Light On Dark Water

The Prestige of the Avant-Garde

I've just been browsing in the most recent issue of The New Criterion, which is a memorial issue for Hilton Kramer, the magazine's founder, who died recently. During the time I've been reading TNC--a little over ten years--Kramer hasn't appeared very often in its pages, and so I really don't know that much about him, other than that he was for many years the art critic of The New York Times. The memorial includes some samples of his writing; this one struck me:

For the "normal condition" of our culture has become one in which the ideology of the avant-garde wields a pervasive and often cynical authority over sizable portions of the very public it affects to despise. That it does so by means of a profitable alliance with the traditional antagonists of the avant-garde--the mass media, the universities, and the marketplace--only underscores the paradoxical nature of the situation in which we find ourselves. It is in the interest of this ideology to deny the scope of its present powers, of course. Its continuing effectiveness--its ability to come before the public not only as an arbiter of taste but as an example of moral heroism--is peculiarly dependent on the fiction of its extreme vulnerability. The myth of the underdog, of a struggle against impossible odds with little hope of just recognition, is an indispensable instrument in the consolidation of the avant-garde influence.

But this is only part of the myth that is fostered in the avant-garde scenario. Central to its doctrine of embattled and threatened virtue is that notion of what Lionel Trilling has called the avant-garde's "adversary" relation to the larger (bourgeois) culture in which it functions. If the institutions that now serve as conduits of avant-garde claims are no longer shy about acknowledging this adversary role, it is because the role itself has acquired an unquestioned historical prestige.

 It occurs to me that this basic description also has some applicability to what we refer to, somewhat clumsily, as "political correctness," or the left-wing orthodoxy which is so very powerful in shaping public debate. The above was written in 1973, by the way.

Sunday Night Journal — April 29, 2012

Dialogue and Motive

A few days ago in a comment thread Paul linked to this interesting report on a study which claims to find that conservatives understand the views of liberals better than liberals understand the views of conservatives. I take Studies of this sort in general with a pretty big dose of skepticism—after all, hardly a week seems to pass that someone doesn’t produce a Study purporting to prove that conservatives are fundamentally stupid, etc. This one is intriguing partly because the results actually go counter to the self-admitted bias of the liberal psychology professor who did it, and partly because, for what it’s worth, my personal experience supports the conclusion.

As far as I can remember I have never encountered, either in person or in print, a liberal who was able and/or willing to understand conservative arguments on their own terms—that is, to address what the conservative says he intends, and the arguments with which he supports that intention, rather than what the liberal assumes he intends. For instance, on the question of our responsibility toward the poor: if a conservative agrees that there is such a responsibility, but that there are better ways to meet it than the federal programs beloved of liberals, the liberal generally does not acknowledge that this is a disagreement about means and not ends. Instead, he concludes that the conservative doesn’t care about the poor, is a social Darwinist, etc. There simply doesn’t seem to be any willingness or ability on the part of liberals to believe that conservatives actually have the common good at heart, but differ about how to achieve it.

I don’t say that conservatives don’t often fall into the same way of thinking. But the study indicates that there are more exceptions to the tendency on the conservative than on the liberal side.

The liberal response seems always to assume that opposition to a particular approach toward solving a problem is opposition to solving the problem at all. In other words, the liberal is incapable of believing, or at least disinclined to believe, that any approach to a problem other than the liberal one can be reasonable and sincere. If you oppose affirmative action, you must favor racism. If you oppose giving more money to any and all government educational agencies, you must want children to be ignorant. (The teachers’ union in my state has been doing this for decades, pretty effectively: any opposition to anything it wants is deemed opposition to education, period.) If you think our programs for the elderly are unsustainable, you must want to push an old lady in a wheelchair over a cliff, as Congressman Paul Ryan was depicted doing in an ad attacking his proposals for Social Security and Medicare reform.

(I always feel obliged to insert this disclaimer: yes, I am mindful of the inadequacy of terms like “liberal,” “conservative,” “left,” and “right,” especially in the American context, but that doesn’t mean the parties don’t exist.)

Ryan, Rand, and Georgetown

Speaking of Paul Ryan: I have long wondered how it is that Christian admirers of Ayn Rand reconcile Rand’s ideas with their faith. At the level of fundamental metaphysics, the two simply cannot be reconciled. Rand’s philosophy as a whole can fairly be described as satanic, except that Satan does not share her foolish belief that there is no such thing as spiritual reality. I’ve suspected that what they, the Christians, do is to separate Rand’s economic ideas from her metaphysics. They read Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead and are thrilled by the achievements of the heroes, and filled with indignation toward their malicious collectivist enemies. They either miss or mostly ignore the materialist and atheist foundations of Rand’s didactic stories; what they see is an inspiring story of individual heroism against collective stupidity and venality. It wouldn’t be so hard to do that if one only read Atlas, which is the only work of any length by Rand that I’ve read; perhaps the same is true of The Fountainhead.

And they aren’t totally off base, at least if we ignore the question of literary judgment—I thought Atlas was bad to the point of being funny. Her opposition to collectivism was the one thing that Rand got mostly right. Her family’s pharmacy was confiscated by the early Soviet government, so she had direct experience of what happens when a government decides to confiscate private property, ostensibly for the benefit of the people but in practice for the benefit of those who run the government, either directly or indirectly. It doesn’t seem to be recognized by the most vociferous denouncers of Rand’s ideas that what disgusted her most (at least on the evidence of Atlas Shrugged) was not so much government itself as crony capitalism, the appropriation of government’s power by private interests. The most loathsome characters in Atlas are those who can’t compete with the genius of the heroes and therefore use the power of government to rig the game in their favor, like a football team that bribes the officials.

And she’s half-right about individual achievement. It’s a fine thing when a gifted person exercises those gifts, and a shabby one when the envious scheme to bring him down. Anyone can cheer the one and boo the other, just as audiences cheer and boo the heroes and villains of any melodrama. She was only half-right, because her gifted heroes are grotesquely egotistical, and risibly enchanted with their own (highly implausible) superiority, like characters in some cartoon version of Nietzsche.

