The Lost 28th Chapter of Leviticus Explains The Rules for Riding Shotgun

BY STEVE ETHERIDGE
McSweeney's Internet Tendency

1 And this is the law ye shall follow when traveling with brothers, whether by chariot, camel, donkey, cart pulled by slave, shoulders of slave, small boat, leviathan, silverback gorilla, or another personal conveyance. 2 The owner of the vehicle shall always be the pilot, unless leprosy hath taken his legs. The pilot must always wear a safety girdle. 3 He who wishes to have the second-best seat may only declare so after leaving the door of the temple, the tax collector's house, a den of iniquity, or any other place. He, too, shall wear a safety girdle. 4 If two men declare the seat at the same time and neither agrees to abide in the back, they shall each kill one bullock and offer its head at the altar. 5 He whose flames turn blue first shall hold the right to the seat. 6 If they turn blue at the same time, call on the elders of Israel to judgeth a rematch. 7 If thy bullock's eyeballs should burst at any time, thou art the winner. 8 If he who slew the bullock forgets to sprinkle blood before the altar, he not only forfeits the seat but dies. 9 If a man loses the contest yet refuses to relinquish his seat, he will surely suffer. 10 He who fails to follow the commands shall offer his youngest daughter as a slave and honey-gatherer to his companion, and if he hath no daughter, he then must scoopeth out his wife's womb with a melon baller and present it on a platter. 11 May it also be known that if it is a man's birthday, he holds the right to the seat. This is the law. 12 Neither women nor slaves may ever have the second-best seat. 13 Neither shall those with blemishes or those who have partaken in the following foods: any cloven-hoofed creatures, the weasel, the tortoise, the talking lizard, cobra jerky, imitation manna, cats born on odd days, and uncircumcised swallows. 14 Those sitting in the worst seats must not sing songs that annoyeth the pilot, nor shall they dangle false idols from the mirrors. 15 If three men are riding on a camel, they shall follow the same rules but shall take long, hard looks at themselves, because people will suspect they come from Sodom. 16 These are the commandments that have been passed on to the children of Israel, or to anyone else's kids, for that matter.

This Coming Election: What Do Evangelicals Want? (Part III) A Reponse to an Evangelical Obama Voter

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Yesterday I posted a letter from an Evangelical Obama voter here.

Today is Part III of the series that began here.

Dear Evangelical Obama Voter,

You are a good friend.

We work together on many important projects and I am thankful that you can model such an irenic attitude in our disagreements. No Christian should believe politics is all important and in our political disagreements we must keep that in mind. Friendship is one of the things more valuable than politics and I have no intention of this discussion weakening ours!

We both agree that human life should be protected. We both agree that this protection should begin in the womb, but does not end there. Our disagreement comes, I think, on means and not ends.

I have responded paragraph by paragraph to your letter to make sure I get your wording right. I have edited your remarks to get to those parts where we strongly agree or disagree.

Our readers can find your whole unedited post here.

The parts in block quotes are from you and I wrote the rest of the text.

You say:

I spend most of my time in our beloved Christian “subculture”, so I’m familiar with the typical arguments about whether or not a Christian can in good conscience vote for a Democratic candidate, especially in the case of the abortion problem. And I must admit, of all political issues, this is the one that keeps me up at night! The cause of life should always be at the forefront of any Christian’s political action. However, I feel that all too often, the Church has allowed political leaders to turn it into a wedge issue, its sole purpose to keep rich men in power, and in doing so, we’ve also allowed the definition of the pro-life movement to shrink beyond biblical teachings. That seems to me to be a very dangerous thing to do.

There are three quick things to say in response.

First, a Christian can, of course, vote for a Democrat. There are pro-life Democrats. Sadly one of them is not running for president.

Second, I worry about phrases such as “keep rich men in power.”

Senator Obama and Senator McCain are rich by the standards of both our families and will raise millions from rich men.

What does that have to do with it?

Such class warfare rhetoric is dangerous stuff. It has been used to do great harm in my lifetime. No Christian can think the rich God’s favorites, but the rich should be treated with justice. There is always a temptation to give special favors to the rich, but there is also a temptation to appeal to the masses with bread and circuses in order to win power. Christians cannot go either way!

Third, I suspect both of us need to be careful about accidentally cutting our losses on certain issues due to peer pressure. Populist peer pressure, even from fellow Christians, is not the sort that impresses us.

Instead I suspect the two of us are more likely to care about the opinions of artists, university types, and those in our cultural set or at least the cultural set we admire. This does not have to be a bad thing, but it can be.

Those groups are not keen on even the best features of the religious right. We don’t get courage points for riling up people to whom we don’t relate well naturally!

You do try to take great care that your opinions aren’t being formed merely in reaction to others. You rightly imply the danger of just buying into the Christian sub-culture, but those charms were not that sort that tempt either of us!

If Christian “group think” is a danger, and it is, then so is “academic group think.”

We don’t want to avoid the worst excesses of the religious ghetto only to become “useful idiots” sitting in the back of secularism’s bus!

I know you agree about this, but it is a question of which is the greater danger to us.

Finally, abortion is a wedge issue, because it represents a real division in our nation. Senator McCain has voted in a pro-life manner all his life. Senator Obama has voted in a pro-choice manner. Their views on abortion are good windows into how they make decisions and whom they turn to for advice.

Any one issue can be used to obscure other bad things a candidate believes, but it isn’t obvious to me that this happening in this election.

For me some issues trump others in deciding where to cast my ballot.

If it became clear that one of the candidates was an anti-Semite, then it would not be a “wedge issue” to bring it up. No person of good faith would vote for a known anti-Semite regardless of his positions on other issues.

In my lifetime such a situation happened in France when the far-right candidate got into a presidential run-off with a socialist candidate.

The far-right candidate was an anti-Semite or something very much like one. If I had been a voter in France, I would voted against the “rightist” candidate with strong anti-Semite views and for the leftist candidate (whose other views distress me), because an anti-Semite is beyond the pale.

Senator Obama has a very extreme view on abortion.

The issue for traditional Christianity is not whether Senator Obama is a leftist or a Democrat. One can be a good Christian (obviously) and be both. Rather the key question is whether wanting “partial birth abortion” to be legal is a disqualification for winning a traditional Christian’s vote.

