Let us call the childrens' deaths in Qana what they are: a horrific freak of war. They were not intended; they were not actively sought; and they were not the product of criminal negligence. In weeks of war and thousands of sorties against a foe that intentionally hides amongst civilians in the active hope of just this manner of carnage, the remarkable fact is that this hasn't happened before. Contrary to founding advocates of airpower -- and unlike its battlefield foes -- Israel does not seek the death of civilians for their own sake. Pace the rationalizations extended to Allied aircrews obliterating Western European villagers unfortunate enough to live near a rail junction, Israel does not even regard acceptance of this manner of death -- unintended, incidental, and not worth especial efforts to preclude -- as acceptable within the moral parameters of war. The uninformed and the insane will react with bitter derision upon being told this, on the heels of the news from Qana: but their emotional self-indulgence does not negate the fact at hand.
Need it be said -- and it is a sign of our fallen age that it does need to be said -- Israel's enemy in this war operates under no such constraint. (One assumes that in bygone days, the difference between a Western democracy and a band of murderous savages would not need repeated explanation.) Hezbollah and the average Islamist do not shrink from direct assaults on civlians as such and as an end in itself. Indeed, it has been their sole tactic in this entire war. If they have not produced scenes of masses of dead children, it is not for lack of trying -- it is, after all, the only thing they try for. That they have not managed it is indicative of the confluence of blind luck and Israeli battlefield superiority. But give it time: give it infinite time to launch its rockets and try its luck, as the braying proponents of ceasefire would have it, and eventually we'll see Jewish children, too, incinerated in their sleep. The difference, of course, is that the perpetrators then will celebrate.
In a sane world, we would give thanks for Hezbollah's failure to murder, regret what has happened in Qana, and reaffirm the justice of the Israeli war. But this is not a sane world: in place of right and wrong, too many appear to operate in a universe of strong and weak (or, one suspects, Jew and non-Jew) -- and their sympathy goes to the weak, even if the weak is a shell of a polity married to a genocide-minded Muslim murder-front. For those of us with our sanity intact, we have but one message this morning for the IAF: keep bombing.
Centrist Democrats will relate to Crunchy Cons instinctively. Secular liberals who won't should read it carefully for commonalities, instead of demonizing others who see differently. Or they can reread Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, whose deep faith sharpened their political point of view. Neither was a moral relativist. Both could distinguish right from wrong.
In the absence of such Democrats on the ballot, Dreher's "Crunchy Cons" will vote Republican. As one of them explains, "The Republican Party is at least somewhat hospitable to religious traditionalists, while the Democratic Party is hostile, or at a minimum has made itself unable to oppose those who are hostile. It's the difference between an unreliable ally and an enemy."
The key to winning elections is to have more allies than enemies.
If there were a cease-fire in Lebanon, Hezbollah would have won this war. They will still have their missiles and infrastructure. But of vastly greater importance, they will have shown themselves to be the only Arab fighting force in history capable of fighting the Israelis to a draw. This will increase their status exponentially, and show that militant Islamic fundamentalism is the hope of the future for the Arab world. A popular pan-Arab revolution could easily result in the overthrow of one or more moderate Arab regimes. And Israel would be in deadly peril, having been proved mortal.
What's happening now in Lebanon is horrible. But it's not the worst thing. And it is entirely the fault of Hezbollah. Israel must fight on, and the United States must support her. Because no one else will.
By the way, I hope you didn't miss this story from the NYT on Saturday, in which fleeing Lebanese Christians blamed Hezbollah for their misery, saying that Hezbollah was hiding among them firing missiles at the Israelis. Check out this passage from British journalist William Dalrymple's "From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East," in which he interviews an elderly priest of the Suriani people, an Arab Christian sect living in southern Turkey. The old priest fought as a boy in Ein Wardo, where his people had holed up to resist mass murder during World War I at the hands of the Muslims:
"After the war, when I was a young man," said Abouna Shabo, "we were friends. But then we were in the majority, so they could give us no trouble. Now the Muslims have all the power and it is different. My son is right."
"They give us very bad trouble," said Bedros [the son]. "In the last three years ten Christians have been killed in the villages around Ein Wardo. We cannot be friends like this."
..."These days feel just like those before 1914," said the old priest, pulling himself slowly out of his chair and making his way, bent-backed, across the room. "It feels like before a storm. You can see the black clouds, and the first drops are already falling."
The book was published in 1997. Earlier on this journey, Dalrymple stopped at a monastery in the area, where a monk told him that Hezbollah had gotten active there, in Turkey. The Turkish authorities, the monk reasoned, considered Hezbollah an effective counterweight against the PKK, the Kurdish revolutionists. Said the monk:
"Sometimes the Hezbollah kidnap Christian girls from remote farms and villages and force them to marry Muslims. They say they are saving their souls; it happened to four girls last year. Another Hezbollah unit has taken over Mar Bobo a Christian village near here: about ten or fifteen gunmen live there now. They've seized the roof of the church as their strongpoint, and they make the Christian owmen wear veils. They say we should go back to Europe where Christians come from, as if we were all French or German, as if our ancestors weren't here for centuries before the first Muslims settled here. Now our people live in fear. Anything can happen to them."
If you think the infidels of Europe don't have it coming to them when Hezbollah and its allies get finished with Israel, you're dreaming.
Sorry for the light blogging. I volunteered to write an op-ed piece for the DMN's Viewpoints page tomorrow, and just finished it. And I gotta head out in about half an hour to pop a couple of sedatives before I hit the dentist's office. A filling. I am the biggest freaking hysteric you ever saw about the dentist. They give me the Novocain shot, they gas me, they put an iPod on my head, and they tell me to take two Halcions -- and still I'm a nervous wreck. But a completely disoriented one, which is why Mrs. Crunchy has to drive me to and from the dentist on days like this, lest a cop pull me over and I be dragged from the car stumbling and ranting about how the *&%^$# factory farmers control the world. ;-D
UPDATE: Well, somehow I survived. Playing the Talking Heads "Remain in Light" at top volume on the iPod is helpful. But the frickin' Halcions didn't kick in until I was leaving the doctor's office. Must be an off-brand. I was a cartoon can clinging to the ceiling. Those poor people in that dentist's office.
Hey, if you had to listen to your iPod to calm you down while getting a filling, what would you put on it? I need intense, loud music, in part to drown out the whine of the drill.
A friend who lives in Seattle, just down the street from the Jewish center that was shot up by the angry Muslim on Friday, writes that he took a walk in the neighborhood this afternoon. This is what he saw:
A little old man was standing a couple doors down from the Jewish Center, holding a sign which read, "I am a Muslim but today I am a Jew."
UPDATE: Reader Clare notes in the comboxes that the shooting suspect, who had declared himself a Muslim, had actually left his Islamic faith last year and accepted Christian baptism. Read all about it. Will Andrew Sullivan take this opportunity to declare the suspect a Christianist anti-Semite, just like Mel Gibson? This guy, Haq, also seems to have had mental problems, and there was tension between him and his father.
How did I miss the fact that David Pryce-Jones has a blog? And a very good blog it is, too. I've mentioned before how much I learned from DPJ's "The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs," especially about how the dynamics of shame-honor culture explain so much that Westerners find hard to comprehend about the Middle East. Here's David on his blog touching on that point again in a July 22 post about the Lebanon crisis:
The current attacks on Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah repeat an essential misperception shared by the Arabo-Iranian elites : that Israel is not a country in its own right with citizens willing to die for it. So they keep on making the same mistake of using force which brings counterforce down with interest on their own heads. Why don’t they learn from experience ? Essentially this is a cultural matter. They have grown up and been educated to despise Jews; and to be resisted and even defeated by these despicable creatures is a shame not to be borne, again and again demanding to be wiped out, whatever the cost. Down the ages, Muslim authorities all agree that Jews are by nature cowardly and ignominious, and therefore their present military successes cannot be what they seem. Somebody has to be empowering them, and that somebody is the United States. Shame is this engine of these fantasies.
The Iranian leadership believes that jihad against the United States will absolve shame, and jihad begins with Israel on the grounds that it is nothing but an American tool. They are Shias, and further fortified in their jihad by expectation of the return of the hidden Imam, who is the messiah and herald of the end of days. Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, are all Sunnis, but they too believe that jihad is the right response to shame.
What we are witnessing is a convergence of jihadis, Shias and Sunnis alike. The culture is proving stronger than doctrinal differences. Al Qaeda leaders are known to be sheltering in Iran. The Alawis (heretical Shias) ruling Damascus push jihadis to join the Sunni insurgents in Iraq. Zarqawi was a Sunni who denounced and murdered Shia. How old-fashioned! By the look of it, someone with a belief in the new-style jihad common to both wings of Islam must have denounced him.
Calling up ground forces, the Israelis appear to be resolved to eliminate the Hezbollah threat in southern Lebanon. This would produce another gusher of shame. President Ahmadinejad is already talking the talk : “If this volcano [of Muslim pride] erupts – and we are on the brink of eruption …and if this ocean rages, its waves will not be limited to the region.”
Perhaps Iran is incapable of mounting a Shia equivalent of the Sunni coup of 9/11, but it seems obvious that a major set-back for Hezbollah would prompt them to do their worst. The Iranian leadership can call on inventive people well able to spring unpleasant surprises. They have the United States in their sights and a culture that distorts the real balance of forces.
Really, really, really -- buy David's book. It's critical but not polemical, and it's written from the point of view of a foreign correspondent who has spent a lot of time among the Arabs, and who obviously likes them very much.
My exhortation, at the end of this week's Radio Derb, to "keep your pecker up" has been widely misunderstood. I apologize. This is a Britishism. It means: Keep an optimistic attitude and mien—shoulders back, head up, nose (that's the pecker) in the air. I hope that is clear.
This report alleges that when Mel Gibson got popped for DUI, he cut loose with a drunken anti-Semitic rant--and that the original police report noting this (images of which--the alleged police report--are available via that link)--was suppressed by the arresting cop's commanding officer. If this is true--that is, if it is independently confirmed--then Mel Gibson's has blown a hole sky-high in his career.
Back when "The Passion of the Christ" came out, I thought the accusations that the film was inherently anti-Semitic were deeply unfair. All the dire prophecies that the movie would lead to pogroms proved to be utter hysteria; most Christians understand that all of our sins--theirs, too--crucified Christ. I came out of the screening shaken to the core by what He suffered because of me. And even though Gibson's father is an open anti-Semite, I didn't think it was fair at all to blame the son for the sins of the father, or to put Mel Gibson in the position of having to denounce his father in public. In fact, I was kind of proud of him for refusing to be baited into denouncing his father, even though his father holds objectively wicked views and isn't shy about sharing them with the world. There's something dishonorable about people who denounce their parents, I think.
But now, if this latest report is true, there can be no doubt that Mel Gibson himself is a Jew-hater. How sad. He will have brought on himself all the opprobrium that will come to him. The Catholic friend who wrote to give me the news said, "Well, you have to give the Devil his due: Beelzebub is nothing if not a pro."
What is it with Jew-haters, anyway? Honestly, I don't understand this bizarre preoccupation that so many people, Muslim and Christian, have with the Jews. Mind you, I consider myself philo-Semitic, but still, objectively, I don't understand where this comes from. (Well, from Hell, yes, but still...).
It's not anti-Semitic to be opposed to this or that act of the state of Israel, or individual Jews. But anti-Semites go way beyond that. If this is true about Mel Gibson, then he ought to get to confession and spend a long time repenting for having embraced the evil of anti-Semitism. Failing to do that not only destroys his own image, it brings disgrace upon Catholics and other Christians who have embraced and supported him--especially those of us who defended him when he was under attack before.
UPDATE: It's looking like the initial report was, alas, true. Well, Mel will still be able to eat lunch in Cairo, Damascus, and Ramallah...
Lee Siegel, who blogs at The New Republic Online, writes about how blogging and comboxes have a way of bringing out the most obnoxious people, and the obnoxious sides of lots of non-obnoxious people. I have no idea what he could be talking about, but here's an excerpt:
But, beyond the blogofascist aside, I had made an argument that I waited futilely for someone to address. I had questioned the effectiveness of blogospheric rage and suggested that blogger fanaticism had a lot to do with the inability of bloggers to apply themselves to serious reflection. All the bite-sized thoughts, rapid disses, and inanely meandering threads make it hard to concentrate on anything for very long. Linking is no substitute for thinking. So people scream because they can't focus. You have the impression of bloggers who are so pacified by shouting their rage--and so appeased by smugly shared sentiments--that they turn off their computers at night and go to sleep feeling empowered and relaxed. No wonder, several years after the blogosphere allegedly became a people powerhouse, the country is mired even deeper in Iraq and successfully distracted by one false public alarm after another. Catharsis is for art, not politics.
...or, today's All-Purpose Mideast Post. Because I've got a lot of work to do this afternoon, and a wake to attend, and besides that, Mrs. Crunchy e-mails to say she's worried about the situation in Lebanon and all, but this blog is getting too fixated, and needs to find something else to talk about.
Message received.
Anyway, "The Gathering Storm" is the title of a book by Winston Churchill, in which he described the lead-up to World War II. It seems like an apt metaphor for what is happening today in the Mideast.
The Times leads today with a report that sentiment across the Arab world is swinging firmly towards Hezbollah. And against their own governments. Why? According to the Times, the Arab street cheers for Hezbollah as redeeming Arab pride for continuing to hold out against Israel. Now, this just shows how psychotic the shame/honor culture of the Arab world is. The terrorist fanatics of Hezbollah launched a war that is destroying Lebanon, and yet the Arab world loves them because they're still standing up to the Israelis. As Thomas Friedman points out in his column today, the Arabs have been pissing away all kinds of opportunities to build universities, hospitals, and all the things that might actually build a stable civil society, one in which ordinary people can live at peace, and create something good and lasting for themselves and their children. No, they prefer to throw it all away on pointless, violent gestures to avenge the perceived loss of "honor."
If they should achieve their dream of destroying Israel utterly, who then will they blame for their miserable state of existence? If every Jew in Israel -- if every Jew on earth -- disappeared tomorrow, it would not improve the lot of Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Yemenis, et alia. They'd be stuck with themselves and the crummy societies they've cobbled together. And then they'll have to find another conspiracy theory to explain away the consequences of their own beliefs and actions. I'm just sayin'.
Nevertheless, it is what it is over there, and what it is is doubleplus bad, and getting worse. In today's NYPost, Ralph Peters explains why Israel is in a world of trouble -- in part because they haven't been ruthless enough. If Hezbollah survives this, as it looks like they will, they've won. And if they win, radical Islam will get a tremendous shot in the arm across the Arab world -- at the expense of sitting governments.
Meanwhile, the situation in Iraq is bleaker than ever. Paul Cella, a conservative who thought the Iraq war was a bad utopian idea, points out that so many Americans still can't reconcile themselves to the idea that democracy in the Mideast will produce bad outcomes if a majority of the people prefer hardline Islam to liberal democracy. Hezbollah has started a war that is destroying Lebanon and destabilizing the region -- and this makes them popular on the Arab street. Freedom is on the march! says Bush. These are the birth pangs of a new Middle East! says Rice.
Yeah, I see that. God help us all. The final chapter of Thomas Ricks' "Fiasco" -- which comes highly recommended to me by a very well-placed and combat-experienced military officer -- sketches out four possible scenarios for the Iraq endgame:
1. Somehow, we muddle through, and things calm down and stabilize after a long and patient occupation, thanks in part to the political patience of the American people.
2. Things don't stabilize, but the US endures
a violent and seemingly endless occupation because if we left, the whole place would collapse into civil war and carnage. Basically we stay there to keep the lid on at best. Cf. Israel's 1982-2000 occupation of Lebanon, or France in Algeria.
3. Civil war, partition, and regional war. Writes Ricks:
[A] thoughtful US Army officer who had served in Iraq sketched out what he expected for the next ten years of his career. "In 2009, after we withdraw, and the south turns into Shiastan, and the Kurds declare independence, and Turkey invades, and Sunnistan leads to the fall of the house of Saud, and Arabia becomes the first step in the caliphate, and oil goes to two hundred dollars a barrel, then we have to invade Arabia with a broken Army, and then it's our Algeria," he said.
... and that's still not the worst-case scenario. That would be:
4. The caliphate. Ricks says the "nightmare scenario" is a new dictator emerging from the ruin and chaos of regional wars. He manages to unite the country, and perhaps the region, and riding a wave of new pan-Arab feeling (and atop massive oil revenues), he marshals the Muslim world behind him in a dramatic showdown with the West.
I don't know about you, but it seems to me at least possible, however farfetched, that the denouement in Lebanon, by uniting Sunni and Shia in hatred of Israel and the US, could get us significantly down the road to the nightmare Ricks envisions.
And now, time for something completely different...
Reader Tope, in a combox below, draws our attention to an extraordinary post by Michael Totten, and American who lived for a while in Lebanon. Read the whole thing. Totten paints a portrait of an entire nation on the brink of returning to civil war. He says that a stable democracy was not possible as long as Hezbollah was there, and everybody knew it. Totten predicts that when Israel and Hezbollah reach a cease fire, the Sunni, Christians and Druze are likely to rearm, and seek revenge on the Shia for destroying their country. Writes Totten:
Israel and Lebanon (especially Lebanon) will continue to burn as long as Hezbollah exists as a terror miltia freed from the leash of the state. The punishment for taking on Hezbollah is war. The punishment for not taking on Hezbollah is war. Lebanese were doomed to suffer war no matter what. Their liberal democratic project could not withstand the threat from within and the assaults from the east, and it could not stave off another assault from the south. War, as it turned out, was inevitable even if the actual shape of it wasn’t. Peace was not in the cards for Lebanon. Its democracy turned out to be neither a strength nor a weakness. It was irrelevant.
(If you think the Christians of Lebanon are united with the Shia in hating Israel unreservedly over what's happening, read this.) I contacted a Lebanese Christian cleric's office in the US last week, seeking an interview. The cleric's secretary told me that her boss was refusing all media calls, out of fear that if he said what was really on his mind, Hezbollah would refuse to let him return to visit his family in Lebanon, on pain of death. Keep in mind whenever you hear Christians in the Mideast speak publicly about such matters, that they might not be being entirely honest, because they can't. When I was covering the papal visit to the Holy Land in 2000, what some Palestinian Christians told me on the record was rather different from what they told me off the record. On the record, they hated Israel's guts. Off the record, they still hated Israel, but they hated and were more scared -- terrified, actually -- of Hamas and the Islamists among them.)
