Again about healthcare - a small note

[fpb]

A real and serious issue with exporting any European or Japanese model of universal health coverage to the USA is the size and diversity of the nation. The attempt to micro-manage the British Health Service - by now reduced, thanks to the growth of local parliaments, to England alone - from Westminster is notoriously one of the major problems with this body, although in my view neither the biggest nor the worst. To expand it over a country eight times as populous as England and sixty times as large would be to multiply problems to an intolerable extent, and to deliver to the Federal Government an amount of power which it is neither well placed nor legally supposed to handle. Any attempt at universal health cover must be based on the States, and, for choice, have its decision-making as far down the level of organization as is compatible with its goals. The issues with this are obvious: first, the inevitable rise of a "postcode lottery" of the kind that is being fought against in Britain as we speak, and much more deeply rooted in the vast differences between states; and second, the danger that some states might take their sets of ideological blinkers to health care provision. I am thinking both of those states that produce leaderships and governors that demand "equal time" for creationism in class, and of infernos of PC and denial such as the three West Coast states. For this reason, establishing an American Health Service would not only be a complicated business, but one that would demand a great deal of legally enforceable protections against mismanagement, and, if necessary, a certain amount of resource transfers from richer to poorer areas.

(Incidentally, I would like to point out that John McCain dodged one Hell of a bullet when he chose his running mate. Among those who favoured a young Christian conservative, the favourite was not Sarah Palin - although she was much better known than the media would have us believe - but Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a man barely in his thirties and widely regarded as a rising star. The problem is however that, while both Jindal and Palin have expressed vague personal Creationist views, Palin has explicitly stated that she would not force her views on the Alaskan education authorities, whereas Jindal has been caught red-handed trying to slip Creationism into the Louisiana school curriculum. And there is far less excuse for him than for her, since he is a self-declared Catholic, and the Catholic Church explicitly rejects Creationism. Jindal is as unacceptable as a candidate to the Presidency as Huckabee - whom I condemned months ago for the same reason - and just as unelectable; and worse, in that as a Catholic he should know better.)

Comments

[secularhermites.livejournal.com]

I do not intend to be disrespectful, but I thought that the Catholic Church had room for those who believe God created the heavens and the earth (as taught in Creationism). I know Pope John Paul II as well as Pope Benedict personally support evolution and have released documents stating as such, but I was unaware that evolution is now an official teaching of the Church. (?) Please confirm.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Not really. To begin with, the Church has NEVER taken an inerrantist, literal view of the Bible. Indeed, far from being "old-time religion", inerrantism of the Fundamentalist brand is a very modern kind of beast; it begins in the 1890s, that is, rather later than Huxley or Darwin. If we catch Catholic or even Protestant writers before the nineteenth century speaking as though the details of Genesis were factually real, it is because these were parts of their inherited store of images and expressions of sacred truth, but not because they necessarily took them to be real in detail.

To the contrary: it is part of the doctrine of the Fathers, and stated both by St.Augustine and St.Thomas Aquinas, that any reading of the Bible which is not in keeping with the best contemporary scientific knowledge should not be held. Indeed, some Fathers (the author of the Letter of Barnabas, for instance) went very far indeed in reading the whole Old Testament in a wholly allegorical sense. "The best contemporary scientific knowledge" of course meant, to Augustine and Thomas both, the cosmology of Claudius Ptolemy, but the fact is that was already most unlike that of the Jewish Bible. (For instance, it regarded the earth as a celestial body, round in shape and existing in a virtually infinite cosmos, and took the moon, stars and planets to be similar bodies - all contradictory to the Jewish picture and all pretty much in line with modern knowledge.) The famous condemnation of Galileo, which was used for ridiculous propaganda, was in effect an academic squabble in which Galileo played his cards wrong (http://fpb.livejournal.com/104343.html).

As for Evolution, what you state was the position in, say, 1860. The Church kept studiously neutral because, in actual fact, not one decade went by from Huxley's time until the nineteen-thirties in which some fundamental attack - now forgotten - was made on Darwin's theories by scientists - and having been burned once by picking the wrong side in scientists' squabbles was enough. The Church does not claim to teach science infallibly; but she is responsible for hundreds of universities, observatories, hospitals, laboratories, schools and other institutions where the theory and practice of science are of the greatest importance, and even for that reason alone she must take a serious and constant interest in the evolution of science. Then there is the reflex of science on philosophy, which is one of her central concern. Altogether the Church neither ignores science nor stays neutral by principle; to the contrary, she may take a very firm position on some matters. Just now, for instance, there is a fierce debate, going on actually inside the Vatican's own territory, on the reality and scientific validity of the concept of "brain death". As the owner of hundreds of hundreds of hospitals, the Church cannot possibly silence or dodge this debate, and she will not.

To get back to Evolution, the position taken by Pope John Paul II in his famous address to the Pontifical Academy of Science in 1996 is a serious matter, and reflects a real development in the Catholic understanding of the world. From then on, anyone who insists on accepting the Fundamentalist doctrine will do so in contradiction, not of Catholic dogma, but nevertheless of the Magisterium, the teaching office of the Church. This is a possible position so long as dogma is not actually violated, but it is a serious decision and should not be made lightly. Governor Jindal seems to have done it both lightly and rather underhandedly, which is particularly bad for a college-educated man.

An interesting article on science and the Church, with a vigorous following debate and some links: http://fpb.livejournal.com/160378.html

[secularhermites.livejournal.com]

Yes, thank you for clarifying. It is also my understanding is that evolution is not Catholic dogma, but rather a current position. - It can get sticky when getting into natural selection, etc.

I imagine governing a body of people as colorful as those in Louisiana, like those of neighboring states, Jindal, setting his personal beliefs aside, has a difficult job of answering to his constituents (some products of higher education, others not). I guess you'd have to live amongst them (and here I am speaking mostly of rural folks) to understand what they are about and how they live their lives (which should not be looked down upon).

I have read your concern for those who teach Creationism in public schools, etc. - but rest assured, few children take it seriously, and it will eventually be phased out of all curriculum. (I remember well in rural, southern US, 1980's) that Creationism was mocked in the classroom even when part of the curriculum. Many move on to higher education, even those taught by parents (or faith community) that Evolution is in contradiction to faith, and choose to believe Evolution or at least parts of evolution as our beginning. Others do not move onto higher education, and make the same choices regarding evolution as those who did.

I personally don't think it's a serious (salvific) issue. After all, few would choose to dig up crawfish, harvest cotton, soybeans, sugarcane, produce fuel, serve others who wish to be pampered, and moreover, choose to help those who do the former shovel toxic hurricane muck if they were all downy-handed Evolution-teaching Ph.D.'s., no? We both know, in the end, God's quivver will be full of those who did and didn't believe in Evolution. - isn't that what we should be most concerned about?

I'm sorry if I appear to trivialize a passion for you, I suppose contributing physically to a hurricane relief effort changes one's perspective on such things.

Thank you for the links. :)