I think it is, but that is not just my view or that of the Evangelical sub-culture. The Roman Church has also come to this conclusion. The Orthodox Church also overwhelmingly condemns a “pro-choice” position. Like bigotry it is a deal killer for us.

Candidates might be able to persuade me regarding other views, but not about the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!

Traditional Christians sometimes do get stuck voting for candidates who are good on basic issues, but weak on other ones. I wish this were not so and that every candidate was a Bobby Jindal or a Sarah Palin. Sadly, most are not.

If Senator Obama were pro-life, then I believe he would win many Christian votes that he will lose because of his pro-choice ideology.

Using an example of a writer whose ideas we both detest, you say:

With one simple title, the book claims an inordinate level of exclusive truth for its teachings.

In much the same way, I think your statement about the Christian’s duty in this election does that. Because I know you, I know that you make that statement having thought through all the various ways in which the cause of life may be advanced and having decided that a vote for McCain is the most effective means of advancing that cause.

However, what your statement literally says is‚ “If you don’t agree with my idea of what kind of political action (i.e. the appointment of Supreme Court justices) will work to advance the cause of life, than you’re not a traditional Christian and you’re not truly concerned with the cause of life.”

That’s unsettling to me.

I agree (as you shall see) that Christians can disagree about means to ends. We both agree on the end (eliminating abortion), but disagree with the means that are best to do it.

Unfortunately Senator Obama does not agree with us on the “end.”

If Senator Obama also had as his goal making abortion illegal and simply had a different way of getting there, then we could agree to disagree. However, Senator Obama favors keeping abortion legal and is doing all he can to keep it so. Senator Obama has pledged to do this and I have no reason to doubt his word on this issue.

Senator Obama intends to keep abortion legal, but might fail (for complex reasons I am sure you could tell me).

Senator McCain intends to make abortion illegal, but might fail (for complex reasons I could tell you).

Surely you would agree that in judging a candidate intent matters? Neither of us would vote for a candidate who intended to hurt the poor even if we thought (by some fluke) that he might not do it.

Senator Obama is fundamentally wrong about his goals and on an issue that matters in a deep way . . . as you concede.

If Senator Casey, a pro-life Democrat, and not Senator Obama were the nominee, then we would not be having this discussion. The morality of abortion would not tip the scales to make it impossible for a traditional Christian to vote for the Democrat candidate.

You say:

And that plays right into the hands of those who would use abortion as a wedge issue but would never dream of acting on it. Because I know you, I know this isn’t your attitude or your intent‚ but you are a rare person in that regard. This attitude is killing the Church, both in terms of our own unity and in terms of our appearance to secular society.

In fact, the pro-life cause has made real progress. It is only twenty years ago that Reagan made it possible to be a national nominee who was pro-life! Some forms of abortion are now illegal. Attitudes have changed. The young are more pro-life than their grandparents!

John McCain is seriously pro-life. He has always voted that way . . . and has carried his conviction to the point of adopting a baby through Mother Theresa. She is now a beloved teenage daughter.

Does that sound like a man who is just giving lip service to the pro-life cause?

Unity is a good thing. God knows I hate schism, but disagreement is not the only bad thing.

Another thing that has killed the Church historically and is killing my own former (and beloved!) Anglican communion is an inability to take stands. On some issues we cannot compromise . . . though we don’t have to be jerks in expressing our point of view.

People who take strong counter-cultural stands are often hated. Of course some pro-life (or Republican or religious right) leaders have been jerks or fools.

By no accident, they often are given big microphones by secularists. Both types of extremist need each other. They even raise money off each other by playing to the fears of their followers.The good news is that we are not stuck with such people or tactics!

The face of my party and of the life movement in the future is not some preacher on the television, but leaders like Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.

Sarah Palin who just brought her lovely baby into the world knowing it will have some struggles in life is also a pro-life leader in my party.

Jindal and Palin are the future of our movement. If you grew up in the “bad old days” when we were represented by sketchy television preachers and party hacks it is hard to realize the change that years of hard pro-life work made in the Republican Party.

I am not ignoring rising Democrat stars such as Heath Shuler and Bill Casey. When they are your nominees for President, you can be sure that many of us will look hard at them.

Heath Shuler would get my vote over a pro-choice Republican. The problem is that Congressman Shuler is not your nominee and his is not the platform on which your nominee is running.

You say:

I’d much rather refer to Jim Wallis’ book God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get
It, which lays out a great argument for Christians acting though but not shackling themselves to political parties, since both at their heart are
about seeking power, which is not exactly a biblical virtue.

I would feel better about Jim Wallis if he had not been making the same claims (and writing roughly the same book) since I was a college student!

Nobody sane thinks we should be shackled to a political party.

Nobody who lives in California could be! Most races (of late) are between the lesser of two evils. I am not a Schwarzenegger Republican!

However, I think it a bit precious to be against “seeking power.” I am against seeking power for its own sake or as an end, but surely to fulfill one mission (to love our neighbor) one could seek some power to do so effectively (earn money?). There are bad people in politics, but I have also known some good ones in both political parties. It is easy enough to throw rocks, but not everyone in the religious right is a phony or a hypocrite and not all of them are just looking to stay in office.

Some are. Those people are wrong and we should avoid them when we can. Fortunately, life is not all politics. . . though college life has proven just as political at times (secular and Christian) as government politics in my experience!

You say:

But I will make my case, briefly. Whenever I’m asked how I can be pro-life and be a Democrat, my answer always seems to surprise people. It’s because neither party is pro-life enough for me. I hate abortion, and I hate the death penalty. I hate the situations that make people think abortion is the only option they have. I hate that poverty, which is mentioned far more in the Bible than most issues that Christian march to the polls for, is ignored in the Church. Neither party is fully committed to the cause of life, so I have to pick and choose, as we all do, come election day.

I say:

I don’t think this quite true. The nominee for the Democrat Party doesn’t like poverty, but Senator McCain doesn’t either.

They disagree about means to ends, but agree on the goal.

When it comes to abortion this is not true as the Democrat nominee wants to see abortion, even in terrible and hard cases, fully legal. That is out of bounds to me.

