All is Gift!

"As each one has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God's varied grace."
    First letter of Peter, 4:10

Happy Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time!

In the June issue of The Atlantic, David Brooks wrote an excellent essay on the underpinnings of society, starting from the case of assisted suicide in Canada (The Canadian Way of Death: the nation legalized assisted suicide – and exposed the limits of liberalism.)

Brooks starts from the experience with assisted suicide in Canada, which started with a very narrow set of five criteria and has expanded to proposals for allowing 12-year olds to have physicians help them end their lives.

Brooks is using liberalism in the sense of political philosophy, where “liberals” proposed the rights of man in opposition to the divine right of kings. Brooks recognizes an autonomy-based liberalism, whose one core conviction is “I possess myself. I am a piece of property that I own . . . I can dispose of my property as I see fit.” In opposition he distinguishes a gifts-based liberalism which begins with “I am a receiver of gifts. . . I have received many gifts from those who came before me, including the gift of life itself.”

Brooks posits four truths that “gifts-based liberalism embrace and autonomy-based liberalism subverts”. To quote Brooks:
 

• You didn’t create your life. From the moment of your birth, life was given to you, not earned.
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• You didn’t create your dignity. No insignificant person has ever been born, and no insignificant day has ever been lived.
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• You don’t control your mind. In liberal societies, people are supposed to collect data, weigh costs and benefits, and make decisions rationally. Autonomy-based liberalism, with its glorification of individual choice, leans heavily on this conception of human nature. Gifts-based liberals know that no purely rational thinker has ever existed. . . the very language you think with was handed down as a gift from those who came before. We are each nodes in a network through which information flows and is refracted. The information that is stored in our genes comes from eons ago; the information that we call religion and civilization comes from thousand of years ago; the information we call culture comes from distant generations; the information that we call education or family background comes from decades ago. All of it flows through us in deep rivers that are partly conscious and partly unconscious, forming our assumptions and shaping our choices in ways that we, as individuals, often can’t fathom.
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• You did not create your deepest bonds. Autonomy-based liberals see society as a set of social contracts – arrangements people make for their mutual benefit. . . Gifts-based liberals see society as resting on a bedrock of covenants. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once captured the difference this way: ‘A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship.Or to put is slightly differently: a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us’.’

Or, as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops declared in Stewardship, A Disciples’ Response,