Faith and Reason

St. Thomas Aquinas

Faith and reason; theology and philosophy: thesis. We know what God - which for us means "our concept of God" or what it make sense to say about God (our idols?) - ... we know what God (the Christian concept) revealed by faith and trust. We do not know it, directly, though reason. The story related about Jesus and the woman condemned to be stoned for adultery speaks to the purest part of my heart, the most sacred part of my soul. ‘This comes directly from God’ my heart tells me, and my intellect follows. I trust the source that relates this story and believe in the man that the story is about. My reason judges thoughts about God. God – the sacred, the divine – is beyond me or any man, woman, or even child. If I am to understand anything about God’s reality or will, God must reveal it to me. I could never reach God with my intellect alone. If there is any telepathy with God, it is not through the head but the heart.

      But given faith, I can come to understand many aspects of God through the use of my intellect. If somebody tells me God willed the terrorists to fly into the World Trade Buildings, approved of the Holocaust as a punishment to Jews, “meant” for me to betray my wife, or for the church to burn heretics in the Middle Ages then I know they are wrong because such things contradict the goodness of God as revealed to me through Christ as portrayed in the Gospels.

      If someone responds that I am mistaken because whatever God might will is simply “good”, such that if God wills that I hate homosexuals or adulterers or Jews or Germans (and so on), hating them would be “good”, then I remain certain that God could never possibly will such things. If someone then points to other passages in the Bible that seem to support God approving of something that we think evil, then I say that passage must be understood in the light of stories from the gospels like the one that revealed God to me (for Jews it would be something in the Torah; for Muslims, something in the Koran).

       If a theologian tries to convince me of the “divine command theory” of God – whatever God wills is good – and points out that I am guilt of imposing my sentimental human concept of goodness on God, then I say I find Aquinas’ solution true and the “divine command theory” false: God’s will is goodness itself, as revealed through Jesus and understood by my heart and soul, because God created both. 

      I offer this as a picture – condensed to be sure – of how faith and reason belong to the same family, faith being the loving parent of reason. But without reason, the family would be incomplete. This is my understanding of Augustine’s well-known principle: “I believe so that I may understand.” I believe in God’s goodness so that I may understand the world.

      The most fundamental divide in religion for me is this: between those who believe all the answers are clearly expressed in Scripture in the form of divine commands, and “ours is not to question why, but to do or die”; and those who (like me) believe that God also communicates through reality (Nature, the Creation) itself, through what is Good, True, and Beautiful. A kind of faith – not blind, fanatical faith but trusting your heart when it is inspired by love – is necessary to believe such an interpretation of Being more real than other possible interpretations (e.g. the materialism is a Carl Sagan, the nihilism of a Woody Allen).  Scripture – interpreted not as clear and distinct commands but as something we also need our intellects to grasp – can also reveal realities beyond our ability to grasp with our unaided intellects, but we need our minds and hearts to understand it and strive to conform our lives to it. 

      The mind cooperates with faith and love. To me this is the main difference between most forms of Protestantism and Catholicism as understood in the tradition of Aquinas: the former rejects the use of the intellect as hopelessly corrupted by sin (egotism, passion), whereas the latter, while acknowledging the influence of sin (ego) darkening the intellect, holds that the intellect can also be driven by a love of Truth and must participate in grace by seeking the Truth always.

The Bible. It is so far from being transparent that 1000 different people could read it in a thousand different ways. Churches and indeed individual pastors try to impose some unity of interpretation. For Catholics there is a tradition of interpretation that serves as a guide.  But to say: it is clear, my interpretation is God's interpretation; all other interpretations are from the devil. So don't think,  just live your lives according to my (i.e. God's) interpretation - that is the danger of Protestantism. 

   To me, the center of the Bible are the direct teachings of Jesus - the sermons, the parables,  the stories. The Sermon on the Mound,  the Good Samaritan, The Prodigal Son,  the story of the Adulteress. This is not because that is or should be obvious to any reader. That is because my mind informed by my heart can only make sense of much of the Bible - almost all of the Old Testament, and much of the New - by understanding it in light of this center. So far, I am also in the tradition. 

    In some moods, only those passages for me are Scripture. The Bible would cause less confusion and strife, I think, if it consisted of about 10 to 20 pages of Jesus' own words.  I think even that critical scholarship can be an aide here. There I am out of the tradition, out on a limb, I guess, though not alone there. Tolstoy also believed something like this. 

  In terms of understanding things literally, I think a handful of passages do make that demand on us: for example

“But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:43–44).

Literally, that means not demonizing or dehumanizing people considered to be enemies. (Can any current political regime do without demonizing some enemy?) But what does it mean to love your enemies? What does it mean to love a Trump? There not just your heart but your intellect must struggle to understand. And not only understand the words of Jesus, but reality - what an enemy is, who Trump is, etc. You can't separate faith and reason in real life.  

It's just a thought. 

Capitalist and Fascist Culture, Left and Right 

  Capitalist culture's attitudes toward the biological body may not indicate a rejection of simple biological facts like birth and death, but does seem to deny any link between such facts and what meanings may constitute our sense of self and world. It does seem committed to denying that anything inherent to the life of the flesh should condition any cultural understanding or norm regarding birth, sexuality, birth, death. Why do I think this? In this social form, it is not so much that our only access to nature is by means of “discourses,” but that nature is nothing but an "effect of discourse."  [You can substitute "narrative" or "construct" for "discourse" - same thing.] And discourses are all in some way implicated in the striving for power – that is, are potential moralities justifying some life forms, rejecting others. Thus if we want to live in a reality with 72 genders, we can. If we want to live in a reality in which Trump is a demigod and the rightful president, while the rest of the country is an evil swamp, we can. Constructing reality to suit your will. 

      What is real is relative to an individual or a group. It doesn't condition how we live; we are inclined to live this way or that way, choose to identify with this or that - and then tailor our constructs of reality to justify it. It doesn't make any sense within this culture to question your life choices - if choices they are - by referring them to an independent reality. Referring choices to reality is one discourse among others. Ultimately it is just a personal attack on your identity and lifestyle choices since there is no objective reality, at least outside of natural science and math (for some, not even there).

     Compare to Mussolini:

 

If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we Fascists conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable.

 

I think it is an essential feature of fascism that it denies reality (i.e. is insane) - that it denies reality in the deeper sense that it reduces all possible reality to human constructs and nothing more. The idea of non-reducible reality is itself a human construct. It does this in order to impose its fantasies of power and godlike omnipotence onto nature and human nature. Left fascism, right fascism, the same. Without reality as a measure and a limit, anything goes. 

      Reality comes down to what is intelligible to us, what ultimately makes sense.  In most cases, we have to understand reality, interpret it - like a book. Perhaps their are different readings of reality that are plausible. We can talk about these readings only with reference to the book, to reality. Our readings must make sense of the book, of reality.  We cannot impose our readings onto reality, as though it were an inkblot. Reality talks back to us if we would only stop and listen. 

 Meditation on Happiness and a Thought of J. S. Mill

Happiness is a mediocre concept. Why do I say such a thing? Aren’t I happy to be happy, and sad to be sad? Of course I am. But the important thing is whether my happiness, when I am happy, is worth anything; whether my sadness, when I am sad, is not a fault. Only the happiness of a truly good man matters, one who is happy doing precisely what love requires of him, living precisely as love would have him live. Which of us can say what should make us happy is not sometimes a burden, a duty. Which of us can say that we are not sad merely over the frustration of petty desires?  What does the happiness of a man like Trump matter? As J. S. Mill wrote: "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question.”

 

A profound concept. Aristotle argued that the point of all striving was eudaimonia, which has traditionally been translated (badly) as happiness. Thomas Jefferson made “the pursuit of happiness” – no longer Aristotle’s eudaimonia, but subjective happiness feelings and states of mind – a natural right. I’ve been reading about Kierkegaard’s crazy thought (in Philosophical Fragments) that God – a perfect being – could actually experience something like grief and unhappiness. He – from our perspective insanely – desired to be loved by his creature, man, a creature who did not know or understand him. Love cannot be commanded, although it is said to be the highest commandment to love God. We cannot love God in all God’s power and infinity – our being would simply be absorbed in worship and adoration by God’s infinitely higher being: the beatific vision. 

       Perhaps God doesn’t want our adoration and worship; he wants our love. He wants us to know him. To make it possible for us to love God, God had to descend, to enter time and flesh, to become one of us. God suffered for his love. God didn’t enter into our existence to make himself happy. From God, we learn that the point of all striving is not happiness – especially not the trivial sense of subjective happy-feeling (though I have nothing against that in general). The point of all striving, our quest so to speak, is love. I confess: this is crazy. And yet if I think a universe without a loving God, well, would I choose to be born into such a universe? 