It is true that both parties contain hypocrites who do not care. There are Republicans who support free markets because they don’t care about the poor. There are Democrats who support government solutions just to get some taxpayer money. Both parties have bad citizens.

Nobody has a monopoly in good intentions. Sadly one party has nominated a pro-life candidate and the other did not, so all things are not equal in this case. It is sad that because of this situation abortion is a partisan issue. If Democrats had nominated one of their pro-life leaders, it would not be. I support your bold choice to work for Democrats for Life to bring on that good day.

After all I am no McCain fanatic and never have been.

You say:

This election is particularly difficult in that sense. While Senator Obama is rabidly pro-choice, he’s already been forced to backpedal on his stance for the general election (as all candidates must and do, much to supporters chagrin). While Senator McCain is more likely to back Supreme Court nominees who might vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, there are several problems with that. First, it’s really anyone’s guess if that would actually happen. Far more than once, justices haven’t proven to be quite as predictable as a nominating president might hope. Second, it looks like, barring a major shift between now and November, Senator McCain would face an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, which would make nominating yet another ultra-conservative, in the wake of Roberts and Alito, very difficult at best.

I reply:

At least I have hope with McCain. With Obama all the hard work and gains of the last two decades will surely be lost.

Second, I do not despair about getting McCain’s choices through the Senate. As you pointed out not all Democrats (even in the Senate!) are ideologues. Many will vote to approve a qualified choice by the president . . . as Republicans did with Clinton’s choices.

I would be surprised if a justice like Roberts (who is very mainstream and well liked) would not get confirmed. Surely your party is not that in the grip of the abortion lobby?

You say:

Third, and perhaps most important, what does this barrage of single-minded justices do to our third branch of government? The Court was designed to be a battleground for opposing political ideology. If we pack the Court for one issue that may or may not get heard, and then may or may not go our way, what have we gained?

I say:

Nobody has ever accused Roberts or Scalia of being single-minded! Both are very bright men with complicated views on many issues. They do not march in lock step with each other either.

Conservatives did not make abortion (or gay marriage for that matter) a court issue. The left did. If Roe/Wade is overturned, then the process will return to the legislatures where it belongs. Conservatives do not want to legislate from the bench, after all.

You say:

Could we see the persistence of decisions that perpetuate an inequitable society which increases the number of abortions? Could we see less
hesitancy toward capital punishment at the federal and state levels?

Aren’t these things that damage the cause of life?

I reply:

I am no great fan of capital punishment, but surely there is a difference between a killer who was given a full jury trial with many appeals who is executed after many years and a third-trimester baby killed in a clinic over a weekend?

I hope the court is not in the business of securing economic equity. The attempt to secure that has not gone well.

You say:

I understand this is an unpopular argument to make with the conservative Christian community, and that’s fine. However, until we loosen our bonds to strict political ideology and think in a much more complex manner and act accordingly in the public sphere, we are always going to lose.

In fact, as most of the presidential elections of my lifetime demonstrate, we do not always lose. Sometimes good things happen. When Roe is overturned, your party will gain a great blessing. People such as I am will be able to look at national elections without abortion getting in the way! We will have other options.

We should not be ideologues ever. We should think hard and act cautiously.

I agree with all of that. None of it is inconsistent with a firm and principled pro-life stand.

You say:

When the Church is the champion of those who most desperately need her, from the unborn to the wrongfully accused on death row, to the Afghani
bride at her bombed out wedding, to the mother who fears she cannot feed one more mouth, then the cause of life will advance. Until then, if we
keep our politics too small for the cause of life, we will be guilty of squelching it.

The Church should champion all those people, but we need not hear “the state” when the question is asked, “How shall we help?” This is too simple and borders on idolatry. Let’s not give the state all power!

I want to keep politics small and in its place . . . but let our compassion flow in an unlimited way in many different channels!

You say:

But regardless of what action we take, we must remember, on both political sides, it is Christ’s teaching that must guide us, not a compromised
political platform. We can argue healthily and should about whether capital punishment or poverty are life culture issues, but we cannot alienate each other because we’ve decided on political action and call it a religious issue. The Religious Right is dying. We are watching the end of the Right’s manipulation of the evangelical church, and it is the dawn of a new era for Christian involvement in politics. Let’s not fall into the same patterns as before.

I want to end here, because I agree with so much of it.

Poverty is a pro-life issue. We must have solutions for it, but I don’t think statist solutions are hopeful ones. Otherwise, I would support them. That is the “same old politics” just in a different direction!

Sadly for my friends on the left the religious right is not dying, but changing (evolving!) to become stronger.

New leaders (Jindal and Palin) are emerging.

Why don’t I believe in the impending death of the religious right?

I have heard it all before and it does not die.

In 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 I read that this was the “end of the religious right.” Instead of death, I have watched the development of better communicators (such as Hugh Hewitt) and better political leaders coming to replace the old warhorses.

But there is so much else to do besides politics . . . which though important is not all important.

I am a Christian before anything else. Nobody should manipulate the church and nothing should have our ultimate allegiance other than the Kingdom of Our Lord.

Sadly His Kingdom is not yet and so we must do the best we can to help the hurting, feed the hungry, right wrongs, and vanquish the darkness of our time. In doing so we will frequently be abused, misunderstood, and, yes, even manipulated by all sides. We must be guided fully and ultimately by a prudent attempt to do what is best for all God’s children.

I will get that wrong at times.

The duty to protect must begin with our youngest children. Protecting innocent human life from murder is one of the main functions of the state. Christians can disagree about other powers to be given to government, but not about that one.

This side of Paradise a Christian is not looking for the One but for the best we can get.

That is why, with no great enthusiasm but confident that I must, I will vote for John McCain.

On John Edwards: Blessed Are the Merciful

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Having ignored warning signs for so long, the culture’s fascination, even delight, in the destruction of yet another political leader is sickening. I don’t know if John Edwards is sorry for his sins, but I do know that only a fool or a saint can afford to be unmerciful or delight in his fall.

A fool likes any prurient story because it is entertaining. This fool reads of the fall of great men with no sense of discomfort because he believes that his own vice is “not so bad.” For the fool, self-knowledge is always delightful and easy. He is puzzled why Socrates made such a fuss about it.