Paul Ryan, a Catholic, is somewhat notorious for acknowledging Rand’s influence on him, while simultaneously claiming that his economic vision is compatible with Catholic social teaching. In the past week or so he has made some remarks distancing himself from Rand, and has been accused of lying about his earlier enthusiasm, as expressed in remarks such as “I give outAtlas Shrugged as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well... I try to make my interns read it.” (This remark is usually paraphrased as something like “forces his staff to read Atlas Shrugged,” which is not exactly the same thing, and lacks the light tone of the actual words. The primary source and context for this remark seems to be a 2003 article in the Weekly Standard which is available only to subscribers.)

I don’t think Ryan's there is necessarily any contradiction between Ryan's past and current views (which is not to say that they are entirely coherent). In fact they are what I would expect to hear from the sort of Christian I was wondering about. Every admiring word about Rand that I’ve heard attributed to Ryan has been in the context of economics, and he seems offended that people would think this makes him a full-fledged metaphysical Randian. This doesn’t say much for his intellectual consistency, but it doesn’t surprise me very much.

At any rate, I think there are a lot of good things in his address he gave at Georgetown last week, which you can read here. Some of the Georgetown faculty are up in arms about him, in particular accusing him of being insufficiently orthodox, which is pretty funny coming from them. (Nor do those who signed the letter of protest—theology professors and others—seem likely to have much knowledge of economic reality). But—in line with the study I referred to earlier—they don’t seem even to attempt to meet the argument that his proposals will actually preserve the essentials of the social safety net they advocate. They assume that his disagreement with their means is a disagreement about the end. I am certainly willing to believe that he needs to keep working at the project of basing his economic views less on Ayn Rand and more on the teachings of the Church, but I’m not convinced that he deserves their wholesale condemnation, and I think his ideas deserve an open and charitable debate.

I don’t want to take a position on Ryan’s budget proposal (apart from the fact that I think it should include defense cuts, which it reportedly does not). These things have gotten so vastly complicated that it’s almost impossible for an ordinary person to grasp what a plan like this really contains and what its significance really is. And that in itself is a symptom of something gone badly wrong. What we need are honest and disinterested experts to study it and explain it to the rest of us. But most of the people who have the time for that sort of thing are highly partisan and can be expected to slant things their way, usually in the most hyperbolic way possible. I admit that I tend to dismiss liberal rhetoric about “gutting” social programs, because they say that about any attempt whatsoever to constrain the growth of their favored programs.

I do, however, take Ryan at his word that he believes his plan would be the best thing for the country as a whole, and is not just a cover for his desire to push somebody off a cliff. As he says,

Serious problems like those we face today require charitable conversation. Civil public dialogue goes to the heart of solidarity, the virtue that does not divide society into classes and groups but builds up the common good of all.

But you can’t have a civil dialogue when one side assumes that anything said by the other is only meant to divert attention from an evil conspiracy.

Sunday Night Journal — February 12, 2012

There But For Fortune

I watched, in snippets over a week or so, the above-named documentary about Phil Ochs. Once considered along with Dylan a major "protest singer," Ochs had a considerably lesser artistic gift, and stuck with left-wing activism long after Dylan had withdrawn from it. I never listened to him very much, because most of what I did hear of his music wasn't very appealing. Setting aside the intrinsic problem of polemics in art, I just didn't care much for his music as music. It may seem odd for someone who always liked Dylan's weird rasp to say he found Ochs's voice annoying, but there it is. I did come to like a couple of his songs very well when performed by others: Joan Baez's "There But For Fortune," one of Ochs's less topical and more lasting songs, and Ian and Sylvia's "Changes." I didn't hear much of him as he tried to make the transition from voice-and-guitar to a more expansive musical style in the late '60s, and in the '70s he vanished completely as far as I was concerned. I don't think I even heard of his 1976 suicide till long after it happened. He was thirty-six.

The documentary is very good, as far as the treatment of Ochs himself is concerned. He seems to have been fundamentally a good man, but one who lost his way completely as the energy of the '60s radical movement dissipated. Perhaps, in a very different way from more visible figures like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix (whose connection to politics as such was pretty well nonexistent, but who were very much of the same broad cultural phenomenon), he was a casualty of the times, in that once the excitement and foolish hopes of the period had ebbed he could find no meaning in his life. I don't mean to suggest that any such simple or single explanation explains his suicide--he had developed serious mental problems, for one thing--but it seems to have been a factor.

The film does engage in what I've come to expect of any treatment of the '60s: it hews to the standard Innocents Abroad line of most of those who participated in the whole political-cultural attempt at revolution. In this view, the movement begins in "idealism" which is never really defined except as opposition to war and racism, rides the enthusiasm of John Kennedy's noble presidency, and is crushed by the oppressive war-mongering capitalist imperialist sexist System. Thus we get Tom Hayden trotting out, yet again, the idea that Kennedy's assassination was the work of sinister forces opposed to "social change"; the '60s began "innocently"

believing in the redemption of the American dream through direct action...to take the New Frontier to a more progressive and radical conclusion.... The murder of Kennedy was the first warning that there was something fundamentally dangerous about embarking on social change.

That's ridiculous on several grounds, which really should be obvious, but is not to the diehards of the '60s. It's hard not to believe that someone like Hayden isn't being deliberately dishonest, but perhaps it's just very powerful self-deception.

It occurred to me recently that these old leftists of the '60s resemble those Southerners who continue to insist that the Civil War wasn't about slavery. They're so committed to their myth that they simply can't consider the possibility that it is wrong in any really important way--in the case of the Southerners, that their ancestors were deeply committed to the institution of slavery, in the case of the leftists that they were driven, whether knowingly or ignorantly, by variants of a utopian ideology which has proven its capacity for destruction and oppression many times over. (I know, slavery was not the immediate cause of the Civil War, but it was the primary reason for the division that was the immediate cause.)

