OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
You made a general claim, though, that Muslims will never be - and are in fact forbidden to be - charitable towards non-Muslims. That's not the case. On the doctrinal or dogmatic level, sadaqah is permitted and indeed considered praiseworthy, and sadaqah can be directed towards anybody.
There are some rules about zakat, yes, though depending on the specific Islamic community those rules may be interpreted in different ways, or more or less stringently. One fatwa rarely proves very much, because a fatwa is just an opinion by a scholar, and scholars regularly disagree. Even in this case, the objection to giving zakat to a hospital in a generic sense is that the Qur'an lists the proper recipients of zakat, and hospitals aren't among them. (The needy are, but obviously you can't assume that any given hospital is needy - there are wealthy hospitals and wealthy patients.) The website you've linked says:
Now that we know the eight categories to whom zakah may be given, zakah should not be spent on other interests, whether public or private. Based on this, we should not use zakah to build mosques, repair roads, build libraries and so on, because when Allah mentioned the categories of those to whom zakah may be given, He said (interpretation of the meaning): “a duty imposed by Allah. And Allah is All-Knower, All-Wise” i.e., these categories have come as an obligation from Allah. “And Allah is All-Knower, All-Wise.”
Obviously Muslims are not forbidden to build mosques, repair roads, or build libraries. (Who else would build a mosque, anyway?) They're just not to use the zakat funds for that, because zakat is earmarked for something else.
Now I take it your objection is to zakat being earmarked for Muslims specifically.
The first thing to say is that the linked page explicitly allows non-Muslims to benefit from zakat funds in some circumstances (for instance, it mentions using zakat to buy and free even a non-Muslim slave, especially if there is hope he may become Muslim; or paying zakat to "an evil man... so as to ward off his evil from the Muslims"). However, it is in general true that the point of zakat is the aid and succour of the Islamic community.
It is... unclear to me why that it is immediately forbidden. The money in the church collection plate will be used to benefit the church. If you donate money to a Buddhist temple or to a synagogue, you may reasonably assume it will be used for Buddhist or Jewish causes.
Zakat is not the sum total of Islamic charity, so I guess I don't find it obvious evidence of the evil or perfidy of Islam that Muslims donate a certain amount of money to help other Muslims.
Now, it might be true that, structurally as it were, Islam is less inclined to donate money or labour for the humanitarian benefit of non-Muslims. That's the sort of thing that I plausibly expect would differ between religions - for instance, Christianity and Buddhism both have strong, explicit ethics of universal beneficence and are involved in global aid societies, whereas not all religions might be like that. I'm not immediately aware of any good comparative figures on charitable giving by religion; I suspect it might be confounded a lot by firstly religious people who give to secular causes and don't record their religious motivation, and secondly the fact that different religions are not evenly distributed socio-economically, so religions that tend to have wealthier adherents might show up as more generous. But I'll have a look around later today and see if I can find anything.
The first result Google gave me suggests that in the US, Jews are the most charitable, followed by Protestants, and then Muslims and Catholics are neck-and-neck for the third, and it suggests that Jews and Muslims tend to favour secular organisations, while Christians favour religious organisations. But I imagine that is heavily confounded as well (if nothing else Christian charities are much more common and comprehensive in the US). This page is unsourced but suggests that Christians are the most generous, followed by Sikhs and Muslims, but offers no source. More searching to come.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
That would seem to be an anticipated problem for a religious tradition whose most sacred text says plainly, "The poor you will always have with you." (Mark 14:7, Matthew 26:11) The number of people in need of charity is functionally unlimited - that was the case in Jesus' day, in Aquinas' day, and also in our day.
I take the ordo amoris to be suggesting some structure to our moral duties such that we are not crushed entirely flat by the weight. This much seems right and just. But within that structure, it can hardly be bad to seek to do more than the barest minimum.