A saint can advocate justice without mercy because he has no need for grace. Strangely, Jesus when faced with His own John Edwards did forgive absolutely. The man who could judge didn’t, which suggests it must be better so.

Should we forgive John Edwards?

For his fellow Christians, the answer is plain, if not easy to practice.

We cannot forgive his moral sin because his sin was not against us. As for his lies to the public, the charitable are eager to forgive, but the wise not so quick to trust. As for his sins against God, which at the hour of his death will matter most, God knows his heart, but forgiveness is freely available to Edwards, though bought at great cost to God.

Meanwhile, we can pity him and be charitable in our beliefs about his repentance. We can marvel at his audacity in running for high office so soon after his sins, while the wise will carefully consider his words in the future, but the charitable will also hope for the best. It does us no harm to be generous and might do us some good.

Forgiveness is good medicine for our souls, but only if we do not confuse forgiveness with something else. Forgiveness is not naïve or incompatible with justice or the other virtues. If we forgive, then we release the evildoer from his immediate obligations, but do not give him a free ticket to repeat the behavior.

One can only forgive a man who is truly sorry for his misdeeds. While charity will err on the side of trusting the penitent man, being loving is not incompatible with prudence. Forgiveness without wisdom can become a vice because it empowers future harm.

True repentance is matched by deeds and not just words and forgiveness should be given with this in mind. The penitent knows the forgiveness may be instantaneous, but achieving healing in relationships and in the soul is long and difficult.

Forgiveness wraps the wound and applies medicines to it, but health takes time. Restoration of the penitent, when appropriate, can never be immediate, both for his sake and for those he has harmed.

We misunderstand forgiveness when we think that having received it, all the shame of our sin is gone. Forgiveness may release from guilt, but it cannot free us from the hard soul work of dealing with the consequences of our deeds. When we harm our souls, the scars, like the nail prints on the Christ, remain. Forgiveness gives us the chance to get better, but healing is still hard.

This is best lest we come to view our sin and the pain it causes as nothing and grace as cheap. True forgiveness acknowledges the seriousness of sin by the costly and gracious act of forgiving it. The cheap false forgiveness of much of our culture pretends that our sin is not so bad or makes excuses for it. This is not real forgiveness, but rather moral vacuity misusing the language of virtue. It can do nothing.

For all that, forgiveness is still a mighty and healing balm. Prudent and real forgiveness helps both the man forgiving and the forgiven. The desire for vengeance picks at the scabs on the soul and bitterness can cause an infection worse than the initial harm. The man who receives forgiveness, as I know so well, values it as an unmerited and precious gift. He is grateful for any mercy that he is shown.

Mercy is not much in evidence in our cynical and world-weary culture, but is the very medicine we most need. The merciful are happy, blessed by God, the Lord Jesus Christ said, because they will receive mercy. My own heart yearns for mercy and so when I see the repentance of others my first thought is to pray with them, “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.”

The Moral Life of Cubicles

By David Franz
The New Atlantis

The Utopian Origins of Dilbert’s Workspace

Few arenas can match the business office for its combination of humdrummery and world-shaping influence. Sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote of office workers, “Whatever history they have had is a history without events.” The history of office technology seems especially uninspiring: the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, calculators, and spreadsheets are unlikely material for a captivating History Channel feature, to be sure. Yet the importance of the business office and its techniques is undeniable. Max Weber saw the office’s methods of organization, its rationality, and its disciplines as hallmarks of modern capitalism, making possible dramatic gains in efficiency and forever altering the economic and cultural landscape. Perhaps even more significant in our time, when millions of American workers spend most of their waking day in an office, is the sense that the organizational technologies of office life provide a kind of moral education, that offices shape character, that they create a certain kind of person. And perhaps no aspect of today’s office is more symbolic of office life and office lives than the cubicle.

Mills, in his 1951 attack on corporate bureaucracy, White Collar, imagined each office as “a segment of the enormous file.” Honeycombed floors of skyscrapers organized the “billion slips of paper that gear modern society into its daily shape.” Mills’s book was soon joined by The Organization Man and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit in the decade’s series of attempts to assess the damage office life inflicted upon the worker. The composite picture that emerged was of a character driven by petty desires: for a slightly bigger office at work, a slightly bigger yard at home, and modest respectability everywhere. The man of the office was a middling figure without passion or creativity. These images of the office and its inhabitants were joined in the 1960s and 1970s with the counterculture’s critique of the stifling bureaucracies of the state, the corporation, the university. Standing on the steps of Berkeley’s Sproul Hall, Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio echoed Mills’s condemnation of the great bureaucratic filing machine, now symbolized by IBM punch cards, and suggested to his fellow protesters that they put their “bodies on the gears and wheels” to stop it.

For many, this soullessness of office life is now most aptly represented by the cubicle—that open, wall-less, subdivision of office space. Beginning in the late 1960s, the cubicle spread quickly across the white-collar landscape. A market research firm estimated that by 1974 cubicles accounted for 20 percent of new office-furniture expenditures. In 1980, another study showed that half of new office furniture was placed in cubicled offices. According to Steelcase, one of the largest cubicle manufacturers, nearly 70 percent of office work now happens in cubicles.

The rise of the cubicle is surely due in part to its economics. Partitions are simply a very efficient way of organizing office space. Construction for cubicle offices is standard and cheap, made and assembled in large quantities and with minimal skilled labor. The building shell, lighting, and air conditioning can be set up with little consideration of interior walls, allowing contractors to build economical big white boxes to be filled in later with “office furniture systems.” Perhaps most importantly, cubicles maximize floor space, granting workers only the necessary square footage—a number that is shrinking all the time. According to brokerage surveys cited in National Real Estate Investor, the average office space per worker in the United States dropped from 250 square feet in 2000 to 190 square feet in 2005. Some observers expect this number to drop another 20 percent by 2010. This shrinkage not only saves space, but time as well—time wasted walking to restrooms, the coffee pot, and the marketing department, for example. Supervision is made more efficient too: with no walls to hide behind, slackers have to work or at least imitate work in a convincing way.