The wisest words in the film come from the somewhat unlikely source of Ed Sanders, who thinks guilt about his marital problems and derelictions as a father weighed heavily on Ochs:

When you make mistakes--there are no time machines to rectify mistakes--so mistakes are lodged like harpoons and fishooks in an intelligent person's soul, and I think Phil couldn't get beyond those personal harpoons that made him feel in some ways worthless.

What he needed, obviously, was repentance and forgiveness. I pray he found them.

 

A Progressive and Radical Conclusion

What would Tom Hayden's "progressive and radical conclusion have looked like? Something like Cuba, perhaps? With its wonderful free health care? He should be comforted to find that the flame is very much alive in the White House. We can see part of it in the shocking move of the Obama administration to force Catholic institutions to subsidize contraception, sterilization, and the abortifacent "morning after" pill. I think it would be superfluous for me to say much about this. The main line of argument by the administration is startling. It seems to go something like this: that one major goal of Obamacare (Affordable Care Act, or whatever the Orwellian name is) is to foster health, that contraception is good for women's health, that therefore they have a right to it, and that this right entails that someone else must provide it. Can this reasoning really be accepted as law in the United States of America?

 This may be the first open skirmish in what I'm afraid is going to be a long war between Church and State in this nation. When I was first seriously considering the possibility of becoming a Catholic, I decided I wanted to read a serious history of the Church. I went to a lot of trouble to obtain all three volumes of Msgr. Philip Hughes History of the Church. I didn't retain many details of the intricacies of events and their causes, but I came away with one single powerful impression: that conflict between Church and State had begun with Pontius Pilate and never really stopped for very long, even during the Middle Ages, and that in this conflict the Church had always stood for the primacy of the spiritual over the material. In this country the two have enjoyed, for the most part, a fairly stable and mutually respectful relationship for the past 100 years or so. But as our government has grown in power so it has grown in pride, and Caesar is always enraged when his claim to final authority over his subjects is disputed. I fear we are entering a new period of active conflict. 

It was probably inevitable that the implementation of Obamacare would take this turn. It was certainly predictable. To quote myself, writing while the law was still being debated:

Among many other problems with the idea is that it would increase the polarization of the country by locking our disagreements about abortion, euthanasia, etc. into a health care system that no one can escape, either as a patient or as a taxpayer.

(The whole post is here.) 

As I write this, the administration has offered what it describes as a compromise. It seems to be having the no doubt intended effect of dividing Catholics, with those who supported Obamacare feeling that they now have an escape route from their embarrassing situation, and those who say it is inadequate or meaningless in the position of seeming intransigent. If this is accurate, it is indeed meaningless. In any case, does anyone doubt that the Church's opponents will give up short of complete victory? Or that it will be birth control pills today, abortion tomorrow, since the "women's health advocates" of HHS consider abortion equally important to their cause?

(Personally I've always suspected that there may be a stronger link between the birth control pill and cancer, especially breast cancer, than has so far been recognized. It is at any rate a fact that the pill is carcinogenic. So women's health is hardly the only consideration from the HHS point of view.)

And Finally

I must register my offense that the secretary of Health and Human Services has the same name (apart from a variation in one letter) as one of our greatest composers. Click on the picture to hear something beautiful (image from Wikipedia).

Sunday Night Journal — January 29, 2012

Microfascism

Several weeks ago, in a comment on my post about David Bentley Hart's essay on American religion in The New Criterion , Rob G mentioned another TNC piece, this one by William Gairdner, called "Getting Used to the F-Word," saying it was "even better" than Hart's. I had read it when it came out, and not been especially struck by it. But at Rob's recommendation I read it again, and it's been on my mind a good deal since. My opinion of it is mixed, but its main point is one that seems increasingly accurate, and has been supported by certain events of the past week or two.

 The f-word referred to in the title is not the one you think, and the subject is not obscenity and crudeness in entertainment and everyday life. The f-word is fascism, and the subject is the increasingly tight regulation of our lives by the state.

One reason for my lukewarm initial reaction was that use of the term "fascism" has been more or less mindless for a long time, so much so as to often seem a joke in itself. For the most part none but the most inflamed political partisans use it seriously, and when they do they're likely to be scoffed at. (Variants like "Islamofascism" still have a bit of life in them.) As early as 1945 George Orwell had observed that 'almost any English person would accept "bully" as a synonym for "Fascist".' In recent years it has even seemed that the word had become so exhausted that it might fall back into application only in the fairly narrow literal sense, referring to the specific Italian political movement and its close relatives, a development which would have cheered many who like for words to have clear and stable meanings. 

I do think that as a matter of rhetoric Gairdner was unwise to use the word "fascism" for the phenomenon he discusses. Once, perhaps, we generally reacted with alarm to it; now many of us don't take it seriously, and take even less seriously those who bandy it in reference to current political developments. But he might ask "What better word is there?" and it's true that there is not a ready and convenient alternative. "Totalitarianism" comes closest, but it's somewhat clumsy.

Use of the f-word is not the only thing about the essay that I find somewhat unsatisfactory. I don't think all his arguments and examples are persuasive. And there are some key points on which I don't clearly understand him. And yet: I keep coming back to what seems the essential correctness of his essential point. He discusses what he calls "macrofascism," meaning the brutally violent, aggressive, and repressive movements in Germany and Italy that produced World War II and were destroyed by it. He emphasizes not so much their violence per se but the rationale for the violence, which was to bring everything in the life of a nation (and eventually the world) into conformity with a single will and purpose. 

These recent forms of Macro-fascism, whether French, Italian, German, or Russian, have  always been collectivist, secular, and militant, striving through the fearsome top-down powers of the State to draw all things into the ambit of a single pattern of national -- or in the case of Communism, international -- Will, or centralized choosing, a Will always expressed by the subjugation and assimilation by force of things spontaneous, private, and natural, to artificial and unnatural public designs. 