   Yes, there is the Good. You feel it when some absolute limit confronts you: impossible for me to do that! Or not to do it! I see a gang beating up on someone weaker. As fat and old as I am now, I would have to intervene no matter what; I could not live with myself otherwise. Or the spontaneous joy over the birth of my child. Or the awe and wonder of really beholding and contemplating the starry sky. Etc. God or no God, I would say yes to a universe like that. But to hold such things to be real, I think they must have a source, cannot just be part of the furniture of the universe like atoms and molecules. These experiences force the concept of God as love on me, not that I really understand what that means. In any case, such experiences make or break one's attitude toward life, give life or death to the soul. They - or their absence - goes so much deeper than happiness - i.e. the state of mind that accompanies the fulfillment of my desires. Kili is happy when he gets the new toy he wanted. 

         Indeed, “God is love.” Love is the union of two distinct lives, transcending the distinct individuality of the lovers without destroying it, completing it rather. In the case of God and man, two radically unequal lives. Love is what makes possible the most profound judgment: good, wonderful that you exist! Love makes us glad of our own existence, which makes the true love of our own souls possible. Even in human terms, this is true: who would rather not be unhappy (in Jefferson’s presumed sense) ‘in’ love with the ones you love than happy ‘outside’ of love and apart? What kind of a soul could be happy alienated, cut off from the love of God and other human beings? What is such happiness worth?

 

 Two truisms. In the end, all unhappiness is frustrated love. All sin is a failure of love.

Conscience is a Mediocre Concept 

Interesting how the conscience is socially conditioned. I have learned that for many Muslim men living in Germany, leading a white woman on for a sexual relationship doesn't make a dent in their conscience. Wanting their own child aborted doesn't make a dent. Disobeying a father, even one who takes money from his children, causes a crisis of conscience. That is why he will always be haunted by disobeying the patriarch, not by an aborted child, not by  the woman he seduced. 

   Many Nazis acted according to a strong sense of duty, according to their conscience, as they committed the most vile acts. The slave master suffered no genuine remorse for raping his property in the form of a slave woman. He would not have found it intelligible to suffer remorse because the body and sexuality of an African he had already so demeaned the rape that it was beyond his imagination that it could be an object of love, of a gentle caress. He would have ridiculed someone who made the argument that his property was an intelligible object of sexual love.

      If conscience were the whole story, the human conscience would be nothing more than Freud's super-ego. Conscience can be conditioned by culture – or ideology (false consciousness) communicated through media, as in the case of MAGA, or many feminists when it comes to the unborn, or the Hamas terrorists and their counterparts in Israel, or (at a qualitatively different level of evil) the Nazis. Conscience can be colonialized. I could spend the rest of the decade making of list of people and groups who did evil with a good conscience: not people who rationalized the evil done to deceive their conscience; people who did evil with a pure conscience. Culture or propaganda can invade and take over the conscience. Brains can be hacked and the conscience hijacked. I put no faith in it.

         To matter morally, conscience must be informed by the real Good. How do we know the real Good? Conscience itself doesn't tell us. I guess God's commands as revealed in the Old Testament (variously and mostly opportunistically interpreted) for most protestants, as revealed in the Koran and Hadith for the Muslims, or as revealed in the Torah and Talmud for the Jews. Reason determines the Good for the philosopher (and I would agree if Reason includes hope, faith, and love).

   Aquinas makes the most sense to me on this. The will – conditioned by the virtues – must conform what a clear mind and a pure heart recognize as Good into a duty to respect or love.  Christ's supernatural love reveals the Good for the Catholic and Orthodox; God's love for the world - the Creation - reveals it (John 3:16). Even if you want to think of this a metaphorical, it points you in the right direction. To me, it is revealed in Jesus' parables, the prodigal son, the good Samaritan, and in his compassion for the adulteress for example. Without love, there is no real Good. The Good is revealed in and through love. Jesus said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." An implication of that could be “where your love is, there will your conscience be also.” It’s love that does all the work. The good is what can be loved by a clear mind and a pure heart.        

    Needless to say, our human hearts and minds are to a greater or lesser extent darkened by injustice and sin; by fantasy, sentimentality, and the narcissism of the damaged, alienated ego . We are for much of our lives creatures living out fantasies - some of our own making, but usually emanating from some power complex. Our failures are failures of love, and failures of love happen because fantasy replaces a clear mind and a pure heart i.e. replaces Reason: that which apprehends reality and thus the Good, through thought and feeling. 