The cubicle is the very essence of efficiency—the kind of office only a spreadsheet could love, one is tempted to say. But not quite: alongside the economic arguments that brought the cubicle into ascendancy, there were also moral arguments. Offices in the 1970s and 1980s seemed to their critics burdensome remnants of an older age, symbolic shackles of bureaucracy—a system as inhuman as it was ineffective. Cubicles, by contrast, seemed to lack the fixity, and the constraints of bureaucracy of the old office. Moreover, cubicles eliminated the hierarchical distinctions between managers and workers; every cubicle had an open door, everyone was equally a worker. Empowering and humane, cubicles seemed to create a workplace with a soul.

The cubicle has its roots in the cybernetic school of thought that arose in the middle of the last century. The meaning of “cybernetics” has largely been swept up in the exuberant imagery of movies and commercials with their glowing rivers of ones and zeros flowing through the air. However, cybernetics has an older and deeper history, predating both the personal computer and the cubicle. Fred Turner’s recent book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, shows how the cybernetic idea of seeing the world in terms of information flows grew out of government-sponsored World War II military research and into the information technology industry of Silicon Valley. In the 1960s and 1970s, cybernetic ideas brought groups of military-funded computer researchers together with Deadheads, radical environmentalists, and art communards in the San Francisco Bay area. This collection of long-haired eccentrics began to think of everything from bee behavior to dance parties to computer programming as information processes. In doing so, they liberated the images of information and the computer from the clutches of the military-industrial complex, joining them instead to a new cybernetic-counterculture vision of egalitarianism, communal networks, and democratic “people power.”

Architecture textbooks and journals in the 1960s and 1970s began to talk about a new “cybernetic” idea of the office. Starting with the assumption that offices were fundamentally places for the exchange of information, advocates of the cybernetic office aimed to eliminate walls that stop the “free flow of ideas,” replacing them with cubicle workstations. If the pictures in cubicle advertisements of the time are any indication, cubicles helped ideas flow quite freely indeed. Employees in these ads lack computers, to say nothing of e-mail and the Internet, yet they always seem caught in moments of frenzied, often low-tech, information exchange: pointing to each other across the room, handing papers over and around the burnt orange (“aesthetically pleasing and humanly satisfying”) partitions, all while talking on the phone and jotting down notes.

As California computer companies grew into large businesses, then, cubicles were their natural office form. It was through these companies that cubicles first entered the public imagination. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, business sections of newspapers and magazines described the radical work arrangements of Silicon Valley with curiosity and often breathless enthusiasm. Intel served as the chief example of the creative and egalitarian cubicle workplace. The company had no time cards, no dress codes, no assigned parking spots, no special cafeterias for executives, and above all, no offices, just a sea of half-wall partitions. The long, low buildings of Intel were fields of shared labor, like the communal farms that had so recently dotted the hills around Intel’s campus. CEO Andrew Grove, hip and casual in an open-necked wide-collar shirt and gold chains, was an unpretentious man of the people. He moved among the workers of Intel “empowering” them to do their jobs, and sat at a cubicle at one side of the vast work floor ready to help. Most incredible of all (and unlike the communal farms) this social experiment was economically viable. In a time when the great industrial giants were falling to Japanese competition, Intel was making money hand over fist. For some observers of American business, the Intel office model seemed like a savior. In The Atlantic, James Fallows asked the question on the minds of so many who dared to hope for the future of American industry, “Could the tire companies, the machine tool makers, the color TV industry, learn to work this way?”

This taste for fluid, egalitarian organization was elevated to a general philosophy by a new group of popular management writers. In the early 1980s, precisely at the moment of the cubicle’s introduction to the mainstream of American culture, management consultants, business professors, and CEOs all found a public hungry for management wisdom. Publishers and bookstores quickly seized upon this new market and suddenly management books, previously relegated to obscurity as business school texts, joined diet manuals and self-help books as best-sellers. The Art of Japanese Management and Theory Z (also about the art of Japanese management) were bestsellers in 1981, followed closely by In Search of Excellence, which argued that some Americans were still pretty good managers. These books and those that followed instructed Americans in the subtleties of international business, quality control, and other practical matters. More than this, however, they declared the beginning of a new era in which bureaucratic hierarchy would be obsolete and equality, creativity, and collaboration would rule the day. Separate offices, like formal business attire and human resources departments, were suffused with the musty smell of the old bureaucratic order—what one book called “the barnacle” of the status quo. The new office, with its minimal architectural and bureaucratic structure, would allow for new ideas to move more quickly and naturally through the company. Work would not be guided by policies and procedures, but the “shared values” of a “corporate culture.” One popular book even suggested a future of “boss-less companies” ruled only by a cultural canopy of shared understanding and inspiration. Tom Peters was the most prominent voice of this group, calling throughout the 1980s and 1990s for a “management revolution” and advocating such “anti-bureaucratic” management techniques as “management by walking around,” systematically “defying rules and regulations” and eliminating the barriers between departments. Peters suggested breaking down the figurative and literal walls between departments to encourage “disruptive innovation.” This kind of management thinking drew its lessons from the California technology boom and placed expectations of workplace equality in the idiom of the counterculture and political radicalism. Peters even wrote a book called Liberation Management.

But the moral philosophy of cubicle life was not limited to the sushi-and-Zen crowd of Northern California. Max De Pree, one of the most important figures of both the cubicle revolution and its theories of management, hails from a place far from California in almost every possible way. The little community of Zeeland, Michigan is home to the Herman Miller office furniture company, about 5,000 people, and more than a dozen Dutch Reformed churches. De Pree spent most of his career as an executive at Herman Miller, the company his father founded. Under the leadership of Max and his brother Hugh, Herman Miller sold the first office cubicle, the Action Office, in 1968. De Pree remained active in the cubicle revolution, overseeing various elaborations and improvements on the original design, including snap-in colored panels and new openings for aquariums and ant farms, until he retired from his position as CEO in 1987.

While most of the company’s employees worked in factories rather than offices, De Pree wanted to make Herman Miller an example of the kind of fun, egalitarian workplace that cubicle systems were supposed to encourage. The walls and ceilings of Herman Miller factories were decorated with colorful, life-size papier-mâché sculptures of workers. Employees were encouraged to find ways to use their “gifts” at work. One supervisor wrote poems for the factory newsletter, which were later printed on signs around the factory. De Pree dreamed of a time when the joys of work and the company spirit would make supervision itself unnecessary: “When they go home at night, they don’t actually need a supervisor to tell them how to be a good parent. And being a good parent is a lot tougher than making chairs.” If the California version of equality and freedom at work took its inspiration from communal farms and the remnants of hippie spirituality, De Pree’s version was straight Midwestern Protestantism. A member of the Reformed Church in America, De Pree told a reporter in 1986, “Each of us is made in the image of God. And if that’s true, then you cannot make the assumption that some of us are uncommon, and some of us are common.... We are all uncommon.” This “uncommonness” had two important implications for De Pree. First, it implied a fundamental equality. Second, it meant that individuals are different and must be handled with sensitivity and discernment. Both of these themes would be important in De Pree’s writings.

De Pree achieved a great deal more fame in his second career of leadership writer, speaker, and consultant than he did as an executive. His books, Leadership is an Art, Leadership Jazz, and Leading Without Power, have all sold well and made his name synonymous with “servant leadership” in business and leadership circles. While his writings do not suggest eliminating the category of leadership entirely, he does ask leaders to take a rather self-effacing view of their role. “Leadership is a posture of debt; it is a forfeiture of rights.” What leaders owe their followers is the opportunity “to fulfill their potential.” Organizational life, for De Pree, is a profoundly personal, even spiritual enterprise of self-improvement. He takes “finding voice” and connecting “voice and touch” to be central managerial tasks. De Pree’s description of a good leader is a humble, gentle soul who is “vulnerable,” “discerning,” and “aware of the human spirit.”

Those with moral aspirations for the cubicle—from countercultural Californians like Tom Peters to Midwestern Protestants like Max De Pree—sought to defend some idea of “humanity” against the inhumanity of bureaucracy. Yet, to say that bureaucracy is inhuman has not always been an objection to it. As defined by Max Weber a century ago, bureaucracy makes its great contribution to the world precisely by ignoring the human spirit. Operating according to fixed rules, policies, and positions, bureaucracy in its purest form functions, as Weber wrote, “without regard for persons.” As bureaucracy “develops more perfectly, the more the bureaucracy is ‘dehumanized,’ the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.” The central impulse of bureaucracy is to fashion a world in conformity to the impersonal abstraction and precise relationships of an organizational chart.

Peters and the Californians saw bureaucracy imposing arbitrary restrictions on the natural flow of creativity and information. Separate offices encouraged self-importance and unproductive groveling before the lordly egos of bosses. They created insular silos of knowledge and turf battles between them. Paperwork gummed up tasks that would better be handled with a little common sense and informal conversation. Good ideas were stalled in the system of procedures. In short, bureaucracy hindered human agency. For De Pree, the inadequacies of bureaucracy lay in its effort to cordon off into the private sphere both the emotion and the practice of unique “gifts.” Genuine leadership, for De Pree, is inescapably emotional and personal. Leadership involves nothing less than helping people become who they were meant to be. Such a task could not rest on impersonal procedures and systems alone.

While these humanistic sentiments remain common in writing about management and leadership, the cubicle has been detached from them entirely. In Dilbert, The Office, Office Space, and many other popular satires of contemporary work, cubicles are a symbol of all that is uninspiring about office life, and on this point, cubicles seem utterly without defenders. Fortune recently ran an article called “Cubicles: The Great Mistake,” complete with a public apology from one of the first cubicle designers. Twenty years after his Atlantic article extolling the virtues of the cubicled office, James Fallows wrote another on how he changed his mind. The promises of a cubicle utopia now seem curious, to say the least. In fact, the companies that make cubicles increasingly offer up apologies of their own. Steelcase, in its “State of the Cubicle” report, addresses the “Dilbert-type issues” that surround them, turning to head of design James Ludwig for a response. “Our goal in design would be to unfold the cubicle in ways that might make it unrecognizable.” The cubicle, once a cutting edge statement of corporate identity, has become an embarrassment, even for its makers.

What explains this change in meaning? Cubicle utopianism was probably a victim of its own success. The idea that cubicles formed a more exciting, humane workplace became less plausible to those who had the experience of working in one. As partitions and the space allotted to each worker shrunk, few things seemed to matter to office dwellers more than privacy. From the very beginning, workers reacted to cubicles by blocking up the openings of the “open office.” Newspaper reports of early cubicle offices tell of employees raiding supply closets for cardboard and extra panels to extend partitions. Some workers went so far as to push large filing cabinets into the space created by their cubicle’s missing fourth wall. While the beige rat-maze aesthetics of partition living attract all the jokes, the basic geometric facts of cubicles—their doorlessness and 360-degree visibility—are probably more central to the experience of cubicle work. Private conversations, whether in person or by phone, take on the character of an intrigue, a fact exploited endlessly in office sitcoms where ordinarily private matters of romance, betrayal, and personal failure are made public in the open office to the dismay of those involved. In an odd twist, privacy often requires venturing out into some more public space, one that is either anonymous (like a sidewalk) or relatively soundproof (like a central conference room).

The utopian visions of the cubicle have been crushed by reality. However, while the cubicled office no longer seems brave or new, an aspect of its original moral impulse remains. Indeed, the experiential facts of cubicle life are not so much in contradiction with the ambition to humanize the office as the revelation of the dark side of this effort. The ideals of office equality, fluidity, and collaboration in all their forms—including servant leadership, worker empowerment, and flattened organizations—required a kind of control more diffuse and amorphous, but also more personal than the old hierarchical bureaucracy. As Tom Peters and the other management theorists of “corporate culture” saw (albeit in a more positive light), the real managerial possibility contained in the cubicle was not lower costs or even the ability of managers to watch workers more closely. It was rather the creation of a culture in which workers would feel obliged to manage themselves. With everyone visible to everyone else, managerial obligation could spread itself throughout the entire office, becoming more personal and intense at the same time. Cubicles are not alone in this trend. The advent of 360-degree evaluations (filled out by those above, below, and beside an employee in the organizational hierarchy), the creation of company mission statements followed inevitably (and sometimes preceded) by facilitator-led meetings designed to get “buy-in,” and corporate campuses (which, by containing everything from grocery stores to fitness clubs eliminate reasons to leave), all tend to blur distinctions between personal and professional.