Some will object to the inclusion of Russia and communism in that list, but it's always seemed to me that communism and fascism are far more alike than different, and in the sense that Gairdner is using the term "fascism" it certainly applies (though the inevitable argument about that is, to return to my first objection, one of the problems with the usage.) The European varieties of macro-fascism were throughly discredited and abominated by and after WWII, and there seems little risk of their being revived in anything much like their original form. Communism is no longer much of a political force, though in a vaguer form it has maintained its hold on a great many intellectuals. But the desire for control, to bring everything into order by the power of the state, remains as strong as ever.

In liberal democracies the desire is very self-consciously benevolent, and imposes itself gently, in the gradual construction of a web of laws and regulations which grows ever finer and tighter, but is hardly noticed unless or until one tries to move out of it. Since these are always directed toward making someone better off, not to repression, they don't require violence and aren't resisted very strongly. And even those who are penalized or restricted in the process are generally the beneficiaries of some other manifestation of it, so that they complain only about what specifically burdens them, and are no more interested than anyone else in trying to weaken the web as a whole. This, I think, is what Gairdner calls micro-fascism:

So it seems that in a pragmatic response to the dark failures of the Macro form, a softer Micro-fascism, also rooted in a much earlier intellectual tradition, has emerged slowly in the second half of the twentieth century, and is now in full bloom as our most pervasive and therefore most invisible political religion. It has produced an historically unprecedented type of polity characterized by a radically individualistic and autonomist ethic that nevertheless, and rather ironically seeks to organize itself as a national inventory of common public orthodoxies expressed, not as a collective triumph of the Will over nature, as in the past, but instead as the triumph of the Will of each and every individual over his or her own individual nature.  

I'm with him up to the second half of the second sentence, beginning with "and rather...". I'm not 100% sure what he means by "a national inventory of common public orthodoxies"; I suppose it refers to various liberal (in the non-classical sense) doctrines concerning sex, race, secularism, and so forth. And I'm not convinced that these doctrines represent primarily "the triumph of the Will of each and every individual over his or her own individual nature." At least I wouldn't put it that way; his preceding mention of the "radically individualist and autonomist ethic" is clearer and, I think, more significant.

But, as I noted in the beginning, I do think that this urge to bring everything under the control of one central government, for the good of all, is the predominant note of what we call liberalism or progressivism. The benevolent intention is genuine, and that makes it very easy for liberals to believe that opposition to their ideas can only be motivated by anti-benevolence. (I think the left in general is more morally confident than the right; conservatives are easily put on the defensive, liberals less so.)

Well, if most people benefit in some way, and no one is being executed or tortured or sent to a concentration camp, where's the harm?--a shallow question with a deep answer that isn't generally taken seriously by those who ask the question. The resolution of the seeming paradox that Gairdner notes--increasing control at the service of increasing freedom--is in the fact that the presumption of absolute personal autonomy, the rule of the imperial self, prevails only in certain respects, above all in sexual freedom, which seems to be the real religion of a great many influential people. More importantly, it's a religion favored by the state, at least when liberals are in power, and when that religion begins to conflict with others we can see the seriously oppressive potential of the net of laws.

Which brings me to those recent events I mentioned, the main one being the Obama administration's move to require that Catholic institutions provide insurance covering contraception and sterilization to their employees. Among other things, this points up the folly of trying to impose a rigidly uniform and detailed health care system on a very diverse nation. (What, you thought diversity was supposed to be a good thing? Yes, but not the kind that leaves people free to do what progressives do not wish them to do.)

More fundamentally, what we see stirring here is the old enemy of the Church, Caesar, insisting again that he is the real God, the one you really have to obey in the end. You can have your rites and superstitions, he says; you can do what you like in your private worship. But you must acknowledge that Caesar is supreme. In this matter, as in the movement to establish rights for homosexuality at the expense of religious freedom, we're seeing the beginning of a real effort to subjugate the Church. Whether or not one thinks "microfascism" is a good word to describe the machinery in operation here, it's an ominous development, and ought to be recognized for what it is.

As for Obama: I didn't vote for him in 2008 but I respected him. I no longer do. His conciliatory and unifying rhetoric was hot air. Or rather, what he seems to have meant is that conciliation and unity are to be achieved by our doing as he wishes--which does, after all, have more than a hint of fascism about it.

Christ the Despot?

Sunday Night Journal — November 20, 2011

Today is the feast of Christ the King. The archdiocese of Mobile has a traditional celebration of this occasion which still involves an actual public procession. I was going to say that that’s probably a rare thing in this country in these days, but I decided to look around on the web first, and it seems that there are at least some others. My wife is the diocesan archivist, and she tells me that photos in the archive and the testimony of older Catholics in the area indicate that it was once a bigger deal than it is now, and included a big parade in which all the Catholic schools took part. Catholics are a minority in this area, but a large one. Even in a time when Protestants in general regarded Catholics with much more hostility than most do now, the local church was not ashamed to take over the downtown streets for a public celebration of its faith.

“King of King, Lord of Lords.” Every Christian believes that. The Catholic Church and, I suppose, the Orthodox in a somewhat different manner, make it more concrete than most Protestants, both theologically and in practice, still rejecting “separation of church and state” in the sense that secular fundamentalists use that phrase. In the fundamentalist sense, no opinion rooted in religious conviction has any legitimate voice in government. As a rule the fundamentalists are not very consistent in that view—they are mostly on the political left, and they are indignant when Christians plead the sacredness of human life as an argument against abortion, but untroubled when we plead the equality of all in God’s eyes as an argument against racism.

The fundamentalists notwithstanding, there is a vast territory between their view that religious views should be absolutely excluded from political debate (not to mention from the actual administration of government) and the theocracy which they accuse us of wanting to impose. When I hear the screech of “theocracy!” from a left-winger trying to shut down religious opinion, I’m never sure whether it’s consciously dishonest or merely irrational.

