a counterweight,’ ” said Siegel. The owners also presented as evidence a government study, performed before Columbia showed interest in the land, that West Harlem was revitalizing itself. This is all very well—but property rights shouldn’t depend on owners’ creativity and resourcefulness in proving beyond all reasonable doubt that their land isn’t blighted.

Further, the lower-court ruling is a tenuous victory. The case is proceeding to the court of appeals, and though Siegel is “cautiously optimistic” that it will rule in his clients’ favor, there’s no way to be sure. Meantime, Goldstein and fellow residents and business owners in Brooklyn have asked the court of appeals to reconsider its Atlantic Yards ruling after it rules on Harlem. But the starkly different decisions in the Harlem and Brooklyn cases, coming so close together, have pointed up the need for the Legislature and Governor David Paterson to create clear standards for the government’s power to seize property.

An obvious step is to dispense with “underutilization” as a justification for a taking. As the court noted in the Harlem case, “the time has come to categorically reject eminent domain takings solely based on underutilization. This concept . . . transforms the purpose for blight removal from the elimination of harmful social and economic conditions . . . to a policy affirmatively requiring the ultimate commercial development of all property.”

But the state should go even further and eliminate blight itself as a justification for property seizure. Since the sixties, when creeping blight seemed to threaten the city’s existence, New York has learned that the real remedy for “substandard” conditions is good policing and infrastructure, which create the conditions for people and companies to move to neighborhoods and improve them. As for 1930s-style “unsanitary” conditions, modern health care, infrastructure, and building codes have eliminated them. Today, the biggest risks to public health are often on government property: dangerous elevators in public housing, for instance, or the 2007 fire that killed two firefighters in the Deutsche Bank building in lower Manhattan, owned by the city and state since 9/11. Unless it needs property to build a road, a subway line, a water-treatment plant, or a similar piece of truly public infrastructure—or unless a piece of land poses a clear and present danger to the public—the state should keep its hands off people’s property.

Eminent-domain abuse, dangerous though it is, is a symptom of a deeper problem: government officials’ belief that central planning is superior to free-market competition. That’s what New York has decided in each of its current eminent-domain cases. In Brooklyn, high-rise towers and an arena are better than a historic low-rise neighborhood; in Harlem, an elite university’s expansion project is better than continued private investment; and in Willets Point, Queens, almost anything is better than grubby body shops.

To cure yourself of the notion that the government can do better than free markets in producing economic vitality, stroll around Atlantic Yards. You’ll walk past three-story clapboard homes nestled next to elegantly corniced row houses—the supposedly blighted residences that the state plans to demolish. You’ll see the Spalding Building, a stately sporting-goods-factory-turned-condo-building that, thanks to Ratner and his government allies, has been slated for demolition and now stands empty. You’ll peer up at Goldstein’s nearly empty apartment house, scheduled to be condemned and destroyed.

And you’ll see how wrecking balls have already made the neighborhood gap-toothed. A vacant lot, for example, now sprawls where the historic Ward Bakery warehouse was, until recently, a candidate for private-sector reinvestment. Today, Prospect Heights finally shows what the state and city governments want everyone to see: decay. The decay, though, isn’t the work of callous markets that left the neighborhood to perish. It’s the work of a developer wielding state power to press property owners to sell their land “voluntarily.” It’s also the result of a half-decade’s worth of government-created uncertainty, which stopped genuine private investment in its tracks.

Such uncertainty offers a crucial lesson to the rest of the nation, and not just in the area of eminent domain. Whenever government fails to confine itself to a limited role in the economy, it creates similar uncertainty. Even when the results aren’t as poignantly obvious as they are in Brooklyn, the private economy suffers—whether it’s financial or auto bailouts unfairly benefiting some firms at the expense of others, or mortgage bailouts unfairly benefiting some home buyers at the expense of others. Free markets may be imperfect, but they’re far better than the alternative—the blight of arbitrary government control and the uncertainty that it creates.

Research for this article was supported by the Brunie Fund for New York Journalism.

Nicole Gelinas, a City Journal contributing editor and the Searle Freedom Trust Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is a Chartered Financial Analyst and the author of After the Fall.

Yale University press has just released this book on irish Sculpture which looks to particularily significant:

Paula Murphy, the leading expert on Irish sculpture, offers an extensive survey of the history of sculpture in Ireland in the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on the large public works produced during the Victorian period. The works of such major figures as Patrick MacDowell, John Henry Foley, Thomas Kirk and Thomas Farrell are discussed – as well as works by a host of lesser-known sculptors. Lavishly illustrated, the book covers the work of many Irish sculptors who worked abroad, particularly in London, and the work of English sculptors, including John Flaxman, Francis Chantrey, E. H. Baily, and Richard Westmacott, who worked in Ireland. Murphy makes extensive use of contemporary documentation, much of it from newspapers, to present the sculptors and their work in the religious and political context of their time.

On St Mel’s Cathedral, Longford

http://www.rte.ie/news/2010/0717/9news_av.html?2789247,null,230

This is the Lady Chapel whose altar was dislocated by the former president Michael Ledwith so that a number of American dononrs could see him as he proceeded to present them with the “medal” of St Patrick.

Bourges Cathedral: