Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 521

China Steps Up the Pressure on Japan

An armed Chinese navy ship, alongside two other ships, today sailed into waters claimed by Japan—the first such encroachment. Bloomberg:

The three vessels approached waters north of Kuba Island from around 8:19 a.m. local time, entering Japanese territorial waters starting from 9:30 a.m. and left by 10:50 a.m., according to e-mailed coast guard statements. The armed vessel was the same one that the coast guard reported on Dec. 22 was sailing in waters 28 kilometers (17 miles) east-north-east of one of the islands, according to a coast guard official, who asked not to be named, citing government policy.

Kuba Island is among East China Sea islands whose sovereignty is disputed by Japan and China. Ships from both nations have been tailing one another in the area since Japan bought three of the uninhabited islands from a private owner in 2012. The dispute is among the biggest diplomatic issues between the two nations. The islands are known as Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese

Among the world’s top powers, the Japan-China rivalry has the most potential to launch a major war. But until this incident, there was relative quiet in this dispute. China had been calming the waters, smoothing over tensions in its relationship with Japan. If Beijing is now going to raise the stakes in the standoff over small islands, 2016 could see Asian tensions hit new highs. More aggressive Chinese policy in the East China Sea would be an ominous sign for the new year, indeed.

Fracklog Grows as Producers Await Price Rebound

These are grim days for oil producers. Europe’s oil benchmark is below $38 per barrel, a far cry from the $115 high water mark it set in June of last year. America’s benchmark is similarly depressed. For petrostates, the plunge that prices have taken over the past 18 months has pinched national budgets; in the private sector, oil companies are scrambling to find ways to stay profitable in the bearish market. Trimming capital expenditures is the most obvious way to try and get out of the red, but a number of U.S. shale firms are employing a more forward-looking tactic: drilling wells but not yet starting production, choosing instead to wait for prices to rebound before they get the crude flowing. The New York Times reports:

[Deferred completions]—known in the oil business as D.U.C.s (an acronym for drilled but uncomplete)—are a bet on higher oil prices than the current level of about $38 a barrel, which is about 60 percent lower than in summer 2014. They are viewed by oil executives as a way to hoard cash as service costs plummet and are a flexible lever to rapidly increase production whenever oil rises again. […]

But the incomplete wells are also another reason many analysts say a recovery in the oil price is nowhere in sight. Together the well backlog could produce as many as 500,000 barrels of oil a day, about the same amount of oil that Iran is expected to add to the glutted global market after it complies with the recent nuclear deal by the end of next year.

This “fracklog” has been growing all year long, and is in some way a product of one of the key features of shale drilling: the ability to rapidly increase or decrease production at wellheads. In contrast to more conventional oil projects which require larger capital outlays and investments, shale production requires relatively little infrastructure and time to get the crude flowing. Fracked wells also see output decline quite quickly, so the industry as a whole has been forced to become quick on its feet, capable of drilling and fracking the next well as soon as the current one is tapped.

Producers have found that, by drilling but not yet fracking shale formations, they can do all the heavy lifting on the front end and wait for prices to tick upwards before actually bringing the oil out of the ground. Thanks to sustained low crude prices, the American fracklog is quickly growing.Looking ahead to next year, this array of unfracked wells, combined with the prospect of an oil output renaissance in sanctions-free Iran, promises to keep the global supply of crude well above demand. The world is swimming in oil, and as soon as prices inch back up, a new wave of American shale production will quickly come online and send prices back down again.

Not Peace but War

Prime Minister Modi dropped in on a family wedding for Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif on Friday. WSJ:

India’s prime minister made a surprise stop Friday in Pakistan to meet his counterpart in a richly symbolic gesture likely to add momentum to a tentative reconciliation process between the nuclear-armed neighbors […]

The trip was heavy with imagery. Mr. Modi has Hindu nationalist roots and has railed against Pakistan. Lahore is Mr. Sharif’s hometown. Not only was Friday Mr. Sharif’s birthday, but his family was also celebrating a wedding. Dec. 25 is also the birthday of the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

In most of the world, this wouldn’t be newsworthy. Nobody flips out if the Danish Prime Minister goes to Norway for a weekend. But the twisted and charged India-Pakistan relationship, marked by wars, massacres, terrorism, nuclear rivalry, and continuing tension, is something else, and something unique.

The Modi-Sharif meeting looks like an attempt to restart an on-again, off-again process of improving economic relations between the two estranged neighbors. The two leaders come from somewhat similar roots: Both are identified with relatively pro-business, liberal economic ideas, and both are associated with nationalist ideas and movements. In the South Asian context, nationalism and religion are mixed. Pakistan was founded on the “two nations” theory, which holds that Muslims and Hindus in British India constituted two different nations, so that each needed a state of its own when the British left. Modi’s political power base is in the BJP, a pro-Hindu party that takes great pride in what it sees as India’s Hindu identity.These analogies are always tricky and misleading, but in an American context, both of these politicians could be seen as Republicans, combining free market economics, old-fashioned patriotism, and conservative religious ideas. Their opponents—the Gandhi family and the Congress Party in India and the Bhutto-Zardari family and the PPP in Pakistan—are more like Democrats. Neither Sharif nor Modi represent the extreme wings of religious identity politics in their country; both would be more like Jeb Bush than Donald Trump.But those similarities don’t necessarily make it easier for the two leaders and their countries to get along. The reality that Sharif (who took refuge in Saudi Arabia after a 1999 coup overthrew him) has Islamist support and Modi has a Hindu base makes it more difficult for them to get along—even as both share a strong interest in promoting economic growth and trade liberalization.Sharif in particular has problems with his defense establishment. The military almost had him executed after he attempted to replace its leadership with his own supporters back in 1999. Today, the military is basically in control of anything that touches on national strategy and security, and it is as committed to rivalry with India as ever. Modi’s base, on the other hand, is inflamed against the Pakistani-backed campaign of infiltration and terrorism that helps keep the pot boiling in Kashmir and that has more than once led to major terrorist attacks in India.It’s very hard for outsiders to read the tea leaves here, but it looks as if both the Pakistani military and the BJP are ready to tone things down a bit and to allow at least the appearance of progress in the bilateral relationship. Pakistan needs foreign investment and some quiet to nurse a fragile economy toward higher growth. The Pakistani military was shocked by the extent of violence that’s been directed against its own troops and installations by radical jihadis in recent years, and it’s probably more concerned about internal stability than usual. Growth could help with that, and while trade with India probably won’t amount to much, improved relations and a more peaceful atmosphere could help attract the foreign investment Pakistan badly needs. And the meeting with Modi strengthens the impression Sharif would like to create in Pakistan that his civilian government is something more than an insubstantial veil concealing the reality of military rule.For his part, Modi, among other things, benefits at home from projecting an image of statesmanship abroad, and by demonstrating that a BJP government can manage the relationship with Pakistan effectively he is bolstering his party’s appeal. Modi’s anti-Muslim image, dating back to bloody riots in Gujarat while he was governor, riots in which thousands of Muslims were killed and, in the opinion of many outside observers, not enough was done to protect them, still disturbs many Indians both inside and outside the country’s large Muslim minority. An embrace from Pakistan helps.What we are seeing, then, is almost certainly not the beginning of a real process of reconciliation between these estranged neighbors. This looks more like a piece of theatrical politics that announces a real but limited thaw. This is part of a well-established pattern in India-Pakistan relations as domestic leaders manipulate the tense international relationship in response to the political needs of the moment. The underlying hostility never fades away, but the intensity of the confrontation varies over time. India is not so secretly hoping that the violence, the ethnic conflict, and the regional strife simmering just under the surface in Pakistan will lead to the gradual breakup of a country they believe can never work. Many in the Pakistani security establishment hope that India’s Muslim minority, much of it economically disadvantaged, will grow more militant, and that a resurgent Islam will undermine Indian unity and power. Both sides fear the other, and both sides think they have reason for optimism about the ultimate outcome of their rivalry.Unfortunately, while all this goes on, both countries continue to develop their nuclear arsenals, and the kind of deep trade integration that could really help ordinary people on both sides of the frontier doesn’t take place. India and Pakistan have fought three wars since the British hauled down the Union Jack for the last time over the old Raj. A fourth, quite possibly involving a nuclear exchange, cannot be ruled out. Modi’s quick visit to Lahore gives us some confidence that the relationship isn’t about to take a dramatic turn for the worse, but it will take more than a single encounter to create real hope that one of the world’s most expensive and dangerous rivalries is beginning to die down.

Rolling the Credits

As we start to look at this whole bizarre Christmas phenomenon, it makes sense to begin with the basics. The first questions any sensible person asks about Christmas are pretty straightforward: What event is this holiday supposed to commemorate, and how do we know it happened? The short answers are that Christmas is a holiday commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, a Jewish prophet and holy man who lived about 2,000 years ago, whose followers came to believe that he was the Son of God. And we know about this, despite all the years that have come and gone since, for two reasons. First, more than 2 billion Christians around the world, the largest religious community in the history of our species, testify to the existence and the influence of this prophet, and second, because as it happens, early followers of the prophet wrote down what they and their community knew about the circumstances of his birth.

The documentary sources for the Christmas story are pretty good by the standards of the ancient world, but few and short by the standards of our time. Of the four “Gospels” (books in the New Testament that offer narratives about the life and death of Jesus), two provide information about Jesus’ birth. A third offers a theological reflection on the meaning of his birth, and the fourth (the Gospel of Mark) says nothing about Christmas at all.In Matthew, the Christmas story and its immediate sequel runs from Chapter One, verse one through the end of Chapter Two at verse 23 (or Matthew 1:1-2:23 as this is usually written). In Luke, home of the longest and most elaborate Christmas account, the story runs from Luke 1:5 through 3:38. In the Gospel of John, the opening section (verses 1:1-1:18) offers a kind of meditation on what Christmas is about, and contains some of the most moving and memorable words in the Bible.(If you invest twenty minutes or so reading these accounts you will know as much as anybody else in the world about the written history of the birth of Jesus; these are all the written sources from within one hundred years or so of his birth that exist.)The first and oldest version of the story in Matthew starts out rather strangely; it gives a 42-generation genealogical tree for Joseph, “the husband of Mary of whom Jesus was born.” The purpose seems to be to link the baby Jesus to the history of the Jewish people, not only connecting him to Abraham, widely considered the father of the nation, but also to the royal line going back to the heroic, Goliath-killing King David.That’s important; one of the main themes of the New Testament is that Jesus of Nazareth was The One, the heroic savior that the Jewish scriptures foretold. From the very earliest days of Christianity, this claim has been one of the central elements of the Christian message and it has lead to a new and distinctively Christian interpretation of the holy books of the Jewish people. It’s why these books are included in the Christian Bible. Those books contain many predictions of a coming Anointed One (“messiah” is an English transliteration of the Hebrew word that means “anointed one;” the word “christ” is a transliteration of the Greek word that means the same thing). The libretto of Handel’s Messiah is basically a collection of passages from the Jewish scriptures that Christians believe are fulfilled by Jesus’ life and death. The Messiah was predicted, Christians believed, to be a descendant of the Jewish national hero King David and the ancient kings of Judah; he was also going to be born in Bethlehem, the town where David’s family had its roots.As a literary device, starting a book with a genealogical tree strikes me as an odd choice. This is not the way they teach you to write stories in journalism school; this kind of writing is known as “stepping on the lead.” In the older translations, instead of translating the Greek word “egennasen” as “was the father of,” they used the simpler and more literal “begat.” “Abraham begat Isaac; Isaac begat Jacob,” and so on. There are a lot of passages like this in the Bible, and “the begats,” as these are sometimes called, make some of the dullest reading around.But the Gospel writers had a purpose in starting the story this way. It’s useful to think of these begats as “rolling the credits” before the main story begins; Luke’s longer Christmas story will end with another family tree for Jesus, this one going all the way back to Adam. So one Gospel rolls the credits at the beginning, the other at the end. Theologically, the point is the same: They anchor the story of Christmas and of Jesus to the larger stories of Jewish and human history.However, the “begats” in Matthew and Luke do raise two problems for readers.First, the begats trace Jesus’ ancestry through Joseph, but both Matthew and Luke make very clear that Joseph was not Jesus’ biological father. In fact, they both make the startling claim that Jesus did not have a biological father in the ordinary sense, but that God directly intervened at the moment of conception so that Mary was still a virgin when she became pregnant and that Jesus is, as the old translations say, “the only begotten Son of God.”The second and theologically more significant problem with the begats is that they aren’t the same: The family tree that Matthew gives for Joseph is rather different from the one that Luke gives. This is slightly disguised because Matthew gives the list in descending order from Abraham down while Luke goes the other way from Jesus up. But if you study the trees closely, you will see that they do not agree. Matthew’s list of the five immediate ancestors of Joseph runs like this: Jacob, Matthan, Eleazar, Eliud, Achim. Luke’s list goes like this: Heli, Matthat, Levi, Melchi, Jannai. The two lists come together on key names like David and Abraham, but otherwise they go their merry and largely independent ways.What do we make of these problems?The first, I think, is relatively simple. Belonging to a royal house in those days meant being acknowledged by the house. This is how it worked for the Caesars. The Caesar we know as Augustus was the adopted son of Julius Caesar; his successor Tiberius was also adopted and Tiberius in turn went on to adopt Caligula. More broadly, we should remember that paternity was a different thing in a pre-scientific age. In a world without DNA tests, if your mother’s husband acknowledged you as his son or his daughter, that was it. End of story. Joseph acknowledged Jesus as his son; Jesus was of the House of David, and his claim to the throne of David was as good as Tiberius Caesar’s claim to the throne of his adopted father Augustus. That at least is how it must have seemed to the Gospel writers.The second problem is trickier. Christians believe that the Bible is not just an ordinary book or, more properly, a collection of ordinary books. The Bible is a collection of unusual, even unique books, and most Christians historically have seen them as inspired by God. As St. Paul puts it in the second of the two letters addressed to Timothy in the Christian Bible, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.” (2 Tim 3:16 KJV, emphasis mine).That, presumably, means that the holy books are accurate: Would an omniscient God inspire a writer to make factual mistakes? If, as some Christians hold, the Bible is a divinely inspired book without a single error or contradiction, what is Joseph doing with two incompatible family trees?Readers have been scratching their heads over this issue for almost two thousand years, and many theories have been advanced to account for the discrepancy. There are plenty of writers who have come up with various ingenious solutions as to how these family trees can be reconciled. Far be it from me to say that they can’t be, but for a humble lay blogger like myself a lot of this effort seems beside the point. It’s enough to see the literary point of what’s happening.Regardless of the details, both Matthew and Luke think it’s extremely important that Jesus was a Jew and that the story of Jesus is part of the story of God’s encounter with the Jewish people. Gentile Christians going back to the first century AD have often wished this wasn’t so. In ancient times, various Greek and Roman cults grew up that detached the figure of Jesus from this Jewish context and turned him into something more like the mythical heroes and deities of the mystery religions that were so popular at the time. More recently, the Nazis in particular hated the idea of Jesus being a Jew and some of them went so far as to invent an “Aryan Christianity” with an Aryan Christ.  The Nazis were picking up on a kind of anti-Semitism that flourished in the first and second centuries after Christ as theological writers like Marcion argued that the Jewish God of the Old Testament had nothing to do with the much higher, more noble, and philosophically acceptable deity proclaimed by Jesus.That is not how the Gospel writers saw it and these family trees are there to make sure that the Jesus story stays grounded in the story of the Jewish people. That reality mattered more to whoever finally assembled the Gospels into their current form than the genealogical details, and this should be the takeaway for those of us reading the story now.There are two messages we should get from the begats: First, that Jesus was Jewish and his story needs to be seen as the continuation of the Jewish religious story that starts with God’s promises to Abraham and even further on back to the creation of the world.Second, the life of Jesus should be seen as part of the grounded world of history and not a free-floating myth. It’s important to the Gospel writers that we approach the Christmas story as a historical event with spiritual significance rather than as a set of pretty fables. They are claiming that all this really happened, and to understand the Christmas story as we tell it, we have to acknowledge this claim.Luke makes this even more clear in the way he starts his Gospel; he prefaces the story by saying that he’s writing his account after a thorough investigation. (See Luke 1:1-4.) Luke is so determined to stake a claim to writing as a historian that his language changes; the Greek in which these verses are written is much more like the classic Greek of great historians like Thucydides and Herodotus than like the casual and loose Greek in which most of the New Testament is written.By historian, though, he didn’t mean what we mean today by a historian. We have professional historians who work in a tradition of investigation and archival research that has been developing for more than 200 years. There are accepted requirements for documentation and citation, and historians today have both the comfort and the burden of knowing that their work will be checked and examined by many others.Some of the world’s greatest and most influential historical writers lived in the ancient world, but in an age without printing, video recording, freedom of information laws, and taxpayer-supported archives open to professional investigators, they worked under quite different circumstances. A good historian spoke to as many different eyewitnesses as possible, and used reason and common sense to bridge the inevitable gaps in the record. Written records were both sketchier and harder to come by in those days, and it was also much harder to travel around. State papers were often considered the private property of the people who produced them, and the modern concept of a repository for documents that are cataloged and kept orderly and available for researchers was unheard of. The greatest Greek and Roman historians did not even try to present word for word accounts of important speeches; they supplemented what they and other eyewitnesses remembered of important speeches by putting what they felt were the appropriate words into their characters’ mouths.Luke, like the other Gospel writers, lived in a world in which “best practice” for historians was different from what we are used to today, and to read the Gospels or indeed any other ancient historical document as if it had been written by a modern professional historian is to miss much of what the authors intended for us to know.  In point of fact, by modern standards, the Gospel writers—because of the supreme importance they attached to the literal words of a man they believed to be the Son of God—went to much greater lengths to preserve the actual words of Christ than, for example, their pagan contemporary historians were interested in preserving the actual words of Augustus Caesar. Nevertheless, historical writers in an age where written sources were rare and video and sound recordings non-existent necessarily saw their job in a different way than historians do today.And there is something else to remember: In a world in which every book had to be laboriously copied out by hand, length mattered. Parchment was expensive; books were rare. Every chapter, every line, every word put into a document made that document more expensive to preserve and distribute, and increased the chance that copying errors would creep in.Length also mattered because books were written then to be performed rather than read silently as we now do. In those days, writers wrote without punctuation marks or even breaks between words; readings were generally communal. Books were recited and silent, solitary reading was extremely unusual. The letters written on a page worked more like notes in sheet music today; unusually gifted and educated people could “hear them in their heads,” but books were primarily written as aids to public performance rather than as instruments of private study.Today, we see 700 and 800 page biographies and memoirs being produced about some pretty insignificant lives. In Greco-Roman times, it was extremely rare to have a book-length biography of a single person, however important. The life of Jesus is better attested by more contemporary writers at greater length than the life of just about anybody else from this time period; we have more evidence about what he said and did than we have about any of the other famous people of his era. Even so, by the standards of a modern political or business leader the written records we have about his life seem fragmentary and scant.The historians of the ancient world were concerned with explaining the meaning of important events. To assemble the massive and detailed factual information that a standard biography now features was utterly beyond their capacity; they looked for the telling detail and the illuminating moment because that is what they had the ability to record. We see this in the way the Gospels, unlike modern biographies that tell a single connected narrative from cradle to grave, concentrate on a handful of key episodes in the life of Jesus. The writers selected details ruthlessly because they couldn’t write 800-page biographies with 200 pages more of bibliographies and appendices. They worked with the records and the sources they had, and they used the methods of historical investigation they knew and that were accepted by the educated people of the time.Most Christians, and I include myself in that number, believe that both the Jewish and the Greek books of the Bible were inspired by God. How to reconcile that faith with the reality that these are also human documents, written by people whose ideas and understanding were shaped by the intellectual climate around them and the age in which they lived, is a complicated question. I do not pretend to have all the answers to that; but just as I can believe that Jesus of Nazareth, a human being like the rest of us, was also the Son of God with a unique relationship to the creator of the world, I can believe that divine inspiration, working in and through the consciousness of limited, human authors, produced documents through which people today can hear the word of God. The union of the eternal and the temporal, of ultimate truth and reality with day-to-day human life, is the central mystery of the Christmas story. It is not surprising that the texts through which we learn of this story are shaped by and reflect that same meeting of the world of timeless truth and the world of history and change. The Bible reflects and expresses the encounter of humanity with God, the union of time and eternity, and all the mysteries and paradoxes of that encounter are reflected in the text as we read it today.The Christmas story may or may not be real history; that is a question each reader has to answer on his or her own, based on a mix of factual information, personal experience, and theological conviction. We will be looking both at the story of Christmas and its meaning as these posts continue. But for now, this much should be clear. Those who first researched the story and wrote it down worked very hard to make two important points as strongly as they knew how: that the Christmas story is real, and that it is really Jewish.They used all the literary and historical techniques available to them to make these points as strongly as they knew how, and it is worth remembering at this point that few other events in the ancient world have as much evidence behind them as the Christmas story. The infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke are not the kind of history a modern historian would write, but the people who wrote them knew the difference between history and mythology, and they did what they could to ground the Christmas story in the real world.

Ukraine Averts Loss of Bailout Funds

Ukraine’s parliament passed a budget Christmas Eve, taking an important step toward ensuring that IMF bailout funds will continue to flow to Kyiv. The Financial Times:

Ukraine’s parliament adopted crucial tax amendments, a 2016 budget and other related laws in tense – at times sleepy — voting that stretched from Thursday morning past midnight, into the early hours of Christmas Day.

Though dramatic, the development eased fears that mounting political infighting within a shaky ruling coalition could derail the contested laws that are key to preserving the war-scarred country’s $40bn international lifeline led by the International Monetary Fund.After bitter clashes in past weeks with the government of embattled Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk, a majority of MPs rubberstamped a compromise package of legislation in voting that ended just after 4am.

It’s a piece of good news for Ukraine and the West, which would have been put in an awkward spot if the IMF had had to decide whether to cut off Kyiv. It is, of course, a continuation of the status quo for Ukraine, and the status quo is better for Russia than it is for anyone else. But Putin is very happy to see the IMF and Ukraine fight, so avoiding such tension is a good thing for the West. On the whole, 2015 hasn’t been a great year for Kyiv. The question in 2016 is whether the West will step up its efforts or continue to do the minimum possible to confront Moscow.

U.S. Shale Driving Mexican Renaissance

A little noted story from the last year is how Mexico has largely avoided the disaster that is enveloping so many commodity-exporting countries around the world—and especially in Latin America.

There are three reasons for this positive and welcome development. First, Mexico didn’t drink the left populist Kool-Aid that has laid low several other Latin countries—Brazil, Argentina and above all Venezuela quickly come to mind. Second, diversification: Mexico opened its economy and built a strong manufacturing sector. Using access to the U.S. under NAFTA and going for foreign investment, Mexico is becoming a major manufacturing center, and is following a development path that in some ways looks more Asian than Latin American. Third, Mexico’s geographical position, and its courageous decision to deregulate the energy sector—something that the Mexican left has hated and feared for years—means that cheap U.S. shale gas is flowing through new pipelines to Mexican electric plants, reducing energy costs and boosting the competitiveness of Mexican manufacturing at a critical time.This is excellent news for young Mexicans, who can now get good jobs at home without having to immigrate to the U.S. It is also excellent news for the U.S., as the deep integration with the Mexican economy means that prosperity there supports economic growth here. And it is excellent news for Latin America in general, as Mexico points to the way in which Latin American countries can escape the trap of commodity dependence and unequal development that goes with the traditional populist nostrums.Mexico is no utopia, of course, and lots of problems remain. But the process of democratization and modernization that Mexico has chosen is slowly transforming its prospects.A little good news in an otherwise gloomy world.

Christmas Gift!

Merry Christmas and happy holiday to all! Christmas is a tense morning wherever the Meads gather, as we jump whenever the telephone rings. There’s an old South Carolina custom that when two friends or relations greet one another on Christmas morning, the first one who says “Christmas gift!” gets to select one of the other person’s presents. I’ve never known anybody actually to get an extra present this way, but we are nothing if not determined and we all continue to try. If you call us on Christmas Day, don’t expect anybody here to answer with “Hello?” and give you a chance to say “Christmas gift!” We are onto this trick and to protect our rich hauls of presents we always answer the phone with an aggressive “Christmas gift!” to get in first. So don’t call us unless you are ready to part with a present.