And yet—there are those on my side in that debate who worry even me a little. When some traditionalist Catholics speak of the “the social reign of Christ the King” I get the feeling that what they really want is “the social reign of me and my friends” They seem to be pretty sure about how the world should be run, and that they would sort things out in a jiffy if they had the power. Of course they pay some deference, at least, to the belief that in a fallen world political and social arrangements will never be perfect, but I sometimes get the feeling that they believe they could do a whole lot better than anyone ever has before, and that the process would be a fairly straightforward implementation of the laws they know to be right. They’re disdainful of secular republics—not altogether without reason, but yet not altogether as appreciative as I think they should be of the real gains in human rights and related matters that have been made in these republics. I have heard that case made quite succinctly: secular governments allow people to do things that endanger their souls; a Christian government would establish laws that prevented these things and thus save souls; therefore the establishment of a Christian government is a moral obligation.

Well, in some sense it is, but not necessarily in the theocratic or near-theocratic sense. It’s the over-confident quality of the prescription that bothers me. It sounds too much like other attempts, beginning with the French Revolution, to enforce an abstract ideal of government on the human race. Or like certain strains of Islam, whose leaders believe that they know God’s will in more or less perfect detail, and that all that remains is to implement it. Of course I don’t think this would-be Catholic authoritarianism is as fundamentally wrong as either the atheistic or the Islamic, because it starts with better premises, but I do think it misguided and that it would, if implemented, be bad for the Church. We don’t need a Catholic utopianism.

I often think, when I watch the behavior of American voters, that democracy really is, from the historical perspective, an unnatural phenomenon that may not last very long. Many people seem to want a king, almost naturally—or maybe not even almost; maybe it is natural, not just in the sense that it comes easily but in the sense that it is part of the nature of man. George Washington reportedly had to resist a movement to make him king. The tendency was especially noticeable in the 2008 election, when many Obama voters clearly saw him as a sort of monarch who would, entirely by his own hand, solve most of our problems. And when you look at our relationship to God it makes sense that the desire for a monarch would in fact be built into us There is certainly no reflection there of the modern idea that the power of the government derives from the consent of the governed. There is no question of who is in charge, and the attempt on the part of the creature to claim equality with the Lord, and to prefer his own will to the Lord’s, is the fundamental source of evil.

Unquestionably, and unlike human beings who take the role upon themselves, God does have, intrinsically, the right to act as an absolute monarch. Just as clearly, though, the gospels do not present this as the way he chooses to act. Christ the King is not Christ the Despot. If we look to medieval civilization for a conception of kingship, we see that our relationship to this king is meant to be not that of his serfs, but of his liegemen and vassals: a sworn fealty, given freely.

It’s not an absolute freedom, of course. There are consequences for choosing wrongly, for defiance, and for oath-breaking. But if God is willing to wait on us, we must be willing to wait on our fellow sinners, and there is only so much a government of any sort can or should do to bypass that process. The social kingship of Christ is something that we can only hope to realize very imperfectly in this world; it can’t be a destination at which we expect to arrive before the end of time.

Having said all that, though, I wonder why I bothered. We are more likely to be wiped out by an asteroid strike within the next thirty years than to witness the imposition on the United States of an authoritarian Catholic government that would ban rock-and-roll and allow no television except EWTN. I suppose it’s just that these views get on my nerves. What is actually happening is that the upper class is working to make Christians of all sorts into a despised minority, and to limit the practice of the faith where it conflicts with contemporary dogma on sex, marriage, and reproduction. Here is a good example of the left-wing fear-mongering about “theocracy.” The pattern—and I don’t say it’s a conscious tactic, but the pattern that emerges—is to paint Christians as a danger to the nation. That’s a very old theme. It’s a little surprising that it would be so effective in a country that is so heavily Christian. But the left-wing position now has the prestige and confidence that mainline Protestantism had a hundred years ago. At the same time, because it is smaller in numbers, and because Christianity is still culturally predominant outside the big cities, the universities, and most of the media, it can pose as the brave rebel. Nice position to be in.

Conservatives And Social Justice

Sunday Night Journal — November 13, 2011

The eccentric right-wing TV/radio personality Glenn Beck attracted a great deal of wrath a while back when he warned people to flee any church that preaches “social justice:”

I beg you, look for the words “social justice” or “economic justice” on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words.

He was denounced furiously, with some reason. And then one of those tiresome media and internet tempests ensued, people shouted superficial talking points at each other for a few days, and the whole thing was forgotten.

Beck’s opponents were right to condemn the clearly absurd notion they took from his remarks, which was that Christianity has nothing to do with social justice. But Beck, in his goofy way, did have a point. In many contexts, the terms “social justice” and “economic justice” are indeed code words, in that the justice they prescribe is a pretty specific set of policies which can fairly be summarized as support for the modern welfare state, and sometimes, depending on who’s talking, for pure socialism. And it's also true that some Christians have substituted this political program for the faith. So it’s not without reason that one who disagrees with the program reflexively tunes out anyone who uses the terms.

But to stop there is merely reactionary. Obviously the terms in their literal meanings refer to something that has to be taken seriously when we think about politics, especially when we think about politics from a Christian perspective. What, in fact, is the point of politics, if not to foster social justice? Or, to use a less politically charged term, the common good? I assume no one reading this, and few people anywhere in the Western world, would argue that the point is to gain as much power as possible, or to subjugate and plunder other peoples for the glory and enrichment of one’s own country, both of which seem to have been uncontroversial answers to the question in many times and places. It is probably because of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian philosophical and religious traditions that they are now generally disgraced, though still practiced (obviously).

It’s especially important for conservatives to articulate principles of social justice. We live in a more or less capitalist society—I say “more or less” because capitalism, unlike socialism, does not have a specific and generally agreed-upon definition. It is less a system than socialism, in that it is not first a fully thought-out intellectual creation, but rather a messy mixture of ideas and historical developments. An ideology of pure capitalism exists, but it’s somewhat of an after-the-fact thing. And its proponents don’t seem to think that American society, for instance, really meets the definition. Other non-ideological capitalists often seem to think that “capitalism” means nothing more than private property and markets that are free within the limits of laws against fraud, breach of contract, etc.

But at any rate, whatever you want to call the system, conservatives are in general defenders of it. If they wish to preserve it, they should wish to reform it. The uncritical defenders of an institution are often a greater danger to it than its open enemies. By digging in their heels and refusing to acknowledge its defects—which, in the normal way of human things, will get worse if no active effort is made to repair them—they weaken it, and strengthen both the arguments and the animosity of those who wish to do away with it.

The attack on capitalism from the left tends to be simplistic, emotional, and often at least implicitly revolutionary. It goes against the American grain in being fundamentally hostile to capitalism. And so even when it’s correct in identifying this or that problem, as in the Occupy movement’s protest against the current trend for the rich to get richer and for the middle class to become poorer, it loses popular sympathy, as well as persuasive power, by going beyond specific problems and plainly wishing to replace the whole system with something else entirely. Americans by and large do not want that; they want reform, not revolution, and they certainly do not want the sort of revolution envisioned by those who, strangely, still seem to look to the leftist ideologies of the early 20^th century for a solution, in spite of their vast record of crimes and failures.

Reform must, by definition, begin with what is here. So those who understand the thing that is to be reformed, and who wish to see it reformed, ought to be in the forefront of the attempt to understand and address its problems. Human nature, of course, tends to produce a different result: the desire to defend the institution becomes an unwillingness to acknowledge its faults, and then an active attempt to ignore and conceal them. That has been the response of a lot of conservatives to the current economic crisis, and it’s a mistake.

Back in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, when I was abandoning my own youthful leftism, I thought the neoconservative defense of capitalism was a needed corrective to the prevailing doctrines of welfare-state liberalism, not to mention the revolutionary delusions of the far left. The prosperity of the ‘50s and ‘60s had been taken for granted, and when things turned sour in the mid-’70s there was a need to examine the welfare-state presumption that business was the problem and government the solution, and to make the case that government redistribution of wealth was only feasible and useful if there was wealth to distribute. Someone said—and I think Ronald Reagan may have used it in a speech, though I don’t know that it was his line originally—that it was time to stop worrying so much about how to distribute the golden eggs and start worrying about the health of the goose.

All right, then: within the framework of the question “how can we maintain our prosperity?”—that is, assuming a reformist rather than revolutionary goal—those were valid arguments. But many who made them stuck there. They dug in their heels. They over-praised capitalism. They minimized its defects. They constructed a sort of academic’s fantasy about how and why it operates, speaking of “the circle of exchange” rather than of war and Darwinian struggle, as actual capitalists often do. And in the current crisis they don’t seem to have anything useful to say. As middle class and poor Americans have to struggle more and more to stay where they are, and the rich enjoy wealth and privilege which make them in many ways more distant from the masses than kings of old, the intellectual defenders of capitalism have little to offer beyond their old formulas of lower taxes and less regulation. Does anyone seriously believe that such things, even if one grants that they are good policies, will do much to stop the erosion of the American middle class? I doubt it. And conservatives who focus on those things only provide cause for others to think that they either do not understand or do not care that it is getting harder and harder for Americans to earn a middle-class living.

I know there are exceptions—Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review, Ross Douthat of the New York Times, for instance—but for the most part the more visible conservatives and neoconservatives seem to just keep repeating formulas that seem irrelevant at best: that people move in and out of the category of “wealthy,” that any tax increase will crush the incentives of “job creators”—as if insanely well-paid CEOs haven’t been busy for many years now sending every job they can to China—that the top 5% of taxpayers pay 40% of the income taxes (or whatever the number is), etc. Long-time Catholic neoconservative George Weigel seemed almost a parody of the breed when, upon the publication of Caritas in veritate, he rushed into print to tell Catholics which parts of the encyclical were not actually representative of Benedict’s thought and need not be given much attention.

All of this is just a prelude to saying how pleased I was to read this piece by Ryan Anderson of the Witherspoon Institute, which is a sort of social conservative think-tank. Reviewing a recent book from the American Enterprise Institute, Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism, by Peter Wehner and Arthur Brooks, Anderson criticizes the failure of capitalism’s apologists to go beyond the not-necessarily-true argument that capitalism is just because, in the long run, almost everybody benefits. I’ll quote one passage, which I think will cause anyone interested in this subject to read the whole piece:

Perhaps most disconcerting, however, is that Wehner and Brooks offer no principles of justice on how individuals should deploy their wealth, and in a book titled Wealth and Justice this is disappointing. Supporting free markets and limited government doesn’t even begin to address the question of how citizens should behave in the market: Can a citizen be guilty of injustice in how he uses his wealth? Do citizens have duties—in justice—to distribute their wealth? Wehner and Brooks are silent.

In justice. One doesn’t have to believe that the government should micromanage the economy to hold that some positive assertion of the demands of justice, independent of the workings of the market, must have a place in a healthy economic order. I think Ryan Anderson is a young man: a hopeful sign, if true.

And while I’m at it: in searching for the Glenn Beck quote above, I found this solid Christian response to him, from the prominent Southern Baptist Albert Mohler.

Justice is our concern because it is God’s concern.

Another hopeful sign.

Do-Everything-Ism

Sunday Night Journal — September 11, 2011

It often seems to me that no one of genuinely conservative temperament and instincts is ever entirely at ease in the mental atmosphere of the United States. As has been pointed out many times, the whole spirit of the place is fundamentally progressive, and a major component of what American conservatives seek to conserve is the promise of a continually improving future. But if you’re the sort of person who believes not only that things could get worse but that there’s a fairly good chance that they will get worse, that the capacity of the human race to improve itself is quite limited, and that every improvement is subject to the law of unintended consequences, you just don’t ever feel fully on board the progress train. Whether you’re on the last car, looking back at the landscape disappearing behind you, or up front with the engineer, fretfully anticipating dangerous curves, damaged tracks, and menacing obstacles, you are never very confident that the journey is going to end well, and that you might not better have stayed home.

From this perspective, the American left and right appear to be in fundamental agreement, in that they both believe that tomorrow can and should be better than today: they both believe in some variation of the traditional American idea of progress. The right believes that the bright future is to be attained by unleashing the enterprising genius of the people, with little interference from the government. The left believes that the people need mostly need to be restrained, and that the government must intervene constantly to protect them from themselves and each other. In a nutshell, it’s the old argument which pits equality of opportunity against equality of result.