      But that which is in itself lovable – or beautiful (a kind of love) – is like the Northern Star or a compass for the conscience. I think the best most of us can do is start with our children - some can't even love their children but only sentimental fantasies of children. But for those who can love their children, imagine others - including those desperate people seeking not just a better life but survival at our southern border - as someone's child, as held by Christ, as a loving God's children. ["I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." - see Matthew 25:40-45] Even if you think of it as a metaphor, that works better than abstractions. Perhaps the first act is the steadfast refusal to reduce and demean other people, especially those you think of as "enemies." (There was a reason why Christ told us quite literally to love our enemies - not to like them, but to love them, to will their good, to pray for them: not to reduce them to orcs or liberals.) 

 

 Do we love it because it is good, or is it good because we love it? Indeed, the good is only revealed through love – at a minimum through it being intelligible that someone could love it even if I can’t. But if our loving it alone made it good, then good would have no reality. The Good is the real. Evil is a corruption or perversion of that which is real (as the Christian tradition teaches). Therefore loving it alone does not make it good. Through love, the deepest aspects of reality accessible to us are disclosed. We can only know our children, for example, through loving them. Outside of love, their reality remains hidden from view. 

see my entry from November 22, 2023

 Hamlet and Horatio

     Any attempt to limit what can possibly count as real by means of a metaphysical theory is bound to be reductive. There are either “more things in heaven and earth (i.e., in reality) than are dreamed of in your philosophies (i.e. including science).” Or: there are fewer things that we take for real: this seems to be the consequence of making a metaphysical philosophy out of the axioms and methods of natural science. For example, if all events involved agents consisting of matter-energy, and all things consisting of matter-energy are subject to the laws of cause and effect, then reality is denied to human freedom and to spiritual phenomena. Even something as fundamental to humanity as love or courage would be reduced to caused events of matter-energy, subject to the same kind of explanation of the orbit of the planets of the freezing of water. Another possibility broadens the second to include into the real other phenomena we can explain in human, worldly terms. 

        The first possibility seems true: there is the fact of mystery: why anything exists rather than nothing, why exactly this universe and not another, what exists beyond our sensory and cognitive limitations; the feeling of amazement over the beauty of the earth or the eyes of a beloved person; the sublime vastness of the universe, of some music, of Shakespeare and Dante…. The first option leaves open fundamental mystery, all so many of our most important experiences and insight presuppose Mystery. Reality as such, Being imagined as a limited whole, can never be one factual state-of-affairs among others. The second possibility reduces the fundamental Mystery into a Sherlock Holmes type mystery: there seem to be phenomena that science cannot explain; it is like a detective game to find the scientific explanation that do not so much explain these phenomena as explain them away, showing that only what science can investigate is real and in need of explanation.  Like in Star Trek (or Scooby Doo) – the apparently magical or divine always had a scientific explanation. I grew up thinking there was a scientific explanation to everything because of Star Trek.  Spock was my hero. Believe only what the scientific evidence supports, nothing more, and have faith that there is always a scientific explanation, which is to say have faith that all of reality without remainder is scientifically explainable.

        The third possibility – the Real is the rational and the rational is the Real – also leaves no space for Mystery. While more inclusive than reductionism, this “humanism” denies the reality of the sublime, the transcendent, which the first possibility leaves open. And that also makes it reductive, given that a border to drawn between the world and the other-worldly, although some phenomena just are other-worldly – Jesus’ actions to save the adulterous from stoning can be explained in worldly terms, but that would miss the essence of the action, for example. Metaphysics (or ontology) is a conception of Being as a limited whole, from the point of view of eternity as it were, which we can only access through imagination and our deepest core emotion-and-thought pregnant moments of most intense life. (A terrible mistake to think of

metaphysics as a dry logical or pseudo-scientific exercise in abstract thought.)

       Indeed it seems a blessing that we cannot know reality as such. A true metaphysical theory would tend to be dogmatic and totalitarian. We know how the Catholic Middle Ages, which believed themselves for long periods of their history to be in possession of such a theory, dealt with dissenters. A parallel case existed in the countries of real-existing socialism in the 20th century. [The metaphysical significance of the Hamlet quote was pointed out to me by Peter Kreeft in The Philosophy of Tolkien.]