The ideal of the cultural workplace and its embodiment in cubicles also moves against another longstanding distinction of office work—the distinction between managers and workers. The ideal of a boss-less company has not been realized on anything like the large scale the management writers dreamed of, if it has in fact been realized anywhere. However, the impulse to equality and management through culture has led to something like the opposite of the boss-less company with bosses everywhere. As the managerial role is increasingly shorn of “authoritarian” tendencies and managers adopt the stance of a servant and facilitator, the scope of demands upon ordinary workers has risen. Observation, evaluation, encouraging the proper attitude and habits in other employees—these are all managerial tasks that are supposed to be shared. Such is the nature of being a team member. Cubicles may not be inspiring, but they have clearly contributed to new obligations.

These obligations go beyond the management of work to the management of self. The teamwork and collaboration of the open office elevate the importance of relational dexterity and a sunny (but not too sunny) disposition at work. Books promising work success through “emotional intelligence” and pharmaceutical advertisements portraying the difficulties faced by office workers with anxiety and attention disorders are both responding to the emotional demands of a work environment that puts a premium on self-presentation.

It would, in a way, be comforting if the rise of cubicles were simply the result of a bad decision to grant spreadsheets and their budgeteer masters imperial dominion over office space, but that’s just not how it happened. The cubicle revolution, in fact, was above all ideological. The clichés hurled at cubicles were woven into their sound-dampening fabric board from the beginning. Any discerning criticism of office life will have to take this moral history into account. Indeed, it is precisely the axioms of what makes for a good company and a good person buried within the cubicle that most need to be uncovered and held to critical attention.

Politics and Independence

By Rev. Robert A. Sirico
Acton Institute

On the question of religion and politics, it seems like the Christian community is forever sliding between two errors. On the one hand, there is a long tendency to eschew politics as too worldly and unbecoming to Christian piety. If we place our hopes in the afterlife, why should we dedicate ourselves to political change now? This is the error of quietism, which calls for quiet contemplation and prayer and totally eschews any action. Yet God calls some to a political role in the hope of making a difference in the world. There is nothing wrong with this. Indeed, our faith calls for a cultural transformation. It is not satisfied with individual piety alone.

On the other hand, there is the opposite tendency to place all hope in worldly transforming, to build a pure City on a Hill, to bring the kingdom of God to earth by our own political efforts. This occurs on the left and right. The left-wing view has sought to create perfect social utopias where the structures of poverty are completely eliminated and there is no equal holding of wealth. On the right, we see a tendency for some to use the state to stamp out every manner of vice.

Both positions will lead to despair. The refusal of Christians to engage in any political activity surrenders the entire sector over to secularist control, which often leads to disastrous results for believers. Christians have an important contribution to make to public life and they should not be shy about making it, even if it means running for office and engaging in political activity.

On the other hand, we must always be aware that Christ's kingdom is not of this world. The only perfect society is found in Heaven. As a former generation of conservatives used to say, the eschaton cannot be “immanentized,” especially not the through the power of the state. The use of power is particularly dangerous for Christians. The use of the sword is almost always linked with abuse. The mixing of state and religion has ended in the corruption of religion above all else.

In the last twenty years, we've seen these tendencies ebb and flow in the Christian community, which has placed its trust in princes and has been disappointed. This has produced a counter-reaction that leads people to a mistaken belief that involvement in political life is nearly always futile and even contrary to the gospel.

I would like to stake out a moderate position. Those who feel called to political involvement should not hesitate. We should defend life, property, and freedom as among the foremost political and moral values. At the same time, we should avoid the temptation of putting trust in any particular leader merely because he or she professes the same faith as we do. All people have a tendency to fall into sin, and I dare suggest that the political class may be even more prone to particularly destructive forms of compromises.

What about party affiliation? Political parties are part of the fabric of democracy and are unavoidable. However, no party should be able to count on the “Christian vote” lest that be taken for granted and otherwise ignored. If any group of people should be willing to consider itself politically independent, it is Christians, who should carry with them the realization that it was political state that prosecuted and executed our Lord and his followers. To be inextricably attached to a particular party is as much an error as believing that a particular form of government can be the answer to all our woes.

Seven Uncomfortable Truths For Liberals

By John Hawkins
Townhall.com

The biggest problem with liberalism is that much of it is based on incorrect assumptions about human nature, the government, and how the world works. That's why liberal policies that seem so well-intentioned often have such disastrous results over the long-term. Until liberals start to understand these truths, their ideas will continue to be damaging to their country and the world.

Human beings are born selfish and badly behaved: You, me, your father, Mother Theresa, the Pope -- we were all savage, self-centered little animals when we were born and it was only through the socialization process that we became fit for other humans to live with. That's why people do need religion, rules, and social pressure to be convinced to behave. It's also why projects like communism, which assume that people can be brainwashed to completely disregard their own nature and love their fellow citizens every bit as much as they love themselves, are always doomed to fail.

Change is often a bad thing: It goes without saying that sometimes laws, traditions, and moral practices should be changed, but it shouldn't need to be said that change for its own sake is not a plus either.

Unfortunately, there are far too many people who treat massive changes, changes that have the potential to permanently impact our society in a negative way, very cavalierly. Sure, we'll change the definition of marriage, legalize drugs, weaken the Christian church, allow countless numbers of illegal aliens from a neighboring country to become citizens, etc., etc., etc. -- what could go wrong? A lot, actually.

In fact, if you look back through our history, for every positive change on a large scale, getting rid of slavery for example, you can find multiple significant changes for the worse: like killing children by the millions via abortion and massive increases in illegitimate births because of welfare. That doesn't mean we should avoid change. Let me repeat that: that doesn't mean we should avoid change. However, we should take great care before making massive changes to the way our society works.

People are different: This would seem to be a rather obvious point, but it's one liberals seem to have a great deal of difficulty digesting. In their mind, women and men should be treated as if they have exactly the same predilections and abilities. Different races should perform identically well, in precisely equal percentages, in every activity, and any difference between people must be explained by some sort of unfair societal constraint placed upon the less successful.