For the Mead clan, this is our third Christmas without the woman who was for so long the heart and strength of our family. My mother died in September of 2013, and the memories of her love jostle with our grief over her loss as we gather in her absence. The Yule Blog was one of her favorite features on the site, and as her sight failed, she asked my father to read them to her in the hospital. As I go through these posts to prepare them for another year, I am sustained and encouraged to know that these essays meant something to her in that last difficult year of pain and decline—and inexpressibly sad not to be able to share them with her as the season rolls round once again.Today the Christmas blogging continues; this begins the thirteen posts of Christmas on our traditional Via Meadia Yule blog, first published in 2009 and updated ever since. Introduced with yesterday’s Advent post on Christmas Eve, the series continues through January 6, the traditional end of the Christmas season. To give the team—and me—a bit of a holiday break, we’ll be publishing on a lighter holiday schedule through New Year’s Day, and while the pace of regular blogging will pick up after January 1, the Yule Blog will burn all the way to Twelfth Night.Back when mammoths ruled the earth, a first-class postage stamp cost three cents, and my idea of a great adventure was to cross the street without holding hands, my parents used to set up a manger scene every year. During Advent, the four weeks before Christmas, Mary and Joseph would set out en route to the manger, passing through the different rooms of the house and getting a little closer each day. On Christmas Eve, they got to the manger and on Christmas morning, they would be there with the baby Jesus, an ox, a donkey, and the requisite shepherds and angels.That was also the day the figures of the Three Wise Men would set out toward the manger, retracing Mary and Joseph’s journey through the house until they joined the baby and the shepherds on January 6. By then we were all pretty sick of Christmas and were happy to pack up the manger scene, take down the Christmas tree, and get on with our lives.The  these days really is the face of Christmas for most people and perhaps not surprisingly it is one of the aspects of the season that people resent and fight. Every new Christmas season brings its harvest of lawsuits by groups trying to displace manger scenes in public places. Well, unlike some religions I could name, Christianity has the self-confidence and experience to shelter dissent and see pluralism as a religious value. In any case, the manger scene started out in a protest movement against the materialism and complacency of mainstream Christianity. The first one seems to have been assembled by St. Francis of Assisi in 1223 as part of his program to bring the truths of Christianity to the masses. It was a bit more dramatic than the ones we see today; he used actual living people rather than plastic figurines. The animals were real, too, although there isn’t any direct evidence in the Biblical story that there were animals anywhere nearby. Much like the Pope who has taken his name, St. Francis made many of the orthodox uncomfortable as he challenged the easy compromises that Christians are often tempted to make. Christmas has been contentious ever since.St. Francis introduced the manger scene hoping that it would draw attention away from gift-giving and secular celebrations to the religious meaning of the season. This does not seem to have worked very well. The last time I checked, the score at the mall seemed to be Santa Claus and Shopping ten million, St. Francis and The True Meaning of Christmas, zip.We think of Christmas as a timeless holiday festival, but it’s had its ups and downs over the years. In Anglo-American history, the Puritans gave up on trying to “put the Christ back in Christmas” and just tried to get rid of Christmas completely. They banned it outright in Massachusetts and did the same thing in the Old Country after the English Civil War. Many of the Founding Fathers had distinctly grinch-like attitudes toward a holiday they associated with papistry and superstition. Well into the nineteenth century, many New England Christians ignored Christmas; according to one report, no college in New England celebrated the Christmas holiday as late as 1847. After all, there’s no date given for Christmas in the Bible; our custom of celebrating Jesus’ birthday on December 25 has nothing to do with the scriptures, and everything to do with the way the ancient church tried to take over pagan festivals. Just as today’s radical Islamists destroy shrines and celebrations they consider un-Koranic, so too many Protestants went to work demolishing anything that smacked of un-Biblical superstition and the pagan solstice-fest called Christmas was an excellent place to start.It took a while for Christmas to make it back into respectability among the Theologically Correct. Two of the classics of Christmas literature, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and The Night Before Christmas (most likely by Clement Clarke Moore), come from the early nineteenth century, when Christmas was fighting for wider acceptance in the English-speaking world. Ebeneezer Scrooge, like many Dickens villains, is a degenerate type of Puritan; he has lost any love or thought of God, but his life is still cramped by the rules and restrictions his ancestors laid down to stop the frippery and folderol of popular glee. (Even the name Ebeneezer, taken from the Hebrew scriptures, points to his Puritan background. In 19th-century Britain, Hebrew names were usually associated with low church and evangelical Dissent.)Christmas never disappeared from the English-speaking world, but once the more zealous Protestants got back with the program, the winter festival exploded to become what it is today: The most widely celebrated and distinctive holiday we have. (Oddly, the most anti-Christmas Christians in former times are the most zealous celebrants of the holiday today. A 2013 poll showed that evangelical Christians are more likely than Catholics or mainline Protestants to celebrate Christmas as a “strongly religious” holiday. It’s a finding that, for different reasons, would surprise and appall both Cotton Mather and Cardinal Newman.) Christmas has become a melting pot of traditions and ideas. It’s sometimes hard to know which pieces of Christmas come from the Bible (shepherds, manger, baby, parents, angels, wise men), what comes from paganism (the date, Christmas trees, mistletoe, lights, logs, presents), what comes from pious legends with little or no historical or Biblical basis (animals, the association of St. Nicholas with gifts, crowns for racially integrated wise men named Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar), what from medieval custom (manger scenes, carol singing), what comes from sentimental Victorian literature (named reindeer, flying sleigh, Santa Claus as a fat and jolly elf, Tiny Tim) and what comes from modern commercialism (dreaming of a white Christmas, Rudolf, the little drummer boy, Black Friday, the Grinch).  There are parts of Christmas (like Santa Claus, Christmas trees, and the whole gift-industrial complex) that non-Christians around the world have embraced with a sometimes terrifying enthusiasm; there are other parts—like fruitcakes—that everybody hates but that somehow refuse to die.In a further wrinkle, many of America’s most beloved modern Christmas songs are written by Jews. “White Christmas” is by Irving Berlin, for example, and the author of “Rudolf, the Red Nosed Reindeer” came from a secular Jewish home in New Rochelle. But American Jews are no stranger to the Christmas celebration. A recent Pew poll of American Jews tells us that one in three had a Christmas tree in the house. The country that has everything even has a klezmer Christmas album: You can get the Klezmonauts’ “Oy to the World” at Amazon.Christmas meanwhile reigns as both the world’s most popular and universal modern holiday and the world’s most repressed and despised one. The spirit of St. Francis is still very much with us; the pulpits of Christendom thunder every December with orations urging us to turn away from the secular festivities at the mall and spend more time and energy on the “true spirit of the season.” Some of the pushback is more in the spirit of Cotton Mather and John Winthrop: Religious zealots and scripture-thumping clerics in much of the Islamic world today frown on both the secular and the religious celebration of the day. In Iraq in 2009, many churches were closed due both to fears of fanatical Sunni-based terrorists and a concern for awakening Shi’a hostility; in that year, Christmas came very close to the day on which Shi’a Muslims commemorate the Battle of Karbala and the death of Husayn ibn Ali. In 2010 and again in 2011, rising sectarianism and religious extremism persuaded many Christians to do their celebrating quietly and at home, and in the year of grace 2013, Christmas morning brought the news that “at least” 37 people have been killed in bomb attacks in the Christian neighborhoods of Bagdad. In 2015, the Sultan of Brunei won the Sanctimonious Grinch award for banning public Christmas celebrations in his Sharia-governed, oil-rich enclave on Borneo. More seriously, Christians in countries like (northern) Nigeria, Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran live in fear and, overall, Christians remain the most persecuted major religious faith in the world.In some of the countries in the Arab speaking world, all public expression of Christian faith is banned by law, and putting up so much as a holiday wreath or a picture of Santa Claus where the public can see is strictly verboten. In Gaza, Palestinian Christians from time to time report persecution from Islamic extremists. Disturbing reports from Egypt in recent years tell of increased trouble for the largest remaining Christian minority in the Middle East and a reported 28 people were killed by Christmas bombings of churches in Nigeria on Christmas Eve in 2011. In Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, Christians continue to face violence, discrimination, and suspicion. ISIS has martyred dozens of Christians and sold many into slavery. Based on current trends, the 21st century could well be the century in which the long Christian presence in the Middle East comes to an end; the tide of violence continues to rise, and Christians are getting out where they can.There is, alas, nothing new about the association of Christmas and persecution. The original historical figure on whom Santa Claus is based was a martyr: St. Nicholas, an early Christian bishop based in what is now Turkey who lived 300 years after Jesus and whose legendary generosity and good deeds led to his metamorphosis into the modern figure of Santa Claus. Nicholas was persecuted for his faith under the Roman emperor Diocletian. (Bones reputed to be those of St. Nicholas are currently enshrined in a church in Bari, Italy; the Turks want them back as, apparently, the local authorities in the city where he died believe that the bones of Santa Claus would be good for the tourist trade.) 2000 years after the birth of Jesus, Christians still face persecution in many countries around the world. While improving, conditions in China and Vietnam are still far from perfect; the Pope’s Christmas message for 2010 called for Chinese Catholics to show courage in the face of continuing restrictions on their freedom of religion. In South Asia, mob violence can still be a problem in both India and Pakistan. On my visits to Pakistan, local Christians have taken me quietly aside to talk about the climate of fear in which they live. In 2010, Indian Christians reported an ominous new trend toward attacks and arrests of Christians timed to coincide with major Christian holidays, including Christmas.There are a number of organizations working to promote religious freedom for both Christians and non-Christians around the world. An end of year gift might be one nice way to celebrate the season and promote religious toleration. One in particular with whose work I am familiar seems both responsible and wise; the Institute for Global Engagement led by Chris Seiple works effectively with both religious and political figures in many countries around the world to find solutions to problems of religious intolerance.Looking at the long history of vicious persecution of Christian dissidents and non-Christians by church and state authorities throughout Europe and the Byzantine world, Christians cannot feel smug about the record of the faith. Nevertheless, even as Christians and others suffer persecution in so much of the world today, we can take some satisfaction in seeing that in almost all of the historic lands of the Christian faith, religious minorities, Christian or not, are more free than ever to practice and proclaim their beliefs without fear of persecution.Religious tolerance for minorities in our midst including people without religious faith, respect for the dignity of all human beings, solidarity with Christians and others wickedly persecuted for their beliefs around the world: These are three of the gifts we can bring to the manger on Christmas Day, and one somehow thinks both Mother and Child would prefer them to yet more gold, frankincense, and myrrh.Meanwhile, we are left to contemplate one of the many paradoxes of the season: It is the commercial, consumerist side of Christmas that has won the most acceptance worldwide, while the faith that St. Francis hoped to promote can still get you in trouble. Santa Claus is welcome where the baby Jesus is not. Santa Clauses, reindeer, and elves prance freely through the streets of Tokyo where few have ever really thought about the Christian religion. American public schools with zero tolerance for manger scenes revel in an orgy of seasonal Santa kitsch.What makes this holiday so irresistible and global, yet also so particular and controversial? Why do so many people love Christmas while rejecting or in some cases actively hating Christianity? And why do so many others hate Christianity so deeply that they want to suppress all public celebration, however secular, of the symbols of Christmas?For that matter, why do so many followers of the man who famously blessed the poor celebrate His birthday with the greatest spending sprees the world has ever known? How did the birthday of a crucified religious teacher become an excuse to drink egg nog?Christmas is anything but simple; I invite readers to join me here at the Yule Blog as we reflect together on the meaning of the world’s most famous and most controversial feast. Among the Meads, even as we remember those no longer with us this Christmas, we welcome newcomers to our family circle. Emma Lynn was born on November 22, 2013 and Lucy Claire came on Christmas Eve of that same year. We are expecting at least one new arrival in 2016. These are the Christmas gifts worth keeping, and like the baby who came to the manger so many years ago, the youngest among us welcome Christmas today surrounded and protected by those who love them.

Oregon Wrestles with Public Pension Costs

Conflict between public employees on the one hand and schools and business groups on the other is setting up a political clash in Oregon. The Portland Tribune:

Oregon’s major business groups want lawmakers to start dealing with rising public pension costs as early as the session that opens Feb. 1.

Although those costs start to kick in with the 2017-19 budget cycle — 18 months away — advocates say it’s not too early to whittle down an unfunded liability projected at $18 billion over the next few decades.“If we do nothing, 100 percent of the burden falls on taxpayers, government services and their ability to undertake reinvestment in budgets going forward,” says Tim Nesbitt, currently a consultant for the Oregon Business Plan. […]Cheri Helt, co-chair of the Bend-La Pine School Board, says pension costs will jump from the current 16 percent of payroll to 20 percent in 2017-19, and to 25 percent in the cycle afterward.

The question of how America’s state and local governments dig themselves out of their massive pension hole will be one of the great (and underrated) fiscal and political questions of the next generation. As the article implies, the process of divvying up resources to fund the pensions will not be pretty, pitting key Democratic constituencies—public employees (producers of services) and citizens who consume public services—against one another in a blue civil war. The reckoning can only be put off for so long.

A Warrior for the Working Day

The Churchill Documents, Vol. 18: One Continent Redeemed, January-August 1943 

by Martin Gilbert and Larry P. ArnnHillsdale College Press, 2015, 2,200 pp., $60

The Churchill-obsessed go through various phases. The affliction usually takes hold when one hears excerpts from the great speeches of 1940 or leafs through his history of World War II. It deepens as one reads some of his other works—his six volumes on World War I, or his autobiography, My Early Life. In the next stage, it continues with the collection and reading of his biography of his great ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough (another six volumes).

Fully possessed, one wades into his great official biography—more chronicle than analysis, but no less wonderful for all that—the eight volumes written by his son Randolph and subsequently by the late, lamented historian, Sir Martin Gilbert. Shortly before or after, one develops the secondary symptom of reading the Churchillians as well—The Fringes of Power by John Colville, his secretary during much of World War II, or the charming Winston Churchill as I Knew Him by the beauty who spurned him but remained a good friend, Violet Bonham Carter (and yes, she was the grandmother of Helena Bonham Carter, a.k.a. Bellatrix Lestrange of Harry Potter fame). Of course, the besotted student of the great man (American, almost always, the British now being merely embarrassed by him) has meanwhile begun making pilgrimages to the holy sites—the Churchill War Rooms in London, Chartwell, and Blenheim Palace.In the final stage before visible madness (which takes the form of putting “Action This Day” stickers on papers to one’s subordinates and placing a Churchill beer mug on the mantelpiece), one accumulates the volumes of documents that accompany the official history. In this connection it is delightful to welcome Volume 18—yes, 18—in this series, covering six months of World War II from January through August 1943. It is the fifth in the series of war documents, the first three published by Sir Martin Gilbert before he passed away, and the most recent two taken up by his former research assistant Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College.We will never again have so thorough a record of any statesman’s decision-making, and certainly not of one so great, in a war so vast and consequential. Accompanied by a full apparatus of footnotes identifying persons mentioned, correcting dates, and clarifying obscure references, the documents volumes contain an extraordinary array of materials: official memoranda, correspondence, speeches, diary entries by friends (and enemies), reports, instructions, recollections, and even dinner lists.The early 1940s were still an era in which decisions were made in face-to-face meetings; in which adults routinely wrote letters, and were willing to confide candid thoughts to their journals and diaries. British decision-making was particularly remarkable for the orderliness and clarity of the written word and its prominent place in the workings of government. Indeed, at the outset of his tenure as Prime Minister, Churchill told his subordinates to disregard any instructions from him that did not come in writing. And so many of them—not just Churchill, but his friends, his American counterparts, journalists, and public officials—wrote lucidly and powerfully. Amusingly, too, as when Captain Richard Pim of the Royal Navy recorded the Prime Minister’s stay at the White House in May 1943:

One morning the President thought he would visit the Prime Minister in his bedroom to see if he had everything he required. At that moment Mr Churchill was coming out of his bathroom looking for a towel. The President expressed his regret at catching the Prime Minister unawares and unclad, but the latter replied ‘Please do not concern yourself – England has nothing to hide from the President of the United States.’