Mark Shea slaps me over my claim, re: Israel's response to Hezbollah, that "proportionality is madness." I think Mark has a good point. It was wrong of me to make that blanket claim about the abstract principle of proportionality. What I should have said, and what I say now, is that the particular risk Israel faces makes the claims that many have made about its lack of proportional response unpersuasive. Given how tiny Israel is, and given that its enemies -- Hezbollah, for one, and its patron, Iran -- are religious fanatics who openly brag about wanting to eliminate it from the face of the earth, it is unreasonable to expect Israel to sit back and tit-for-tat with this enemy until Hezbollah acquires enough missiles to destroy every city in Israel.
So I see a disproportionate response from Israel as justifiable in principle. Whether the actual disproportionate response they've made is justified is another question.
What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?
What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities -- every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians -- and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?
To hear the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world -- governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats -- has completely lost its moral bearings.
The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is "disproportionate," as in the universally decried "disproportionate Israeli response."
When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel "proportionate" attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cinders, and turned the Japanese home islands into rubble and ruin.
Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right -- legal and moral -- to carry the fight until the aggressor is disarmed and so disabled that it cannot threaten one's security again. That's what it took with Japan.
Cal Thomas writes that the conflict between the West and the Islamic world is not open to being solved by politics as usual:
This is a religious divide. The president thinks people we see in bondage want to be as free as we Americans. In fact, many of them regard us as the ones in bondage and, in their religion, they see themselves as free. They regard our ways as decadent and our culture corrupt. They want no part of it. They are welcome to their 7th-century ways, but they are not welcome to impose those ways on the rest of the world.
In order to feel superior, one must be able to look down on others. It is difficult for these fanatics who have never invented, discovered or created anything but chaos and bloodshed to look up from the bottom of their pile of rubble to see that the world has long ago passed them by.
Their region of the world has taken in huge amounts of money from petroleum sales to the developed world. Has that money been used to upgrade people from their squalid lives? Have great universities been constructed, cures for diseases discovered, products invented to benefit all humankind, music composed and art created that the world envies and admires? They have not, so they blame their miserable existence on the Jews and the West who have done such things and more.
Unable to cope with their failings and to justify their guilt, they seek to bring others down to their level. They will not be stopped by diplomatic appeals, or reason. They have taken up the sword and they must be made to die by the sword in sufficient numbers that even they will see the futility of their ways and be forced to engage in less warlike pursuits.
[A]uthorities are stepping up censorship efforts, openly talking about media “speech codes” and aggressively slapping labels such as “racism” or “xenophobia” on anybody daring to criticize the immigration policies or pointing out the inadequate response to Muslim gang violence.
There is obviously a connection here: The less control the authorities have with Muslims, the more control they want to exercise over non-Muslims.[Emphasis mine -- RD.] As problems in Europe get worse, which they will, the EU will move in an increasingly repressive direction until it either becomes a true, totalitarian entity or falls apart. This strange mix of powerful censorship of public debate, yet little control over public law and order, has by some been labelled anarcho-tyranny.
While Islamic groups in Britain openly brag about how they are going to subdue the country by violent means or call for beheading those insulting Islam, Bryan Cork, 49, of Carlisle, Cumbria, in the Lake District, was sentenced to six months in jail for standing outside a mosque shouting, “Proud to be British,” and “Go back to where you came from.” One British court ruled that even use of the word “immigrant” as an insult could amount to proof of racial hostility.
More examples in Fjordman's post. Read the whole thing. What's going on in Europe is worthy of Orwell.
And I believe that Iraq, in some ways, faces the same difficulty, and that is a new democracy is emerging and there are people who are willing to use terrorist techniques to stop it. That's what the murder is all about. People fear democracy if your vision is based upon kind of a totalitarian view of the world. And that's the ultimate challenge facing Iraq and Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories, and that is, will the free world, and the neighborhood, work in concert to help develop sustainable democracy?
And Iraq took a long step along that -- a big step on that path when they developed a constitution that was ratified by the Iraqi people. And it's a modern constitution, and it's a landmark moment in the history of freedom advancing in the Middle East.
I believe that deep in everybody's soul, Mr. Prime Minister, is a desire to be free. And when 12 million Iraqis went to the polls and said, I want to be free, it was an amazing moment. I know it seems like a long, long time ago that that happened. But it was a powerful statement about what is possible in terms of achieving peace.
And yet, it is democratic elections that put Hamas in power, and democratic elections that put Hezbollah into a leading political role in Lebanon, and democratic elections that have failed to stave off barbaric sectarian warfare in Iraq. When will we put these pitiable nostrums about some illusory "march to freedom" aside, and confront the region as it is, not as we dream it to be?
I get guilty pleasure out of Ann Coulter most of the time, but in this interview with Bnet editor Charlotte Allen, she really pours on the obnoxiousness. She seems to have decided ahead of time that Charlotte, a former editor of the conservative Catholic magazine Crisis, is a liberal, and decided that that gave her license to be as petty and vain toward her interviewer as she could be. Bad show. I'm sure this shtick sells books, but jeez...
Claes Ryn, who teachs politics at Catholic University in Washington, had what I consider the best essay of the impressive bunch. In it, he argues that modern American conservatism has been "enthralled by politics," and has failed to understand and act on the truth that "the activities that shaped the deeper sensibilities and desires of Americans have continued to be dominated by people trying to dismantle what remains of traditional American and Western civilization." Politicians aren't the ones who set the long-term direction of any society; it's those who "capture a people's mind and imagination."
To recover, American conservatism would have to reorder its priorities and most especially put politics in its place. America's crisis is at bottom moral-spiritual and cultural. Though a new alliance of homeless political groups is desirable, a realignment would be unavailing in the long run unelss the old obsession with politics were also broken. The issues most needing attention will make the eyes of political junkies glaze over.
Prof. Ryn says that those who made modern conservatism were foremost political intellectuals, and economics enthusiasts. They weren't all that engaged by morality, religion and culture (except, I would say, to the extent that it was politically useful).
The problem, simply put, was lack of sophistication -- an inability to understand what most deeply shapes the outlook and conduct of human beings. Persons move according to their innermost beliefs, hopes, and fears. These are affected much less by politicians than by philosophers, novelists, religious visionaries, movemakers, playwrights, composers, panters and the like, thought truly great works of this kind reach most minds and imaginations only in diminished, popuular form.
Prof. Ryn says that the modern conservative movement has never really cared about the mind or the soul. Concerning ethics, it trusted the churches to take care of things, but the churches were compromised by the general trends in society. Evangelicals stayed mired in their "accustomed intellectual poverty," and faithful Catholics avoided engaging philosophy and the arts, and satisfied themselves with upholding "orthodoxy." Therefore:
The kind of intellectual, aesthetic and moral-spiritual renewal that might have transformed the universities, the arts, the media, publishing, entertainment, and the churches never quite came off. Without a major reorientation of American thought and sensibility, conservative politics was bound to fail.
Conservatism today, he says, has become "a captive of party, money, and media celebrities." But conservatism, properly understood, wants to conserve "the best of the human heritage because the latter is an indispensable guide to finding and promoting the good, the true, and the beautiful in the present." Achieving that goal requires adaptation to new circumstances. If figuring out how to promote the good, the true and the beautiful now is what conservatives want to do in our present circumstances -- and they should -- then they should get over this "increasingly philistine obsession with politics."
The Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald believes that the conservative movement is alienating people like here: atheist or agnostic conservatives who are conservative not in spite of their skepticism, but because of it. She says that the conservative movement "is crippling itself by leaning too heavily on religion to the exclusion of these temperamentally compatible allies."
The presumption of religious belief -- not to mention the contradictory thinking that so often accompanies it -- does damage to conservatism by resting its claims on revealed truth. But on such truth there can be no agreement without faith. And a lot of us do not have such faith -- nor do we need it to be conservative. ... Skeptical conservatives do not look into the abyss when they make ethical choices. Their moral sense is as secure as a believer's. They do not need God or the Christian Bible to discover the golden rule and see themselves in others.
...So maybe religious conservatives should stop assuming that they alone occupy the field. Maybe they should cut back a bit on their rleigious triumphalism. Nonbelievers are good conservatives, too. As Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has advised, it should be possible for conservatives to unite on policy without agreeing on theology.
Prof. Lukacs says that "inflation" has ruined the meaning of the word "conservative":
Most conservatives disliked liberals more than they liked liberty. Serial marriages, divorces, consumers of pornography, barbaric households with mannerless children were as frequent among conservatives as they were among liberals. Worse: conservatives came to believe in Progress even more than liberals; their inclinations to conserve shrank to near nothing.
...The real enemy is now the (outdated) idea of Progress, together with the (thoughtless) belief in Technology. Conservatives should be the first to recognize that. ...A conservative who fails to protect and to conserve is nothing but a radical loudmouth of a bad sort.
Paleocon Paul Gottfried questions the premises of right-wing populism:
A key dividing line between the Right and other political positions is its appeal to the people in opposition to political elites. In "The Revolt of the Elites," Christopher Lasch exemplifies thei right-wing populism. Lasch exudes praise for "the people," who seem drawn from a 1950s vignette of a Catholic working-class family. His ideal wife is depicted as packing her husband's lunch pail and then preparing her offspring for their departure to parochial school. Against this charming but archaic conception of "the people," Lasch portrays the elites who are besotted with vice and have no attachments to either nations or communities. The question that is never posed, and one that right-wing populists studiously avoid, is how did this Catholic working-class family permit social degenerates to take power? And why do they waste their hard-earned money on consumerist products produces by those whom they are supposed to despise?
Ross Douthat says liberals believe in Francis Bacon's dictum that the ends of politics are "the conquest of nature for the relief of man's estate." Conservatives are those who say "no" to Baconism, or "no" up to a point. The problem today is that conservatives are confused because the Right won a victory in the second half of the 20th century, and "turned modernity away froma particularly pernicious path."
This unexpected triumph has meant that many people who became accustomed to calling themselves "conservatives" when the conquest of nature seemed to require socialism or Communism are back on board the Baconian train, racing happily down a different track into the brave new future. These are the people who insist that conservatism ought to mean "freedom from government interference" and nothing more -- the Grover Norquists of the world, for instance, or the Arnold Schwarzeneggers. In fact, they are ex-conservatives, because they are no longer sufficiently uncomfortable with the trajectory of modernity to be counted among its critics. They were unwilling to give up fredom for hte sake of progress, but they're happy to give up virtue.
The picture is further complicated by the fact that because conservatism only really exists to say "no" to whatever liberalism asks for next, it fights nearly all its battles on its enemy's terrain and rarely comes close to articulating a coherent set of values of its own. Liberalism has science and progress to pursue -- and ultimately immortality, the real goal but also the one that rarely dares to speak its name -- whereas conservatives have ... well, a host of goals most of them in tension with one another. ... Lilberals, on the other hand, dream the same dream and envision the same destination, even if they disagree on exactly how to get there. It's the dream of Thomas Friedman as well as Karl Marx, as old as Babel and as young as the South Korean cloners. It whispered to us in Eden, and it whispers to us now: Ye shall be as gods. And no conservative dream, in the 400 years from Francis Bacon until now, has proven strong enough to stand in its way.
From Jeremy Beer's TAC essay, in which he praises the work of the Brandywine Conservancy, which buys up and protects land in his Pennsylvania region -- and happens to be run by liberals who happen to love the land and heritage of that part of the world:
Here is where Russell Kirk was truly exemplary. He ought to be remembered not as "the principal architect of the postwar conservative movement," as the quasi-official adulation has it, but because he went home. There he restored an old hous, planted trees, and became a justice of the peace; took a wife (and kept her) and had four children; wrote ghost stories about census-takers and other bureaucrats getting it in the neck; took in boatpeople and bums; and denounced every war in which the US became involved -- especially the first Gulf War, which he detested. And he also denoucned abstractions because he knew they were drugs deployed to distract us from the infinitely more important work of the Brandywine Conservancies of the world.
If there is ever to be truth in our political labeling, we need conservatives who will go home, or at least make homes somewhere, conservatives who will abjure Washington and New York and pick up the struggle in their own burgs to help (re-)build real communties, work to conserve the land and its resources, and ally with ther naturally like-minded brethren in order to revive -- locally -- the religious and historic traditions that might sustain us. In face, those are the only conservatives we need.
The new issue of The American Conservative arrived last night, and I read it all from cover to cover. They don't have any of it up on their site yet (not even the cover), but for anyone interested in the future of the conservative movement, it's a must-read. The entire issue is devoted to short essays from a variety of contributors, including some liberals, and even Your Working Boy, who were asked to answer the following two questions:
1. Are the designations "liberal" and "conservative" still useful? Why or why not?
2. Does a binary Left/Right political spectrum describe the full range of ideological options? Is it still applicable?
Lots of good stuff followed. I'm going to put up some of the best stuff from the issue in subsequent postings. I'll keep the authors separate so we can have several threads going at the same time.
Dom Bettinelli brought to my attention last night a great piece by Bill McKibben in the current National Geographic, about the future of the environmentalism. Unfortunately it's not available online. Anyway, in the essay McKibben talks about how profoundly global warming is affecting the planet, and says that the environmental movement is not handling the crisis properly. He says we need to start thinking of our economic decisions in a new way: "We need to stop asking, Will this make the economy larger? Instead, we need to start asking, Will this pour more carbon into the atmosphere."
He writes that we need to change our sense of "identity and desire," not out of fuzzy idealism, but our of "pure pragmatism" -- that is, we cannot keep living in ways that pump so much carbon into the environment. We can make small but important changes. For example, he says, it takes enormous amounts of energy to transport fresh fruits and vegetables from wherever they're growing to parts of the country and the world where they're out of season. What if we learned to eat whatever was in season locally, and to be satisfied with that? Similarly, proposes McKibben, what would it take for us to learn to be satisfied with houses that are not big, but big enough?
It would require, I think, a movement that takes people's aspirations for good and secure and durable lives seriously. That takes those desires more seriously even than the consumer economy has taken them. We would need a kind of cultural environmentalism that asks deeper questions than we're used to answering.
How deep? Here's a data set just as interesting as the ongoing spike in planetary temperatures -- and almost as depressing. Since researchers started trying to measure such things in the years after World War II, the percentage of Americans who consider themselves "very happy" with their lives has remained steady, even though the material standard of living has nearly tripled in the same period. More stuff is not making us happier -- but we can't break out of the cycle that offers more stuff as our only real goal.
McKibben says that researchers are finding that what really makes people happy is a sense of community -- but the hyper-individualized way we live not only makes us unhappier, it pumps more carbon into the environment. McKibben writes about how his experiment to see if he could live through a Vermont winter eating only what was available locally at his farmer's market proved that not only was it feasible, but he made "dozens" of new friends by getting involved in the farmer's market. He concludes by saying that we need to be thinking of similar ways we can live better, together. He concludes:
Environmentalism has often been a somewhat grim business. (There is, after all, plenty to be grim about.) But a convivial environmentalism, one that asks us to figure out what we really want out of life, offers profound possibilities. Perhaps the most important of those possibilities is a new link with communities of faith in this country. Though they don't always live up to their ideals, churches and synagogues and mosques are among the few institutions that can posit some idea for human existence other than accumulation. ...It's precisely [the] ability of religious leaders of all stripes to see individuals as part of soemthing larger than themselves that's so important. And also their commitment to taking care of the needy, because of course there are lots of people in the world who aren't rich. If we can't help them figure out some path to dignity other than our hyper-individualism, the math of global warming will never work.
We don't need to erase individualism; it is one of the glories of the American character. But environmentalists desperately need to learn how to celebrate community, too.
There's been some rumbling in various comboxes and in my e-mail box with people wondering what this blog is all about. Someone said a day or so ago that he thought this was supposed to be a place to discuss the ideas put forward in "Crunchy Cons," and he seemed dismayed that we've been talking about the Middle East so much. Others have been writing, both on the blog and in private e-mails to me, complaining about the obnoxious presence of trolls. A typical reader in this regard is David, who e-mailed to say he doesn't understand why the comboxes attract people who don't want to have an actual discussion or exchange of views, but who just want to rant and emote to no useful end. This, David says, makes it hard for readers to sustain an actual discussion among people of various views who might not agree with each other, but who don't want to shriek that those who disagree with them are evil cretins who must be shouted down.
I hear you. Let me repeat: there is nothing I can do about these people as long as they don't violate Bnet's terms. All I can do is to encourage the rest of you to ignore them. I'm doing my best to stick to that strategy. As I've said before here, I don't understand why someone who hates baseball would spend so much time on a blog about baseball, telling everybody why people who are interested in baseball are rat finks. But there are people in this world for whom sitting around the house picking the pills off their afghans is insufficiently entertaining. Whatever. Just try to ignore them. What else can you do?
As far as the purpose of this blog, it's a news and commentary blog where I talk about whatever's going on in the news that day that attracted my interest, or that I consider worthy of comment. Some days I'm going to spend more time talking about crunchy-con stuff than others. It just depends. If there's something you'd like to bring to my attention for possible blogging, or a topic you'd like to talk about or otherwise bring to the attention of this blog's readers, write me at rdreher(at)dallasnews.com, and if my completely annoying spam filter doesn't grab it first, I'll consider posting it.
A construction worker just found an early medieval Psalter buried in an Irish bog -- a find that's being compared to the Dead Sea Scrolls in terms of its significance. It was discovered open to Psalm 83 -- which, given the situation in the Middle East at the moment, strikes some as a sign. Well, it's at least an interesting coincidence.
A Shaidlian coda to the hysterical screaming fit some lefty commenters had in the George Michael comboxes, in which they insisted that cruising for anonymous sex in public places had nothing whatsoever to do with gay male culture, and for that matter male homosexuality had nothing whatsoever to do with the Catholic sex-abuse scandal.
Writes Kathy Shaidle:
Of course, when I brought up this (I thought) well known fact (as well as the aspect of gay "culture" that praises one night stands) on this blog and on TV panels during gay "marriage" debates, I was roundly condemned as a know-nothing trog. For twelve years, I'd lived directly across the street from one of Toronto's most popular crusing parks, the one next to the day care center, the playground of which was littered with used condoms every morning -- but I "didn't know what I was talking about."
It sometimes seems that the only debating tactic left to the Left is to roll their eyes, huff loudly and try to Gaslight you into thinking you don't know what you know. It helps explain some of the fury that drives the Ann Coulters of the world, I think -- raging against the boldfaced lying and headgames of one's opponents.
Via TMatt comes this L.A. Times story about the Christian Booksellers Association's annual convention. The CBA is well-known for being a Mecca for what some uncharitably call "Jesus junk." I don't know about other Christians, but I can't stand seeing how Christians who traffic in most of this stuff trivialize the most important thing in the world. Is anybody actually brought to faith in Christ by this junk? Or are more people driven away by the cheesy sentimentality of much of it? I vote the latter.
Clark Stooksbury passes along Walker Percy's advice on Bourbon drinking. Percy's essay on Bourbon really is fine, and the recipe for a proper mint julep he includes is first-rate (secret ingredient: a light dusting of fresh-grated nutmeg). It pains me to report that I had to give up Bourbon-drinking a few years ago. Single-malt Scotch too. The gods punished me by giving me some kind of mild allergy to whisky. Even a single shot will give me a serious headache. So I drink clear spirits now. A Grey Goose vodka martini, I mean filthy, is just the thing.
But nothing reminds me of back home like the smell of Bourbon.
...is not guilty (by reason of insanity) of the murders of her five children. I think this verdict is just and merciful. It is hard -- extremely hard -- for many people to accept that a mother could be so out of her mind with psychotic depression that she would kill her own children. But it's true. Via the AP, consider the history of this poor miserable creature:
_ April 17, 1993: Russell "Rusty" and Andrea Yates are married.
_ Feb. 26, 1994: Noah Yates is born. Yates later tells doctors that shortly after the birth that Satan told her to get a knife and stab someone.
_ Dec. 12, 1995: John Yates is born.
_ Sept. 13, 1997: Paul Yates is born.
_ Feb. 15, 1999: Luke Yates is born.
_ June 16, 1999: Andrea Yates calls her husband at work and asks him to come home. He returns to find her shaking and crying.
_ June 17, 1999: Yates overdoses on Trazodone, a prescription sleeping medicine given to her father after a stroke.
_ June 18, 1999: Yates is transferred to Houston's Methodist Hospital psychiatric unit and is diagnosed with a major depressive disorder.
_ June 24, 1999: Yates is discharged from Methodist.
_ July 20, 1999: Russell Yates wrestles knife away from his wife, who was holding it to her neck in the bathroom at her mother's house.
_ July 21, 1999: Yates is admitted to Memorial Spring Shadows Glen for psychiatric treatment and is prescribed Haldol, an anti-psychotic drug.
_ Aug. 9, 1999: Yates is discharged from Memorial Spring Shadows Glen.
_ Aug. 10, 1999: Yates begins daily outpatient care.
_ Aug. 18, 1999: Psychiatrist Eileen Starbranch warns the Yates couple that having another child could trigger another psychotic episode.
_ Nov. 30, 2000: Mary Yates is born.
_ March 12, 2001: Yates' father, Andrew Kennedy, dies. Rusty Yates later says his wife's condition begins deteriorating soon after.
_ March 31, 2001: Yates is admitted to Devereux Texas Treatment Network and begins taking anti-psychotic medication.
_ April 12, 2001: Yates is discharged and begins outpatient care at Devereux.
_ May 4, 2001: Yates is readmitted to Devereux and begins taking Haldol.
_ May 14, 2001: Yates is again discharged from Devereux.
_ June 4, 2001: Dr. Mohammad Saeed, a psychiatrist, tells Rusty Yates to have his wife taper off Haldol over next three days.
_ June 18, 2001: The Yates couple have follow-up visit with Saeed. Rusty Yates reports his wife is not improving.
_ June 20, 2001: Yates drowns her five children in the bathtub.
_ Feb. 28, 2002: Trial on two capital murder charges begins.
_ March 12, 2002: Yates is convicted of both charges.
_ March 15, 2002: Yates is sentenced to life in prison.
_ Dec. 14, 2004: Yates' attorneys argue her appeal before 1st Court of Appeals in Houston.
_ Jan. 6, 2005: 1st Court of Appeals in Houston overturns Yates' conviction, ruling that some erroneous testimony may have influenced jurors.
_ June 26, 2006: Yates' second murder trial begins.
_ July 26, 2006: Yates found innocent by reason of insanity.
People understandably want Andrea Yates to suffer for her unspeakable deeds. I understand that. But consider that she has been psychotic since she had her first child, and was in such pain that before murdering her children, she tried to murder herself. Twice. And consider that she has to live with the killing of her five children on her conscience. If there is a prison more punishing than that Andrea Yates now lives i
n, and will have to live in for the rest of her life, even if she regains her sanity, I don't want to think about it. I have seen in the lives of close friends how serious depression affects them and their ability to reason -- and they were nowhere near as sick as Andrea Yates -- and I cannot accept that this poor miserable creature understood what she was doing on that terrible morning.
I was thinking that that shockingly obtuse ex-husband of hers, Rusty, deserves a great deal of opprobrium in all this, for the role he played. But considering that he buried five children, it's hard for me to muster much anger at him. It's all so horribly, horribly sad. Lord have mercy on them all.
Tony Blankley wonders, as well we all might, why, after the bloody wake-up call of 9/11, we're not talking and arguing about the true nature of the threat Islamic fundamentalism poses to our civilization. Excerpt:
In five years we have, remarkably, never had such a sustained effort to publicly debate the nature of the danger. At the outset of the Cold War, Congress spent years holding hearings on the "red menace." Some people think they overdid it. I do not. But it required that sort of an effort to establish the public support and bipartisan judgment over 50 years that communism was, in fact, a worldwide threat to civilizations. It was such a threat; and it was defeated. But only because the public, for 50 years, understood the danger and voted for politicians who were prepared to vote trillions for defense.
Until the American and European publics have become convinced of the present danger to them, we will continue to stumble, take half measures and fail to adequately defend ourselves. Before action, must come belief; before belief must come understanding; before understanding must come education and debate. In the beginning was the word. It is time to begin.
The Bush administration, by overselling the Iraq War as vital to the "war on terror" (which is a stupid and misleading phrase; terror is a tactic; the war is on Islamism), has made it a lot harder to have this debate. People are suspicious, or should be, about being manipulated. I get that, and we should be wary. Still, I am awfully tired of all the cant from right and left about "freedom" and "democracy" and "Islamophobia" and so forth. I'd really like to hear a credible and sustained public discussion about the war we're actually fighting, as opposed to the war this or that faction -- including the media -- would prefer to believe we're fighting.
How do you say "Sieg heil!" in Arabic? Ask the Hitler, I mean, Hezbollah Youth giving the Nazi salute at a rally photographed by Time magazine.
This is what evil is. You tell me how to negotiate with it. You tell me how a Jewish nation, in light of the Holocaust, is expected to sit quietly and calmly while this Islamofascist storm gathers on its northern borders, stockpiling missiles.
Joshua Trevino makes a brief case for letting Iraq -- a country whose borders were determined and imposed by the British, not by any organic process -- separate into ethno-religious states. I don't see how this fate is to be avoided. Josh says that the West views pluralism as a moral good, when it isn't necessarily that. And anyway, not every society is capable, for whatever reasons, of maintaining a pluralist society. Now, as soon as one says this, you have people yelling, "Oh, you must be racist! You must be saying that Arabs/Muslims are incapable of democracy!" No, one would be saying that for historical, cultural and religious reasons, these Arab Muslims are incapable of (liberal, pluralistic) democracy in the present moment. Says Josh, "What is detestable is a United States Army worn down year after year interposing itself simply to keep savage men from doing savage things to the chronically ungrateful." And:
Pluralism never really had a chance in the Muslim world. There is diversity, to be sure, but it is an uneasy thing, and peace within it must be maintained by the stamp of the oppressor's boot, or the political supremacy of the non-Muslim. The former repels us, and the latter is far too tenuous to ever last. Egypt’s Copts exist at the sufferance of a suspicious and occasionally violent majority: they are the remnant of a once-thriving society of Nile Christians that ended when Nasser expelled the Greeks and other non-Muslims from Alexandria and the delta. The House of Sa’ud ruthlessly represses its eastern Shi’a. Syrian Alawites maintain power through plain brutality and fear. Iraqi Christians, having endured two genocides in the past century, and a subsquent Ba’athist cultural repression, live in quiet fear of their next ruling class. Iranian Shi'a harass and murder their Baha’i and Zoroastrian fellow-countrymen. The most obviously plural society in the region, Lebanon, was long ago reduced to a fictitious polity of borders without identity.
In this light, a unitary Iraq without an autocrat is a fool’s dream.
Reihan Salam has an excellent post criticizing the Times for its alarmism over Poland's turn toward tradition and populism. One can certainly understand cause for concern over the return of anti-Semitism and chauvinism in Poland, and it really is hard to defend the Polish leadership. Still, the Times analysis doesn't give remotely enough consideration to the fact that the Eurostate maliciously suppresses many things having to do with tradition, localism and particularism among EU member states. Reihan's on it:
Perhaps more importantly, the hostile reaction to Poland's government -- which is admittedly crude (in railing against the foreign press, and foreigners) speaks to the narrowness of secular Europeanism. Remember the Rocco Buttiglione controversy? Christopher Caldwell had the definitive take in the Weekly Standard. The real "problem" with Poland is that it is more democratic than the established democracies of Western Europe, where populism is blunted by a powerful, entrenched elite consensus. Keep in mind that the death penalty is in fact very popular in much of enlightened Europe, not to mention intense xenophobia generally kept in check through complicated electoral formulas (in France) or strategic accommodation (everywhere else).
The dire consequences of proportionality are so clear that it makes you wonder if it is a fig leaf for anti-Israel sentiment in general. Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness. For Israel, a small country within reach, as we are finding out, of a missile launched from any enemy's back yard, proportionality is not only inapplicable, it is suicide. The last thing it needs is a war of attrition. It is not good enough to take out this or that missile battery. It is necessary to re-establish deterrence: You slap me, I will punch out your lights. [snip]
Readers of my recent column on the Middle East can accuse me of many things, but not a lack of realism. I know Israel's imperfections, but I also exult and admire its achievements. Lacking religious conviction, I fear for its future and note the ominous spread of European-style anti-Semitism throughout the Muslim world -- and its boomerang return to Europe as a mindless form of anti-Zionism. Israel is, as I have often said, unfortunately located, gentrifying a pretty bad neighborhood. But the world is full of dislocated peoples and we ourselves live in a country where the Indians were pushed out of the way so that -- oh, what irony! -- the owners of slaves could spread liberty and democracy from sea to shining sea. As for Europe, who today cries for the Greeks of Anatolia or the Germans of Bohemia?
These calls for proportionality rankle. They fall on my ears not as genteel expressions of fairness, some ditsy Marquess of Queensberry idea of war, but as ugly sentiments pregnant with antipathy toward the only state in the Middle East that is a democracy. After the Holocaust, after 1,000 years of mayhem and murder, the only proportionality that counts is zero for zero. If Israel's enemies want that, they can have it in a moment.
Here's an interview Christina Hoff Sommers did with James Bowman about his book "Honor: A History," to which I linked in the previous post. The first thing it reminded me of was how much more comfortable I am raising my sons in the South (well, insofar as Dallas is part of the south, which is a matter of debate, but on the matter of male-female relations, it's definitely more Southern than NYC) as opposed to New York City. One day, when Matthew was only three, Julie was on the playground in Brooklyn with him, and trying to teach him manners, asked him to step aside and let the little girl behind him climb up the slide ahead of him.
"Ladies first," Julie said. She got in return a sneer from the little girl's mother. Typical.
So many of the simple courtesies that made life so gracious and mannerly, even when I was growing up in the 1970s in small-town Louisiana, are now lost to us, or very soon will be. I hate it when small children call me by my first name. I hate it when adults encourage my children to call them by their first name. They can call them "Mrs. Smith" or, as Louisiana kids of my generation were taught (charmingly) to do, "Miss [First Name]," even if they're married. The point is to convey respect to elders. In my town when I was a child, if a kid ever spoke to an adult as if on equal terms, it was considered a shameful thing for that child, and in turn for his parents, who were presumed not to have raised him right. Practicing good manners was considered a matter of personal honor. So much of that seems gone now in our time of egalitarianism.
Anyway, Bowman's talking about something much more profound than mere courtesy, but courtesy, in traditional Southern culture, is inseparable from personal honor. Here's an excerpt from the Bowman interview, but you really should read the whole thing:
Christina Hoff Sommers: You show that the Western concept of honor has lost much force and is becoming obsolete. Can you tell us what you think is the most serious consequence of this ongoing diminishment?
James Bowman: The most serious? That would have to be in the corresponding diminishment of our will to live as a society and a culture. Honor is among other things an assertion of collective identity. We are this and we are not that. We are American and not Islamicist. When we are attacked, it is a counter-assertion by someone else that he is that and not this. He is Islamicist and not American. Honor is the name that used to be given to the will to assert the one identity over the other. If you attack me because I am American, honor dictates that I must counterattack and defeat you because you are Islamicist—since you have shown me that being an Islamicist means being an enemy of America. But nowadays we find something disreputable about this kind of assertion and counter-assertion of identity. It is fundamentally at odds with the multiculturalist orthodoxy of the last 30 years. What we ought to have learned from the terror attacks of September 11th and subsequent events is that multiculturalism has sapped our will to fight back and thus to survive. If American patriotism has to be expressed at the expense of non-Americans, even non-Americans who want to kill us simply for being Americans, we are ashamed to express it.
Lots of urgent complaints lately about the violence the Israelis are inflicting on Lebanon. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to pity those poor innocent souls caught up in this war. But at the same time, what choice do the Israelis have? They are fighting an enemy that is sworn to their destruction, and which is raining down rocketry with the express intention of killing innocent civilians (versus Israel's attempt to pinpoint its strikes). Israel is facing an enemy that places its military targets in civilian areas. Israel did not choose this war, but it has to fight the war that's in front of it, not the war it wishes it had.
What if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests? What if the universalist idea of liberal democracy - the idea that all people are created equal - has sunk in so deeply that we no longer assign special value to the lives and interests of our own people as opposed to those in other countries?
What if this triumph of universalism is demonstrated by the Left's insistence that American and Israeli military actions marked by an extraordinary concern for preventing civilian casualties are in fact unacceptably brutal? And is also apparent in the Right's claim that a war against a country has nothing to do with the people but only with that country's leaders?
Can any war be won when this is the nature of the discussion in the countries fighting the war? Can any war be won when one of the combatants voluntarily limits itself in this manner?
Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Didn't the willingness of their leaders to inflict mass casualties on civilians indicate a cold-eyed singleness of purpose that helped break the will and the back of their enemies? Didn't that singleness of purpose extend down to the populations in those countries in those days, who would have and did support almost any action at any time that would lead to the deaths of Germans and Japanese?
What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?
If you can't imagine George W. Bush issuing such an order, is there any American leader you could imagine doing so?
And if America can't do it, can Israel? Could Israel - even hardy, strong, universally conscripted Israel - possibly stomach the bloodshed that would accompany the total destruction of Hezbollah?
John Tierney, writing in today's NYT (behind the wall, of course), considers that the West doesn't understand that in confronting Arab Muslim enemies, we are up against a culture in which shame and honor define morality. The most important thing is not to lose face, no matter what. Tierney quotes James Bowman of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who has a new book out on honor, as saying that the Israelis have no choice but to do what they're doing, namely to try to destroy and shatter Hezbollah, given how Hezbollah would define victory. In the shame/honor mentality, no cruelty is too great to inflict on others in the name of saving face. In his extraordin
ary, must-read book "The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs," David Pryce-Jones draws a lesson for the West out of the shame/honor psychology of the Arabs:
Westerners habitually and ignorantly misconcieve the responses they are likely to encounter from the Arabs, unsuitably and even laughably projecting their own political and moral attitudes where these cannot apply. ... Depending on the interests at stake, either [military] entry into the Middle East should be avoided altogether for the sake of the shame-based hostility it will trigger, or it must be undertaken with inflexible determination to use whatever degree of force is required for supreme arbitration. In 1983, a terrorist sponsored by Syria or Iran drove a truck packed with explosives into a barracks, kiling 200 American marines. To abandon Lebanon as a result was a response comprehensible as pragmatic to an electorate, but which in the Islamocentric perspective looks quite different, a shaming of the entire West and an honor to the anonymous terrorist whose bomb, however freakishly, proved to be strong enough for supreme arbitration.
As a Western democracy unable by reason of geography to extricate itself from the Arab collectivity, Israel is in a similar predicament, routinely obliged to arbitrate by force while fruitlessly pleading for democratic procedures of compromise and civility to resolve a conflict that would be redundant, indeed would never have asumed its historic form, if such procedures had been available in the first place.
The question about loneliness is: Why do people do this to themselves? Why do Americans, who reported an average of nearly three close friends in 1985, now report an average of just over two? And why does one in four have nobody with whom to discuss personal issues? This is the age of Oprah and MySpace, of public emoting on television and the Web. Apparently people watch "Friends" but don't actually have many. [snip] You can see how this American isolationism sets in. Modern society creates the tools that allow you not to save -- if you have to pay for the kids' college, you can refinance your home -- while doing little to change the basic need to save for old age and misfortune. In the same way, modern society creates tools that extend your casual networks -- e-mail, instant messaging, social-networking Web sites -- while doing nothing to remove the basic need for soul mates. Meanwhile, people work more hours. They commute longer because they've moved to the exurbs in search of larger homes; they've got spacious entertainment rooms but no mental space for entertaining. And then there's the subtle effect of the culture. "Family time" is endlessly extolled, and lovers emit poetry and song about every facet of their relationships. But when was the last time a rock singer or a new man waxed lyrical about friendship?
Yet the biggest reason for American loneliness, and perhaps the clue to some kind of cure, lies in path dependency. People know that tending to friendship is important, but their behavior follows the path created by countless other decisions -- and friendship is neglected.
It's all too easy to recognize oneself in this portrait. For all the extolling of friendship and socializing in "Crunchy Cons," it recently occurred to me that I am forever telling friends that we "just have to have dinner" with them ... but we rarely get around to doing it. Everybody's so busy. It's such a big deal to pull everything together for a dinner. Or so it seems. We go for weeks, and even months, without seeing people we really care about. The last time one couple we really like came over was just before Christmas in 2004. We keep talking about getting together again ... but it never happens. And when we do have friends over to dinner, we always remark afterward how much fun that was, and wonder why we don't do it more often.
I hate this, but how to make it stop? Mallaby says social science experiments find that if you have in place structures that compel behavior with what amounts to a nudge, people will comply. One of my colleagues here at the paper says that he and several neighbors have a standing date to have dinner together at one of their houses each month. It's a potluck, so it doesn't put any host out too much. The point is not to eat prime rib, but just to be together, drinking and eating and talking and practicing the art of being friends and neighbors. I bet if they didn't have this standing date -- and the "path dependency" it creates -- it'd be a lot harder to pull that off.
Thoughts? How do we avoid a "Cat's in the Cradle" future regarding our social lives?
Is Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee a closet crunchy-con? He came by the DMN today to talk to the editorial board about his run for the GOP presidential nomination. I wasn't able to attend the meeting, but my colleagues came out of it quite impressed. I did catch the governor for about five minutes before he left the building, and aware that he's a religious conservative who is trying to appeal beyond the usual theocon issues, I asked him how his agenda differs from GWB's "compassionate conservatism." He didn't have a clear answer, but he did say that he didn't understand how any of us conservatives who call ourselves Christians can limit our political concern to social issues like abortion. I think that's pretty much what Bush said in 2000, is it not? Still, it will be interesting to hear what he has to say on the '08 trail. He did talk with me briefly about the environment, and how excited he is that Evangelicals like "my former seminary classmate Rick Warren" are talking about good stewardship of the natural world as a Christian virtue.
In the short time I had with him, I asked Gov. Huckabee about Jim Pinkerton's essay in the current issue of The American Conservative, particularly about Pinkerton's discussion that a revival of William Jennings Bryan's style of populism -- economically progressive, socially conservative, religiously engaged -- could bring the Democratic Party back to power. I asked the governor if that kind of populism would work on the GOP side. I'll have to replay the tape to see what he said, but I recall that he found the idea at least intriguing. It sounds like he's edging toward that sort of thing. He's going to be one to watch, if only because win or lose the GOP nomination, it will be fascinating to see if he becomes the standard-bearer for a new generation of the Religious Right.
William F. Buckley tells CBS News that President Bush has let down the side:
"I think Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology — with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress. And in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge."
By the way, I have high-level military scuttlebutt that says WaPo senior defense correspondent Tom Ricks' new book about the Iraq War, "Fiasco," is going to set off some pretty big waves that could swamp Rumsfeld.
Celebrity train wreck George Michael got caught having gay sex in the bushes in a London park with a geezer this past weekend. What interested me most was the pervy popster's response to the press when confronted:
"Are you gay? No? Then f*** off! This is my culture!"
This is my culture. How true do you think it is that cruising for anonymous sex in public is a part of gay male culture? I think it's bigger than the press would prefer to see. Years ago, I was amazed by how a city park in my neighborhood became a popular cruising grown for gay men seeking sexual encounters after dark. A guy I knew--young, good-looking, successful, the farthest thing from a gross troll--was one of them. He used to cruise public restrooms too, seeking anonymous sex. Had he been arrested, it would have destroyed his career, but I think the thrill of the thing drove him. When George Michael first got arrested for seeking gay sex in a public bathroom, a gay Republican male--very successful guy, well-dressed, in the public limelight, not at all a desperate troll--told me that this was a pretty normal part of gay male culture. He told me that he used to cruise public toilets looking for sex, in part because the stench of those locales smelled like "nectar."
I see that on a British gay website today, one writer is saying that this George Michael thing is no big deal:
"As gay men, there are very few of us who can deny copping off with a minger once in while. Some of us do it more than others and though it used to surprise me, seeing unbridled passion between a beauty and beast is something barely worth commenting on these days- especially when I'm one of them."
Of course it is unfair and inaccurate to say that all gay men are into this, or even that most are. So don't misread me here. Still, I am curious to know to what extent George Michael's "This is my culture!" claim is true. And if it is, what are the rest of us supposed to think about gay male culture, and the degree to which it self-defines according to behavior that most people rightly find repulsive? I do believe, having seen the media's unwillingness to confront more openly the gay-culture aspect of the Catholic sex abuse scandal, it's pretty clear to me that the media, as a general rule, have a habit of sanitizing coverage that reflects badly on gay male culture. (See Get Religion's critique of a recent New York Times example of avoiding the pink elephant in the sacristy.)
Daniel Larison cites some post-ESCR-veto comments by Tony Snow that draw the moral meaning of the president's act into question. Maybe those of you in the CC comboxes who thought he was cynical were more right than I gave you credit for.
Jody Bottum says the Vatican's approach to the Middle East has failed to take into consideration how radically the situation has changed:
Of course, in one sense, [Vatican Secretary of State Angelo Cardinal] Sodano was merely indulging the kind of ritual statement--everybody's wrong, but Israel most of all--that the Vatican has been issuing for decades. It didn't mean much in 1973, and it doesn't mean much now.
In another sense, however, Sodano's remarks on Vatican Radio--and similar statements by other Catholic figures, from the custodians of the holy places in Israel to the editorialists in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osserv atore Romano--are most disturbing precisely because of their datedness. The situation in the Middle East is no longer simply a battle between Israelis and Palestinians. With the increasingrole of the Iranians, and the refusal of the Arab League to involve itself, the fight doesn't even really center around the Arabs.
It is, rather, a war between the Islamists and the West--a proxy fight, in which the totalitarian governments of Syria and Iran have aimed the weapon of terrorism at modern democracies. And, for the Catholic Church, the answer cannot remain the old, ritual statements about the Middle East, dusted off one more time. John Paul II had a vision for confronting totalitarianism--a way of refusing government by the lie and naming things for what they are. It is time for the Vatican to apply that vision to the Middle East.
There are signs that Benedict -- unlike his predecessor, who for whatever reason was far more conciliatory toward Islam than was warranted, especially given the way Christians of all kinds are treated in most Muslim countries -- is willing to recognize publicly the true nature of the conflict that has been forced upon the West by radical Islam. But Vatican diplomacy still has a long way to go. (Hat tip: Amy.
Kathryn Jean Lopez criticizes what she considers the Vatican's misguided analysis of the Israeli-Hezbollah clash, and Andrew Sullivan accuses her of being a right-wing cafeteria Catholic. This sort of thing happens all the time, and reflects a basic -- and frankly, self-serving -- misunderstanding of the way Catholicism works.
If the Vatican says Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys is a poopyhead whose records stink, Catholics are not obliged under canon law to agree. If the Vatican says Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys cannot canoodle with George Michael without committing a sin, Catholics are obliged to agree. It all has to do with what theologians call "prudential judgment," a good article on which as related to the death penalty and war can be found here.
Remember Julie and Hillary Goodridge, the lesbian couple whose lawsuit resulted in the Massachusetts Supreme Court imposing gay marriage on the state? They were the first same-sex couple married under the new regime there. What a day that was! According to one report:
The Goodridge wedding was filled with laughter, tears and a sense of validation. "We are absolutely no different from any couple who loves each other," Julie Goodridge, 46, said after the ceremony. "We intend to uphold our marriage the rest of our lives."
The couple walked up the aisle as the guests sang the traditional wedding march to the words, "Here come the brides, so gay with pride ... lovely to see, legally free, finally hitched by a 4-3 decree."
Oops! I guess they are like about half the straight couples in America.
John Paul II was a great pope, but he was often frustratingly opaque in his writing and speaking style. The John Paul II Random Speech Generator is funny because its nonsense lines sound ... well, they sound an awful lot like the real guy. Here are three lines the Generator spat out for me:
The immense inspiration of social systems will penetrate tomorrow's experience of mystery.
The immense extraordinary gifts of dignity of the human person will evolve the restoration of our social justice.
The mysterious extraordinary gifts of peace will penetrate the restoration of our celebration.
Ross Douthat has a great piece in First Things this month reviewing the typing of gibbering fearmongers who see militant Jesus freaks behind every tree. His piece calmly but utterly eviscerates the wack-job paranoia of the Kevin Phillipses, the Michelle Goldbergs, and other writers who have made a cottage industry of portraying the role of Christian conservatives in contemporary American politics as a dark conspiracy to take over America and turn it into a Christofascist theocracy. As Ross puts it, the kinds of things Christian conservatives stand for politically were completely mainstream in the late 1950s, when America was very far from a theocracy. Writes Ross:
This reality poses no particular problem if you simply disagree with religious conservatives about abortion or gay marriage or prayer in public schools. But if you’re committed to the notion that religious conservatives represent an existential threat to democratic government, you need a broader definition of theocracy to convey your sense of impending doom. Which is why the anti-theocrats often suggest that it doesn’t take mullahs, an established church, or a Reconstructionist ban on adultery to make a theocracy. All you need are politicians who invoke religion and apply Christian principles to public policy.
If that’s all it takes to make a theocracy, then these writers are correct: Contemporary America is run by theocrats. Of course, by that measure, so was the America of every previous era. The United States has always been at once a secular republic and a religious nation, reflexively libertarian and fiercely pious, and this tension has been working itself out in our politics for more than two hundred years. It’s often been a mixed blessing, giving us Prohibition as well as abolition, Jesse Jackson as well as Reinhold Niebuhr, the obsession with free silver as well as the zeal for civil rights. But there’s no way to give an account of American history without grappling with this tension—and with the role played, for good and ill and sometimes both, by religious reformers from Jonathan Edwards all the way down to Jerry Falwell.
Yet this is a history that the anti-theocrats seem determined to reject. The Christian Right isn’t just bad for America because of its right-wing misapplication of religious faith, they suggest—it’s bad for America because any application of faith to politics is inevitably poisonous, intolerant, and illiberal.
Except as Ross observes, they don't believe that at all. These same writers celebrate the role Christianity has played in American public and political life when it has led the way in achieving goals important to liberals, like civil rights. Which is fine, but you can't have it both ways: you can't praise religious leaders like Martin Luther King for bringing their faith to bear on politics while at the same time condemning Pat Robertson for doing the same. To be sure, it's perfectly fair to criticize Robertson (or whoever) for the particular stands they take, but if it's fair for the Religious Left to get involved in politics, it's fair for the Religious Right to do the same thing. As I've said before, the whole "preachers should stay out of politics" line you get from liberals these days is the mirror image of the same stance I heard as a child down South from whites who resented clergy active on behalf of civil rights.
Finally, Ross makes the important and necessary point -- first made by political scientists Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio in a 2002 issue of The Public Interest -- that the rise of religious conservatives and their influence in the GOP parallels the rise of devout secularists within the Democratic Party. Because the media is so overwhelmingly liberal and secularist, Bolce and De Maio persuasively argue, they didn
't perceive the Dems going as hard to secularism as the GOP was going toward religious conservatism. To the media, embracing secularism is normative. But that's not how it is with much of America, or how it has ever been in our country, as Ross indicates in the passage I quoted above. But this anti-religious hysteria does serve a useful function on the public square; in Ross's words, it "frees the anti-theocrats from the messy business of actually arguing with their opponents. From sex education and government support for religious charities to stem cells and abortion, it’s enough to call something 'faith-based' and dismiss it."
In First Things this month, Richard John Neuhaus alleges that his former-employee-turned-harsh-critic Damon Linker received a $160,000 advance for his forthcoming book "Theocons," which purports to expose how a small group of mostly Catholic conservative intellectuals have influenced the Republican Party and is seeking to bring about "the end of secular politics." I haven't seen the book, but the only early review I could find, from Publisher's Weekly, says:
Primarily and almost obsessively concerned with Richard John Neuhaus and his journal First Things, Linker's exposé sometimes makes it seem as if the political philosophy that animates perhaps a quarter of the electorate is essentially a one-man show. More curious is that, though his words drip with disdain for virtually every position championed by the magazine, Linker himself was an editor at First Things until barely a year before his book's publication. This book may leave readers yearning for a more broad-based study of how Neuhaus—whose journal has a circulation of well under 50,000—and his ilk have managed to motivate a resurgence of politically minded religiosity in such a large number of Americans.
In his First Things column this month, Neuhaus declines to respond to what he calls Linker's "relentlessly tendentious commentary on items appearing in these pages." But he goes on to say that Linker had worked full time for FT from May 2001 through January 2005, apparently happily. According to RJN, in the fall of 2004 Linker told him he was tired of commuting from Connecticut, and wanted to get a large enough book advance to become a fulltime writer. RJN reports that he was "entirely sympathetic" to Linker's ambition.
A few weeks later, he told me he was thinking of writing a book about First Things and its editor in chief. He explained that the book would be a critical appreciation of the achievements of the magazine. I said I would be happy to cooperate with such a project but I didn't think there would be enough interest in the subject to elicit a large advance from a publisher. Moreover, this would be a first book by a relatively unknown writer. In early December, he told me that several publishers had indicated intense interest in the book he was proposing and that Doubleday had offered an advance of $160,000. He wanted to leave at the beginning of 2005 to start writing. Surprised but pleased by his good fortune, I congratulated him and renewed my offer to be of assistance wtih the book. I then said it might be helpful in that connection if I could see the proposal he had submitted to publishers. At this he blanched and, with obvious embarrassment, said that would not be possible. This was the first indication that he had agreed to write what in the publishing business is knowns as an "attack book," which, unfortunately, is the genre to which "The Theocons" belongs.
Hmm. Well, look, if the number Neuhaus floats for Linker's advance is accurate, that's pretty shocking, from a strictly business point of view. Linker might well have written a fantastic book, but even assuming that, he'd have to sell a hell of a lot of them -- I'm talking tens of thousands -- just to break even for his publisher on an advance that generous. I look forward to reading "Theocons" to see what the author has to say about ideas and people I, a theocon, care about. But how many people are there like me (and not to put too fine a point on it, but given the extremely negative reaction among theocons to the Linker New Republic essay to which I linked above, I bet there won't be but a relative handful of theocons willing to give the book the time of day)? Are there at least 50,000 readers of whatever theological and political stripe in America interested in paying cas
h money to read an entire book ripping an intellectual magazine most people have never heard of -- especially when, as a publishing industry friend points out, those hot for theocon-bashing have already sated themselves with Kevin Phillips' "American Theocracy"?
We'll see. In the meantime, Damon Linker ought to send his agent a bottle of Cristal.
In today's Wall Street Journal, Fouad Ajami writes perhaps the most informative and moving analysis of Lebanon's tragedy I've yet seen. Lebanon, in his view, is held hostage to the thug Nasrallah and his puppetmasters in Damascus and Tehran. Let there be no doubt that these are the men responsible for Lebanon's destruction.
I was arguing with some colleagues yesterday about democracy in the Middle East. They were put out with me for taking the position that if given a choice between a democratically elected Islamist government, or a non-Islamist authoritarian regime, the US should side with the authoritarians -- for the sake of stability. It's the less bad choice, as I believe the past few years have shown.
We came to no satisfying conclusion, because I don't think there is a satisfying conclusion to be found. Later, I was thinking about how hard it is for us Westerners to conceive of the mindset of that region. I was reminded of a man I met walking the road to Bethlehem in 2000. He was an American, a Catholic priest who lived in one of the monasteries in or around Jerusalem. He'd served in the area for at least a decade, he told me, and was no closer to understanding the way the people there think.
He told a story about having dinner one night around the table in the monastery, with the monks and brothers. The topic of conversation that evening was the 1982 massacre Syrian president Hafez al-Assad carried out on Islamist rebels in the city of Hama. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood had been waging a terrorist campaign against Assad, including an assassination attempt. He finally had enough, surrounded the Islamist stronghold, and slaughtered possibly up to 25,000 people there. That was the end of Islamist rebel activity against his government.
Anyway, the priest told me that the clerics gathered around the dinner table -- all Americans or Europeans -- were marveling with disgust over Assad's savagery. Finally, two Syrian-born Catholic novices at the far end of the table spoke up. "You don't understand," one of them said. "If Assad hadn't done that, the Muslim Brotherhood would have taken over the country, and they would have killed us all" -- "us" meaning the Christian population. The novices defended the massacre as the only rational thing left to Assad to do -- and as an act of deliverance for the Christian community there from Islamofascists who would have put them to the sword.
"We all kind of sat there just staring at them," the priest told me. "We didn't know what to say. They saw how shocked we were, and then they pretty much put their masks back on. We didn't speak of it again."
Here's an Amazon link to "Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology" one of the late media theorist Neil Postman's many books. And here's an interview in which he described himself as a "conservative," even though he was on the editorial board of The Nation. Why?
Postman now calls himself a conservative, and contends that most others who now use that label — loyal Republicans and corporate boosters — are actually radicals. He explained why in a speech given several years back to a group of business leaders and academics in Vienna. "A capitalist cannot afford the pleasures of conservatism, and of necessity regards tradition as an obstacle to be overcome.... It is fairly easy to document that capitalists have been a force for radical social change since the 18th Century, especially in the United States.... In today’s America...if anyone should raise the question,‘What improves the human spirit?’ Americans are apt to offer a simple formulation: That which is new is better, that which is newest is best.
"The best cure for such a stupid philosophy is conservatism. My version, not President Reagan’s."
In "Technopoly," Postman argues that we, as a culture, have surrendered to technology:
Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deificaiton of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology. This requires the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional beliefs. Those who feel most comfortable in Technopoly are those who are convinced that technical progress is humanity's superhuman achievement and the instrument by which our most profound dilemmas may be solved.
Technopoly is supported by "scientism," which in Postman's view is a religious-like trust in science as the only reliable guide to life and ultimate meaning (Michael Shermer, writing in Scientific American, has some thoughts about this). It implies that "faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system." He also said of scientism that it was
“not merely the misapplication of techniques such as quantification to questions where numbers have nothing to say; not merely the confusion of the material and social realms of human experience; not merely the claim of social researchers to be applying the aims and procedures of natural science to the human world,” but also “the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief that some standardized set of procedures called ‘science’ can provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority.”
It should be said clearly that Postman was not opposed to science and technology. What he did stand against was the idea that science and technology should be embraced as unambiguous goods. He held that our society was completely in thrall to technology and scientism, and that we could not or would not understand that science and technology are deeply ambiguous phenomena. We shouldn't reject technological or scientific progress out of hand, but we should be suspicious of it -- and of those who sneer at people who do as Luddites, as religious fanatics, and so forth.
If nothing else, the 20th century and its horrors should make us all humble in the face of claims that science and technology should be embraced with little or no moral reflection (and "massaging our consciences until they comply" does not count as moral reflection). As Christine Rosen reminds us, the most sophisticated Americans and Europeans of their time were ardent proponents of eugenics -- and in this country, only the Catholic Church and fundamentalist Protestant churches organized resistance to the eugenicists and their attempts to prey on the poor and racial minorities. Writes Christine:
It is perhaps a useful reminder, as we confront the serious ethical challenges presented by our rapid technological and scientific progress, that we've faced such difficult situations before. Then, like now, the proponents of the new science framed the debate as one between enlightened scientific progress and the forces of ignorance and religious zealotry. In the past, we didn't make the correct choice.
Today it would be helpful to reframe the debate as one about the limits and ethics of science more broadly, not as a battle between reason and faith: Should we do things merely because we can? How much of a voice should citizens concerned about the ethics of science have in these debates? And how can we craft a more permanent compromise on stem-cell research – one that will not entirely thwart science but offers sound ethical protections for human life?
These are the questions we should be asking. If we do, we might be judged better by our own children and grandchildren than we now judge our ancestors who so enthusiastically embraced eugenics.
He rightly senses that conservatism, in the philosophic sense, does not define the conservative movement; rather, the conservative movement now defines conservatism, at least as far as the media and the public understand the term.
Ain't it the truth. I've had a lot of coverage for "Crunchy Cons," for which I'm grateful, but one thing I've consistently seen is the inability of many interviewers to understand that I really am writing about a strain of conservatism, not liberalism with a conservative patina. The mass media think that conservatism begins and ends with the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Fox News and the elite punditocracy. It's just not true. An important conservative editor at a national publication e-mailed me the other day to agree with Bramwell's other observation in that same piece -- that American conservatism has gotten bogged down in a slough of conformity. This same editor also wrote that he was glad "Crunchy Cons" stirred up some arguments, saying, "Apparently there are conservative traditions---Burkean, Kirkian, Eliotian or whatever---that many self-styled conservatives today either don't know or don't like -- an odd state of affairs."
"Crunchy Cons" doesn't pretend to be the last word in defining conservatism. I only wanted to draw attention to an older strain of conservatism -- a traditionalist conservatism -- that doesn't get much attention these days, and which has a lot to tell not only the conservative movement, but the entire country. I'm happy, of course, that people buy my book, but I'd be much happier if they'd leave my book wanting to read the far meatier stuff by Kirk, Eliot, Weaver et alia, and figure out how to apply their insights to contemporary challenges.
Meanwhile, it would be nice if journalists who cover politics would spend a little time reading about historical conservatism instead of assuming that the people on their Rolodex are the only conservatives worth calling. George H. Nash's terrific "The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945" (ISI Books) is a great place to start.
I feel obliged to come to the president's defense on his embryonic stem cell research veto. I find the absolutism of those who view a blastocyst as a human person to be morally unpersuasive, but I cannot see how it can be seen as anything other than human life. I know also that many of these superfluous blastocysts and embryos will be discarded anyway and so not using them for research does not protect them from extinction. Nevertheless, it is hard not to be troubled by the line this crosses. Human life is created and then experimented on to save other human lives.
...I respect the case of those who favor [ESCR]; but, when push comes to shove, I'm with Bush on this. It took political courage to take this stand. And the morality it reflects - a refusal to treat human life as a means rather than as an end - deserves respect even from its opponents.
Watch Andrew be excoriated for giving in to the Luddites, the religious-right fanatics, the anti-science crazies...
One thing this blog, and my kind of conservatism, is about is the rejection of the view that science should be allowed to do whatever it wants -- that science and technology are morally self-justifying. There are people on the left who believe this too. When I come back from lunch, we'll talk about the late Neil Postman and "Technopoly"...
The Washington Post has revealed itself ignorant of a pretty basic (and pretty important) fact of history. TMatt and the Get Religion gang are calling the newspaper on it. Believe it or not, one of the most important newspapers in America actually wrote that Turkish Muslim anger at Christian missionary activity has to do with the Crusader sack of Istanbul. Except that Istanbul was at the time called Constantinople, and was a Christian city! The Muslim armies didn't sack the city until 1453, and they made the Holy Wisdom church into a mosque.
The WaPo bought propaganda from the Turkish government hook, line and sinker. Incredible. Why do you suppose they did that? The Sack of Constantinople -- Christian versus Christian -- is a basic historical fact.
President Bush has done the right thing in vetoing the bill that would have provided federal funding for the willful destruction of embryonic human life in pursuit of stem-cell research. The president spoke of his veto while surrounded by so-called "Snowflake children" -- kids who began life as embryos to be discarded, until loving couples adopted them and carried them to term as their own children. Said the president today:
"Each of these children was still adopted while still an embryo and has been blessed with a chance to grow, to grow up in a loving family. These boys and girls are not spare parts."
As I see it, the real ethical heart of this issue is not really whether or not exploiting human embryos for research results in the taking of innocent human life. The embryo destroyed to get stem cell lines is human, and it is alive and growing; whether or not is possesses moral personhood is a matter of dispute. I strongly believe it does. If you believe otherwise, I'm not going to waste my time and your dredging up the "when does life begin?" argument. (Though see Jeremy Lott's elegant pictorial syllogism in that respect.)
(And please spare me the talking points about how many lives Bush is consigning to suffer for his veto. For one thing, he's not banning ESCR (too bad!), only saying the federal government won't subsidize it; states and private enterprise are free to do what they like. For another, the idea that ESCR is a magic cure-all is hogwash.)
A point, though, on which we can all have a fruitful discussion is on whether or not human life, in whatever form, should be seen instrumentally. By that, I refer to the premise implicit in the pro-ESCR argument that it is permissible to see some forms of human life according to the precepts of instrumentalist morality -- that is, its worth should be judged by what good uses can be made of it, because it has no intrinsic moral worth.
This is the point of view taken by Sen. Bill Frist when he says, as he did today, "I am pro-life, but I disagree with the president's decision to veto the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act. Given the potential of this research and the limitations of the existing lines eligible for federally funded research, I think additional lines should be made available."
In other words, I am pro-life, unless exterminating unborn life might do people some good.
But that's not the position of people who genuinely don't believe the living human embryo is morally a person. I want y'all to consider, though, that permitting the use of human embryos for scientific research is another step down a slippery and very dangerous slope toward the dehumanization of the weak. The road began with legalized abortion, but took a big leap forward with in vitro fertilization techniques, which result in surplus embryos that will be destroyed (Side note: IVF is widely accepted among Christians, even those who believe they are pro-life; Baptist theologian Al Mohler shows here and here why Christians who participate in IVF are deeply compromised.) Yes, IVF creates hundreds of thousands of genetically unique human embryos whose very existence poses profound and pressing moral questions (see Liza Mundy's great Mother Jones story about this), but we gloss right over it because hav
ing children is seen as a social good that nullifies all moral objection.
And so now we are at the point in which most Americans have no moral qualms about doing research on human embryos -- which each of us once were at the start of our lives -- as long as some good might come out of it for the strong. Even if you do not believe a human person is losing his or her life when an embryo is destroyed, how can you not wince at the willingness to exploit human life -- to cannibalize it -- for a greater good? A pseudonymous reader of this blog posted something chilling the other day on this issue. He (or she) said that if stem-cell research can cure his (or her) diabetes, then let's get on with it and screw the morality.
That, I'm afraid, is the bottom line in America, circa 2006. In the end, screw the morality: if it works, or might work, let's do it. I shudder to think where this kind of instrumentalist moral thinking will take us in this biotech century.
Yes, it makes us squeamish to genetically engineer babies in the womb, but think of the suffering we can spare those children by keeping them from being fat, or short, or red-haired, or gay, or...
Yes, it causes some concern to compel mothers to abort their physically or mentally handicapped babies, but it's wrong to expect insurance companies or the taxpayer to pay for the lifelong care these flawed children will require, especially when we have other pressing medical needs that have a claim on our national health-care budget.
Yes, it is icky to some to grow unborn children in laboratories to harvest their organs for the living, but these fetuses would never have grown to maturity anyway, so why shouldn't they be put to use helping the living?
Yes, many think it's wrong to take the handicapped out of health-care facilities and euthanize them, but what kind of quality of life do they have? Why should the rest of us be expected to support them? Face it, their lives really aren't worth living.
And so forth. That's the moral line we keep crossing. President Bush took a brave and moral stand today against the culture of death. I think -- I fear -- it will be ultimately a futile one, but God bless him all the same.
In the film criticism thread below, reader Simon had some really interesting things to say:
One of the great conceits of our balkanized, affinity-based culture is that single people with good incomes living in large metropolitan areas often assume their experience of the world is very broad -- especially in contrast to the supposed superficiality and unthinking conformism of the suburbs.
In my own experience, it's the life of trendy restaurants and cutting edge fashion that's dull and shallow. Raising children, OTOH, provides a permanent stake in the community and a deep appreciation of the things that matter. The "Entertainment Industry," however, has no collective understanding of this basic reality. That, I suspect, is a big part of why Hollywood box office receipts have been in long term free fall. So many people who have grown up, settled down and had kids have abandoned going to the movies altogether.
This reminds me of the point Flannery O'Connor made to her correspondent, and that I blogged on last week: if you really want to see the world as it is and write about it in fiction, don't leave Alabama for the big city, but stay in a small town. I think one of the most important lessons I've learned -- and am still learning -- is how misleading is the idea that just because you live in a cosmopolitan environment, are well-traveled, and have an eclectic collection of friends, that you therefore know more about the way the world really works than people sitting in a dull suburb or podunk small town. You might well know more than they do, but you shouldn't assume that; the old farmer who doesn't know Paris, Texas, from Paris, France, might actually be more wise to the ways of the world than a university professor, a Wall Street businessman, a top magazine editor, etc.
I know I'm just stating the obvious -- and yes, Dad, you were right about a lot more than I was able to admit -- but it seems to me that Simon really has keyed into something here when it comes to the culture-producers, and those who comment on their work. I'm the father of two small children, with one on the way. I had no idea how little I knew until I began to have the experience of raising those children -- and for precisely the reason Simon identifies. You can't avoid questions of how the direction of popular culture will affect the hearts and minds of your children, and the society they'll grow up in. Having kids revealed to me, slowly but surely, the true shallowness of my prior aestheticism.
Understand that I'm not calling for moralistic art, or moralistic art criticism. I think "message movies" are bad, even if the putative moral is one of which I approve. What I'm saying, though, is that Hollywood and its orbit (which includes film critics) often fail to connect to the realities that most people live in. And the grotesque sex and violence the entertainment industry pumps into the culture, to willing customers (it must be admitted), is something from which those elites can insulate themselves.
Example: last Christmas season, my neighbor and I went down the street to tell a young man who was blasting gangsta rap from his car to turn it down. This is a residential neighborhood. Kids were out front with their folks putting up Christmas decorations, and this idiot was blasting "m.f." this and "m.f." that from his car radio. When I looked into the car, I saw a two-year-old sitting there on the seat, taking this all in.
Fifteen years from now, what will that kid carry in his heart? He will have been raised in an environment where that kind of pornographic language and violence will have fed his soul. What will he do with that? Will he do what some gangbangers did in Dallas the other night, and kill people in a barfight precipitated by a gangsta-rap anthem?
There has been lots of talk in local media here about whether or not this anthem had anything to do with the violence. While it's certainly true that you can't establish a direct causal link, it's nonsense on stilts that music doesn't have anything to do with actions in the real world. There was a reason why "We Shall Overcome" and "We Shall Not Be Moved" were theme songs for the civil rights movement. There's a reason why "Give Peace a Chance" was widely embraced by the antiwar movement. Hell, there's a reason why I had a habit of making mix tapes for girls I was trying to woo. Art not only reflects who we are, it tells us who we ought to be. There is tremendous promise in that, but also tremendous responsibility. Art -- be it film, music, prose, what have you -- does not happen in a vacuum.
I think many critics forget this. Like I said earlier, it's an occupational hazard. It's the easiest thing to get so caught up in the technique of filmmaking and its aesthetic qualities, and in the groupthink of people like you, that you forget that you're raving about a movie that sympathetically portrays a pederast's attempt to drug and rape a child.
Why do the opinions of film critics so often differ from those of the general public? Tony Scott tried to answer the question in Tuesday's Times, but I couldn't really figure out what he was saying. Here's my short(ish) answer, based on having spent much of my professional career as a film critic, my last post being a stint as the chief film critic of the New York Post.
Film critics really don't watch movies the same way most people do. If they're any good, they watch not merely for entertainment (though a critic who forgets a film is supposed to be at least entertaining is not very useful), but for craftsmanship, and at best artistry. All the time people would say, "Boy, you have the best job in the world, getting paid to watch movies," which was usually their way of saying, "How'd you luck into a job any boob could do?" The thing is, most people can't explain very well why they thought a particular movie was good, bad or somewhere in between. They'd shipwreck themselves after the first paragraph or two. A professional critic has to be able to write hundreds of meaningful words about what he sees. To do that requires real professionalism. Not just any yahoo can do it, but if you learn to read movie ads carefully, you'll see the same names from obscure media outlets turning up raving about turkeys. Those are the Any Yahoo brigades, and nobody should take them seriously.
So a critic tends to have higher standards than most casual moviegoers, because he or she is trained to watch movies closely. It took me a long time after I left reviewing to unwind while watching a movie, to quit analyzing it but instead just give myself over to the experience. But it's also the case that a critic quickly grows bored with this or that aspect of contemporary filmmaking simply because it's old news to him long before it is to most moviegoers. That's largely because in major markets, critics will see between five and 10 films a week, not counting film festivals. Normal people don't watch movies at nearly that rate, and can enjoy a trend long after the critics have gotten tired of it from overexposure.
This also leads to critics placing far too much value on novelty. I'll never forget how staggered I was to watch an audience filled with most of the major film critics in North America giving a film festival standing ovation to that sicko Todd Solondz' film "Happiness," which, among other things, featured a grown man's attempt to drug and anally rape a child played for comedy. (I seem to recall that some reviews later appreciatively noted the skill with which the director manipulated the viewer into rooting for the rapist to succeed.) Were these critics perverse? Maybe. But I think that reaction can be explained mostly by the fact that the director showed them something they hadn't seen before, and did so cleverly. Another example: I noticed that when I quit regular reviewing, which happened around the time I had my first kid, I became a lot more aware of the degree of sex and violence in many mainstream movies. I professed shock to my wife, who told me that she thought I had simply grown numb to it because of constant exposure, and was now like a heavy smoker who had quit, and was shocked to discover once again that things had tastes.
And it's also true in my experience that nearly all film critics are political and cultural liberals, and many of them don't have children. Having kids dramatically changed the way I thought about pop culture, and the movies. It injected a serious element of social awareness in my understanding of art. Nobody can bring to a film a perspective that's not authentically their own, but the perspective the individual critic brings into the theater will inevitably shape his reaction to the movie. Roger Ebert, for example, is acutely concerned with issues of race and racial justic
e, which in my view leads him to overpraise some films built around those themes. But someone else might say that Ebert understands and appreciates those movies more than somebody like me, who is more sensitive to the way religion is treated in film than most critics. In general, I'd say that quite a few film critics don't have a lot in common, culturally and politically, with the people for whom they write.
A final, minor point: because professional critics see everything for free, we can be guilty of overpraising small, worthy films. After I quit reviewing professionally, it startled me to think about how many movies I'd given three stars (out of four) to that I wouldn't mind renting on DVD, but that I'd never pay $10 to see. I think a pure critic would have said honestly what he thought about the movie, and not thought of his job as having anything to do with being a consumer guide. But I was not paid to be that kind of critic; I worked for daily newspapers, and people had a right to expect me to help them figure out if this or that movie was worth the price of a ticket. A more honest and truly useful ratings guide would have been to chuck the star system, and do one of three choices: "See it," "Skip it," or "Wait for the video."
Now, for all that, I do believe good film critics are indispensable. If you read widely enough on the web, you'll find critics whose tastes more or less match your own, and those critics can be useful in guiding you toward good films, steering you away from bad ones, and helping you to understand the art and craft of filmmaking. Every now and then I'd run into somebody who, upon finding out what I did for a living, would say, "If the critics loved a movie, I stay away from it, and if they hated it, I figure it's something I'd enjoy." My stock response: "See, we are helpful to you after all."
It's 9:30 p.m. here in Dallas, and it's 101 freakin' degrees outside. Wasn't this mentioned in Deuteronomy or something as a harbinger of the End? IJS.
If some moron movie studio would just buy rights to "Crunchy Cons," I'd blow the cash wad on a summer dacha in Murmansk. Or how about a waterfront cottage in Baffin Bay? How's the beer in Spitsbergen this time of year?
Right now in my living room, on the Daystar Television Network, a Pentecostal-flavored channel, they're having a live Israel-fest, with a bunch of Christians standing in front of a massive Israeli flag singing a klezmer-ish song called, "If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem." You can watch live here. It's ... really something.
As fiercely as I'm willing to stand up for Israel's right to defend itself by crushing the Islamofascist nutters, I cannot understand the enthusiasm shown by some on the Right for getting the United States involved in a shooting war with Syria and/or Iran. The war in Iraq has been a disaster for us. I hate to credit Paul Krugman, but his (unlinkable) column in yesterday's NYT -- a mere collection of hubristic statements made by the administration and other war supporters leading up to the Iraq war, juxtaposed with subsequent quotes stating the grim realities -- ought to have been a sobering bitch-slap to conservatives and others still addicted to the idea that if America wills it, it will happen.
"Grotesque" was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's characterization of the charge that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was responsible for the current Middle East conflagration. She is correct, up to a point. This point: Hezbollah and Hamas were alive and toxic long before March 2003. Still, it is not perverse to wonder whether the spectacle of America, currently learning a lesson -- one that conservatives should not have to learn on the job -- about the limits of power to subdue an unruly world, has emboldened many enemies.
Speaking on ABC's "This Week," Rice called it "shortsighted" to judge the success of the administration's transformational ambitions by a "snapshot" of progress "some couple of years" into the transformation. She seems to consider today's turmoil preferable to the Middle East's "false stability" of the past 60 years, during which U.S. policy "turned a blind eye to the absence of the democratic forces."
There is, however, a sense in which that argument creates a blind eye: It makes instability, no matter how pandemic or lethal, necessarily a sign of progress. Violence is vindication: Hamas and Hezbollah have, Rice says, "determined that it is time now to try and arrest the move toward moderate democratic forces in the Middle East."
Does anybody still believe this stuff from Rice? Anyway, Will goes on to criticize the Weekly Standard's crusade for an American war on Iran now as "untethered from reality." He's right. I wish we could have a nice, tidy little war with Iran, destroy its nuclear program, and be home in time for football season. But Iraq was a pushover compared to Iran, and we're bogged down there in a savage civil war (I heard on NPR this morning that an Iraqi man was killed as he went into a field to recover the severed head of a girl; bombers had booby-trapped the head with a bomb; and so it goes in liberated Iraq).
It is clear that at this time in history, if you don't want the Mideast to go over to Islamic radicalism, you'd better find a way to support the authoritarian SOBs running the place now. In December, at a conference in Dubai, I spoke to an American academic then living and teaching in Syria. He said that as much as the Syrians disliked the Assad regime, they much preferred the stability it gave them to the anarchy and violence in Iraq -- and they expected that that was exactly what they would get if Assad fell.
A reader draws my attention to this WaPo review of Nina Planck's book "Real Food: What To Eat, and Why." Reviewer Jonathan Yardley concedes that Planck's probably right to say that all the mass-produced, processed junk that fills the American diet today not only tastes mediocre, but is not all that good for us. But:
Then there's the social and economic side of Planck's argument, or, more accurately, the side she prefers to shrug off rather than confront directly. She casually asserts that natural, organic food need not be expensive, but market reality makes plain that it usually is. By and large, "real food," the virtues of which are self-evident, simply cannot be produced, distributed and marketed with the same efficiency and cost-effectiveness as industrial food. A mass market demands mass production. People fortunate enough to have nice incomes and to live near farmers markets or natural-foods retailers can treat themselves to the healthy banquets Planck so lovingly describes, but they are a very small minority. It is true that these people -- by their buying power -- have influenced producers and supermarket chains to improve the quality of their merchandise, but for most Americans, unless you're growing your own food on your own farm, you're being fed industrial food.
I don't think this is quite accurate. True, not everybody can afford to shop at Whole Foods all the time, and frankly, given the prices they charge, I wouldn't want to if I could. But that doesn't mean you can't afford to eat better on a more modest income. I went to a farmer's market in my hometown this weekend, and the prices were really, really good, even compared to the farmer's market in Dallas. Anyway, because we can't afford to shop at Whole Foods for all our food, we only make it a priority to buy meat and milk from there; we get fresh or flash-frozen vegetables from the normal grocery store. It also seems to me that we Americans eat much larger proportions than is good for us. I've noticed that when we've bought the relatively expensive beef roasts from our local Evangelical Christian organic meat producer, the meat is so rich that it lasts for a long time if you watch your portions. The point is, you don't have to be well-off to eat better than many people do now -- maybe not as well as you'd like to, but better than you do now.
I once stood in the kitchen of a friend who told me that it was all well and good for people like me to talk about eating better food, but families like hers didn't have the money to do so. And I'm staring at sacks and sacks of chips and cookies, boxes of Pop-Tarts, cans of soda and similar processed stuff piled up on her counters. That stuff ain't cheap, y'all.
...a Dostoevskian allegory for downcast converts who are fed up with the church, and wondering what it all means. This is sublime. Thanks to Reader John for the link to this passage from "The Brothers Karamazov."
The Senate says we ought to do research anyway on those embryos, which are just going to be discarded. Okay, so as long as we're starting to treat human creatures instrumentally, why don't we put death-row inmates to the stake early, just so we can harvest their organs and put them to use making sick people healthy. After all, they're going to die anyway. Right?
(Note to the thick: I'm being sarcastic. I can respect to a certain extent the pro-stem-cell-research views of people who don't believe that embryos possess moral personhood. The real cads in this debate are Republicans like Orrin Hatch and Bill Frist, who are pro-life except when they aren't, and logic be damned.
Lawrence Auster offers a crucial insight into our chronic inability to take the Islamist terrorists at their word, and why we can't muster the effort to see what is plainly in front of us. Says Larry, speaking truth:
They [Western elites] are not interested in understanding any reality outside their own world and the professional language in which they are competent. That way they can “assimilate” all phenomena, including Muslim jihadism and terrorism, into an intellectual and social system familiar to and manageable by themselves. For these intellectuals to acknowledge the particularity, the divinely based authority, and the sheer unassimilable Otherness of Muslim doctrines would mean the end of their liberal, rationalistic world view.
I've long thought that one reason conservative/traditionalist Christians are more hostile to radical Islam than most in this country is their understanding of the power of religion to make someone behave in ways that strike those who don't share those particular religious beliefs as irrational. I think many Americans -- and certainly the elites of left and right -- believe that religion is something subsumable within a more materialistic and rationalistic worldview. And on evidence, they're right: most American Christianity, it seems to me, has become entirely assimilated to bourgeois mores. But true believers understand the power of divine command. We Christians are expected to be willing to go to our deaths before renouncing God and his commands. Death is not the worst thing; rejecting God is. So when an Islamist says he believes God commands him to set up the rule of God's kingdom on earth in the form of sharia, I believe him. Utterly. If I believed as he did, I wouldn't be in a compromising mood either. We in the West tend to think that the Islamists really don't believe what they say, that it's just a pose, and what they really want is something else. This is what Larry Auster is getting at: we arrogantly refuse to take them on their own terms, and act accordingly.
US policy has turned to dust and ashes. ...Rather than a stable and democratic Iraq, Bush will leave Iraq a killing field. Oil-supply disruption will derail the world economic recovery. Nonetheless Washington must proceed according to the script of the strategy, which will culminate in US bombing of Iran's nuclear capability.
Spengler says not just US policy, but everybody's policy lies in ruins. Europe has failed to appease the Islamists. Saudi Arabia has had to come out against Hezbollah. Israel's best option is to return to :status quo ante 2000, when Ehud Barak withdrew Israeli forces from southern Lebanon." Iran will have miscalculated so badly that it will now suffer horrific consequences from the US doing what it has little choice but to do.
America's foolish belief that its democracy and democratic mentality could be successfully exported to the region figures large in the current mess, Spengler correctly observes. And then the conclusion:
The West should prepare itself for a war that will be prolonged and merciless. Iran's national ambitions are in play, but Islam is not a national movement, and Iran's plight will attract the sympathy and ardor of disaffected Muslims in many places, not least Western Europe. The medium-term consequences of US-Iranian confrontation might include civil unrest in European countries with substantial Muslim populations.
The central reality that we must all come to accept: You cannot appease radical Islamists. You can only destroy them before they destroy you.
Via Steve Sailer comes this astonishing bit of truth-telling from my friend Austin Bramwell, a young conservative lawyer who was tapped by Bill Buckley to continue his legacy at National Review. Bramwell wrote it in the July 17 issue of The American Conservative:
First, the conservative movement in large part exists to promote intellectual conformity. Few writers or scholars affiliated with the movement care to risk their sinecures (or their institutions' funding) by disagreeing too vociferously with the official movement position. Consciously or unconsciously, right-wing writers instead tend to suppress thoughts that may be deemed too eccentric or independent. Meanwhile, the movement selects and promotes the careers of young writers whose primary qualification consists of believing ab initio what the movement tells them to believe. One should not be surprised, given this incentive structure, if the movement has become increasingly bland, notwithstanding the usual humbug about how intellectually superior the Right is thse days. Blandness is part of the institutional design.
Second, those at the top of the conservative movement have wide discretion to set its movement's official positions. Bedrock or founding principles, whatever they may be, play very little role in determining what policies the conservative movement will embrace. Whatever may be said of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq, for example, they were surely not deduced from immutable conservative principles. Nevertheless, the signature achievement of the conservative movement in the past decade has been to rally -- or, perhaps more accurately, manufacture -- public support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. With just one or two changes in personnel, however, one could easily imagine events turning out very differently. Reckless or prudent, thoughtful or ignorant, the opinion-mongers at the top set the movement line; the other constituents -- the donors, the directors, and other writers and the consumers of opinion -- then accept and promulgate whatever positions the movement tells them to.
The terrorist dirtbags in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran have recently escalated their War of Total Annihilation against Israel, and they are doing so through their usual proxy attack dogs, such as Hezbullah, et al.
But none of that is surprising. However, it does have one unfortunate side effect: whenever Israel tries to defend its people, all the anti-semitic vermin suddenly start coming out of the woodwork, and already they are jumping into the comboxes at Dreher's blog. And, what is worse, these creeps are wrapping themselves in the mantle of Xnty.
Disgusting.
Rod is free to run is blog as he sees fit. But until he takes substantive steps to make absolutely clear that he stands against this pernicious, Marcionistic anti-semitism, I simply will no longer link to his blog.
I'm not sure how much more clear I can make it that I wholly and unreservedly support Israel here. However, I do not believe that criticizing Israel automatically equals anti-Semitism. That said, I think it's entirely possible that some of the combox commentators on the many threads I've begun on the current Mideast situation could be motivated by Jew-hatred, but I don't know that. If they are, it is disgusting, but I've got to remind Oengus and everybody else that I have absolutely no control over the comboxes on this blog. That belongs to the Beliefnet staff. If you believe Bnet's policies have been violated by something you read in the comboxes, don't tell me, tell Bnet. I've been trying not to respond to combox commenters who post outrageous, provocative or just plain cloddish things, because that only seems to encourage them. I don't read every comment that goes up, either. Again, if you think Bnet's policies have been violated, then by all means complain. But don't complain to me, because I can't do a thing about it.
Josh Trevino has an interesting analysis of why Europe is falling all over itself to castigate Israel for defending itself against the provocations of the same forces that ultimately wish to destroy European civilization as well. Excerpt:
Israel is Western — and if the West condemns it, it is not because Israel has broken ranks with the West, but because the West fails to apprehend itself.
The Israeli war on Hezbollah will continue, as well it should. In a sane world, there would no longer be any reason for civilized societies to endure the mere existence of Islamist organizations like it, like Hamas — or like the Mahdi Army in Iraq. But this is not a sane world. And so, when plainly evil entities are subjected to crushing blows and punishing assaults, and when those under threat from those entities complain about it, those prosecuting the war should take note — and redouble their efforts.
One of these days, I pray, the Israelis and the Palestinians will be able to lay down their arms and build a viable and peace-loving Palestinian state, side-by-side with Israel. But as long as radical Islam remains a force, that day will never come.
Ran into a fairly high-ranking military friend just back from a lengthy stint in one of the most dangerous parts of Iraq. N. has a lot of contempt for Rumsfeld and Cheney, and said that feeling is widely shared in military circles. But N. said we can't afford to leave Iraq now; as bad as it is now, to withdraw would make things much, much worse. N.'s view is that we Americans had no idea how thoroughly Saddam has psychologically devastated his country. People who think Islam is incompatible with democracy, N. said, might be right, but N.'s opinion is that Iraq's basic problem has less to do with Islam and far more to do with Saddam's having destroyed every mediating institution of civil society, and made his population entirely dependent upon the government. Said N., "People forgot how to do things over the years. They forgot that they can and should take care of themselves. It's what socialism does to people: it cripples them in every way. That's what's happened to the Iraqis."
Yes we are, said Newt Gingrich on today's "Meet the Press." It has mostly to do with radical Islam, and according to Gingrich, "we don't have the right attitude about this." He's right. We simply do not take the challenge from the jihadists and their state supporters with nearly enough seriousness. David Brooks lays it out in starkly realistic terms in his Times column today, which of course is behind the Times firewall. Here's the gist of his piece:
1. This Mideast crisis differs from its predecessors because Israel's main antagonists are not normal states or the PLO, but radical jihadists of Hamas and Hezbollah and the fanatics in Iran who support them.
2. In previous crises, things could have been solved by negotiation and reconciliation. Jihadists don't want to negotiate. They want to kill Jews, even if doing so means giving their own lives and starting a regional war.
3. Forget for the foreseeable future anything resembling a peace process in the Mideast. Arabs who sincerely want peace with Israel may exist, "but they are not running the show now."
4. Land for peace? Forget it. Previously, the idea that if Israel just gave up land, it would get peace. When Israel withdrew from Gaza last year, Hamas seized the opportunity to turn territory the Israelis gave to the Palestinians into a terror base from which to attack Israel. Hezbollah has now done the same thing with southern Lebanese territory the occupying Israeli army evacuated.
5. Conclusion: "The core issue is that just as Israel has been trying to pull back to more sensible borders, its enemies have gone completely berserk. Through some combination of fecklessness and passivity, the Arab world has ceded control of this vital flashpoint to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Bashar al-Assad. It has ceded its own destiny to people who do not believe in freedom, democracy, tolerance or any of the values civilized people hold dear."
6. "And what's the world's response? Israel is overreacting."
With that acid final line, Brooks damns the see-no-evil mentality that grips so many in the West in the face of radical Islamic evil. This is not a normal time. Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Mideast studies in the US, and a gray eminence who is now in his nineties, said earlier this year that he thinks the world is once again at 1938. History shows that the British were absolutely desperate to believe that Hitler wasn't as bad as all that, that he could be appeased. They were deluded. So are we. At least Israel understands the stakes: you cannot negotiate with these berserkers, you can only kill them before they kill you.
NRO's Andy McCarthy, responding to Michael Ledeen, utters a difficult truth:
Democracy promotion as a goal of national policy is fine and admirable. On the other hand, selling democratization as a complete, self-contained response to terrorism is nothing beyond a more appealing manifestation of the regnant political correctness that induces us to call this enterprise the "war on terror" lest we offend anyone by mentioning who the enemy is. Wouldn't it be wonderful to believe that the problem wasn't a religious doctrine but rather the denial of a great aspiration — freedom — that we just happen to be in a noble position to provide?
But it's a fiction. The terrorists don't want to kill us because they have been deprived of freedom. They want to kill us because they believe their religion tells them that is what they are required to do. It is why they continue to try to kill us even when they live in very comfortable democratic circumstances. Freedom is not a cure for what ails them.
...I admire the proponents of democracy. I am skeptical that they can succeed in the Islamic world, but I admire that they are trying, and I hope they are right. Nonetheless, as you have explained more compellingly than anyone I know, this is a war and it's gotta be fought like a war. A foreign policy in which paeans to democracy substitute for confronting hard truths about what is driving the enemy is not a winning policy.
Hizbollah and Hamas, and their patron Iran, have sworn to remove Israel from the face of the earth -- in those very words. Iran has defied the world community in asserting its determination to complete its nuclear program. Syria supports Iran, hosts Hamas and is a party to this malignant Islamic crusade. Behind them stand Russia and China and North Korea, and also apparently the international left which is lining up squarely behind the jihadists -- and has been doing so throughout the open preparation of this second holocaust. The left's favorite apostle Noam Chomsky only months ago was embracing Hizbollah's Hitler, Hassan Nasrallah, and his genocidal agendas.
So here is the issue: If you were Israel's prime minister, could you afford to wait until Iran attains nuclear warheads for Hizbollah's missiles? Or can you be sure it hasn't already been supplied such warheads by Russia or China through Iran? Could you afford to wait to see if Syria will supply the chemical and biological weapons it has cached for Saddam Hussein to Hizbollah and Hamas? Or would you proceed to plan B and obliterate them now?
While the Israeli prime minister ponders this question, leftists who are encouraging the forces of genocide -- Hizbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran -- might want to think how all the present bloodshed and the next terrible decisions that Israel must take to defend itself -- and their consequences -- will lie on their heads.
Israel knows that it is not fighting a standard war; this is a war for its very survival against the forces of Islamofascism -- forces that have not tried to conceal that their goal is not peaceful coexistence or a "just settlement" of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but the obliteration of Israel from the face of the earth. Given the complete hash the US has made of matters in Iraq, I have enormous reservations about us taking the fight to Iran. Israel, though, almost certainly doesn't have any choice. As I wrote the other day, imagine how this current conflict would play out now if Iran had the bomb, and was able to threaten Israel with the nuclear annihilation of Tel Aviv if Israel didn't submit to Hezbollah's attacks in the north.
Please do note: Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon a few years ago. Hezbollah promptly moved in and set up positions from which it now launches rocket attacks against Israel. Israel withdrew from Gaza last year; Hamas and other Palestinian radical groups used the territory Israel gave up to set up a terror state from which to launch rocket attacks against Israel. What is the lesson here?
If you don't believe Israel should exist, which given the facts on the ground now, means in practical terms that all the Jews there should leave at once, or submit to their deaths, then you will understandably object to the war Israel is now fighting against Hezbollah, Hamas and their patrons. If, however, you believe Israel does have the right to exist, I wish you'd explain to me how it could afford not to be pursuing its current offensive in light of the stakes, because I'm not seeing it. The nice, safe, moderate choice that makes everybody happy doesn't exist, thanks to the genocidal Islamofascism preached by Hezbollah (and its Iranian and Syrian patrons) and Hamas (which is the democratically elected government of the Palestinian Authority).
Here's the rub: her stories might be more palatable to modern Christians if she were just writing shock-jock horror stories. Frank Peretti sells, after all. That sort of writing goes down easier because we don't really believe it. It feels like someone else's world. It's alien enough that we're not truly threatened. But O'Connor's world is too close. And if her picture of dark grace is right, then our typical take on life fails. Since Victorian times, Christians have tended to picture grace as cottony and covered with rubber. Grace always comforts and smoothes our furrowed brows; it always, always wipes away our tears, so sorry for them. We believe God is all-good; He's pretty much a nursery-school attendant, pink and white, who doesn't want anyone to get cut. In fact, we're surprised when people actually bump their heads. Pain seems unnatural to us. It's a no-no, and God is on our side. He never touches the stuff Himself. In short, we believe deeply that all evil is bad. That's the heart of modern Christian faith. All evil is bad. It permeates our day-to-day lives, our work, our sermons, our struggles, our analysis of disasters. All evil is bad. And if so, then grace has to be Nice. Grace and niceness become interchangeable, and Flannery sees this as a (if not the) chief source of wickedness in the modern world. It's a lie about grace.
I'm an O'Connor admirer from way back, and I recognize the correctness of this judgment. I've had lots of conversations with non-Southerners about O'Connor over the years, and the point I keep making is that Flannery O'Connor was a stone-cold realist. I have never read a writer who more illuminates the world in which I grew up than does O'Connor. Never. When I read about Mrs. Turpin's (from the short story "Revelation") sitting in the doctor's office, I was transported right back to Dr. Gould's waiting room here in St. Francisville. O'Connor's characters and settings are as familiar to me as my own face -- and I never am more aware of that than times like now, when I'm back home visiting. And see, that is scary to me, because there is far too much Hulga and Asbery ("Azzberry") in me. All that intellectual pride corrupting my heart. I think about all the rough grace surrounding one here, and about how holiness is not the same thing as niceness, and how you can only equate the two by working very hard to remain blind. As I do. As most of us do.
Ralph Wood, I think, said something on his Mars Hill interview to the effect that as broken and guilty as the South was over its sins, because it was "Christ-haunted" -- not "Christ-centered," because, said Wood, if it truly were Christ-centered, it'd have a different society -- it was most open to conviction, to repentance, to transforming grace. I think that's true. It's strange to get to the midpoint in my life and to realize that despite all my young-man fantasies of living in Paris, in New York, etc., I really wouldn't be comfortable settling anywhere outside of the South.
Archbishop Milingo, who has once again left the Catholic Church and has gone back to the loving arms of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Excerpt from John Allen's exclusive interview:
Milingo added that he was "very surprised at how the Catholic church has spread so much evil against the Rev. Moon," and that he would like to be an "intermediary" between the two religious bodies.
Milingo claimed that Moon's vision for global peace and the family are consistent with recent papal teaching. He said he has been fishing three times with Moon, and was "very, very surprised" at Moon's "simplicity" and his spirit of "living for others."
Fox News blogger Father Jonathan, on the incredible courage of Regina Doman, the mother who accidentally ran over and killed her little boy in the church parking lot -- in front of her five other children:
Joshua's mother, Regina, stood in front of the congregation with head held high. It was the unassuming strength that comes from true humility. She started out like this, word for word.
“Every parent's worst nightmare is to lose a child. When you become a parent, when your child is born, you sit there with this tiny, vulnerable infant in your hand and the fragility of life overwhelms you. From that moment on, in every waking moment, you are vulnerable because you care so deeply, so very much about this little life intrinsically connected to your own. Every danger or hurt you encounter yourself is magnified because you see it on some conscious level as a threat to that little being who smiles up at you.”
That's how much she loved Joshua. This is how much she hurts now.
“What happened to Joshua was, literally, my worst nightmare. The one trial that I prayed that God would spare me from was hitting someone's child with my car. God, in His strange and mysterious mercy, has not chosen to spare me that trial. Pray for me.”
Several commentators in the comboxes below have deplored Israel for attacking Lebanon in response to the Hezbollah-instigated war against it. Lee Smith, writing from Beirut, says instead that all of Lebanese society has been ignoring for a long time the presence of an armed and militant Islamic extremist faction living there, and the threat their very existence posed to any stable peace in their country. Excerpt:
And yet the international community—especially the United States and France—has, over the last year, explained quite clearly that Hezbollah is a serious problem. Several U.N. resolutions, as well as almost every Western diplomatic initiative here, have emphasized the urgent need for the Lebanese government to disarm what the U.S. State Department calls a terrorist organization. Instead, Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and other national leaders have insisted that Hezbollah is neither a terrorist group nor a militia, but is rather "the resistance" and nothing but "the resistance." In other words, we side with the Party of God and agree that their arms benefit all of Lebanon! And then, this week, the democratically elected government disclaimed responsibility for the actions of Hezbollah, which is part of the government. The Lebanese are not innocent bystanders; they did not tempt their fate, they ignored it.
Here's the Dallas Morning News editorial send-off for Bishop Charles Grahmann, who turns 75 tomorrow. All you need to know about the kind of man the Bishop of Dallas is can be found in this passage from today's DMN story about his impending resignation. Behold, the man!:
The stalemate between the two bishops [Grahmann and Co-Adjutor Joseph Galante, who eventually resigned in disgust], along with continuing controversy about Bishop Grahmann's handling of sexual abuse allegations, led The Dallas Morning News to publish an editorial in November of that year calling for Bishop Grahmann's resignation.
James M. Moroney III, publisher of The News, went to the bishop's office the day before the editorial ran to tell him about it.
"He was very surprised, disappointed, upset to some degree," recalled the publisher, who is Catholic. "He asked me if we would reconsider."
Bishop Charles Grahmann spends an hour a day in prayer in his private sanctuary. He allowed this photograph to be taken in September 1995, five years after being named bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Dallas. Mr. Moroney said he replied that the newspaper would not reconsider. Bishop Grahmann, he said, "told me if he were me, he wouldn't want to have this issue to deal with when it came my time to face my judgment day. ... I felt like I was listening to one of my third-grade nuns at Holy Trinity."
We just got word here that Charles Smith has died of cancer. Charles -- I wish you could have known him. He was one of those wonderful characters that Southern small towns have a way of producing. Charles came from a working-class family, and lived here with his mama, Miss Lois, for all his life (he must have been in his early fifties). Everybody knew Charles here, and liked him, but given Charles's way -- let the reader understand -- he felt he had to have two lives: one in town, and one out of town.
And Charles's other life -- the aspect I saw, anyway -- was amazing. In fact, that's how I got to know him as a grown-up. In 1994 or thereabouts, I was invited to one of Charles's "Louisiana dinners" at the home of Carolyn Lochhead, a Washington correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. Carolyn's a Californian, but when she graduated from UCal Berkeley's journalism school in the late 1970s, she headed to the ends of the earth to get her start. That meant St. Francisville. As the editor of my hometown paper, Carolyn gave me my start in opinion journalism with a Man on the Street column. I was 13. Carolyn made friends with Charles when she was here, and stayed in touch all these years. Charles would go visit her in New York, when she was based there, and later in Washington, where she remains today. When I was working in DC as a journalist, Carolyn called me to tell me that Charles was coming to town to cook, and could I come to dinner.
Now, my Aunt Patsy, who is a fantastic Louisiana cook, had instructed Charles, and I had heard through the grapevine that he was a master. I looked forward to going. When I got to Carolyn's, there was Charles in the kitchen, his toupee a bit askew, sweating over boiling cauldrons of goodness, with a food writer for the Washington Post peering over his shoulder. There was at that dinner a White House correspondent for a major network, a Washington correspondent for German TV and his wife, and sundry other worthies from the Beltway journalistic elite. And they heaped honest praise on Charles for his magnificent cooking. More and more food came out of that kitchen, and it was like a minor version of "Babette's Feast."
I remember thinking at the time, What if St. Francisville could see Charles now? He has the cream of the Washington journalism elite at his feet. He's not much back home in people's eyes, but look at the esteem he's held in here. It was, no kidding, a beautiful thing to see. Had Charles left this town, he might have been a renowned chef. But he stayed here, taking care of his mother, cooking for people when he could, living a quiet private life. But on those culinary trips to Washington, he covered himself with glory. I wonder if this town has any idea of the kind of man they've just lost.
His cousin Evelyn was the one who called my mom with the news. Charles loved mustard greens, so yesterday Evelyn went to the farmer's market to get a mess. She delivered them to Miss Lois, who washed them and cooked them and brought them home to her dying son. He ate his greens, then went to sleep. He never woke up. It was, I imagine, a good death.
By the way, tomorrow will mark the 32nd anniversary of Roy Dale Craven's death. Roy Dale was Evelyn's little boy, and therefore another of Charles's cousins. If you pray, remember them both this weekend.
Michael Brendan Dougherty weighs in on Caleb Stegall's call for a new populism that returns real power to localities, and allows for the emergence of regional differences, and the return to a more nationalist sensibility (versus progressive globalism). Well and good, says Michael, but:
The problem is that there does not seem to be a social class out of which a more nationalist elite can emerge. The paleo-conservative thinker Samuel Francis proposed that Middle Americans themselves can provide the social base for displacing the managerial elite -- the dynamic economy of the Sun-belt, the cultural alienation and resentment and on and on it went. But Middle Americans lately tend to be a passive bunch - enjoying living under the cultural authority of Vivendi, Murdoch and other multi-national media corporations.
I think I'm a lot more pessimistic about the prospect for political change in the Stegallian mode, despite my deep sympathies with him, precisely for the reason Dougherty identifies. Most people, it seems to me, aren't terribly unhappy with the way things are. Yesterday I had several different conversations here in St. Francisville with folks about a new Mississippi River bridge the state just started to build here in West Feliciana Parish. The bridge is going to go in a few miles south of the town. Good, I thought, there won't be massive traffic going through the little town. And that's exactly the way some of the people I talked to feel about it; they think St. Francisville dodged a bullet. But others here -- and I suspect this is the majority position -- are excited that when the bridge opens in five years, they'll be 10 minutes away from the nearest Super Wal-Mart. They believe the decision to put the bridge south of the town was a foolish one. The idea that bringing more commerce and consumer convenience to town is not worth the sacrifices that would be made in the town's character is considered to be an elitist position by most people here, as far as I can tell.
Ross is also sympathetic to Caleb's position, but skeptical that it's workable in our current political reality. Like Ross, I really look forward to Caleb's forthcoming book on prairie populism. If Caleb can articulate a practical strategy for achieving these goals, and do so in a way that can appeal to a broad audience, he could make a tremendous contribution to the future of American politics.
And by the way, Dougherty bee-yotch-slapped a couple of anti-crunchies masterfully here. Anthony Sacramone of First Things somehow got the idea that people who complain about the current state of affairs from what might broadly be considered a crunchy-con perspective prescribe lighting out for the territories as a solution. Huh? I don't know where this comes from, but certainly not from my book, where I make plain that not everybody is called to live in a small town or rurally, and certainly not Your Working Boy. But writing as if anybody was seriously advocating that makes it easy to dismiss conservatives who wish to explore the disorders of modernity and how we might live better as crypto-Pol-Pot-ists.
Dougherty zeroes in on what I think is the key to so much of the contra-crunchy complaining:
The anti-Crunchies are the ones who believe in the end of history. Society is not the best of all conceivable worlds - but America right now in 2006 is the best possible world. And on Friday it will be the same or better. There are no new or old ideas that matter anymore, anywhere. ...The Ant
i-Crunchy argument however, always comes down to this formula: Caleb wants us to be rooted. Therefore he must want a constable guarding the border of every podunk country in America, beating the big city dreams out of children trying to get away from home with a 19th century nightstick - and he wants the federal government to pay them. This is not an argument. It's one step above saying Caleb wants trains to run on time Just.Like.Hitler.
"In particular, the Holy See deplores right now the attack on Lebanon, a free and sovereign nation, and assures its closeness to these people who already have suffered so much to defend their independence. ...The right of defence on the part of a state does not exempt it from its responsibility to respect international law, particularly regarding the safeguarding of civilian populations."
Hezbollah, Iran's proxy, used the safety of its Lebanon position to attack civilian populations in Israel. And Israel is supposed to just sit there and take it? Are the only good Jews those who go meekly to their deaths at the hands of cutthroats?
And what about the Lebanese Christians, most of them Maronite Catholics? Does the Vatican suppose they welcome the militant presence of the Islamofascists in their country, these terrorists who are bringing such destruction onto Lebanon? There will be no secure peace for the Arab Christians of Lebanon as long as Hezbollah remains a force.
UPDATE: No, I don't think that whatever Israel does is justified, as a general matter. And yes, I hope that things calm down there. But what I simply do not understand is why the Jewish state is expected to suffer unremitting terror attacks without responding firmly and forcefully. Israel has time and time again offered to negotiate a two-state solution, and for peace. Every time they make a concession, the Palestinians take advantage of it to press violent attacks. (As for Hezbollah in Lebanon, they have even less excuse). I just think that Israel, while certainly not sinless, God knows, gets a raw deal here.
Today I drove into St. Francisville to visit the farmer's market and to look in on Ellen Kennon. Actually I've never met Ellen, but I read about her in The Wall Street Journal. She runs her own interior paint and design business; her "full spectrum" paints, which eliminate black paint for more luminious and light-reactive colors, are highly prized by decorators nationwide. She's apparently doing a land office business nationwide from her beautiful little studio on top of the hill in this little river town of about 3,000 people. I find this incredible -- and very, very encouraging. As it turned out, Ellen wasn't in when I stopped by, but I did spend some time with her assistant Ellen McFarland, who told me that they do all their business over the Internet -- she didn't even have a brochure to give me!
Why do I find this encouraging? Because the Internet is increasingly making it possible for creative people -- artisans and merchants -- to live where they want to live, and to make a good living. Ellen Kennon has made a national reputation for herself, and she didn't even have to leave this town.
I should say too that Ellen's office is within the Shadetree Inn, a bed-and-breakfast she and her ex-husband Kenwood run. I got a tour of the rooms, and I have to say, they're really, really inviting. If you ever find yourself in this part of Louisiana, you really should treat yourself to a stay there.
Just think how different this crisis between Israel and its neighbors would be if Iran had nuclear weapons. Hezbollah is the Iranian proxy army on Israel's northern border. What if Ahmadenijad had the power to say, "Hands off Hezbollah, or I'll nuke Tel Aviv"?
If I were a betting man, I'd wager that most of the world, including most of Europe, would find that situation an improvement on current conditions. Which is why Iran will have the bomb one day, unless Israel can figure out how to stop them.
UPDATE: Rich Lowry blogs an excerpt from a new essay by Yossi Klein Halevi (which, alas, is behind the New Republic firewall):
The next Middle East war—Israel against genocidal Islamism—has begun. The first stage of the war started two weeks ago, with the Israeli incursion into Gaza in response to the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier and the ongoing shelling of Israeli towns and kibbutzim; now, with Hezbollah's latest attack, the war has spread to southern Lebanon. Ultimately, though, Israel's antagonists won't be Hamas and Hezbollah but their patrons, Iran and Syria. The war will go on for months, perhaps several years. There may be lulls in the fighting, perhaps even temporary agreements and prisoner exchanges. But those periods of calm will be mere respites.
Following up on Karl Rove's address to the group La Raza ("The Race"), Michelle Malkin wants to know why federal taxpayer dollars are going to fund charter schools that teach separatist agitprop to Latino students. Good question. But more broadly, I wonder what kind of guidelines exist to regulate the disbursal of tax dollars to charter schools. Could an Islamist academy qualify? A Christian Identity school? A black nationalist school? If there were a school founded for the sake of celebrating, I dunno, Irish culture and identity, would that qualify? Does anybody know?
Amy Welborn drew my attention to a story out of Canada in which a 40-ish self-described "yuppie" decided to abort her unborn child because the baby stood a good chance of being born with significant handicaps ... and she and her husband didn't want to take care of a baby with those flaws. They had wanted a perfect only child.
Here's a great response to C. Smyth, the woman who chose the abortion, and who denounced as "sanctimonious" the pro-lifers whose activism makes her feel bad about her choice:
No, it’s not the “sanctimonious” people who have made it more difficult. It is the people, the people, with genetic disabilities and “tragic flaws” who have made it more difficult. Sanctimonious persons like myself are only the messengers. It is their cry of humanity which has made it more difficult for you. You see, Ms Smyth, they want an answer to the “question” which you posed.
Unlike other oppressed minorities, they have few self-advocates. They do not stage demonstrations or run for parliament. They do not organize media campaigns or engineer public vocabulary. They do not file human rights complaints or challenge court cases.
And so sometimes the simple but unavoidable diagnosis is left for others to pronounce.
You do not want me, because you are selfish, and you are willing to maintain that selfishness at my expense.
And that, my friends, is a terminal diagnosis.
When I think of the future for my child and her peers, it is not the rapist, the abuser, or the paedophile whom I fear. It is the C Smyths of this world, who with their genuine personal tragedy, their understandable choice, deny the humanity of another and openly declare: you are not one of us.
And by the by, don't miss this account, via Touchstone's Mere Comments blog, of the Rev. Donna Schaper, pastor of an American Baptist church in New York City who admits that her choice to abort the baby she and her husband had named Alma was "murder" -- her word -- but that it was still the right choice and she doesn't apologize for it. Such cold-blooded savagery! And yet, Touchstone's David Mills adds this important and necessary fillip to the commentary on the Rev. Schaper's brutish moral sense:
I don't mean to sound particularly pious about this, but after reading such things, in which moral blindness is so horrifyingly displayed, I always wonder: to how many sins in my own life am I similarly blind?
I have a feeling that all of us in this culture -- liberal and conservative -- are going to be judged harshly by God for how we treated the poor and the weak, whether they are handicapped children living in the womb or poor children living in ghetto circumstances, or... .
I don't care how badly you think of Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco for the way she handled Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, she deserved your thanks for a veto she issued yesterday. The state House and Senate overwhelmingly voted to make some verse by a 72-year-old retiree the official state poem. Blanco said, "I don't think so, fellas." Here is what she spared us all from:
I spent much of the roadtrip today in the company of Ken Myers, via his most excellent Mars Hill Audio series. I played an older one devoted to the work of Flannery O'Connor. There was a fantastic interview with Ralph C. Wood, who teaches literature at the Baptist seminary at Baylor, and who has been a lifelong devotee of O'Connor's work. At one point, Wood said that a young Alabama writer wrote to O'Connor, who was by then famous, asking to where she might relocate to get the experiences that would inform her fiction. She must have anticipated O'Connor would say New York, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, etc., said Wood. In fact, O'Connor wrote back to advise the young woman to pick "any Alabama town that has less than 5,000 people in it."
Wood and Myers talked about the paradox of being able to see things universally by living in a parochial environment. Myers said G.K. Chesterton once observed that young people move off to the big city in search of diversity, then promptly surround themselves with people just like themselves. In a small town, Wood added, you know everybody, and everybody knows you, and while that can certainly be oppressive, you are held accountable to and by everybody else. And you run smack into people who are quite unlike you, and have to learn how to get along with them. And so forth.
I thought this was an excellent point, and one that convicted me. I went off to the big city (many of them, actually) in search of experiences and wisdom, yet I find the stories I keep coming back to in my own mind that have most deeply affected me and my worldview are all things that happened to me in this tiny Southern town, or that I observed here in the lives of my extended family and neighbors. Come to think of it, I've had so many people in Washington, New York, Miami and other places I've lived or visited tell me, after hearing true stories of life in the small-town South, that I have got to write a novel about this kind of thing. I don't know if I have a novel in me, but the older I get, the more I understand that even though I have traveled fairly widely in this country and in the world, my father, who is in his seventies now, and has rarely left West Feliciana Parish for any length of time in his life, has in a profound way that I'm only now getting old enough to understand seen more of the world and real life than I have. Mysterium tremendum.
I've been on the road to south Louisiana most of the day, and out of touch with the news. I just logged on to see that Israel is now at war on two fronts. God be with them. Hamas and Hezbollah deserve all the hell the IDF can pour out.
Being from the South, I grew up in a culture that had no real Jewish presence in it, but in which the Israeli military was considered an object of awe among men. I have an early memory of being at the deer hunting camp in what must have been 1973. I say that because Israel must have been at war, or having just concluded a war, which prompted the comment. I remember one of the good ol' boys standing around saying, "Damn, them Jewboys can fight." It was total admiration. I just thought about that again when my dad looked over my shoulder at the computer screen, read the story about Israel invading Lebanon, and murmured, "Israel's got balls."
That they do.
UPDATE: What we're seeing here is the consequence of Islamic fundamentalism in power. Hamas and Hezbollah (Iran's proxies) aren't provoking Israel for any reason other than that they want to see Israel destroyed. They don't want peace, and they don't want justice. They want dead Jews. Look at what Israel is facing this morning, and understand that that's what Islamic extremists have planned for the rest of us. Israel's war, in a broad sense, is also our own, whether we want it to be or not. Those who advocate throwing Israel to the wolves as a way of appeasing the Islamofascists are not only morally reprehensible, they are fooling themselves.
Bishop Charles Grahmann of Dallas will turn 75 on Saturday. He will be most remembered in this diocese for having presided over disaster after disaster involving pervy priests (check out Bishop Grahmann's legacy here, if you can stomach it). Given the agony of the Rudy Kos trial, to mention only the most spectacular of the disasters of his tenure, you might have thought his worst regret would have been not taking Kos out of ministry despite the "red flags" found in Kos's personnel file when Grahmann took office.
You would think. But how un-Grahmann-like that would be! Here's an excerpt from the special Grahmann newspaper section published by the diocese (and unavailable online):
If you could have changed anything during the last 16 years, what would that be and why?
First of all, when I came here I did not know the composition of the life of the church here, of the people. The very wealthy -- and then the very poor. I would have more forcefully challenged people to a conversion of heart. I would have challenged those with more resources to share them. I would have also challenged the concept of power and control, and invited people to unite as one body and serve everyone, esepcially the poor and the needy. Toward the end of my ministry here, I see how entrenched all of that is! That leaves me very sad. This abyss between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, is deep -- how deep it is! If I could have changed anything, I would have more forcefully challenged people to a conversion of heart.
That's beautiful, Bishop. I'm sure the family of Jay Lernberger, an altar boy your priest Rudy Kos molested, and who later committed suicide, will be so touched by your words.
This is the kind of pastoral sensitivity that Bishop Grahmann has become so well-known for here in Dallas. I swear, Saturday can't come fast enough.
UPDATE: A Catholic priest e-mails to say how breathtaking he finds Bishop Grahmann's remarks, saying that they essentially amount to Grahmann saying that he regrets that when he got here, he didn't realize how screwed up his flock was, and how sorry he is that he didn't do more to straighten them out. That's our bishop! Say, for another example of jaw-dropping episcopal vanity, check out this response from retired Bishop Timlin of Scranton to a recent newspaper series showing in part how he mishandled sexually abusive priests in his diocese. Timlin wouldn't talk to the paper when it repeatedly asked him for his side of the story during the reporting phase, and he won't talk to them on the record now, or take up their offer to give his side in an op-ed. But he phoned the editors to let them know how "hurtful" their series was to him and to "all Catholics." Good grief! It doesn't hurt, presumably, when your bishop lets pervert priests make sexual toys of Catholic children, but it supposedly grieves the heart of every last Catholic in the diocese for the local newspaper to point out the bishop's dereliction in office?
I recall you saying in your book that no one (or almost no one) preaches about greed. The pastor of my church regularly gives sermons on what he generally refers to as “more.” His latest was this past Sunday. For a listen at what happens at lots and lots of regular (non-mega) evangelical churches around the country, click on the “Greed” sermon here.
Crunchy update: Maryville, Tennessee. I stopped here for lunch on the way back from Gatlinburg where I vacationed with my in-laws. I didn’t want to eat fast food, more because of "Supersize Me" than "Crunchy Cons." I stopped at a local outdoor farmers’ market and asked the cashier where I could get some good, local food. Preferably Tennessee BBQ, of which I’ve always been a fan. She recommended Ruby Tuesday’s, the most popular place in town.
I shrugged, tracked down the market’s manager and asked him where I could eat that was local. He, too, enthusiastically suggested Ruby Tuesday’s, describing it as the only “nice” place in the area, a short drive away. We left (without buying their hypocritical vegetables) and walked to a local place a half-block away that served up a truly excellent burger. Looks like it’s going to be a long, uphill slog on the buy-local front.
Oh, and it looks like the U.S. is now importing the bulk of its organic food, trading fertilizer for jet fuel and marine diesel. Prediction from the land of the Formosan termite: the absence of pesticides on international organic veggies will bring in all kinds of non-native bugs, requiring more pesticide use on our shores.
As it happens, I'm roadtripping to south Louisiana tomorrow. I asked Julie to make me some tomato sandwiches for the trip, because there's no place to stop and eat that's not fast-food "Supersize Me" stuff. You know what we need? A guide, online or otherwise, to places where folks can get good, affordable, healthy food not too far off the Interstates.
I read Le Roy Barnett's letter ("Muslims, speak up," June 26) about Muslims' opinion on Abdul Rahman's conversion to Christianity.
Islam is not only a religion, it is a complete way of life. Islam guides Muslims from birth to grave. The Quran and prophet Muhammad's words and practical application of Quran in life cannot be changed.
Islam is a guide for humanity, for all times, until the day of judgment. It is forbidden in Islam to convert to any other religion. The penalty is death. There is no disagreement about it.
Islam is being embraced by people of other faiths all the time. They should know they can embrace Islam, but cannot get out. This rule is not made by Muslims; it is the supreme law of God.
Please do not ask us Muslims to pick some rules and disregard other rules. Muslims are supposed to embrace Islam in its totality.
Nazra Quraishi East Lansing
Well, leaving aside the content, it's hard to get a more pure and direct statement of orthodox religion: one fulfills a commandment not because of how one feels about it, but because God commands it. In this case, according to Nazra Quraishi, God commands Muslims to murder anyone who leaves the Islamic religion. This letter reminds me of the prominent mainstream Muslim leader in Dallas (I've blogged about this before) who told me and two colleagues over an expensive lunch that he believes in executing homosexuals and adulteresses because that's what God commands through the Islamic law. Simple as that.
What I would like to know is how many Muslims here share this belief in sharia? Lawrence Auster writes on his blog that "believing Muslims" should therefore not be allowed to live in a society like ours that's built on religious freedom. That's not going to happen, but what should the response of the broader community be to people like Quraishi? How should Muslims respond? In his latest column, Daniel Pipes points to recent surveys of British Muslims that indicate a substantial fifth column living in Britain. This suggests that the beliefs of Muslim populations living in the West cannot be a matter of indifference.
Tonight on PBS, the documentary "Tintin and I" will air. We're big fans of the classic Belgian cartoon journalist in our house (official Tintin site here; unofficial fansite here), and the DMN's TV critic was generous enough to let me take home a preview copy so my kid wouldn't have to wait up late tonight to watch it. I watched the film last night to make sure it was okay for a six-year-old, and I've got to say that I wish it had focused more on Tintin, and less on the life and psychology of the strip's creator, Herge'. I think Matthew's going to get bored with it in the first half hour, and will therefore miss the only dicey part for little kids, the part where Herge talks about leaving his wife.
The film was, to be sure, pretty interesting in its portrait of Herge', and how his life and personal psychology informed the Tintin adventures. He grew up in Belgium in the early part of the 20th century, and had a middle-class life he describes as gray and "mediocre." He started the Tintin comics while working in the 1930s for a right-wing Catholic newspaper, and his patron was an Abbe' Wallez, a cleric who sympathized with fascism. Herge' was never, apparently, a fascist sympathizer, but his working for a German-controlled newspaper during the Second World War got him denounced as a traitor (Abbe' Wallez went to prison for his activities). Herge', who died in the 1970s, describes himself in a taped interview featured in the film as a fastidious, moralistic boy scout. He married Abbe' Wallez's secretary. He lived out his adventure fantasies in his art, while leading in reality a very conventional bourgeois Catholic life.
Yet -- and here's where the movie gets interesting to me, for another reason I'll get to in a second -- at some point, apparently in the 1950s or early 1960s, he suffered a breakdown from overwork. Eventually he left his wife for a younger woman, and cast aside the Catholic morality he found so constricting. Near the end of his life, Herge' is heard extolling the student protesters of the late 1960s. What you're left with is a portrait of a good little Catholic boy who drove himself to the point of insanity by trying to be a pious observer of the rules.
This made me think about why you can find practically no more radically secular places in Europe today than Belgium and Holland. What was it about the Catholicism in which they were raised that they rebelled so radically against? A few years ago when I was in Holland reporting this story for National Review, I spent an afternoon at the University of Leiden interviewing law Prof. Andreas Kinneging, the intellectual leader of the Netherlands' small conservative movement. Kinneging told me that after World War II, the Dutch tried to put back together their institutions as they had been before the great trauma, but found that few people believed in them again. As soon as the first breezes from the counterculture started to blow, everything collapsed.
I presume something similar happened in next-door Belgium. I'm 39 years old, and the sort of person to resort quickly to anger at the previous generation for so thoroughly trashing our heritage, especially within the Catholic Church. But as is often remarked, things wouldn't have collapsed so suddenly within 1960s Catholicism in the US and Europe if everything had been okay in the 1950s. I guess I'm not really interested in wasting any more energy deploring the revolutionaries, and instead want to understand what made them revolutionaries so that those of us whose task it is to rebuild from the ruins they left us don't make mistakes that could lead our children and grandchildren to such a suicidal backlash.
Can you be theologically conservative but politically progressive? Of course, says Harvey Cox; in earlier generations of American Protestants, that was par for the course.
Spengler sees it coming whether Tehran wants it to or not. He quotes something I reported that a top Saudi minister said to the Dallas Morning News editorial board recenetly, and which I reported on this blog, to the effect that Iran must not be allowed to go nuclear. The minister would not even answer the question in the hypothetical (i.e., "Let's say Iran does go nuclear, what then?"). He refused to entertain the possibility. One thing I didn't mention earlier in this space was that my next question in the interview concerned the stability of the Shiite-majority eastern part of the Saudi kingdom, where most of the oilfields are. If Iran's influence is growing, especially if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, don't you all have a huge problem on your hands? I put to the minister.
Meanwhile, in the New Yorker, Sy Hersh has been talking to his unnamed sources, and they indicate that the military has serious doubts about the workability of a military solution to the Iran problem.
Pope Benedict went to Spain and said that efforts -- such as legalizing gay marriage -- that undermine the traditional family are a serious threat to civilization.
“In contemporary culture, we often see an excessive exaltation of the freedom of the individual as an autonomous subject, as if we were self-created and self-sufficient, apart from our relationship with others and our responsibilities in their regard,” Pope Benedict said.
”Attempts are being made to organize the life of society on the basis of subjective and ephemeral desires alone, with no reference to objective, prior truths such as the dignity of each human being and his inalienable rights and duties, which every social group is called to serve,” he said.
You really need to read Benedict's entire homily to understand what he's saying. It's quite profound. He speaks of the truths of the Christian faith as being something that we must conform our lives to, not something that we can reinterpret to fit our own desires. And here, the essential point:
Faith, then, is not merely a cultural heritage, but the constant working of the grace of God who calls and our human freedom, which can respond or not to his call. Even if no one can answer for another person, Christian parents are still called to give a credible witness of their Christian faith and hope. The need to ensure that God's call and the good news of Christ will reach their children with the utmost clarity and authenticity.
He means that tradition is not merely a human construct that we're therefore free to edit, but something that transcends us, and that preserves revealed truths and authoritative teachings faithfully from generation to generation. This is radical stuff. It goes against the deepest spirit of our modern society. We are free, Benedict says, to do what we like, to accept God or refuse God. But we are not free to pretend that there is no such thing as right and wrong. And that there will be no consequences for rejecting our patrimony.
UPDATE: To clarify further, this is a point that I hope fair-minded liberals will try to appreciate. When those of us who believe in the traditional Christian teaching on gay marriage speak up for it, I know a lot of you genuinely believe that we're simply theologizing our prejudices. What you should understand is that we don't believe we are free to change the teaching, even if we want to. That's what Benedict is speaking about here: that we don't have the right to alter what we've been given stewardship of. You are asking us to change laws that we don't have the authority to change.
Continuing the Chicken-Little-ism today, take a look at NY Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin's bit today declaring that World War III has begun. Excerpt:
It's not perfectly clear when it started. Perhaps it was after the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended. Perhaps it was the first bombing of the World Trade Center, in 1993.
What is clear is that this war has a long fuse and, while we are not in the full-scale combat phase that marked World Wars I and II, we seem to be heading there. The expanding hostilities mean it's time to give this conflict a name, one that focuses the mind and clarifies the big picture.
Well, okay, but does "World War III" really serve that purpose? I don't think so. Y'all have any ideas? And do you think Goodwin is panicking, or is he onto something? I think both. Anyway, it started in 1914. This phase of it is going to be the worst of all, I fear.
I'm late this morning turning in a piece to a symposium that takes up the question of whether the terms "liberal" and "conservative" have any meaning any more, and what other ideological options, if any, are out there. The reason is I keep completely rewriting my short essay. I was just about to send it in, when I read, via Amy, Richard John Neuhaus's reflections on the recent death of Philip Rieff. Now I'll have to do another revision. Here's Neuhaus:
For all the intellectual panache, however, there was something more sobering about Philip Rieff, for which the right word may be prophetic. While we were preoccupied with our therapeutic games, it went largely unnoticed that our culture died some while back; the ideas, habits, and traditions that sustained and vivified it have been shattered and can’t be put back together. Culture began with renunciation and ended with the therapeutic renunciation of renunciation.
Rieff, a Jew, believed that Christianity supplied the best bet for a sustainable culture, but that’s all gone now. In a 2005 interview with the Chronicles of Higher Education, he says he does not believe that an authentic religious culture could be resurrected, no matter how hard we might try. Following Marx, Weber, and Freud, he argues that modern prosperity, cities, bureaucracy, and science have completely transformed the terrain of human experience. People who try to practice orthodox Christianity and Judaism today, he says, inevitably remain trapped in the vocabulary of therapy and self-fulfillment. “I think the orthodox are role-playing,” he says. “You believe because you think it’s good for you, not because of anything inherent in the belief. I think that the orthodox are in the miserable situation of being orthodox for therapeutic reasons.”
I’m still reading the last book, but I think Rieff is saying that it’s all over. I don’t think he’s right about that. I hope he’s not right about that. But he could be right about that. At the very least, it is a possibility to be considered when proposed by one so thoughtful as Philip Rieff. Christ never said of Western Civilization that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
I think Rieff is wrong about orthdox religious believers. The demands of any kind of serious Christian or Jewish orthodoxy are so difficult in the modern world that I can't imagine anyone choosing to live that way because it feels good. But I can't get it out of my head that he's generally right about it being all over. Like Neuhaus, I desperately hope he isn't right about that, but the trouble I've been having with this essay has to do with not having much hope that politics can do much to arrest our fragmentation and decline. Yet I resist accepting that, because of its implications. It would bring us to the point that Alasdair Macintyre described in this famous passage:
It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead -- often not recognizing fully what they were doing -- was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conc
lude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another -- doubtless very different -- St. Benedict.
You look around at the peace and prosperity around us, and wonder, "What planet does MacIntyre and did Rieff live on?" But what both men saw was the metaphysical and philosophical structure of Western civilization having decayed beyond repair. Before dismissing them as hysterical pessimists, we should take their arguments seriously. One enormous catastrophe -- the Mideast going up in war, cutting off the world's supply of oil and collapsing the world economy, say; or an avian flu epidemic in humans; or Washington obliterated by a suitcase nuke -- would make our world and our prospects look very, very different, and quickly.
A few days ago I blogged about Obama's speech, and remarked that it's time we had a new conversation about religion and politics in our country. Christopher Lasch, writing at the dawn of the Reagan era, suggested exactly the kind of conversation we need. The whole thing is here, but I'm referring to this long excerpt:
Conservatives stress the importance of religion, but their religion is the familiar American blend of flag waving and personal morality. It centers on the trivial issues of swearing, neatness, gambling, sportsmanship, sexual hygiene, and school prayers. Adherents of the new religious right correctly reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics. They campaign for political reforms designed to discourage homosexuality and pornography, say, but they have nothing to tell us about the connection between pornography and the larger consumerist structure of addiction maintenance. Their idea of the proper relation between politics and religion is to invoke religious sanctions for specific political positions, as when they declaim that budget deficits, progressive taxation, and the presence of women in the armed forces are “anti-biblical.” As in their economic views, conservatives advance views of religion and of the political implications of religion that derive from the tradition of liberal individualism. Liberalism, as a Lutheran critic of the religious right points out, “means straining scripture to mandate specific positions on social justice issues, . . . bending the word of God to fit your political ideas.” The religiosity of the American right is self-righteous and idolatrous. It perceives no virtue in its opponents and magnifies its own. In the words of a pamphlet published by the United Methodist Church, “The ‘New Religious Right’ has. … made the same mistake committed by the social gospeler earlier in the century. They exaggerate the sins of their opponent and negate any original sin of their own. They have become victims of what Reinhold Niebuhr called ‘easy conscience,’ or what the New Testament describes as the self-righteousness of the Pharisees.” The most offensive and dangerous form of this self-righteousness is the attempt to invoke divine sanction for the national self-aggrandizement of the United States in its global struggle against “godless communism,” as if American imperialism were any less godless than Soviet imperialism. In the words of Paul Simmons, a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, “Identifying the Judeo-Christian posture with American nationalism is to lose the transcendent and absolute nature of the Christian faith. For Christians and Jews, loyalty to God must transcend any earthly loyalties.”
The proper reply to right wing religiosity is not to insist that “politics and religion don’t mix.” This is the stock response of the left, which has been caught off guard by the right and remains baffled by the revival of religious concerns and by the insistence—by no means confined to the religious right—that a politics without religion is no proper politics at all. Bewildered by the sudden interest in “social issues,” the left would like either to get them off the political agenda or failing that, to redefine them as economic issues. When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of “family values” for their own purposes, while arguing that the only way to strengthen the family is to make it economically viable. There is truth in this contention, of course, but the economic dimension of the family issue can’t be separated so easily from the cultural dimension. Nor can bigger welfare budgets make the family economically viable. The economic basis of the family—the family wage—has been eroded by the same d
evelopments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life. The family is threatened not only by economic pressures but by an ideology that devalues motherhood, equates personal development with participation in the labor market, and defines freedom as individual freedom of choice, freedom from binding commitments.
The problem isn’t how to keep religion out of politics but how to subject political life to spiritual criticism without losing sight of the tension between the political and the spiritual realm. Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice. But neither can it be dismissed as the work of the devil (as Jacques Ellul maintains in his recent writings). A complete separation of religion and politics, whether it arises out of religious indifference or out of its opposite, the religious passion of Ellul, condemns the political realm to “perpetual warfare,” as Niebuhr argued in Moral Man and Immoral Society) “If social cohesion is impossible without coercion, and coercion is impossible without the creation of social injustice, and the destruction of injustice is impossible without the use of further coercion are we not ill all endless cycle of social conflict? . . . If power is needed to destroy power, ...an uneasy balance of power would seem to become the highest goal to which society could aspire.” The only way to break the cycle is to subject oneself and one’s political friends to the same rigorous moral standards to which one subjects one’s opponents and to invoke spiritual standards, moreover, not merely to condemn one’s opponents but also to understand and forgive them. An uneasy balance of power now enshrined as the highest form of politics in the theory of interest—group liberalism—can be ended only by a politics of “angerless wisdom,” a politics of nonviolent coercion that seeks to resolve the endless argument about
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