However, you must take the uniqueness of the person and the group he's a part of into account. People don't have the same backgrounds, interests, talents, or cultural experiences. Because of that, nothing could be more foolish than to treat every person as if he's an interchangeable widget that should fall into some statistical category to make a bunch of bean counters in D.C. happy.

Most nations are interested in what's good for them: The only thing liberals love better than big government is even bigger government. So, yes, they love using the power of the federal government, but they're even more in love with the idea of building up the United Nations or some other form of world government.

Setting aside the fact that the bigger government gets, the less efficient it becomes, there's another huge problem with the United Nations: it's comprised of individual nations that view the organization as little more than a way to further their own interests, which may oftentimes be in conflict with those of other nations.

The truth is that most people and most nations are primarily interested in taking care of Number One. Moreover, those that don't think that way and feel strongly enough about it to take action beyond a few platitudes or token contributions are few and far between. So since that is the case, any nation that doesn't have strong safeguards for its own national interests in any sort of deal it enters into with other nations or groups of nations, is extremely foolish indeed.

Most of the world operates by the law of the jungle except when they fear the consequences of doing so: Ann Coulter once said that, "the natural state of the world is Darfur. The freakish aberration is America and the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world." Throughout much of history, the idea that most of the world operated by the law of the jungle was so self-evident, that few people doubted it.

However, because the world's only Super Power is a benevolent force that has worked very hard to keep global conflicts to a minimum despite getting very little credit for its actions, many people allow themselves to believe that the world is a relatively ordered and civilized place. That's not so. The prosperous and democratic nations of the world may not have any designs upon their neighbors, but most nations are neither prosperous nor democratic, and the only thing stopping them from taking what they want by force is their inability to do so.

The federal government is by its very nature, slow, stupid, expensive, and inefficient: There are always politicians promising to "reform government" or "make government work," but the federal government always has been and always will be a poor, misshapen tool compared to the free market.

That's because their money isn't on the line and they don't go out of business when they fail. So, the more we keep the functions handled by the federal government at an absolute minimum, the better off we will tend to be as a nation.

Every problem is not fixable: The poor? They are always going to be with us. War? It's always going to exist. Inconveniences and annoyances? We're never going to live in Utopia -- not on this earth anyway.

That's not to say government should never try to help the poor, avoid war, or make a more perfect society. Again, let me repeat that: that's not to say government should never try to help the poor, avoid war, or make a more perfect society. However, there is also something to be said for letting sleeping dogs lie and just accepting that the government cannot and should not try to fix every problem.

That's because not only is it impossible to fix every problem, but because the government's efforts are usually ineffective and often as not, over time, it simply ends up creating a new set of problems to be solved.

Conservatives more honest than liberals?

By Peter Schweizer

The headline may seem like a trick question — even a dangerous one — to ask during an election year. And notice, please, that I didn’t ask whether certain politicians are more honest than others. (Politicians are a different species altogether.) Yet there is a striking gap between the manner in which liberals and conservatives address the issue of honesty.

Consider these results:

Is it OK to cheat on your taxes? A total of 57 percent of those who described themselves as “very liberal” said yes in response to the World Values Survey, compared with only 20 percent of those who are “very conservative.” When Pew Research asked whether it was “morally wrong” to cheat Uncle Sam, 86 percent of conservatives agreed, compared with only 68 percent of liberals.

Ponder this scenario, offered by the National Cultural Values Survey: “You lose your job. Your friend’s company is looking for someone to do temporary work. They are willing to pay the person in cash to avoid taxes and allow the person to still collect unemployment. What would you do?”

Almost half, or 49 percent, of self-described progressives would go along with the scheme, but only 21 percent of conservatives said they would.

When the World Values Survey asked a similar question, the results were largely the same: Those who were very liberal were much more likely to say it was all right to get welfare benefits you didn’t deserve.

The World Values Survey found that those on the left were also much more likely to say it is OK to buy goods that you know are stolen. Studies have also found that those on the left were more likely to say it was OK to drink a can of soda in a store without paying for it and to avoid the truth while negotiating the price of a car.

Another survey by Barna Research found that political liberals were two and a half times more likely to say that they illegally download or trade music for free on the Internet.

A study by professors published in the American Taxation Association’s Journal of Legal Tax Research found conservative students took the issue of accounting scandals and tax evasion more seriously than their fellow liberal students. Those with a “liberal outlook” who “reject the idea of absolute truth” were more accepting of cheating at school, according to another study, involving 291 students and published in the Journal of Education for Business.

A study in the Journal of Business Ethics involving 392 college students found that stronger beliefs toward “conservatism” translated into “higher levels of ethical values.” And academics concluded in the Journal of Psychology that there was a link between “political liberalism” and “lying in your own self-interest,” based on a study involving 156 adults.

Liberals were more willing to “let others take the blame” for their own ethical lapses, “copy a published article” and pass it off as their own, and were more accepting of “cheating on an exam,” according to still another study in the Journal of Business Ethics.

Now, I’m not suggesting that all conservatives are honest and all liberals are untrustworthy. But clearly a gap exists in the data. Why? The quick answer might be that liberals are simply being more honest about their dishonesty.

However attractive this explanation might be for some, there is simply no basis for accepting this explanation. Validation studies, which attempt to figure out who misreports on academic surveys and why, has found no evidence that conservatives are less honest. Indeed, validation research indicates that Democrats tend to be less forthcoming than other groups.

The honesty gap is also not a result of “bad people” becoming liberals and “good people” becoming conservatives. In my mind, a more likely explanation is bad ideas. Modern liberalism is infused with idea that truth is relative. Surveys consistently show this. And if truth is relative, it also must follow that honesty is subjective.

Sixties organizer Saul Alinsky, who both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say inspired and influenced them, once said the effective political advocate “doesn’t have a fixed truth; truth to him is relative and changing, everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.”

During this political season, honesty is often in short supply. But at least we can improve things by accepting the idea that truth and honesty exist. As the late scholar Sidney Hook put it, “the easiest rationalization for the refusal to seek the truth is the denial that truth exists.”