In reading the documents, one detects the little jolts of electricity that clean, confident writing transmits, and which invigorated a bureaucracy in its fourth year of unremitting wartime labor. Bureaucratic writing today is much duller, and our government the worse for it. Power Point, email, video-teleconference, and phone calls have displaced minutes, memos, and state papers. More to the point, our politicians and bureaucrats have so little mastery of the English language, and so little inclination to commit their thoughts to paper—for their own benefit or their colleagues’, let alone for posterity—that they will mainly leave behind anodyne or semi-literate musings. Nor are they likely to be quite so candid in admitting, as Churchill did in speaking of the relationship with the United States to parliament in June 1943 that, “All sorts of divergences, all sorts of differences of outlook and all sorts of awkward little jars necessarily occur as we roll ponderously forward together along the rough and broken road of war.”

It is not bad to start browsing through this treasure trove with this volume, precisely because it has none of the drama of 1940, or the awful foreboding of 1945. This is the middle of the war, when the possible outcomes began to narrow in number, but the obstacles before Churchill and his colleagues loomed large. The United States is thoroughly engaged in the war and the Allies have landed in North Africa after an acrimonious debate, but the campaign there is far from won. The Soviets might still desert the cause if the Anglo-Americans do not invade mainland Europe in 1943, or so Churchill and Roosevelt think. The French exiles under De Gaulle are impossible to deal with, but the old Vichy generals and admirals are probably worse. The great week to ten-day conferences—in this volume alone, at Casablanca, Washington, and Quebec—to settle the future course of the war must be prepared, staffed, conducted and followed up. Churchill’s 69-year-old body is showing the strain of it all.The reader dipping into these documents, particularly if he knows something about government work today, is amazed at Churchill’s mastery of detail, and the questions with which he peppers his subordinates. To the military and civilian heads of the Royal Air Force on January 7, 1943: “Considering that Bomber Command have done hardly any flying in the last month worth speaking of, it is astonishing that only 547 aircraft should be serviceable and fit for operations out of an establishment of 808.” Actually, probably not astonishing (the RAF had, after all, been running all out for about four years straight), but not a bad thing for his subordinates to have to explain.No less impressive are his reflections on inflection points in the war. See, for example, his July 26, 1943 “Thoughts on the Fall of Mussolini,” a memorandum several pages long working through the implications of the coup that brought Mussolini down, and that would take Italy out of the war. No less striking than his prescience is the sheer fact of a head of government taking the time to spell out to his colleagues and subordinates what he makes of the great events of the war, and to express himself with a ruthless candor impossible in the age of ubiquitous leaks. Of war criminals swept up in the liberation of Italy he writes, “Some may prefer prompt execution without trial except for identification purposes. Others may prefer that they be kept in confinement till the end of the war in Europe and their fate decided together with that of other war criminals. Personally I am fairly indifferent on this matter, provided always that no solid military advantages are sacrificed for the sake of immediate vengeance.”These documents are also valuable in their least dramatic moments, because they show how Churchill’s genius consisted not only in inspiration, but in an astounding capacity for grinding, meticulous labor. Yes, he had his flights of fancy, his unreasonable demands, his implausible schemes—but that is far less important than the work ethic that, with his intelligence and judgment, helped steer his exhausted empire and its powerful but raw and untested ally across the Atlantic Ocean to victory.At a time when nearly twenty politicians have put themselves forward as potential presidents of the United States, we would do well to ponder that lesson of this volume—that it is the capacity for sustained, high-level executive work, as well as the ringing phrases, that make a leader effective; that rhetoric divorced from action is empty, and planning without careful implementation downright dangerous. There are no Churchills out there, and thank goodness, we do not need them just now, because we face nothing like the dangers and struggles he did. But in all conscience, it is a troubling enough time that we need a President who has more than a bit of the Churchillian ethos, someone who is, as Shakespeare puts it, a warrior for the working day.

Young Kurds Bring Violence into Turkish Cities

Young Kurds, outside the control of normal political or militant structures, are attacking government forces in southeast Turkey. The WSJ reports:

Since the government last week declared what it called a “decisive” campaign to end five months of limited violence between Kurds and government security forces, young Kurdish militants in the cities of Diyarbakir, Cizre, Silopi and Nusaybin have been targeted by Turkish tanks, helicopters, artillery and snipers, according to local residents and news reports from the region […]

More than 40,000 people have died in fighting between the PKK and government forces since 1984, when the PKK took up arms.Most of the group’s attacks occurred in rural Turkey, but a new generation of militants—mostly local youth, some as young as 15—has brought the conflict into the heart of southeastern Turkey’s cities and towns, increasing the risk to civilians.

Pair this piece with one in the FT about the radicalization of young Kurds. Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, spent the better part of this year driving tensions between Turks and Kurds higher and higher in a bid to win elections and accrue to himself even more power. In doing so, he undid his own previous achievements in forging a measure of peace between the two groups. Erdogan is not the only cause of the phenomenon described in the FT; the story also points to developments elsewhere, like Syria, as contributing to the extremism. But Erdogan could have gone down in history as a man who helped heal one of Turkey’s most doleful divisions. Instead, he may be the man who helped radicalized another generation, led to more war, and drove the two sides further apart.