Response to Sabine Hossenfelder on Free Will

 Here is the link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI5FMj5D9zU&t=321s

   Very interesting presentation! Is this a valid criticism of the basic argument? I put this forward in fear and trembling, having admired your logical prowess in many other videos.

   The basic assumption of the argument is that reality – absolutely, not just an aspect of nature, nature as it reveals itself to physics – is a closed, deterministic system. Not only physically, but metaphysically. What makes sense as an axiomatic assumption in physics – it yields interesting results – may or may not make sense as a metaphysical interpretation of reality as a whole. I agree that free will (in any meaningful definition) is incompatible with nature as a deterministic system – and therefore, with physics. The area of disagreement is over whether physics is not only valid as science – if I doubted that, I wouldn’t be here; I love physics – but whether science also provides us with a metaphysical interpretation of reality as such.

   The assumption that reality as a whole, in an absolute sense, is a closed system is not a possible scientific proposition. No experiment could prove it. No logical-mathematical proof could establish its soundness. The assumption that reality is not a closed system (e.g. the “strong emergence” view) is also not a scientific proposition for the same reason. It is an attempt to make sense of our experience of the world: the experience of being responsible for our actions, of being amazed over the goodness of certain people and actions, horrified over the evil that exists, of loving – find a person or a place good (‘good that you exist!), of being self-conscious (my particles change but the form of my particles show a kind of unity and I am conscious of it). I could go on. I don’t see how any conceptual space for the genuine experience of love, meaning, goodness, beauty, or freedom can exist in a closed system. Or rather, our experience of love, meaning, goodness, beauty, or freedom could reveal nothing about the world (or ourselves) if we in advance adopt a theory of determinism.

   I think such things reveal a deeper level of reality than physics can, as much as I love physics. The lived experience of all these spiritual qualities is powerful evidence that at some level determinism does not apply but our inner lives emerge, like Bach’s music emerges from the physics of sound; the fugue does not violate the laws of physics but it is qualitatively different and cannot be reduced to the latter. Physics is blind to the reality of the fugue.  (No I don’t think this implies a ghost in my machine; it does imply that my body is not a machine, or at least that it is more than a machine.)

    Equating all of Being to the closed systems studied by natural science is a possible, logically consistent version of the world. But to adopt it, if it makes sense to you, then you will have to reinterpret much of our experiential lives. When most of us say, for example, “The earth is beautiful”, we do not mean ‘when I see a picture of the earth my brain, following algorithms, produces a certain response in my organism, and we call that beauty.’ This is subject to further reductions until we get to the right equations. No, when we say the earth is beautiful we mean the earth is beautiful, really. The deterministic world interpretation reduces our experience to other categories – equations in the end. Our biographies could be translated without remainder into equations. Etc. It's like we lived in a Matrix. As though we must subject all experience to doubt and radical reinterpretation to see the world right: like we correct our experience of the sun rising.  Only one class of experience, science, reveals the world as it really is. I don’t really love my children, at least not in the common meaning of love; I am programmed by evolution, which reduces to particle physics, to behave and feel in certain ways about them, all things being equal. Same with the grief when a parent loses a child. I can’t refute that reductionism because to refute it we would have to get out of determinism and my common-sense worldview (“folk metaphysics”) and compare our versions of the world to the world as it is in itself, undescribed, unperceived, unconceptualized.

     You quoted Wittgenstein, perhaps the most powerful critic of reductionism in metaphysics. Philosophy leaves the world as it is. The urge to reduce it, to make one practice, science, epistemologically absolute, is the problem here, as I see it.

     Believing in reality as a closed system is no less an act of faith – of what makes sense – than my belief that at a certain level of complexity, determinism doesn’t apply. That all of reality conforms to one human epistemological construction, even one that gives us such power over nature, is a breathtaking leap of faith.

     I agree many conceptions of free will don’t make sense. We are never absolutely free – we are conditioned by our culture, our families, and much more, no doubt. But the kind of causality and determinism that makes sense in physics doesn’t make sense in a courtroom, for example, or in a family. As a physicist trying to understand nature, I can understand how determinism makes sense. But when the physicist leaves the laboratory, I can’t imagine how it can make sense without turning the world upside down.