Aquinas was familiar with international charity. Thomas Aquinas lived in the mid 13th century. By his day, international projects like the Crusades were a century and a half old, and among the justifications for the Crusades had been charity - that it is an act of gracious generosity to one's fellow-believers who are in need, even though they may be on the other side of a continent.
The idea of giving charitable aid to people a long way away from you geographically goes back as far as the New Testament itself - for instance, in 1 Corinthians 16:25-28, Paul talks about his plan to bring donations from churches in Achaia and Macedonia all the way to Jerusalem. Aquinas was surely familiar with such cases.
So I don't think we can assume that Aquinas' model of charity assumes only local charity. He understood and approved of the idea of a Christian making great sacrifices in order to aid Christians in another country entirely.
Now, sure, this doesn't necessarily equate to "on the hook for everyone suffering in the third world" - that's an exaggeration or caricature. What I'm saying is that Aquinas' interpretation of the ordo amoris plainly allows for charity to people with whom the giver is not personally familiar. For Aquinas, proximity is one among several factors influencing who it is appropriate to give charity to, alongside need, holiness, and the common good more generally. These are criteria that allow for international projects in some circumstances.
Aquinas does think that having something in common with the needy is important. This comes up further in the next section of the Summa:
On the contrary, Augustine says (De Doctr. Christ. i, 28): "Since one cannot do good to all, we ought to consider those chiefly who by reason of place, time or any other circumstance, by a kind of chance are more closely united to us."
I answer that, Grace and virtue imitate the order of nature, which is established by Divine wisdom. Now the order of nature is such that every natural agent pours forth its activity first and most of all on the things which are nearest to it: thus fire heats most what is next to it. In like manner God pours forth the gifts of His goodness first and most plentifully on the substances which are nearest to Him, as Dionysius declares (Coel. Hier. vii). But the bestowal of benefits is an act of charity towards others. Therefore we ought to be most beneficent towards those who are most closely connected with us.
Now one man's connection with another may be measured in reference to the various matters in which men are engaged together; (thus the intercourse of kinsmen is in natural matters, that of fellow-citizens is in civic matters, that of the faithful is in spiritual matters, and so forth): and various benefits should be conferred in various ways according to these various connections, because we ought in preference to bestow on each one such benefits as pertain to the matter in which, speaking simply, he is most closely connected with us. And yet this may vary according to the various requirements of time, place, or matter in hand: because in certain cases one ought, for instance, to succor a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one's own father, if he is not in such urgent need.
You will notice that, having established the principle that one owes more to people with whom one has a commonality, Aquinas then goes on to explain two things. Firstly, that 'closeness' has several measures, including natural, civic, and spiritual matters. Thus he might argue that, for instance, a fellow Christian in another country is spiritually close and has a stronger claim on a Christian's aid than a non-believer. Secondly, this does vary contextually, such that, as he says, a stranger in desperate need may have a higher claim on charity than one's own family.
This does not add up to "you have a direct moral responsibility for the entire planet", but it does legitimate kinds of international charity. If those with whom I have a natural bond (e.g. a family relation), or a civic bond (e.g. if we are members of the same nation), or a spiritual bond (e.g. we are both Christians) reside far away geographically, I may still possess duties of charity towards them.
The case for extending this even to non-believers in certain circumstances seems fairly straightforward to me (cf. Matthew 5:47), in a way that does not create an infinite obligation, but does suggest that doing good even for those to whom one shares no connection is supererogatorily good. Aquinas appears to agree that need is sufficient to create a kind of moral claim, which must be judged carefully alongside the claims created by connection or proximity:
For it must be understood that, other things being equal, one ought to succor those rather who are most closely connected with us. And if of two, one be more closely connected, and the other in greater want, it is not possible to decide, by any general rule, which of them we ought to help rather than the other, since there are various degrees of want as well as of connection: and the matter requires the judgment of a prudent man.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
It's a pathology I used to notice on the online left as well. If you're in a heavily-online space and engaged in curating your identity, you want to stand out from the pack and grab attention. The best way to do that is to say radical things. Occupying an extreme position also allows you to more easily denounce your rivals for not being as hardcore or based as you are, since the biggest threat to a wannabe-thought-leader like this is competition from others in the same space. The result is pressure towards radicalising yourself, taking stronger and stronger positions that more clearly mark you out from the normies. This is particularly the case because, unlike in the real world, online all you have are words - you're often pseudonymous, and even if you're not, it's much harder to point to actual things you did in the real world for other people. So it's all self-presentation, and the way to get attention there is to be extreme and weird.
It might work for a while, but it falls apart the moment you try to build a mass movement or appeal to people in the real world. Once you've talked yourself into taking extreme or insane positions, you've handicapped your appeal to anyone else, because it turns out that most normal people have pretty basic moral instincts, and recoil from things that seem absurd or repugnant. We've seen that happen with woke overreach; the right-wing equivalent is unlikely to be any different.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
This is correct - zakat is more like a tithe in that it's a mandatory payment that's supposed to go to the wider Islamic community. It is therefore usually only spent on causes that benefit the Islamic community, though if you look at uses of zakat in practice, it is often spent in ways that 'overflow' and benefit everyone (e.g. public health or infrastructure in majority-Muslim communities).
Non-obligatory charity, or sadaqah, is considered highly meritorious and may be used for any righteous purpose, including aid to non-Muslims.
I think it helps to put this into a historical context, where zakat is basically Islamic taxes. It would be paid to the caliphate, which is to say, to the state, which then uses it for causes of benefit to the entire state. Historically, this was a confessional, Islamic organisation, because the historical, pre-modern mode of Islamic governance is either theocratic, or at least a confessional monarchy of some kind. At present this model is a bit muddled because there is no caliphate, so in practice Muslims pay taxes twice, once to the state and once to the ummah, and the latter are used by various Islamic NGOs. This is definitely an awkward situation and there's no doubt need for some critical conversations within Islam about the role of zakat in a secular state. However, this:
Charity from non-muslims towards muslims will never be returned, dogmatically.
is simply false. Zakat is not the extent of Islamic charity.
There is a lot of Islamic giving that is preferentially directed towards Muslims, naturally, but then, I doubt you'll have much trouble finding church aid services that are directed particularly towards Christians, or similar. It is, at any rate, not Islamic dogma that no charity may be offered towards non-Muslims.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
Quite - I think ordo amoris by itself fails as an argument against foreign aid, partly because it's not at all clear that the small amount of foreign aid the US provides is not in fact net beneficial to the US, and partly because ordo amoris in no way says that you should have zero care for people far away from you. It says that your moral duties to care for others scale with distance, such that American moral obligation to non-Americans is less, but less is not zero.
It is worth noting that Aquinas actually talks for a while about almsgiving as an act of charity, and appears to be wholly in favour of doing corporal works of mercy for others simply because they are in need. He follows the ordo amoris (article 9) in asserting that it is better, all other things being equal, to give to those "more closely united to us", but immediately qualifies that with the note that all other things are usually not equal. Aquinas:
I answer that, As Augustine says (De Doctr. Christ. i, 28), "it falls to us by lot, as it were, to have to look to the welfare of those who are more closely united to us." Nevertheless in this matter we must employ discretion, according to the various degrees of connection, holiness and utility. For we ought to give alms to one who is much holier and in greater want, and to one who is more useful to the common weal, rather than to one who is more closely united to us, especially if the latter be not very closely united, and has no special claim on our care then and there, and who is not in very urgent need.
Per Aquinas, it is better to give to a more righteous cause, or to one who is in more desperate need, over one who may be closer to us in other terms. He endorses the kind of charitable triage that I mentioned here. The ordo amoris requires a kind of discernment around need, righteousness, justice, and so on.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
I was reading it in the context of debates about the aid budget. I admit I haven't watched the entire Fox News interview. Is there a transcript of it anywhere? I've only seen the tweet with a one sentence quote that blew up.
