Chapter 4 -- Comparative Damages
[sorry for the delay. Uh, blame the heat. Or the busy weekend. Or Harry Potter. Or Trogdor the Burninator. Gotta blame it on somethin' . . .]
I am happy that Doug got the jump on me. His way of responding to a chapter makes a better lead-in than mine, and I hope he'll take advantage of my sloth to get in the last word, too. I'll use my response to Doug to get into the particulars, more.
I tend to, having read the text, choose some one piece to gnaw on (Doug digests, I ruminate). In this case, it's surprisingly tiny; I'm interested in the form of the argument encapsulated in his concluding remark for this chapter, and with what it may reveal about Frame's approach--and what we may have to deal with as we engage the topic further:
Let us assume that we answer Frame's first question with a resounding "No!" Does it follow that we must answer with the expected "No!" to the second?
I'd like to reframe (no pun intended, professor) the argument just a bit. In order to build a new multibillion dollar stadium, the city of Los Angeles has just bulldozed hundreds of old apartment buildings. Those apartment buildings included one that was an amazingly important architectural treasure (unlikely, but this is my hypothetical, OK?); they also included a number that had been "condemned" by way of suspicious fires set by shady fellows in zoot suits. Now, a mediocre sports team (let us say that Los Angeles just acquired, oh, the Astros) is holding forth in a very expensive stadium that barely pays the rent, while exacerbating the housing shortage.
Now, can anyone seriously say that this urban renewal project does not cause practical problems for the city? I should hope we would answer, "No!" And can anyone deny that there would be considerable benefits to demolishing the stadium?
Well, of course, we certainly could deny that. And we might be right. Especially if the stadium were demolished, say, by shady fellows in zoot suits dynamiting it in the night, leaving smoking rubble all over the place. Or terrorists nuking it during a game. Or even the city fathers deciding to raze the place in favor of a housing project (housing projects run by city governments being generally describable in terms of Dante's famous poem--and no, not the Paradiso).
In other words, we can admit that we arrived at the status quo in a bad way, for bad reasons, with bad results, and we may still be rightly convinced that merely abolishing the status quo conveys no benefits. The question is, "How can we do better?" and not merely, "When will we do something?"
And that is what Frame has yet to answer, and until he does so his belaboring the "bad, bad, bad" denominations is much like telling humans that aging is bad.
Sure it is. But what else can we do?
I am happy that Doug got the jump on me. His way of responding to a chapter makes a better lead-in than mine, and I hope he'll take advantage of my sloth to get in the last word, too. I'll use my response to Doug to get into the particulars, more.
I tend to, having read the text, choose some one piece to gnaw on (Doug digests, I ruminate). In this case, it's surprisingly tiny; I'm interested in the form of the argument encapsulated in his concluding remark for this chapter, and with what it may reveal about Frame's approach--and what we may have to deal with as we engage the topic further:
There may be other problems of denominationalism which I have not mentioned. But after this survey, can anyone seriously say that denominationalism does not cause practical problems for the church? Can anyone deny that there would be considerable benefits in abolishing denominations?
Let us assume that we answer Frame's first question with a resounding "No!" Does it follow that we must answer with the expected "No!" to the second?
I'd like to reframe (no pun intended, professor) the argument just a bit. In order to build a new multibillion dollar stadium, the city of Los Angeles has just bulldozed hundreds of old apartment buildings. Those apartment buildings included one that was an amazingly important architectural treasure (unlikely, but this is my hypothetical, OK?); they also included a number that had been "condemned" by way of suspicious fires set by shady fellows in zoot suits. Now, a mediocre sports team (let us say that Los Angeles just acquired, oh, the Astros) is holding forth in a very expensive stadium that barely pays the rent, while exacerbating the housing shortage.
Now, can anyone seriously say that this urban renewal project does not cause practical problems for the city? I should hope we would answer, "No!" And can anyone deny that there would be considerable benefits to demolishing the stadium?
Well, of course, we certainly could deny that. And we might be right. Especially if the stadium were demolished, say, by shady fellows in zoot suits dynamiting it in the night, leaving smoking rubble all over the place. Or terrorists nuking it during a game. Or even the city fathers deciding to raze the place in favor of a housing project (housing projects run by city governments being generally describable in terms of Dante's famous poem--and no, not the Paradiso).
In other words, we can admit that we arrived at the status quo in a bad way, for bad reasons, with bad results, and we may still be rightly convinced that merely abolishing the status quo conveys no benefits. The question is, "How can we do better?" and not merely, "When will we do something?"
And that is what Frame has yet to answer, and until he does so his belaboring the "bad, bad, bad" denominations is much like telling humans that aging is bad.
Sure it is. But what else can we do?
posted by pgepps at 7/20/2005 09:42:00 AM
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