       

 

 Loose Reflections on Representative (or Indirect) Democracy

    Direct democracy is not a good idea, except for very specific questions. But it is always a risk to entrust questions of fundamental importance to the people – in a referendum, say, Brexit being one glaring example. Representative democracy, or indirect democracy, however, is worthless if the representatives do nothing but vote according to public opinion polls – or much worse, special interest lobbying, a form of legalized corruption – or even worse, representatives who just do whatever Trump wants them to, no matter how toxic for the country.

  The criteria to vote for a representative should be emphasized in education. Above all competence – a person of independent judgment, experience, and virtuous character (wisdom, self-restraint, justice, courage). This means that a representative must be willing to lose the next election if necessary. There is little a political process can do to guarantee only competent, virtuous representatives will govern. You can take away all the corruption – legal and illegal – by getting the money and lobbying out of the system: elections should be publicly financed; instead of TV ads designed to pull emotional strings, only rational debates with competent moderation and editorial pieces in newspapers and magazines. Books of course. And speeches. This presupposes an enlightened public, which is not given in any current liberal democracy, though some are closer to it than others. This also presupposes a sense of community, which alone can give people a deeper sense of who they choose to represent their interests. There must be a healthy political culture if there is to be good representation, and this is sadly missing. The growing of a healthy political culture is paramount. Actually, if there were a healthy political culture and an enlightened public, the arguments against direct democracy would be correspondingly weakened.

   In Germany, the problem of competent representation is dealt with by the party system. The parties select their list of candidates based on internal criteria – political promise, character, intelligence, etc. (ideally). If elected to the Bundestag (Parliament), they are assigned to committees – foreign policy or military policy, for example – where they acquire expertise and experience. It’s like starting to work for a company. You get promoted if you show ability (or have good connections). By the time you reach the top policy-making positions, you will have usually already proven yourself over time. For example, the current minister of the health system, Dr. Karl Lauterbach,

 

Curriculum vitae

Born in Düren on 21 February 1963, career: university professor.

1982-1989: Medical studies at the RWTH Aachen, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, University of Texas San Antonio (USA), (PhD in Medicine).

1987: Research residency at the University of Arizona, Tucson (mentor: Prof. Dennis Patton).

1985 to 1990 PhD in Medicine at the Institute for Nuclear Medicine of the nuclear research facility in Jülich (mentor: Professor Ludwig Feinendegen).

1989-1990: Master of Public Health (MPH) at the Harvard School of Public Health focusing on Epidemiology, and Health Policy and Management.

1990-1992: Master of Science in Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.

1992-1995: Doctor of Science in Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health (mentors: Professor Marc Roberts and Professor Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences).

1992: Fellowship in Ethics and the Professions at Harvard University (Director: Professor Applbaum)

1993: Fellowship at Harvard Medical School’s Division of Medical Ethics (Director: Professor Lynn Peterson).

Since 1996: Guest lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

Since 1998: Director of the Institute for Health Economics and Clinical Epidemiology of the Medical Faculty of the University of Cologne.

C4 professorship offers from the Ernst Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald and the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen.

Since 2008: Adjunct Professor at the Department of Health Policy and Management of the Harvard School of Public Health.

Main research focus: Primary and secondary prevention of chronic disease, in particular disease management of diabetes mellitus, hypertension, COPD, and hypercholesterinaemia. Health economics and health policy.

1999 until 2005: Member of the Advisory Council on the Assessment of Developments in the Health Care System.

2003: Member of the Commission on Sustainable Financing of the Social Security Systems (Rürup Commission). Member of the SPD Cologne Programme Committee.

2004: Member of the SPD Party Executive’s working group on citizens’ insurance.

Since 2005: Member of the Bundestag, on leave from his post as the Director of the Institute for Health Economics and Clinical Epidemiology of the Medical Faculty of the University of Cologne. (In his absence, Professor Stephanie Stock is Acting Director).

2013-2019: Deputy parliamentary party leader of the SPD.

Since December 2021: Federal Minister of Health.

  

  Note that he only became a minister after years of experience making law in the Bundestag and within his party. Of course, other parties disagree with many of his policies. He is not popular among the doctors. But no one can doubt his qualifications. His personality and policies are well known. Disagreements with him are like two accomplished pianists disagreeing over how to perform the end of a Bach piece than between an accomplished pianist and an amateur like myself over the same subject. We have very few such qualified people in Congress, and why should we? Congress is not responsible for making policy, though they do have the power to wreck policy and leave the country without a policy – as is the case currently with Ukraine support, immigration policy, and many other issues.

  And of course, in the German system, the Bundestag produces the government. Should the SPD (Lauterbach’s party) not be part of the next election, Lauterbach would still be in the Bundestag and take part in debates about policy as a critic. These debates – ideally – would contribute to the political education of the citizens. Unfortunately, few citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany follow the discussions in the Bundestag. They – like everywhere – increasingly tend to get their news from Instagram or whatever. The public media does regularly cover Bundestag debates, however.

   Since our Congress does not make policy but only approves or disapproves the policies of the executive – or make deals with the executive to secure their approval – discussions, such as they are, have a very different quality. The fact that Congress has only this negative role reduces the need for expertise. At present, our Congress is so dysfunctional – a ground for shame.  But that is connected with the structure of our government: a debating society with the power to reject policy or make acceptance conditional on all kinds of things (concessions to big Pharmacy to the oil industry to the political needs of a certain congressman to the will of Trump) – that is so unworkable; only representatives of amazing character could overcome it, but how our representatives get chosen has nothing to do with the way Karl Lauterbach was. Money is usually all important, and of course public persona, which is a function of media access.

    The German system tends to produce better representatives because of the discipline imposed by the party system. To advance a representative is beholden to the party – not special financial interests or media access. Anything human is imperfect however: we have some fine representatives (too few) and there are some idiots in the Bundestag. But overall the Parliamentary system with the parties governing produces better representatives. I suppose the disadvantage is that party discipline means that policy decisions are made at the top; for a lower-level legislator to reject the policy decisions of their party leadership means an end to their political career. This is not necessarily bad: policy is made by the most experienced, the most proven. But every system needs the occasional maverick to buck it.

 

Parties in the Federal Republic of German and the United States

    I would like to have a system without parties, in which a representative was elected for their competence and character. But that requires a level of enlightenment and investment of time on the part of the voters that is utopian in the current society. In Germany, people vote for parties first, personalities second if at all – under normal circumstances. The general orientation of the parties is well-known enough for people to cast their vote without the kind of investment of time my party-less idea would require.

   Germany uses a mixed-member proportional representation system, which allows for a greater diversity of political parties to be represented in the national parliament (Bundestag). This system encourages the formation of coalition governments, as no single party typically wins an outright majority of seats. In contrast, the United States primarily employs a first-past-the-post electoral system for congressional elections, which tends to favor a two-party system. 

   German political culture places a strong emphasis on consensus-building and compromise, particularly due to the proportional representation system and the prevalence of coalition governments. German parties are often more ideologically disciplined, and there is generally a higher level of trust in political institutions compared to the United States. American political culture, on the other hand, tends to be more adversarial and polarized, with a focus on winner-takes-all elections and ideological purity within parties.

    Since the American system is a winner-take-all, we have only two parties. Within the two parties – before Trump – different groupings would have their own parties in Germany. For example, within the Democratic Party, there are so-called progressives, that are close to the Social Democratic Party or the Green Party in Germany. And you have liberals who are more friendly toward the corporate economy – like Clinton and Obama. Our system forces them into the same bed, which can become quite uncomfortable for the one or the other.  Sometimes compromises are made to ensure harmony going into an election – Biden was certainly moved to the left by the progressives, pissing off many “moderate” (hilarious ideology) Democrats like Joe Manchin. This is like the Social Democrats having to work out compromises with the Greens to form a government. In the German case, the compromises are worked out after the election, and the agreements are like a governing contract that is public. But Green voters don’t have to stomach voting for the SPD and vice-versa.

    Again, in my ideal of party-less candidates, the working out of compromises would be so complex as to be unworkable. Parties seem to be a necessary evil. German political parties tend to have a more centralized and hierarchical structure compared to American parties. Decision-making within German parties often involves party leaders and officials at the national level, with a strong influence from party headquarters. In contrast, American parties often have a more decentralized structure, with considerable autonomy given to state and local party organizations – i.e. less control over who is elected, who advances, etc. – and more beholden to private sources of money. When representatives represent corporate or billionaire class interests, we can no longer speak of indirect democracy. Indirect Plutocracy would be a better term, and that is where we increasingly were going in my home country. There has been under Biden hopeful movement in Democratic Party to correct this. 

 

    In the end, while the structure of a political process is important, it all comes down to how healthy is the pollical (democratic) culture; how enlightened are the voters; how competent and virtuous are the candidates. Political systems that encourage or make difficult these things, but not guarantee them. A democracy is only as good as its voters and representatives.