At any rate, I do stand by the idea that there's a lot of talking past each other. Here's the National Catholic Reporter arguing that Vance is wrong, but only rebutting a strawman. At least in the tweet I saw, Vance wasn't saying that love should be calculating or conditional; rather, he doesn't seem to have been talking about love in that sense at all. Here's R. R. Reno in Compact:
Aquinas applies the notion of ordo amoris to our love of other people. There is no question that all persons are equally worthy of our love. We are created in the image and likeness of God. But each of us is cast into a world of already existing relationships. These relationships bring with them duties and responsibilities.
This seems like a helpful distinction to me. A Christian ought to love all people, i.e. regard all people with an attitude of impartial benevolence, or agape. But a Christian's concrete duties and responsibilities are ordered in a particular way, and proximity is one of many factors influencing those responsibilities.
Other factors include things like need or culpability. If my family member has a skinned knee and a total stranger is drowning in a river, the stranger's greater need outweighs the family member's relational proximity to me. Likewise if I caused a total stranger to receive an injury, I have a much greater responsibility to care for that injury. So Christian moral responsibility is not univariate, and proximity, however we construe that term, is only one relevant factor.
Am I steelmanning Vance a bit here? Perhaps - I haven't been able to find the full original interview, and Vance's snipes on Twitter aren't enough to get a nuanced idea of what he means. But I hope that reflection on Christian moral obligation is useful even beyond the quest to indict or vindicate a politician of the moment.
All right, I guess I'll bite on this one at last.
Ordo amoris, in essence, is a relatively common-sense doctrine intended to make sense of most people's moral intuitions, while avoiding two absurd extremes. The first extreme to be avoided is the hardcore utilitarian, Peter Singer perspective - all lives are equally valuable, there is no rational basis for preferring those in close proximity to us, and therefore we should seek to improve as many lives as possible, affording no preference whatsoever to family or country. The second extreme to be avoided is the exclusive tribalist - we have definite moral obligations only to those with whom we are connected in some way, and all other people can burn for all we care.
Both those positions seem absurd to most people. Most people's intuitions seem to say that if we can treat even distant strangers benevolently, we ought to; but also that we have greater moral obligations towards those closer to us. That's roughly what ordo amoris is - we have moral obligations to behave benevolently and compassionately towards all people, but those obligations scale with proximity.
There is also a side issue here to do with how we conceptualise 'closeness' or moral proximity. Scott's tweet is particularly silly because most versions of the ordo amoris I'm familiar with would give quite a high moral priority to people who are literally, physically in front of you, whether they're related to you or not. (As James Orr puts it, "we must care for those who fall within the compass of our practical concern".) However, most also do consider the bonds of family, tribe, political or religious community, and so on, to serve as intensifiers. If there are two drowning people in front of you, there is only time to save one, and one is a family member, ceteris paribus you should save your family member. Likewise your nation, your faith, or whatever. However, most of what we might say about the ordo amoris works regardless of the exact way you define moral proximity.
The problem I have with the whole Vance-instigated ordo amoris debate is that it seems like every side is using this actually-quite-common-sense idea in bad faith. Vance is using it to suggest that American moral obligations towards foreigners are either nothing, or are far less than are currently being served by the (actually very small) American aid budget. Some of his opponents are therefore responding by caricaturing the whole doctrine as nationalist or racist, or by suggesting that American obligations to foreigners are exactly as the same as American obligations to Americans. None of this is what ordo amoris implies.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
I can see the value of quick explanatory blurbs, but I think in my case I just don't trust AIs or bots to accurately report factual information. Reading the AI summary would then make it necessary for me to look up the AI summary's claims in order to establish whether they're true or not, and at that point I might as well just skip the AI summary entirely and research it myself. There is no value gain from the AI, in either time saved or information received.
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
Thank you. The moment I see a bot quoted, whether a conversation, an essay, or even someone using a bot as a substitute for Wikipedia or to check facts, I stop reading.
I would hope that the point of a forum like this is for people to talk to each other. Not to vacuous robotic garbage.
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
Those are statements of dogma, not reasoned arguments. What reason do you have to think that it's genuinely inconceivable that a majority-Mormon population would ever welcome more than 1% of a non-Mormon population? That Swedes would never welcome more than 1% non-Nordic immigrants? On what basis do you think that? There's at least directional evidence at the moment suggesting that both Mormons and Swedes are happy living in societies that are less than 99% homogenous.
You've also avoided clarifying exactly what you're talking about - I understood you to be making a racial argument here. Presumably Norwegian immigrants to Sweden are fine. German? Slavic? Italian? I am guessing that by 'immigrants' you mean 'non-northern-European immigrants'? Likewise are you assuming that 'Mormons', contextually, means fair-skinned Mormons?
This idea is a bit foreign to me, are there people actually arguing that?
Well, someone just upthread for a start.
I don't assert that everybody in every culture throughout all of history has had exactly traditional Christian beliefs on sexual morality. Demonstrably it is not universal human consensus that marriage is an objective reality constituted by the decision of a single man and single woman to form a faithful, sexually exclusive lifelong bond oriented towards the begetting and raising of new life; and I'd argue that there are some ways in which the early Christian understanding of sexual morality was revolutionary.
However, I assert that in broad strokes, it appears to be relatively universal that humans form monogamous male-female pair bonds in order to raise children, and while there are forms of alternative sexual behaviour that we often see in history (polygamy and homosexuality being likely the most common), the universality of the male-female parenting unit, and likewise its universal recognition in social institutions either equivalent or roughly analogous to marriage, is apparent. (It is perhaps also relevant that polygamous relationships typically have been understood as marriage, but same-sex relationships have not; the possibility of children is the most obvious explanation for that difference.) What the consequences of that observation should be for our understanding of sexual morality today is, of course, a controversial question, but I can see no way to evade the observation itself.
That is, for better or for worse, marriage, by which I mean sexually exclusive long-term male-female pair bonds, appears to not just be a quirk of Christian or Abrahamic culture. It's widespread enough that I think it must be understood as either part of human nature itself, or as an inevitable consequence of human biology and evolutionary history in the environmental context of this planet.
I doubt you disagree with me on that, but I might as well state it as clearly as I can in my own terms!
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
Well, yes, I agree, but then I'm inclined to natural law arguments in the first place. There is a telos to human sexuality which is discernible from nature and implicitly known to almost every human culture, despite occasional deviation. We can cash that out in either evolutionary or moral terms, but it seems fairly evident to me.
This position is naturally consistent with Christian theology (it is in fact the traditional Christian position), but it would cut against the idea of any kind of 'Christian exceptionalism', where male-female monogamy is a unique Christian innovation, rather than a Christian re-statement of a universal principle. Hence my asking the question - if male-female monogamy is unique to Anglo Christians, why isn't it, well, unique? Why does the same pattern recur globally, even in very isolated cultures and communities?
The alternative - that, ironically enough, the Christians are right and it's a human universal - seems to make more sense to me.
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
Well, Trace isn't a Mormon any more, so I hardly see the relevance.
How would you convince Mormons to invite non-Mormons to live alongside them? I'm not sure. 45% of Utah is non-Mormon, so it doesn't appear to be that difficult, and as far as I'm aware Mormon Utahns don't seem to have any great hatred of their non-Mormon neighbours.
Or is it specifically how you convince 'Northern Europeans' (Nordics? Germanics? Aryans?) to live alongside non-Nordics? That again doesn't seem that hard? Minnesota, for instance, was settled as majority Scandinavian and Germanic, I believe, and it now seems pretty welcoming of non-Nordics.
I just don't particularly see the riddle here. Neither Mormons nor Northern-European/Nordic/Germanic/Aryan/Whatever people are in fact inherently predisposed to exclusionary ethnic communities. You may just be typical-mind-ing here. Perhaps you feel a kind of visceral opposition to living in a community that's something less than 99% Nordic, but demonstrably not even most Nordics feel that way, much less most fair-skinned people, and much less people in general.
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
To what extent does Ben Shapiro even represent a form of 'Jewish identity politics'? If anything, Shapiro is a Western chauvinist who generally frames his arguments in terms of pan-Western common cultural values, rooted in a Judeo-Christian tradition.
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
Precisely, and to the extent that they indulged in racialist theories, those theories made some very fine-grained distinctions among different European peoples. The white/northern-European/Aryan version of the thesis has to be filled with epicycles in order to make it match either historical or contemporary experience.
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
Let’s assume they aren’t gay furries.
Cheap shot?
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
That actually leads to a question that I wish would be asked more often -
Why isn't gay marriage the default?
There's an argument you sometimes hear from Western progressives that goes "there is literally no argument against it" - that is, gay marriage is so much of a no-brainer that failure to affirm it isn't even wrong so much as it is utterly nonsensical. If asked as to why it hasn't already been the case, a common answer is to blame Abrahamic religion and specifically Christianity. (Just above we see a variant of that answer.)
But if so, then why isn't gay marriage the historical default, and exclusive male-female marriage the weird aberration? Why haven't China or India had gay marriage for thousands of years? Why didn't the Persians, or the Mongols, or the Bantu, or the Mississippians? Suppose that poll is accurate - what's going on in Thailand, that not only did it not have gay marriage last year, but it also didn't have it for centuries?
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
Do have a theory as to why that might be? I'm struck that, even if not quite as strong, norms around marriage as a theoretically faithful, male-female bond do seem to have arisen all around the world.
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
We're about Texas sized, I think. The way I think of it is less that we're the size of a state and more that the biggest US states are the size of small countries.
Even then I'm sometimes shocked at the size of some countries. I once roomed with a Czech and was shocked to realise that his entire country was smaller than an Australian state capital.
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
Okay, fair. I'll qualify that to elves never voluntarily side with Morgoth or Sauron.
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
My short definition is "a posture of extreme or exaggerated deference to identitarian sensibilities, or to the imagined shape thereof".
Wokeness is more of an attitude or posture than it is a list of doctrines that must be accepted. That posture is one of identifying supposedly marginalised or oppressed voices, and then assigning those voices epistemological and ethical priority over other voices. Wokeness is then what happens when you self-present on this basis.
I note explicitly that wokeness does not require actually listening to or acting consistently with the preferences of a supposedly marginalised group. It is the presentation of acting as if one is doing that. The classic example is 'Latinx'. This makes it more clear that wokeness tends to be a manner that privileged or educated people adopt in order to be seen by other privileged people. You don't say 'Latinx' to actually help or engage with Latino people, but rather in order to performatively display your sensitivity to Latinos. Latinos themselves are not the audience, and so their actual feelings can be ignored.
I think this element is helpful with regard to your last question - the difference between social consciousness and wokeness. Social consciousness is actually being aware of the feelings, concerns, and cultural norms of a particular social group. Wokeness is the performance of that awareness for the sake of intra-elite competition. Thus to pick a concrete example, a white person who goes to a majority-black church and understands their local culture, is accepted among them as a friend, etc., is likely socially conscious as to issues in the black church, but may not be woke; meanwhile a white person who goes to an all-white church but has a BLM sticker on their car and tweets about structural racism is likely woke, but probably not that socially conscious.
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
Don't people refer to the Secret Service as the SS, at least in contexts where the referent is clear?
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
It's not a Roman salute, at any rate - the arm is flat in a true Roman salute.
I buy that he was trying to do a "my heart goes out to you" gesture, if only because I can't believe that even Elon Musk is dumb enough to try to do a Nazi or a Roman salute in public.
I don't for a second believe that there's any chance of that happening, or even that Trump really intends to do it. Trump likes extravagant opening bids that he then immediately backs down from - as we've just seen with Canada and Mexico.
He's saying something absurd to grab attention and so that he can barter down from it later. I do not take it literally or even very seriously.
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