Also from my perspective, it is immediately obvious that there is some truth in both views, and that in each case that there is a valid point to be made in favor of what they advocate and against what they denounce. Obviously the wealth of this country was produced mainly by enterprise and invention, and it is foolish to contemplate the redistribution of wealth without considering whether your actions will result in there being little to distribute. Equally obviously, enterprise and invention do not always operate ethically when left to themselves (the institution of slavery serves as sufficient illustration of that fact), and there are always predators who must be restrained by the force of law. And there are always those who cannot provide adequately for themselves and must be helped by others.

Both sides tend to press their own case in a Manichean sort of way—forces of good vs. forces of evil, and as we all know this is a big part of the reason for the extreme levels of hostility in political life. But underlying the programs of both is the assumption that we can do something about our problems: most problems can be solved, given the willingness to do so.

This is certainly not a bad thing in itself. It is surely a major part of the reason why we have in fact solved many problems. The conservative voice whispers but the solutions have introduced their own problems and that’s generally true, but surely even the most pessimistic of us can admit that sometimes people really do succeed in making things better, and that to believe the attempt is worth making is not necessarily foolish utopianism.

When Americans see a problem, we think “Somebody ought to do something about that.” And a significant number of us follow that thought with “And that somebody is me.” I am not usually one of these people, and I’m glad we have them. They may sometimes be quixotic, and they may sometimes be partially or completely wrong about what they want to accomplish. But on the whole I think we’re better off for the prevalence and strength of this impulse.

It has its limits, though. It can lead us to think not only that we can Do Something about every problem, but that when we have done it the problem will be gone. It becomes an ideological commitment, in which one believes that even the biggest problems have fairly straightforward solutions, and that the only moral thing for us (that is, society at large) to do is to implement them. Do-something-ism becomes do-everything-ism. It is not content with modest measures, but is determined to be radical, to solve the problem at its root, so that it will cease to be a problem.

It is not enough to help the poor; we must have a War on Poverty. It is not enough to take prudent straightforward measures to protect ourselves from homicidal fanatics; we must have a War on Terror. One of those notions comes from the left, the other from the right, but they originate in the same American confidence that there is a solution to every problem, and that big problems must be addressed by big plans from a big government. The conventional voices of the left and the right all want a big government, either for social justice (on the left) or for national security (on the right); they differ in what they want it to to do, but they agree that it must be very big and very powerful. (I emphasize “conventional” because there are those on the right who question our militarization, and those on the left who question our centralization.)

This is a very American way of approaching things, and one hardly needs to point out the hubris that may go along with it. America has done so much: why should there be anything at all that we can’t do, if we but choose to and set our will to it? With the economy a mess, with social life deteriorating, with our military ventures failing to transform the Middle East, we now seem to be coming to the end of that fantasy. Now that the money has run out, and there has begun to be some recognition that we can’t keep borrowing and printing more of it indefinitely, we may hope to see some lessening of our destructive over-confidence.

There are many good things which might never have been if the people who attempted them had listened to people like me. But sometimes the conservative voice that says you can’t really solve that problem; you can only alleviate it is right. And the more fundamental the problem, and the more grandiose the plan for solving it, the more likely that is to be true. There is, in the end, only one truly radical solution, and that is the Gospel, which never promised an end to trouble in this world.

***

Although this piece is not specifically about 9/11/2001, it was written with that anniversary very much in mind; specifically, with the ill-advised war in Iraq and the weird, sometimes scary, internal security measures which were responses to that attack in mind. I'm sixty-two years old. I'm not going to live long enough to get over being bothered by the fact that the United States has a Department of Homeland Security.

Are Your Political Opponents Crazy?

No, they aren't really, but a lot of them act like it. I know people who are otherwise very civilized who seem to unleash some sort of inner beast when the subject of politics comes up; if you disagree with them, you'd best just not talk to them at all on the subject.  Here is an interesting piece by a Notre Dame philosophy professor analyzing the process by which we come to see another's views as crazy. If heeded, it might take some of the heat out of our debates. But it's probably too cool and rationalistic for the people who might benefit most from it.

The Best Political Commentary I've Read Recently

At Front Porch Republic, by Walter A. McDougall: Part 1: The Challenge Confronting Conservatives and Part 2: Sustaining a Republic of Hustlers

Catholic and Conservative (3)

Sunday Night Journal — February 7, 2010

In the first post of this series I argued that conservatism is not a religion, and therefore not, at least conceptually, a rival to the faith, and that a Catholic who describes himself as conservative does not thereby make himself less of a Catholic. In the second I argued against the idea that there is a single Catholic approach to politics and social issues. Now I want to discuss what conservatism is, and why I am willing to describe myself as a conservative (though, as I said in a comment on one of the other posts, I wear the label pretty lightly). And my intention is for this to be the last installment.

Unavoidably, because conservatism does not have a very precise definition, I will have to engage in something close to the True Scotsman gambit:

(a) All Scotsmen like haggis.

(b) Tom is a Scotsman, but he doesn’t like haggis.

(c) All true Scotsmen like haggis.

I think this is normally called a fallacy; I’m calling it a gambit, because I’m not saying “true conservative” but “my sort of conservative.” Anyone familiar with the internal debates of conservatism knows that in fact there is a never-ending discussion about who is and is not a conservative, with frequent instances of  “if you think that, you aren’t a true conservative.” That gets pretty tiresome. There is something broadly identifiable as conservatism, but, unlike Scotland, it does not have clearly defined borders. So when I speak of conservatism, I have in mind primarily principled and thoughtful conservatives, not mere right-wingers whose conservatism is mostly capitalism and nationalism. I should note, while I’m at it, that I’m using the terms “liberal” and “progressive” interchangeably.

I can’t find the remark now, but long ago I read an observation by Fr. Henri de Lubac, S.J., that went something like this: “Insofar as the terms liberal and conservative refer to anything more than personality types, they are political terms that have no place in the life of the Church.” I like those words—or perhaps I should say that idea, since I’m not sure how accurately I’m recalling the quotation. And I think anyone who wants to be a faithful Catholic should do his best to be, simply, Catholic, and to avoid looking at the life of the Church through the distorting lens of a liberal-conservative opposition. I do not describe myself as a conservative Catholic, and if someone insists on using that terminology I can just as accurately describe myself as a liberal Catholic.

Yet as appealing as it is to want to go beyond those terms, they persist, not only in politics but even in the Church, precisely because they are based on personality types which are perennial. They may harden into ideologies, but they are rooted in personal attitudes and temperaments. In almost any human enterprise, including the Church in its humanity, there are people who press urgently for change because they see the problems of the present condition, and people who think the present condition worth preserving in spite of its problems (or else think the solution recommended by the progressive will actually be a change for the worse).

Whether one finds oneself in an objectively conservative or progressive position—resisting change or calling for it—depends greatly on the circumstances. If you’re in a car going 60 miles an hour, it is, strictly speaking, the conservative position to continue going 60 miles an hour. And if you’re rolling down an open highway where the speed limit is 60, it’s the correct position. On the other hand, if an 18-wheeler going 75 miles an hour is coming up behind you, you should consider adopting more progressive views.

Similarly, what we call conservatism is fundamentally a concrete response to a specific moment in history, and it’s fundamentally the response of a certain temperament and attitude: a sort of resignation to the fact that human life is always going to be something of a mess, that things could always be worse, and that it is very easy to do more harm than good by making large and sudden changes in the name of reform. Some maddeningly literal-minded (and occasionally malicious) people insist that the word “conservative” be defined as “always and everywhere opposed to any change whatsoever.” They seem to think they’ve scored a grand rhetorical coup when they catch a conservative saying, for instance, that a Supreme Court decision should be reversed. “You want to change something! You’re not a conservative!” This is sophomoric, and really not worth arguing against. No serious conservative denies the need for a constant reform of human institutions, and the reality of continuing change in human affairs whether we want it or not.

That brings me somewhere close to my final point, which is a response to the challenge Daniel issued in that Caelum et Terra exchange, quoting my own words from a 1991 Caelum et Terra book review:

“When someone tells me he is a conservative, I want to know what it is he wishes to conserve. And I ask the question with a certain intention to harass, for I have always had trouble understanding how the beliefs which most Americans understand to be implied by the word “conservative” could reasonably merit that term.

“….what does it mean to believe oneself a conservative in a society which grows daily more attached…to practices and principles utterly irreconcilable with those one wishes to conserve?….how many of society’s assumptions may one reject before one becomes, intellectually at least, a revolutionary?”

(The complete review is here.)

I do in fact have answers to those questions, though I didn’t care to present them then and there. When someone asks me in this context what it is that I wish to conserve, the answer is: the cultural and political traditions of America and Europe. And one is a conservative and not a revolutionary in relation to one’s society as long as one believes that there is within it still some essential foundation worth preserving. And I do believe that.

For several decades now I’ve pondered, as I was doing in that book review, the question of whether our society is really worth preserving, or whether it’s so corrupt that it can’t and shouldn’t stand. I’ve very often been tempted to answer, respectively, no and yes to those questions. But in the end I come back to the many good things that still persist in our tradition, especially in the U.S., where religion apparently flourishes more vigorously than in most of Europe. For all the very grave faults of this Euro-American culture, it still represents much which I would not wish to see lost. I’ll go further and say much that the human race cannot afford to lose. In the practical realm, a reasonably stable, reasonably free, and perhaps too prosperous society is not something to be cast away lightly. The culture of the West is still far from dead, though it may be dying. And it’s one of the essential insights of conservatism that it is much, much easier to destroy than to build. If you help your enemies destroy the last of what others have built and you have inherited, you will most likely find yourself living not with what you wanted, but what those enemies wanted.

And I think the Western tradition has a real, conscious, dedicated enemy in what I might call secular progressivism. Assuming that both conservatives and progressives have similar views of how things ought to be, the quarrel between them ought to be, and often is, only one of means, not ends, and a question of emphasis. But the quarrel between conservatism and secular progressivism is now also one of ends. What I mean by secular progressivism is not the push for a certain sort of government-heavy solution to specific practical problems like health care. I mean the deep cultural revolution of which the beginning is conveniently marked by the French Revolution, the revolution of materialism which seeks to deny God, deny the existence of the soul, and make the whole being of man subservient to, on the one hand, his own appetites, and, on the other, the state, which promises to help him satisfy his appetites at the cost of his soul.

To say that I want to preserve the Western tradition is not the same as saying that I want to preserve the Catholic faith. (I don’t want so much to preserve the Catholic faith as to spread it, but that’s another, though related, topic.) The tradition could not exist without the faith, but the faith is not the only thing which gives the tradition its particular character. I also want to preserve the elements of truth and genuine progress which have appeared since the Enlightenment, and so I am willing to be part of an alliance that includes people with views pretty substantially different from my own. They are among the not necessarily Catholic, not necessarily Christian, “men of good will” to whom the Second Vatican Council wished to appeal.

American conservatism is a big and chaotic movement, and far from pure or united in its defense of what Russell Kirk referred to as the permanent things. But the battle to preserve those things from the materialist revolution is, in my view, the great and crucial fact of our times, and the conservative movement, for all its flaws and inconsistencies, is, in general, on the right side of that battle. I don’t apologize for allying myself with it.

One last thing needs mentioning: I want to preserve the U.S.A. because I love it. Sometimes I hate it, too, and in my youth I hated it more than I loved it. And often I despair of it. But I still love it, not only as I wish it were but as it is.

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Now, with all that said, I want to emphasize that “liberal,” “progressive,” and “conservative” are provisional and relative terms that do not in themselves contain solid principles. To that end:

The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

—G. K. Chesterton, in The Illustrated London News, 1924

CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary