Liberty, Virtue

An off-blog conversation with Alpheus leads to a query from him--if I put virtue first, and liberty as a second-order consideration, aren't my principles likely to decay toward the Gulag, the gas chamber, etc.? To which I have to say, yes, that is a danger, although I think all philosophical systems have their characteristic dangers. Yes, the Republic of Virtue can turn quite Robespierrian. First Withywindlish counter: the very exercise of rhetoric, of conversation, involves respect toward one's interlocutor, because the use of words submits one's virtue-ideals to someone else's judgment. Also, my stipulations of the Republic of Virtue involve freedom of speech within the polity--universal rhetoric, universal judgment of rhetoric, no physical violence to silence or to prevent judgment, and separation of powers to prevent the too hasty exercise of force, are all meant to inhibit the violent aspects of virtue. But, says Alpheus, shouldn't the content of one's virtue-statements also incorporate an element of self-doubt, so as to reinforce liberty as more than a second-order virtue?--and not simply rely on the external constraints of constitutional architecture and the character of rhetoric? Second Withywindlish counter: hmm, that's an interesting point. And my answer is! ... still thinking it out. This one requires some mulling. It may very well be that my system simply holds fewer guarantees for liberty than does liberalism, and that's all she said, but possibly I'll come up with some articulation that encompasses an ideal of liberty in a way to satisfy Alpheus et al. But this will take some thinking, so this is by way of advertizement to the world (!) that I have this problem in mind, although I'm nowhere near a satisfying solution.

(And they ask what blogs are good for. Why, this could be good for another article in a journal!)

On Homosexuality

Homosexuality is, of course, the third rail of academic conservatism—an economic conservative is vaguely understandable, a foreign-policy conservative tenuously within the realm of comprehension—but a social conservative? Someone who thinks homosexuality is anything less than OK? Shock, horror, oh, what a loathsome bigot, etc., etc. Well, no—and here I differ from Alpheus—I don’t think homosexuality is just OK, end of story. Why?—let us have a few preliminaries to approach the ground.

While I am inchoately religious, I belong to no denomination; therefore I am in no position to argue as a believer about any particular faith’s attitude toward homosexuality. As a sympathetic outsider, however, I do take seriously religious doctrine, and traditions of interpretation—and, indeed, the plain words in Scripture that condemn homosexuality. I have very little sympathy for people who dismiss religiously motivated opposition to homosexuality as unthinking bigotry—this is itself an unthinking response, which fails to take into account the overwhelmingly important motivation of obeying the word of God, and equally fails to recognize the extended works of theological exegesis that explain the condemnation of homosexuality in terms both of reason and of love. You need not believe such an interpretation yourself—indeed, if you are not a member of a particular denomination, or do not assent to the condemnatory tradition, disbelief would be the more obvious response—but not to take these faiths and exegeses on their own terms, not to regard them with respect—simply to say “They’re bigoted and I’m good and tolerant, yay me.”—I find an unappealing mixture of intellectual rigidity and self-regard.

Again, as an outsider, I also am dubious toward those attempts to justify homosexuality within the Jewish and Christian traditions. Yes, there is interpretation involved in various Scriptures—yes, we do not kill farmers who dig a pit such that their neighbor’s ox falls in—yes, indeed, the Abolitionist claim that the Bible proscribes slavery is distinctly less textually solid than the slave-owners counter-claim that the Bible prescribes it, and so American Christianity’s love of liberty has unmoored it from the text of Scripture long since, and is by now a longstanding tradition itself, in what James Kurth regards as the Protestant Deformation. Yet these latest attempts do involve the contradiction of plain Scriptural command. It is always a delicate subject to speak of faith—people take it very badly when you cast doubts on their propinquity to God, and it is so unverifiably personal—yet, as an outsider, I am somehow dubious that homosexuality and (in Christianity, in Judaism, in Islam) obedience to God, love of God, fit well together. The “justifications” seem remarkably close to “ignoring God’s word.” Now, all this is to taste—pacifists, say, are quite harsh about the exegeses of the Bible that justify state violence. Yet the various proscriptions, both in the Old and the New Testament, do seem remarkably clear-cut.

But I am not religious; my arguments about homosexuality therefore should take place in the realm of natural law, of secular interest and ideals. Before I go farther, however, I should say something about my general assumptions about human nature. Basically, I don’t believe in any innate human nature. I don’t believe we are naturally good or evil (well, with a proviso set aside for original sin); I don’t believe we are naturally homosexual or heterosexual, monogamous or polygamous, good-natured or bad-tempered, interested in science or humanities, liberal or conservative, naturally or essentially anything. We are radically mutable—babyhood nutrition and infant psychology transform us, so too do all the shocks and contingencies of youth and adulthood. We are self-deceiving, and like to invent memories of our unchanging nature, personal teleologies to convince us that the child really is father to the man, but it’s all hogwash. We change, change, and change again.

I therefore do not take seriously the arguments that anyone is essentially homosexual. The putative biological evidence is still scarcely a decade old, and liable to revision from the next few experiments—and does not take into account the arguments of history and anthropology. The incidence of homosexuality rose and fell sharply in Greek (aristocratic male) culture in the millennium from Homer to Periclean Athens to Christian antiquity, took different forms in each time—including a lover/beloved dyad quite alien to the modern American forms of homosexuality. What essence or biology can explain that changing frequency of homosexuality in one small area of the Mediterranean? The thousands of tribes studied by anthropologists have quite varied sexual patterns, including radically varying attitudes towards and incidences of homosexuality—much of it weirdly ritual in ways equally alien both to us and to ancient Greece. (See Gilbert Herdt’s studies in New Guinea and Melanesia.) What essence can explain the human mutability revealed by anthropology? Acceptance of homosexuality, and practice thereof, varies widely the cultures of the West and near-West: north European homosexuals of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century established a tourist archipelago in the Mediterranean in good part because the Mediterranean peasant cultures were more accepting than, say, the peasant cultures of Russia or Yorkshire, of allowing their young men to enter into homosexual liaisons. What does this have to do with biology? George Chauncey’s Gay New York is good on showing how modern homosexual assumptions are a cultural construction barely a century old—that the essential divide used to be between penetrator and penetratee, rigidly separated roles, and that the idea that the essential divide is the gender of your beloved is not much older than Gore Vidal, originally class-bound (working classes preserved the traditional penetrator/penetratee for more generations than the middle classes), and astonishing in non-Western cultures. (As I recollect, Chauncey has a fascinating passage on the extraordinary effects abroad of American gay porn videos, where the partners switched position.) Then there is the homosexuality-of-deprivation, in prisons and armies, which seems to have little to do with orientation—although there are overlaps, see the traditional view of the British boarding school. All of this argues that homosexuality is not any sort of essential attribute. I therefore reject any essentialist arguments in favor of social tolerance or civic rights for homosexuals.

Now, one can argue in favor of homosexuality as one argues in favor of religious freedom or political freedom—we are not essentially Catholic, Jewish, liberal, conservative etc., nevertheless it is an integral human or civil right to exercise the right to have such a choice. This argument is more persuasive—but it is liberal in its philosophical foundations, as I am not. Neither human liberty nor the pursuit of happiness is my touchstone; human virtue is. I believe that a broad range of liberties to pursue our several happinesses conduces to the greater exercise of human liberty—but that each individual liberty or joy must be considered in light of how it conduces to human virtue, and the survival of a virtuous, indeed free, society. Religious and political freedom is not an absolute either: when Catholicism did not recognize the claims of parliamentary liberty, England was right to repress Catholicism, and when that quasi-religion Communism asserted revolution against liberal democracy, the Western nations were right to repress Communism. Homosexual rights, as any other rights, must argue that they conduce to personal, societal, and political virtue, before they are to be accepted.

We now return to the mutability of human nature. I believe our characters are formed—but they are not formed willy-nilly. We are formed deliberately, by our society. Our society tells us what is approved and what is prohibited. Is little Johnny an ambitious, mercantile tot? The ambition can be directed toward drug-dealing or business school. Is Johnny bookish?—he can be a monk on Mt. Athos or a history professor in Swarthmore. Human nature is not perfectly plastic in the face of societal pressure—but neither is it set in stone against it. Furthermore, I absolutely disbelieve that humans in general will act virtuously without societal pressure. There is enough innate virtue in us that freedom is possible—but enough innate depravity (to speak nothing of fecklessness and sheer stupidity) that society must sanction certain behaviors. Many of us are not naturally murderers—but enough of us incline that way that we need the sanction of the death penalty and/or a lifetime in confinement to deter us from following our natural inclinations. (And even those of who are not naturally murderers have our passionate moments—mutability is the watchword.) Virtue comes partly from within, but it requires iron bars around the soul to be sustained.

This brings us to family bonds. I take family bonds very seriously. For one thing, families are the pattern of our society and politics: the shifting authority within the family, from authoritarian patriarch to egalitarian man and wife, is intimately related to the rise of democratic polities and societies. To change what the definition of the family is inevitably, if slowly, to change every aspect of our society and politics. The family, moreover, is the building block of civil society—the essential little platoon that mediates, supplements, and makes unnecessary the overarching reach of the state—the basic collectivity that presents our descent into atomized individualism at the mercy of a totalitarian and/or nanny (replacement mother!) state. The family is also the means by which society raises its young—educates them, gives them a moral stamp, supports them, loves them enough to prevent them from becoming young sociopaths. Preserving the family must be one of the highest duties of society and the state, so as to preserve their character, to prevent the descent into tyranny, and to raise the young.

But family bonds are no more natural than any other inclination of mankind. There is some natural inclination thataway—otherwise they would be impossible. But we are heedless, foolish, callous, selfish, evil, and we can wander away from families easily enough, never mind the damage to spouse or children, of our own accord. Family virtues also require iron bars—social and legal sanctions of various degrees of severity, to stamp family life with societal approval and to stigmatize each and every alternative. Tolerate fornication, tolerate adultery, tolerate divorce, and they provide a corrosive acid to the stability of the family tie—a sense that it is optional, that it is up to human volition. What other people do does affect how people behave. License is an attractive example.

Tolerate homosexuality, and you provide another option, and weaken family bonds. Redefine marriage to include homosexuality, and you are tinkering, unprecedentedly, with a critical institution that patterns our society and our state. I would on conservative principle resist a drastic, and all too likely irreversible, innovation of this nature. On the grounds of social science quantification—I know Kurtz et al and their opponents both have their spreadsheets, and frankly I am dubious that any statistics can “prove” an argument about something as complex and unscientific as society better than can common sense and intuition. I would say that the “oh, homosexuality correlates but doesn’t cause societal breakdown” doesn’t seem an overwhelming argument for passivity. So it’s only a correlation—well, since we don’t quite know what the cause is, perhaps limiting various civil recognitions of homosexuality will by-the-by address this root cause, and also, not by coincidence, reduce societal breakdowns. Besides, we do have precedent: loosening the legal and societal sanctions against divorce, adultery, etc., does seem to correlate with a fair bit of societal breakdown the last few decades—surely we should take seriously the thought that loosening the sanctions against homosexuality will have a similar effect?

Now, this is an argument of distrust on principle. We do seem, perforce, to be engaged in a regime of great experimentation, and the extension both of social toleration and legal rejiggerings in favor of homosexuals; we will see what effect it has on society. (Though what we see will be as impressionistic as our view of any other factor in society, and the arguments about counterfactuals will, inevitably, remain unproveable one way or the other.) While I do think it is wrong now to favor such experiments, I am open to the possibility that I will be persuaded by experience to endorse them after the fact. I am also afraid that all of Western civilization will be irretrievably destroyed by this (among many other) heedless experiments with the social fabric. With any luck, I won’t live to see such horrid effects—but who knows.

You will note that this argument against toleration of homosexuality is not specific to homosexuality, but general to all sexual options outside of marriage. (There is a different natural law argument that states that the pair bond of male and female is essentially different from same-sex pair bonds; this obviously contradicts my principles of mutability invoked in this argument, so I shan’t use it here. Though there may be something to it.) My own druthers are for a general tightening of the social sanctions—I have no particular priority in principle. In practice, it makes some sense to focus on holding the line on homosexuality, since the sanctions on that haven’t yet totally collapsed, while the others generally have. If the wave of homosexualist reform can be defeated, I would be glad to engage in a general reaction against heterosexual license as well—indeed, should the opportunity offer itself, I would be glad to focus on some moral reform focused on heterosexuality. Opportunism, indeed, is the crux of my political tactics on this issue. Since I do not think the political forces on my side of these issues are very strong, I don’t see that I have any choice.

As for the sanctions I would prefer?—I’m a very feeble-hearted reactionary. No death penalties for adulterers, divorcees, or homosexuals. I want the tax structure strongly to favor married couples, especially with children. I want some sort of tangible social disapprobation for all who indulge in extramarital sex. I want the higher realms of politics, business, and society forbidden to those publicly known to have so indulged, so that the spur of ambition can provide a perpetual incentive for continence. That’s about it—which returns us to somewhere between 1955 or 1975 in America.

A brief word on the usual arguments about character—have I ever been attracted to someone of the same sex? Was I a virgin before marriage? Don’t I really hate homosexuals? Well, I am anonymous voice on a blog, a discarnate text, making my arguments without benefit of ethos. The proper response, I think, is that you should make whatever assumptions about my character you find least credible, consider the argument, and judge accordingly. As for the equally tedious part where I say I know lots of gays and lesbians, some of my best friends are gay and lesbian, blah, blah, blah—well, even if true, it would be rather contemptible on my part to invoke such claims here. (The proper question would be toward my gay and lesbian acquaintances—ask them if they consider me a friend, not whether I consider them a friend.) A great many gays and lesbians would find it impossible to remain on terms of friendship with me once they knew my views—so too would a great many heterosexuals with similar political views. I do very badly at my attempts to be a very flinty character, so I cannot say that the reverse is true.

But the essential point is that I do favor some social sanctions against homosexual conduct, and non-recognition of homosexual unions in law. And the rest, I suppose, is words, words.

The Greek Fires

As a classicist, I have a special interest in anything that happens in Greece. I've been to many of the regions devastated by the recent fires, and I've been hearing indirect news from Greek sources that is far from good. There are credible reports of antiquities damaged or destroyed, and it is beginning to emerge that Olympia was not nearly so unscathed as was first reported in the world press. Note the first photo here -- the ancient stadium being touched by fires from the adjacent Hill of Kronos. Also just beneath that hill lie the archaic treasuries built by the Greek city-states for their dedications. I wonder what has happened to them.

Victor Davis Hanson, it seems to me, is greatly underestimating the possibilities for harm to the ancient site of Olympia. It sits amid pine forests planted in the mid-nineteenth century by Queen Amalia, who wished to provide the place with shade. Now Amalia's trees are gone, turned into pitch-pine torches that have menaced and damaged the antiquities they were intended to adorn. And the woods in which I once wandered, seeking (and eventually finding) the confluence of the Alpheus and the Kladeus, are no more.

Hanson also seems to be oddly blind in thinking only of the unlikely "dissolution" of the ancient stones. Even where marble is not converted to lime -- and forest fires so hot as to accomplish this are far from unknown -- the surface is discolored and the stone cracks. The heat causes shifting of the stones and of the earth itself, and walls can easily topple. Olympia, of course, is so well documented that the work of reconstruction will not be too difficult; funding for conservation and restoration will no doubt be readily available. But Olympia is only the most spectacular of the sites affected by the fires. There are reports of very extensive damage here, for instance.

And then, of course, there is the human cost: the deaths, and a hastening of the metaphorical death of the traditional villages of Greece. Many of the little villages of the Peloponnese are inhabited largely by the elderly and those who have deliberately resisted the move to teeming cities like Athens or Patras; their lives have not been easy in recent decades. Now they are even less so.

And all this is surrounded by politics. The fires were almost certainly set either by developers eager to occupy desolated land (property laws in Greece are obscure and public claims to land are very poorly enforced; a forest fire is almost always an open invitation for private seizure of state property) or by "activists" seeking to undermine the ruling party of Karamanlis in upcoming elections. In any case, the opposition has seized on the fires as a way to denounce the ruling party: a situation reminiscent of the politicization of Hurricane Katrina in the U.S.A. Meanwhile, Karamanlis and his people have a reciprocal incentive to downplay the impact of the fires: there have been vague but irresponsible insinuations that foreigners (which I assume means Turks, but might also mean Albanians or FYROMacedonians) are to blame. Greece's politics have always made a harsh land harsher than it has to be.

I'd like to end on an optimistic note, and this is not too difficult. Of course, Greece will recover. Greece has recovered from worse. In the long catalogue of the sufferings of the Greek people, these fires do not loom so very large, and the concomitant inconveniences of power failures and closed roads are par for the course in large parts of the country. Phrygana and asphodel will soon grow on the burned lands. Greek stubbornness will prevail. And, as Hanson points out, the Greeks have a tree, the olive, which not even forest fires can destroy. The olive is slow in taking root -- he who plants one of these trees plants it only for future generations -- but once rooted it is almost indestructible. It cannot be "girdled" or burned or merely chopped down; even a badly mutilated tree will put forth new shoots and begin to grow once more.

In 480 B.C., the invading Persians torched the Acropolis, and the sacred tree of Athena (which she gave to the city in her famous contest with Poseidon) was seemingly destroyed. In a short time, as Herodotus tells us, the charred stump had produced a long, green stem from which it could restore itself. The historian perhaps underestimates how long this took (a day, he says) but the essence of the story is no fairy-tale. I have seen Greek olive trees reviving after seemingly lethal fires.

Ethos, Lack Thereof

And now Sen. Craig joins Sen. Vitter on the list of tawdry Republicans. I have long wished for the Republican party to pass a rule prohibiting the nomination for state-wide or federal office of any candidate known to have committed adultery or to have been divorced. (I would accept a grandfather clause allowing current office-holders at this level to waive this requirement.) So long as the Republican Party continues to disfavor various civil recognitions of homosexuality, I would add homosexual activity to that list. Ethos, as always, is the issue--failure to live up to your ideals does not negate those ideals, but it gravely weakens your ability to persuade others to follow them. The list of divorced Republicans, adulterous Republicans, and closeted Republicans has become scandalously long. If we must choose between the ideals of personal morality and the current Republican office-holders, let us ditch the latter. There are tens of millions of Republicans in the country; I am confident that enough exist who combine competence, charisma, and continence to compete for all offices in all fifty states. If the party chooses to ditch the former--then they deserve to lose elections, although the country hardly deserves to suffer Democratic victories.

I prescribe no such rule for the Democratic party; their stated principles require no such personal virtue. I leave it to any Democratic readers of this blog to come up with analogous rules they favor for Democratic office-holders.

Justice League of America Endorses Republican Candidates for President

Batman, Superman, the Martian Manhunter, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Flash, and Green Lantern: whom do they endorse?

Batman - Rudolph Giuliani without a doubt. Urban crimefighters with an attitude--and a playboy side.

Superman - this is tough. Tommy Thompson had the Smallville vibe, but now he's out of the race. Not Tancredo--Superman is an illegal alien. I think Superman is leaning toward Mike Huckabee.

Martian Manhunter - for Mitt the Mormon from Massachusetts. Who strikes some people as a bit Martian himself.

Wonder Woman - Margaret Thatcher. The best choice then, the best choice now.

Aquaman - Duncan Hunter. No one's heard of him either.

Flash - Fred Thompson. The campaign starts late, but will overtake its competitors rapidly.

Green Lantern - John McCain, the Man Without Fear.

Goodbye, Gonzales

I have no deep thoughts either on Alberto Gonzales himself or on his resignation. I think it would be hard to say anything very interesting in any event: everybody seems to agree it was long past time for him to depart. The only debate is about whether he was a nice guy in over his head or a dishonest careerist who was willing to take dubious actions but unable to defend them. Since I was never very impressed by the "scandal" surrounding the firings of the U.S. attorneys, I incline toward the former view, but I can easily see how Gonzales's mishandling of that controversy could have convinced people that some dirty business was afoot.

So my only thought is this: the fact that Gonzales was appointed Attorney General in the first place reveals, for the umpteenth time, the fundamental weakness of Bush's approach to governance -- the insistence on good personal relationships above all other considerations. Gonzales became AG because Bush liked him. For the very same reason: Harriet Miers was nominated to the Supreme Court; Vladimir Putin's character and aims were badly misjudged; Michael Brown received a post he wasn't qualified for and a compliment he didn't deserve; the Saudis continue to get away with a thousand things they shouldn't; Felipe Calderon continues to exercise a veto over U.S. immigration policy; and the situation in Iraq was allowed to deteriorate for years because Bush wasn't willing to clean house. This is only a brief list of examples that occur to me at this moment.

I'm not saying that the human-relations school of politics (to which Bush's father also subscribed) doesn't have its uses. It's important for a president to be comfortable with the people who work for him. It's helpful for the U.S. when friendship exists between our leader and those of our allies (as it has between Bush and Blair, Bush and Koizumi). And, of course, grappling one's friends to one's soul with hoops of steel is probably one of the best skills one can have in democratic politics. Bush's ability to cultivate strong personal relationships was certainly crucial to his meteoric rise in the Republican party.

But once one is the leader of the free world, I think one ought to develop the willingness to sacrifice personal relationships for the greater good. As long as I'm quoting Shakespeare, let me put it this way: I can't shake the feeling that, if Bush had been Prince Hal, the final scene of Henry IV Part 2 would have turned out rather differently. Probably with Falstaff being made Lord Chancellor.

I Hate Poison Ivy

I hate poison ivy. Hate, hate, hate. Itch, itch, itch. Oo, I look a fright.

Trial Lawyers Are Conservative

A slightly heretical view among conservatives, but I think it's true. After all, trial lawyers bringing class-action suits allow for a private-enterprise regulation (with judicial oversight) of individual, malfeasing businesses rather than requiring a general, governmental regulatory regime that, I strongly suspect, would suppress overall economic growth to a greater extent. (This of course is the crucial question.) The fact that trial lawyers profit from class action suits is neither here nor there; it is a central conservative tenet, after all, that to profit from providing a service to society is no bad thing. I think the conservative dislike of trial lawyers is not only a bit hypocritical but also, in the long run, counter-productive; prevent trial lawyers from bringing suits, and in the long run the populace will bring grinding governmental regulation instead, much worse in effect. Now, perhaps the predictability of a regulatory regime is better than the unpredictability of a class-action trial lawyer regime--but this argument hasn't been made so much. Perhaps there should be some limits on damages from class action suits--but I suspect that any such limit will eventually lead to more pressure for government regulation. Perhaps one should prevent shopping for favorable venues for litigation--but the same reservation applies. In any case, I do rather think that businesses regard trial lawyers much as policemen regard internal affairs officers, with an understandable but unwarranted hatred. One dyad is both on the side of the law; the other dyad is both on the side of free enterprise and the conservative spirit. Slightly less growling is in order--with an eye to the even more unpleasant alternatives.

Goldberg on Vick

Jonah Goldberg is one of my very favorite opinion columnists, in part because he's one of the few pundits who regularly changes my mind or alters my understanding. Recently, for example, I casually agreed with the assertion that Michael Vick's crimes, while wrong, weren't quite the atrocities that some have made them out to be. Now Goldberg, in his latest syndicated column, largely persuades me that there is something peculiarly horrible about dogfighting and that Michael Vick should pay a heavy price. His thesis is that NFL quarterbacks are treated like gods among men and all men are like gods in the eyes of their dogs; by abusing both exalted positions at the same time, Vick has (Goldberg implies) taken on some of the features of Satan himself.

Timor Mortis Conturbat Me

In the 27 August 2007 issue of the New Republic, John Judis has an article called “Death Grip” (not yet, I believe, on line), which argues a great liberal/conservative distinctions—on the attitude toward death. Citing recent psychological studies by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski [SGP hereafter], following up on Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, Judis relates that inducing awareness of death—“mortality salience induction”—induces “worldview defense”—“their term for the range of emotions, from intolerance to religiosity to a preference for law and order.” They also tie this to awareness of 9/11 making American’s more pro-Bush, more pro-Republican—“Mortality reminders not only enhanced the appeal of Bush’s political style but also deepened and broadened the appeal of the conservative social positions that Republicans had been running on.” Of course, Republicans took advantage: “Bush and Karl Rove used the full arsenal of scare tactics to evoke fears of another September 11.” Judis narrates the end of his happy story by saying that the memory of September 11 is dimming, the reminder of mortality has passed with it, and so too may “the ascendancy of politicians who exploited the fear of death that lies within us all.”

I do not think I would have ever summoned up the courage to accuse liberals of what Judis eagerly (if implicitly) advertises—they have no fear of death. Their policies are supported by people who do not meditate upon their own mortality. Their “considered reason” excludes consideration that they too must pass on. They are grasshoppers living in endless summer; Don Juans who, asked to think of death, and the punishment of sins that follows, reply “Tan largo me lo fiáis … De aquí allá hay gran jornada.” [It seems so long to me [until then] … There is a great journey from here to there.] They do not think of death?!? Oh, statistically I can grasp this—increased life expectancy, reduced fear of the four horsemen, vast portions of the population become as heedless of death as a few teenagers were earlier. But people who lack worldview defense—liberals—don’t think of death? And they call themselves the reality-based community? Realists? Sober estimators of the human condition? I can barely understand this.

There clearly is mutual incomprehension—Judis refers to advertisements mentioning 9/11 as scare tactics and exploitation, while these seem to me to be simple reminders of the true and obvious, thorns to prick the populace out of lotus-haze, and remind them that the world is as death-haunted and fragile as ever it was. If you are conscious of death, to speak of fear apparently is normal; if you are unconscious of death, to speak of fear is grotesque, something to be explained, an insincerity, as to respond to the fear of death is irrational. The old Hofstadterian accusation that conservatives are paranoid must relate—“You’re afraid of death? You must be paranoid!” And the contrary accusation by conservatives that liberals are megalomaniac, think the world is putty in their hands to be shaped as they will—what is more megalomaniac than not to fear death? Religion—yes, obviously, a response to the fear of death. And if you are not afraid of death, then you do not need the solace of religion—but, my God, what sort of beings are these who are not afraid of death? Not saints, for whom the love of God provides reassurance in the face of death, but queer aliens, who never had this fear at all.

And then consider what the fear of death provides. Judis paraphrases Becker in The Denial of Death as saying that men defend themselves from anxiety about death

by constructing cultures that promise symbolic or literal immortality to those who live up to established standards. Among other things, we practice religions that promise immortality; produce children and works of art that we hope will outlive us; seek to submerge our own individuality in a larger, enduring community of race or nation; and look to heroic leaders not only to fend off death, but to endow us with the courage to defy it. We also react with hostility toward individuals and rival cultures that threaten to undermine the integrity of our own.

What an indictment of liberalism is here! No religion, no urge to produce children, no artistic impulse, no ability to submerge individuality for a greater good, no admiration of heroism, no courage, no hostility to threatening individuals and cultures—and all because there is no fear of death! And all this placidly proved by social psychologists, controlling for variables in statistically significant experiments, and all this complacently approved of by John Judis, temporary stand-in for the Voice of Liberalism.

It All Is More Complicated, Really. Some conservatives are fearless of death, some liberals morbid—but Judis’ picture has the ring of truth. The spirit of liberalism is unconsciousness of death; the spirit of conservatism is consciousness of death. And doubtless partisans on both sides will nod their heads sagely and say “Of course!—how disgusting to be other than I am.” I confess I am one of them—it seems to me there is something switched off in your soul if you are not conscious of death—a consciousness which—have they tested for this, these social psychologists?—is essential for compassion as well as for fearfulness, for how can you have compassion for other human beings if you have no compassion for their fear of death? And not just lack of compassion; lack of imagination, lack of, yes, recognition of reality.

And these are the ones who pride themselves on their intelligence and sophistication?

Mr. Mollett

Not long ago, I saw the extraordinary movie The Best Years of Our Lives, which deals with the struggles of servicemen who return home after World War II. Many scenes in the movie are powerful; one in particular has haunted me with its relevance to the contemporary debate over the Iraq War.

Each of the movie's heroes faces his own particular difficulties as he seeks to readapt to civilian life. One, a former airman named Fred Derry (played by Dana Andrews), finds that rank of captain and his specialized skills as a bombardier are useless in finding him employment; eventually he's forced to return to his old job as a soda jerk, where he's bossed around by a former assistant who became a department store supervisor by sitting out the war. Another, Homer Parrish (played by real-life veteran and double amputee Harold Russell) returns from the navy having lost both his hands.

At one point in the movie, Parrish, sitting despondently at Derry's soda counter, is accosted by "Mr. Mollett," an opponent of U.S. policy during the war. Sporting an American flag pin on his lapel, Mollett tells Parrish that the U.S. ought not to have gotten involved, at least not on the side it did, and that the American people were tricked into the conflict by powerful interests. Despite Parrish's obvious discomfort, Mollett persists, telling Parrish that he should -- I'm quoting from memory -- "find out the real reasons why you lost your hands." Finally fed up, Parrish erupts at Mollett, brandishing his hooks and expressing regret that he lacks the means to punch Mollett properly. Derry intervenes and decks Mollett; one of the men (Parrish, I think) tears the American flag from Mollett's lapel. Derry loses his job as a result. Walking on the street afterward, he remarks, "You hear about guys like that, but thank goodness you don't meet them very often."

That was then; this is now. These days, one meets constantly with people who are willing to tell American servicemen that their sacrifices -- in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan -- were the result of their government's wrongheadedness or deceit. They emphasize (as Mollett does) that they respect the men in uniform and love America; they are only outraged by the tragedy of a war that they think never should have happened.

The scene from The Best Years of Our Lives makes clear why this is, in human terms, a fundamentally untenable position. It is simply impossible to damn a war without attempting to deny to the people who fought it (and to their loved ones) one of the things they want most: a belief in the righteousness of their cause, a justification for all the risks and suffering and death. The delicate rhetorical line walked by opponents of the Iraq war makes this clear. Earlier this year, Barack Obama apologized for saying that "3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans" had been "wasted." "I never use that term," he later said. But why not, since that is so obviously what he means? If, as Obama claims, the Iraq War was wrong from the beginning, then of course the soliders' lives were wasted -- or worse. To say anything else is patently disingenuous.

I realize that this seems awfully tough on opponents of the war. From their perspective, it means that once a war begins the men and women in uniform become moral hostages -- it is so very much harder to oppose a policy when good people are dying for it that the situation seems unfair: how can the Bush administration first squander soldiers' lives (and those of marines, airmen, sailors, and others) in an unjust war and then, in effect, use those lost lives to perpetuate the injustice?

Well, that's the way it is. The time to oppose a war is before it starts and if a war is worth starting, it's worth winning. One lesson of Iraq may be that politicians in Congress should be less cavalier about voting to use force, but that's a lesson for the future. In the meantime, loyalty to America and support for the troops demand that politicians' energies should be concerned, first and foremost, with finding a way to win without unnecessary sacrifice. To seek defeat is, in fact, disloyal to the troops and is a kind of treason: well-intentioned treason, perhaps, but treason nonetheless.

Most Americans who watch The Best Years of Our Lives will have no trouble seeing in Mr. Mollett a traitor, even though he is attacking a war that is already over and won. One may object to the analogy between Mollett and opponents of the Iraq War on the grounds that Mollett is an Axis sympathizer: we all agree, don't we, that World War II was a good and just war? Well, in fact, there are still those who seem to have their doubts; there were many more of them back in the 1940s. Leaving them aside, though, what made World War II a just war? The fact that we were attacked? Then preemption would have been unjust? Would it have been unjust if the U.S. had intervened on the side of Britain or China in 1939? Was Britain, in fact, fighting an unjust war against a Germany who had never even directly threatened her?

What about the fact that our enemies were evil and our aims were noble? Many opponents of the Iraq War align themselves precisely with the Molletts of the World War II era either in ignoring the transcendant wickedness of Saddam Hussein (and the Iranian- and Syrian-aligned forces now opposing us in Iraq) or in unjustifiably imputing base motives to America's leaders. Just as the sacrifices of the troops give us an additional reason for wanting to win the war, they also give us a reason not to wish into existence a narrative that is morally prejudicial to America's cause. If someone wants to believe that Saddam Hussein's regime was not really so bad; if someone wants to believe that Bush lied about WMDs; if it would be painful rather than comforting for someone to believe the opposite of these things -- then that person's spiritual treason has already gone beyond that actually displayed by Mr. Mollett.

What the Mollett scene in The Best Years of Our Lives makes clear is that dissent is not always patriotic, even when it claims to be. Nor is it always possible to support the troops while opposing their mission. There must be a place for disagreement, even in wartime, and the Molletts should not be silenced or dragged off to prison. But there is no reason that the Molletts should not be seen for what they are.

Off to the City of Brotherly Love

Goldberry and I are off to see a few Egyptian exhibits in Philadelphia the next few days; hence no posts for the duration. I will doubtless return convinced that the Egyptians succumbed to too-rapid modernization, that a stronger defense policy would have saved them from the Hyksos, etc.

Praise for Television

I haven't been posting much lately. The approach of another academic year has turned my mind toward pressing concerns that tend to crowd out any thoughts unrelated to syllabi and lesson plans. At the moment, I don't even have the illusion that I can generate interesting thoughts. I'm expecting things will settle down again soon once I've completed the transition back to teaching.

In the meantime, I do still have time for television. Some television, anyway. I admit I've been a little bitter about the medium lately -- TV executives seem to have a genius for killing my very favorite shows. In recent years, Firefly, Arrested Development, and Veronica Mars have all died tragically young. Meanwhile shows I can't imagine anyone watching on regular basis have lurched foreward invincibly for eight or nine seasons. I'll avoid naming these shows; I don't want to make anyone feel attacked for being a fan of Home Improvement or Big Brother.

See what I did there?

Anyway, summer is usually a time when the "vast wasteland" of television becomes even more arid and inhospitable, and quality seeks refuge in burrows and under rocks to await the return of cooler weather and larger audiences. This summer has been no exception. Reading the cable listings has been like scanning the menu at a Denny's: there are so many options, and none of them are any good.

Except that a few them are good, and a very few are very good indeed. One of the most rewarding TV experiences of the summer has been ESPN's eight-hour miniseries The Bronx is Burning. Based on the book by Jonathan Mahler, and starring John Turturro as five-time New York Yankees manager Billy Martin and Oliver Platt as colorful team owner George Steinbrenner, the series focuses on the acrimonious public struggle between Steinbrenner and Martin in the summer of 1977. Chaos in the Yankee clubhouse is set against the even more turbulent backdrop of a New York suffering under record heat, terrorized by David Berkowitz, and distracted by blackouts, fiscal meltdown, and the no-holds-barred mayoral race that finally resulted in the installation of the colorful Ed Koch in Gracie Mansion. This is epic television, as thrilling in its way as the BBC/HBO historical miniseries Rome. And it illustrates, among other things, that history is often more exciting than fiction -- for a very simple reason: in history, as Aristotle pointed out, anything can happen, even if it defies all reasonable expectations.

It seems, even in retrospect, incredible that the 1977 Yankees should have managed, against all odds and despite occasionally dreadful play, not only to make it to the World Series but to win it, providing a much-needed boost to their city's spirit. In 2001, fate and Arizona's Luis Gonzalez denied the Yankees a similar win (and Salon now seems to be attacking the former mayor of New York for attending the World Series at all) but, for Yankees fans anyway, the ordeal of 1977 had a happy ending.

Now I'm not, myself, a fan of the New York Yankees. In fact, insofar as I have an opinion on them, I tend to think that they've won a little too often and are a little too full of themselves: it was a great pleasure for me to see the much-maligned Detroit Tigers steal the AL pennant from under their noses last year. But just as one can't watch Das Boot without rooting for the Germans, it's impossible to watch The Bronx is Burning without experiencing, vicariously, the agony and elation of a Yankees fan during the 1977 season. The first four or five episodes, it's true, were mostly agony. The climax, and most of the elation, will begin tonight, when the seventh and penultimate episode airs at 10:00pm EST. I'm giddy with anticipation.

It's Raining

It's raining outside.

Authenticity

I don’t like the cult of authenticity—you must be a member of such-and-such a group to speak for them, you must flaunt your sincerity, hypocrisy is the very worst of sins, etc. One reason I’m a conservative is that I don’t like the identity-politics variation of this cult. But this cuts both ways: I don’t much like a good deal of the conservative counter-attack on, in essence, limousine liberals. To wit: the attack on various rich environmentalists (e.g. Al Gore) for taking personal jets to appear at environmental events, hence wasting jet fuel, or the attack on various rich populists (e.g. John Edwards) for enjoying rich mansions while indulging in populist rhetoric. I don’t deny that hypocrisy is a (venial) sin; I don’t deny that ethos is a significant argument—and yet these attacks leave a bad taste in my mouth. John Edwards’ lifestyle has some bearing on his arguments—but we should focus on the arguments themselves. Likewise Al Gore’s lifestyle and environmentalism. Aside from the intrinsic merits of this approach, consider that what goes around comes around: harp on Al Gore and John Edwards, and then liberals can riposte (for example) to a strong-family argument by pointing at Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, or Newt Gingrich. We shouldn’t ignore the praxis of politicians when we judge their theories—but neither should we take their praxis as the only measure of their theories. And I know there’s a happy tit-for-tat warfare in all this, but I wish my side would engage in a little unilateral disarmament on this issue.

Gossip about Scott Thomas Beauchamp

Mere gossip about Scott Thomas Beauchamp. But fascinating gossip. As reported, the whistle-blower at The New Republic is another interesting character. Oh, this is all completely unedifying.

Mafalda Cartoons

The Argentinian cartoonist Quino created a wonderful comic strip back in the 1960s called Mafalda. Sadly, one really needs to read Spanish to enjoy properly. Nevertheless, a few links, si puedes leer y gozar.

On Hillary.
The Entelechy of Sartre.
Women's Liberation.
Perspective.
The Joys of Teaching.
The Joys of Learning.
Necessities.
Prozac.

Ethanol investments

Sugar-based ethanol is supposed to be more efficient than corn-based ethanol; it seems reasonable to believe that at some point a substantial portion of the world sugar crop will be devoted to ethanol. Ceteris paribus, this implies that the price of sugar will rise. A thought for long-term investment follows: buy stock in an American sugar producer investing in ethanol technology—they’ll probably be able to wangle a tariff, and get privileged access to the American market. A second thought: buy stock in sugar substitutes, since the junk food manufacturers will switch away from sugar when the price rises.

And take a trip to the Everglades soon, before they’re completely destroyed by the water-diversion and water-pollution from the Florida sugar plantations.

Where are the Federalist Geeks?

It’s dismal enough that Western tradition isn’t the main culture anymore; but I get really gloomy thinking that it isn’t even a counter-culture. I think back to high school: theatre geeks, computer geeks, art geeks, poetry geeks, even the odd literature geek—but no Cicero geeks, no John Adams geeks, no-one interested in preserving the main line of Western civilization. Libertarians and socialists, politics geeks, but not political theory geeks—people who will end up working for College Democrats or College Republicans, or as editors for The New Republic, but no one really up on their John Locke or Thomas Hobbes. I’d feel happier if there were more pimply young ’uns with glasses peering at dog-eared copies of The Federalist.

Maybe I went to a sub-par high school.

Teaching the Grim Side of History

Picking up on Alpheus' last post ... when is it appropriate to teach children about the dark and bloody side of history? Let's leave aside the question of what to emphasize about our own country's history, the vice or the virtue--when is it OK to tell children about wars, genocides, etc.? I was a precocious tot, and read books about World War II and the Holocaust at age six--I don't think this scarred me for life, but my wife is horrified whenever I mention this, and thinks the proper age to learn about history's horrors is much higher--20, 30, maybe 40. I assume the proper answer is somewhere inbetween--but when? Comments from readers with children especially welcome.

The Emperor's Birthday

Those who know me, know I'm worse than average at remembering birthdays. But for many years now, ever since I was a young teenager, August 15th never passes without some faint recognition on my part that it's the natal day of Napoleon Bonaparte. I don't really do anything, mind you, although two or three times I think I've gone to my neighborhood bakery for the pastry called Napoleon. It's just that on the day when Catholics are observing the Feast of the Assumption, I'm observing, in my quiet way, the birthday of one of history's great leaders.

What kind of geek would remember Napoleon's birthday? And why on earth would anyone want to commemorate, however lackadaisically, an egomaniacal imperialist responsible for so much suffering and death? I'm going to whistle and avert my gaze as I stroll past the first question. The second question is the one that interests me, and the answer is that when I was too young to know better I was sucked in by Napoleon's legend. I was impressed by his meteoric rise from obscurity; by the audacity and brilliance of his campaigns; by the astonishment he inspired among the rulers and peoples of Europe; by the final drama of his daring escape from Elba and the possibility that, if Grouchy had been more vigorous in carrying out his orders, the reinstated emperor of the French could have defeated his enemies at Waterloo and established himself anew as master of Europe.

In short, I was naive. I saw history as an exciting story projected on the screen of the past, and I reacted to it as if it were fiction and normal moral considerations and natural sympathies didn't apply. I also need to admit that there must have been some element of desire to be Napoleon -- to effortlessly command everyone's attention, to be loved and feared, to redefine the world merely by existing. Tolstoy, in War and Peace, described Bonaparte as someone for whom nothing outside himself had any significance, because his will was the only thing that mattered. Sadly, that's an attractive quality, and, like Pierre in the early part of Tolstoy's novel, I was not impervious to the attraction. As long as I'm being confessional here, I may as well admit that I even had one of the Jacques-Louis David portraits on the wall of my room -- not the one shown above but the one where Napoleon is in his study late at night: the famous pose with his hand tucked into his waistcoat.

I can still remember the moment that the attraction began to fade. I was maybe sixteen, reading a book -- I think it was Nicolson's Congress of Vienna -- that told the story of Napoleon's conference with Metternich at Dresden in the summer of 1813. Unfortunately, I can't find the relevant portion of the interview anywhere on the internet, but at some point Napoleon, roused to anger by the allies' demands as conveyed by Metternich, told the Austrian minister that he was perfectly willing to resume the war and that "someone like me cares nothing for the lives of half a million men." Metternich was silent for a moment, and then said: "If only the words you have just spoken could echo from one end of Europe to the other."

Napoleon's words certainly echoed for me. I began to realize that I was admiring a monster, a man who really had drenched Europe in blood for no other reason than to feed his own ego. It became plausible to me that the Napoleonic Code, the attempt to liberate Poland, all the good deeds that could be laid to the Emperor's credit, were really just other manifestations of that same ego. I began to feel revulsion where I previously previously I had felt allure.

It's impossible for me to recall whether I had really learned something new about Napoleon. It's a little hard to believe that I had't grasped the magnitude of Napoleon's egoism before, so maybe I was just growing up and beginning to understand the wrongness of selfishness and the seriousness of history. Maybe I came late to these awarenesses. I don't know. At any rate, the David version of Napoleon began to seem to me to be hollow and false; my vision of the Napoleonic wars began to be more like the one contained in paintings by Goya.

Sometimes, when I start to complain about the fact that history as taught in schools tends to focus too much on a catalogue of crimes and injustices, I try (not always successfully) to remember that my introduction to history was a little too romantic, a little too thrilling and glory-oriented. That had its advantages: it made me want to learn more about the past, whereas those who see the past as a long record of wrongs are naturally turned off to the whole discipline of history. But the disadvantage was that I often did "forget to remember" that past sufferings are no less real than present ones. And the danger that attends upon this is that someone raised in the "grandeur and glory" school of history might be a little too prone to see present events -- including wars -- in terms of grandeur and glory as well. Plenty of poems and memoirs about World War I attest to the fact that the moral dimensions of that conflict were not well understood at its outset.

The Fascist Temperament

The title of this post is inescapably misleading. Even with the most rigorous taxonomy (Stanley Payne), Fascism is a somewhat fuzzy concept; in popular (especially left) discourse, Fascism means Something Bad. Furthermore, what I want to discuss is a temperament I believe characteristic of Fascism, but also possessed by politicians in liberal democracies—sometimes to their nations’ benefit, for the temperament can well keep liberal democracies alive in wartime. It is a temperament not necessarily dangerous—but one whose characteristic danger is the Fascist temptation. Politicians who have this temperament ought to be judged as two-edged swords—terrible in the service of their nation, but able to turn on the nation as well.

What is this temperament?—I take the list not only from Stanley Payne, but also from Walter Houghton’s The Victorian Frame of Mind, which highlights how much of the Fascist temperament flourished in that boast of liberalism, Victorian England. A faded faith in God, that wishes to believe but cannot quite. An impatience with the everyday tedium of the democratic process, of small minds focused on their narrow interests, of the petty selfishness that opposes the public good—a wish, somehow, to set aside these obstacles. A similar impatience with bureaucratic process, for similar reasons. A love of force—Carlyle, Nietzche—that worships might as right; a romance of violence. A sublimation of the holy into the nation and the state—these the tools, and the end, of the immanentized eschaton. An annealing of individual difference into collective unity via these forces. An impatience with ideology—no programmatic ends, no clearly defined utopia; heaven the exertion of willful force rather than the goal for which the force is willed. Praise of the radical middle.

(I think the temperament of the messianic left is distinct. Yes, communism was left fascism, but still Robespierre, Lenin, and Stalin had a somewhat different temperament—more terrible, I would say, but distinct. Napoleon, perhaps, had the Fascist temperament.)

Obviously Mussolini and Hitler had something of this temperament—but so too did Carlyle, and so too, I think, did Kipling and Milner, and other exalters of imperialism in Victorian Britain. It is a characteristic of successful wartime leaders: you can see strands of it in Lincoln, more of them in Theodore Roosevelt, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle—and clearly this temperament was essential for their success as wartime leaders, for in war, the exaltation of national unity, the unreserved use of state power, the setting aside of legalistic process, the setting aside of ideology, all can be war-winning. Other emergencies also make this temperament useful: Fiorello LaGuardia had it, and used it to great effect as mayor of New York during the Great Depression. But it can be dangerous too—for what makes you good at dealing war makes you want to create wartime situations—to chafe at the protocols of peacetime, to erode them willy-nilly. Churchill was a loose cannon, deeply distrusted before World War II—and probably would have made a bad prime minister in any other time than total war. (His post-war premiership came in his extreme old age; he was not as energetic, or as dangerous, as he was in his impish glory days.) A De Valera, who also exhibited aspects of this termperament, preserved Irish democracy, but significantly deformed it by his religious devotion to nation and state.

And in modern America? I think both Buchanan (a De Valera manqué) and Perot had it, and America was wise to avoid their siren charms. I think, all in all, the neoconservative, national-greatness camp within the Republican party does possess this temperament to some extent—the paleocon accusation is not entirely unfounded. (Also their accusation that this associates with ex-Trotskyism—there is, I think, something about having been a Trotskyite and coming ideologically unmoored with correlates with the fascist temperament.) Their standard bearer, John McCain, I think possesses this temperament in part, and this is one reason he arouses unease among conservatives. (Although it should be noted that his defense of the Senate filibuster was a most unFascist defense of democratic procedure.) Not Giuliani—he may be a rough-and-tumble law-and-order man, but he’s not quite mystical enough to be labeled as having the fascist temperament. On the left? Not the Clintons—they have been venial and corrupt, and sometimes power-loving, but not Fascist—witness, most recently, Hillary’s defense of lobbyists, a defense of particularity of interest which is the heart and soul of liberal democracy. Barack Obama may be. That is, part of his appeal is as a pure, uncompromised leftist—but part of it, deliberately cultivated on his part, is apolitical--the rejection of politics as usual—and that, I think, exhibits a strain of the fascist temperament. The Alinsky heritage, a somewhat ideologically unmoored activism, may also correlate with the fascist temperament, though I’m less certain of that. Obama and McCain, together, are the current presidential timbers most fascist in their temperament. Neither of them very much so, compared with a Mussolini—but a little bit.

Are we Doomed?

For weeks now, I've been meaning to read Cullen Murphy's Are We Rome?. This intention has been grounded mainly in a sense of professional obligation; I doubt Murphy is going to shed any really new light on possible connections between the fates of Rome and America. After all, we Americans have been playing Murphy's game almost since the foundation of our Republic. One can hardly dip into the annals of nineteenth-century polemic without stumbling upon some facile analogy between the worst travails of the Romans and whatever transient phenomenon the classically-educated partisan was interested in decrying. This tendency continued well into the twentieth century, probably reaching its qualitative apex with H.J. Haskell's The New Deal in Old Rome and This Was Cicero. The reviews I've read of Murphy's book have tended to confirm my doubts by giving me an impression that the analogies Murphy draws are either obvious (fiscal crisis, unassimilated immigrants, overstretched military), merely cute (the sewage of Rome drained into the Cloaca Maxima; Washington's empties onto the internet), or informed by a distorting partisanship. I still have every intention of picking up Are We Rome? sometime this fall, but in the meantime I'm going to indulge the dispicable habit of pretending I know something about a book I haven't read.

And now I'm wondering if I shouldn't try to read the report mentioned in this Financial Times article first; U.S. Comptroller General David Walker, a Cassandra of long standing in Washington, employs the "we are Rome" meme to once again make the case that America's ship of state is about to break on the rocks of insolvency. In addition to his usual gloomy message, Walker adds warnings about declining morals and overconfidence in foreign affairs. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the report mentioned by FT anywhere on the internet -- it's certainly not on the GAO website. Perhaps Walker's "report" was merely a presentation to the gathering of journalists mentioned in this article in USA Today. In any event, Drudge has linked to the Walker story and the left half of the blogosphere is already a-chatter, with fervid discussions underway at Democratic Underground and the DailyKos. Conservatives, I suspect, will be slower to pick up on the story; the equation between America's prospects and the decline and fall of Rome has always had greater attraction for the party that doesn't control the presidency. Remember when Ken Starr accused Bill Clinton of trying to turn the Secret Service into a Praetorian Guard? The Fall of Rome is one of the few historical events that persists as a narrative, however hazy, in the minds of most Americans, so the attractions of using it to buttress the political arguments of the moment are rather strong.

Nevertheless, despite the dangers of false analogy in the service of polemic, I do believe in the basic relevance for us modern Americans of the story of Rome's collapse. Actually, I tend to think that all the great stories of decline and fall share notable features. Toynbee was right: all great civilizations die by suicide and, even if the means by which self-destruction is accomplished differ somewhat from one empire to the next, there must be a certain similarity in the cessation of the will to go on living. What really terrifies me, what really convinces me that America is in trouble, is the fact that the overwhelming majority of us -- right and left, rich and poor, Christian and secularist -- clearly have accepted the certainty that we are living in the eleventh hour.

Of course, there has always been pessimism; there have always been warnings that the end is near. But on the whole, America has been, from its beginnings, an optimistic nation. When Emerson assured Americans that their greatest days were ahead, that they stood "at the cockcrowing and the morning star," he was arguing only against the idea that the summit of glory and felicity had already been attained, not against intimations of collapse. Emerson's exultant view was quoted as still relevant by Lyndon Johnson in one of his most touching speeches as late as 1966. Even America's original fascination with Rome arose not from an eighteenth-century version of the idea that we were doomed to share Rome's fate but from the conviction that we had been born to restore Rome's glories in a more perfect form. The spirit that appropriated from Virgil the Latin phrases novus ordo saeclorum and e pluribus unum, and which wrote for itself the motto annuit coeptis, was fundamentally Augustan, and this spirit, despite misgivings, remained dominant into the middle of the twentieth century. At John Kennedy's inauguration, Robert Frost explicitly heralded "a next Augustan age...a golden age." Such rhetoric did not yet ring false. But it soon would.

To read Lyndon Johnson's remarks in Dayton, Ohio or Robert Frost's dedication to John Kennedy nowadays produces a painful sense of irony and the tragedy of history. Kennedy, of course, had a hole torn through his brain in Dallas and the medium of videotape allowed America to actually see the celebratory motorcade descend into horror: a new book by James Piereson argues that this was the event that shattered America's consensus politics for good. Johnson, preparatory to quoting Emerson, dwells on America's youthfulness: "we are getting a good deal younger by the year. Fifteen years ago our average [median] age in America was thirty...In another four years, the average age in America will be twenty-seven." He ends his remarks by quoting what he seems to hope is an inspirational letter from a young man drafted for service in Vietnam: "I can't ever remember being so frightened, but the plain fact is that I have to go -- because I want to go."

Today, the median age of the U.S. population is probably close to forty (according to the 2000 census, it was 35.3) and the young draftee's assertion that he wants to serve in Vietnam now seems half-hearted; we know what Vietnam, like the Kennedy assassination, did to the spirit of America. The quotation in Johnson's speech that rings truest, I think, for most of us today is a teenage son's words to his father: "Daddy, no matter what I do or how hard I try, there is not much chance that I can shape things for better or for worse." Johnson meditates on the dangers of anomie (though of course the rough-hewn Texan does not use this word), social disconnectedness, and the loss of national sense of purpose. Reading this part of his speech, we feel that it is Johnson's fears that best anticipate the future.

Now, forty years after the traumas of the sixties, the civilizational pessimism of artists and intellectuals at the dawn of the twentieth century seems to have spread to the whole of Western society and, of course, in becoming common it has lost its charm and its frisson and has become instead a dull, monotonous dread. This dread, evident especially in our political culture, was well expressed by Peggy Noonan almost two years ago: "a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming." The malaise associated with Jimmy Carter seems to have been only briefly alleviated by Reagan's "morning in America." The fall of the Soviet Union was met in the United States with surprisingly muted enthusiasm: a series of Doonesbury cartoons facetiously portrayed people dancing in Times Square but most Americans seemed surprisingly disconnected from their nation's largely bloodless triumph. It was the same with the First Gulf War: a sense of relief rather than satisfaction when U.S. forces prevailed with so few casualties. By the early nineties, the bitterness of our current politics was already visible, with the assumption made on both sides that things were very bad and the only question was whom to blame. The prosperity of the Clinton years was appreciated, but Clinton's attempts to create a national sense of purpose went unrealized. George W. Bush has fared even worse.

The same symptoms of anxiety and disconnection from a national identity are readily discernible in the later period of the Roman Empire, so it's perfectly plausible that we are to some extent reproducing Rome's decline. On the other hand, negativity about Rome's future reared its head in Latin literature long before the end. Livy wrote that the Romans of his time were able to endure neither their problems nor the necessary cures, and he spoke of his treatment of Rome's early history as an escape from a gloomy present into better, brighter times. Some poems of Horace bespeak a similar pessimism (the ending of Odes III.6 is especially famous in this respect). Yet these two men lived in what we think of a new dawn, with the golden age of the Antonines waiting far in the future. It's hard to know how widespread such gloom was in the first century B.C., but perhaps America too can still revive her fortunes even if, as the analogy suggests, it may involve some significant change in self-image (however disguised) and some loss of tradtional liberty.

Perhaps the equivalent of such a loss now seems trivial: after all, somewhere along the line we became used to thinking of ourselves as imperial, rather than republican, Rome. From that point of view, it might be a great relief to most Americans to believe that our private prosperity can endure even if our civic creed cannot. Unfortunately, George Washington is not known to have counted any vultures at the foundation of the United States, so we have no way of knowing exactly how many centuries we have left. As we await the verdict of history, there is a comfort in using the doom of history's greatest empire as a vessel for our fears.

Iraq War, Reading Arguments

Once again in a discussion about the Iraq War, on the comments over at Tim Burke's blog, Easily Distracted, once again giving my usual contracted pastiche of the arguments you would have read at greater length, with greater eloquence, with more facts at hand, in the National Review, the Weekly Standard, the speeches of Pres. Bush, etc., at any time since 2002. Once again facing interlocutors on the left who do not seem to understand the basic arguments of the pro-war case--never to have read them, unable to say anything but "I'm right, you're either stupid or irrational." Do people on the left never read the arguments of the right? Are they really unable to pick out the logic of the arguments? I think I know the arguments against intervention in the Iraq War backward and forward--I can say "I can follow the argument, and take it as internally consistent on its own terms, even if there are issues of fact, judgments of prudence, and judgments of human nature where I differ." I find it rather frustrating that my interlocutors on the left seem unable or unwilling to extend a like courtesy--that every time some discussion comes up, in essence I have to face people saying "Oh, there are no pro-war arguments," and then I have to spell them out again. After which they will still generally say there are no pro-war arguments. (I think this also holds on a variety of other political issues--affirmative action, abortion, etc.--but it seems particularly so as regards the Iraq War.) I find this aggravating--I include it in my reasons to prefer the right to the left, since the right seems often to have a greater capacity to try to understand the logic of the left than vice versa--but ultimately I find it bewildering. How can there be such lack of curiosity, such blankness? I know, I know, incuriosity is an essential part of human nature, we all have it, it's in the political right as well--blah, blah, blah. But, my God! How many times do you have to say "Just because Hussein was a Ba'athist doesn't mean he would never co-operate with Islamist terrorists"? Or, "the sanctions regime was collapsing, Hussein was about to escape from whatever minimal restrictions remained upon his freedom of action"? You don't have to agree with these arguments, but at this point you ought to be aware that they exist!

Evangelical Protestants and Israel

A friendly reader has put in a request for me to say something about Mearsheimer & Co., and their contemptible anti-Israel screed. I confess I don’t have anything intelligent to say about them—there work has been effectively demolished in various publications, and I have trouble imagining a reader who doesn’t say either “Of course Mearsheimer & Co. are cracked,” or, “They are so right!” Is there anyone actually on the fence or undecided about the (non-)existence of the All-Powerful Israel Lobby? I don’t think I have anything much to add on the subject.

But the request does put me in mind of something else—my discovery in the last few years of just how long-rooted is the tie between evangelical Protestantism and Israel. That is, I grew up realizing that American evangelical Protestants from the 1980s onward were staunchly pro-Israel—but there seems to be a far deeper background. There is a Christian Zionism among English Protestants, especially English Dissenters, that goes back at least to the seventeenth century. (For an overview, see Regina Sherif, “Christians for Zion, 1600-1919,” Journal of Palestine Studies 5, ¾ (Spring-Summer 1976), 123-41.) Part of this is an offshoot of millennialism—an urge to gather the Jews in the land of Israel once more, as a prelude to the Second Coming. But there is also a deeper sense of sympathy with the Jews—the identification of England as a new Israel, the recourse to Old Testament naming patterns, the shift of emphasis of a master-imagery and a master-metaphor away from the New Testament to the Old Testament nation of Israel, a sense that the purported purification and simplification of Reformed Christianity indeed brings Reformed Christians closer to Judaism. (I would add that, sociologically and ecclesiastically, the ministers of Puritan New England were something more like rabbis than was the Catholic priestly hierarchy.) Dissenters, marginalized from the Christian establishment, and often called Jewish as a term of opprobrium, were significantly more likely to have this sense of sympathy toward Jews. This was hardly unadulterated sympathy—the attitude toward Christ remained a fundamental difference, and the image of an English Israel, or an American Israel, superceding old Israel, could also conduce to strengthen old hatreds. Then Christian anti-Semitism was deep-rooted—and all peoples have a tendency to dislike strangers. But as compared with all other varieties of Christendom, English Protestantism, English Dissent, seemed unusually open to sympathy for Jews—to the ability to treat them as human—even to Zionism.

And then evangelical Protestantism seems to have been crucial not just for the latest stage of support for Israel, but at its birth. The Balfour Declaration was directly the work of a Tory Church-of-England man—but Balfour’s education was stepped in the Old Testament, in Christian Zionism, and this was a crucial part of developing Balfour’s sympathy for modern Zionism. More importantly, Lloyd George, the prime minister, was a (lapsed) Welsh Methodist, who had been raised (as he said) more familiar with the geography of Palestine than with the geography of England, his imagination and his ideals formed by Bible reading and the dissenting tradition to include a certain crucial sympathy for the Zionist cause. It also helped that Lloyd George led the Liberal Party, the home of non-conformist Christians, and more the creature of the dissenting Christian spirit than either its rival Tories or its successor Labor. (Compare the behavior of a Welsh Labor foreign secretary after World War II to Lloyd George.) Likewise Pres. Truman, recognizing the state of Israel in 1948 and hence crucially assuring its successful birth, resorted (among other influences) to the memory of Bible-reading in the American dissenting tradition, to the image that “I am Cyrus”—that all prudential decisions weighed in the balance, it was right and proper for a gentile to aid in the restoration of the Jews to their land. The skein of evangelical Protestantism has been associated with Israel not just in the present, but in 1917 and 1948—and in spirit, for centuries earlier.

Obviously, this is very far from the whole story. Britain and America had other reasons to aid Israel, commercial, strategic, electoral, and even peculiarly anti-Semitic; and non-evangelicals were also among those who helped establish Israel. (Even Stalin, by God’s providence, played a role in the midwifing of Israel.) It is also worth mentioning that the evangelicals who played a crucial role in establishing Israel were also anti-Semitic under any fair definition—both Lloyd George and Truman mixed their moments of friendliness and sympathy with Jew-baiting and Jew-hatred. (Let us not forget Nixon, that lapsed Quaker, another anti-Semite who saved Israel from destruction during the Yom Kippur War.) The evangelical Protestant attitude toward Jews was never one of monotone saintly kindliness, never free of the old hatreds. But at crucial points, it surmounted the hatreds—long enough for Israel to establish itself, and to survive these sixty years.

What lessons do I take from this? One is of domestic politics. Most American Jews are very suspicious of evangelical Protestants and the Republican party. There are a variety of reasons for this, but I would say that a meta-suspicion of Christian patriotism, on the whole a belief system hostile to Jews since the time of Constantine, plays a profound role in this. Now, I am sympathetic to old traditions, old wisdom, and old loyalties and antipathies, so I can quite see the point of saying you can’t expect a leopard to change its spots in only a few centuries. Nevertheless, the tradition of evangelical Protestant Zionism is a few centuries old—it’s not simply a construct since the 1980s—and I think this does make a difference in the weighing of alliances. I don’t think Jews should regard evangelical Protestants with sappy smiles as My New Best Friend—but I do think they should consider evangelical Protestantism as a tradition deeply impregnated with sympathy for Jews and Zionism—a sympathy of longer antiquity than either the sympathies of liberalism or Marxism, ultimately of greater help for the establishment of Israel, and therefore as trustworthy an ally as exists in this world.

Second, cultural. The decline of Bible-reading in America is the most dangerous cultural trend in the world for the survival of Israel. Lloyd George was a Bible-reader; Truman was a Bible-reader; God in his providence makes George Bush a Bible-reader. But in another generation? The decline of Bible-reading, the decline of evangelicism, bring with them the decline of the only sizeable religious community of gentiles with a tradition of sympathy for Jews. Frankly, the state of Israel ought to support Gideon’s Bibles—it’s the best cultural policy to ensure Israel’s survival.

I Love a Parade

For me, Sunday mornings are defined by a ritual that brings my girlfriend and me closer together and affords us great peace of mind. There's not much novelty or excitment in this ritual, but its very predictability may be part of its appeal. I think our week would be incomplete if we were to miss it, and I also like to think that it makes us better people.

I'm referring, of course, to making fun of Parade magazine.

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, Parade magazine is a periodical an insert that comes free with Sunday papers throughout the United States. Its cover stories are usually about celebrities or health issues, and the rest of the magazine is devoted to a series of features so puerile that their very existence would be infuriating if one were to attempt to take them seriously.

One such feature (for example) is Personality Parade, a Q-and-A column consisting of nine questions sent in by Parade readers. The questions are generally about celebrities from the world of entertainment, but often one of the nine questions will relate to politics or journalism. It is impossible to read these questions without concluding that they can only have been written by PR flacks or morons. They express (or purport to express) intense interest in the whereabouts, physical or emotional health, or future plans of "celebrities." I use quotation marks because many of the entertainers in question are totally unknown to me. But they are intimately known to the people who submit questions to Parade magazine. The typical question will include an expression of affection for the celebrity in question, and will sometimes explain why it is important for the questioner to receive an accurate answer. Here is a typical Personality Parade question:

I loved Ashley Judd in Eye of the Beholder, but my brother says her career has suffered since then from bad reviews for her risk-taking performance in Frida. I heard that Judd's role in that biopic got raves from the critics! Who buys dinner?

If you think for one moment that this is an exaggeration, then you have obviously never read Parade magazine. What's most remarkable about Personality Parade is that almost all the questions could have been answered by three minutes' Googling on the internet. The same can be said for Parade's other Q-and-A feature, Ask Marilyn, a column in which Marilyn vos Savant, whom Guiness used to list as the person with the world's highest IQ, answers all sorts of questions (e.g., "Are electric shocks from touching doorknobs more common in winter?") the answers to which readers could easily find out for themselves. Ask Marilyn also includes a puzzle and a Wordteaser. (Until very recently, there was also a feature in which readers submitted "humorous" answers to a facetious question posed by Marilyn. Even the best of these answers proved so stupid that the feature was quietly dropped.)

I won't dilate further upon the other mockable delights of Parade, except to note that its regular features also include recipes, a reader photo, a hilariously misnamed "intelligence report," columns about medicine and weight loss, a one-page profile of a B-list celebrity, and Laugh Parade (a set of three one-panel cartoons, one of which always features a St. Bernard). You'll just have to take my word for how wretched the whole magazine is.

And this got me thinking. How many people are still buying newspapers just so that they can make fun of Parade magazine? Come to think of it, my entire relationship to the local paper that we get every day is primarily one of undiluted mockery. I smirk at the letters to the editor, the local columnists, the nationally-syndicated advice columns, most of the comics page, and -- when I think of it -- the Jumble. In short, I'm basically a really bad person. But am I alone? Could it be that hundreds -- no, tens of thousands -- of other people continue to subscribe to newspapers only for the sake of feeling superior to them? Does this explain why circulation isn't declining even faster than it already is?

If so, then we may see even faster circulation declines in the near future, because Parade magazine is now available on line, a discovery I only just made this morning. (This means you actually won't have to take my word about the magazine's contents -- you can see for yourself.) And parade.com has additional features! Bill O'Reilly's Baby Boomer pop culture quiz! Additional photos of this week's InStepWith celebrity -- Cold Case's Kathryn Morris! A reader poll! I'm thinking we can just cancel our local newspaper subscription as soon as I can get to a phone.

Oh. Coupons. Newspapers still have coupons.

Irenic Commentary, Part 4

Then, finally, personal characteristics, to which one should not refer if one is being irenic. No, the right is not made up of paranoids; no, the left is not made up of megalomaniacs. Let me say that my criticism of the left is at heart self-criticism—a criticism of how I was. And what I was?—convinced of my own personal virtue, because I was a member of the left, and convinced of the evil and stupidity of the right. And not, I think, alone: I swam in a sea of hatred and contempt, and never realized it. Somehow, then, a slow awakening—that the very hatred and contempt I felt in itself argued against my claim to personal virtue, that the conservatives I met (Alpheus very importantly among them) were both intelligent and decent in ways that had been unimaginable. Various people have argued that this self-regard, this equation of political and personal virtue, is a natural (or even necessary) consequence of the Enlightenment idolization of man. Whether it is or no, it was true of me as a man of the left, and I confess I perceive it as endemic among the left as it is now. It is also a sin of the Right—a human sin—and perhaps since I have lived among the left all my life, I am insufficiently aware of equal self-regard, equal hatred and contempt, among conservatives. But it is the left’s loathing for the right, that I know from my own heart, that is my problem with the character of the left.

Irenic Commentary, Part 3

What else is wrong with the left? Economics. Here we have another tangled issue, replete with the resort to different skeins of facts. But I think what one should say is that a central issue of politics is simple, physical well being—are you better off than you were four years ago? What simple pleasures can you afford? What will provide better for your old age, and provide your children better futures? Now, when I look at all this, I remember how deeply entangled the left was with Marxist economics and dreams, and how much of the current, more chastened policy prescriptions derive from the original Marxist goals. And here I recollect that the first great goal of Marxism was better economic growth—the contention that capitalism could not provide, that the communist system would provide superior living conditions. I then note that, as Marxism proved so disastrous an economic failure, the language of the left shifted from an emphasis on economic growth to an emphasis on economic distribution—never absent from the left’s discourse, obviously, but previously in more minor key. And this shift in language, still present, is to me an acknowledgment of the left’s failure at economics—it prefers to boast of its superiority at achieving redistribution, and this is a measure of its incapacity to achieve economic growth. And economic growth—a fancy abstraction for physical well-being—is fundamental.

Now, to say that the democratic left is entangled in the residue of Marxist economic thought is not the entire point at issue: slippery-slopes are relevant, but one should acknowledge a debate between the issues at hand in America—proposals of mild variations in the degree of government intervention in a capitalist welfare state. (This to the frustration of libertarians and socialists alike.) Here I must point to my interpretations of four separate realms of historical fact, none of which are uncontested.

First, my reading in the birth of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, where I take the liberation of the economy from state intervention, the formation of the free-trade and capitalist nexus, to have brought about the decisive improvement in the living standards of humanity. This thesis is, of course, fiercely contested among historians—and was sharply attacked by Marxist historians for a generation, eager to show that the great triumph of capitalism was anything but. Here I would say that the role of the British state in forwarding the industrial revolution is inarguable—I am no libertarian. I would also say that the immiseration of the poorest of the poor was considerable—I am no Pollyanna. Yet when all the historical back and forth is done, the arguments of a rising standard of living (see Ashton vs. Hobsbawm), as the fruit of free trade and capitalism, seem inarguable.

Second, the history of American economic policy in the twentieth century. Here I tip my hat to Paul Johnson, in whose Modern Times I first read articulated the general thesis that American prosperity was generally built on the free-market, low tax, Republican policies of the 1920s, the 1950s, and the 1980s. The welfare state may have saved capitalism in the 1930s; the Great Society may have lifted two-thirds of the remaining poor out of poverty in the 1960s (although continuing economic growth played its part); but it was the removal of government from the economy that provided the crucial means by which the great advances in the American living standard progressed in the twentieth century.

Third, my experience reading newspaper headlines since the 1980s—predictions right and left about the economic effect of particular policies, vs. the actual results. These are always a mixed bag, but the cumulative impression is quite impressive: predictions on the left of economic disaster at the prospect of Republican economic policies, generally not borne out, and predictions of economic Pollyanna on the part of the right—imperfectly fulfilled, but more right than not. The Clinton years present something of the reverse impression—predictions of disaster on the part of the right at the thought of tax increases, assuredly not borne out. Yet that aside, one gets the further impression of the Clinton administration as largely preserving the Reagan Revolution—only tinkering at the edges—and thus in essence building prosperity by Republican means. (I will freely grant that a liberal might draw very different conclusions about the Clinton years!) But all in all, my lifetime has made me far more amenable to endorsing Republican economic policies.

Fourthly, my experience living in New York. Here the debate has been more between right-Democrats and left-Democrats—Giuliani and Bloomberg really should be considered right-Democrats—but it is the same tension about the relative of intrusion of the government into the economy. Again, Koch, Giuliani, and Bloomberg between them restrained the intrusion of the state, and encouraged the growth of private enterprise—and I have seen my city transformed from seedy near-desperation to vibrant recovery. Every day I see the fruits of unleashed free enterprise, and every day I cherish it more.

And for all of these cases, I see the left as having been unenthusiastic about the role of free enterprise, unwilling to give it priority, unwilling to grant it priority—either undervaluing its importance as a motor of economic growth, or unwilling to give priority in its economic policy to economic growth. This perception doubtless contradictable by another skein of facts; but this is the skein to which I refer.

Irenic Commentary, Part 2

This question of intellectual vocabulary in turn leads to considerations of “hope” and “prudence”—key words, not least in foreign policy. Intellectual vocabulary leads to a consideration of the nature of man, as individual and collective, hence to a judgment of what is an achievable policy aspiration and what is not. Now, the usual fighting lines have been upended since 2003—the conservative denunciation of a utopian left, whose dangerous dreams ought to be tempered with prudence, is now happily reversed. Now, I do think that prudence is essentially an un-Enlightened concept—Aristotelian phronesis, Burkean prudence, and that for the left even to use the concept is to become entangled in conservative ways of thought in ways that will drag them more quickly from the Enlightenment than they now realize. But prudence and hope are to some extent universal—the question is, on what judgment of man do you base them on? There is, I think, a conservative intuition—Jewish, Christian—that both sin and virtue exist in man, positive and dynamic, and that both prudence and hope should take into account the dynamism of the urge to evil and the urge to good. Various of what I take to be the left’s feeble responses to political dangers abroad is, I think, a prudential judgment of danger and threat shorn of a sense of the dynamism of evil. Likewise, the prudential urge to passivity (and this is very much a conservative failing as well—see Ron Paul) is a judgment shorn of a sense of the dynamism of virtue. And perhaps, in all this, a too-placid sense of progressive, Whiggish history, with a muted sense of the abrupt contingency of human affairs, that again alters judgments of hope and prudence. Here my recourse to history is above all the Cold War, where I think the right had rather the better of the judgments of hope and prudence than did the left, precisely because of their accurate perception of the dynamism of sin and virtue. The jury is still out on how the Iraq War will end—but my own judgments of hope and prudence there are indeed based on this dynamic sense of sin and virtue, and I do rather think the lessons I draw from history will continue to apply. But we will see.

The British Navy Endures

Britain will construct two new aircraft carriers. I am very glad for purely sentimental reasons that the British navy is not yet reduced to a coast-guard--that even the relatively left-wing Gordon Brown believes the projection of British military force a priority.

As for Britain's long-term military plans ... I gather that the combination of Tony Blair intervening in Iraq and Afghanistan and Gordon Brown (as chancellor of the exchequer) refusing to spend more money on the armed forces has led to a terrifying hollowing out of the British armed forces, with all services cut to the bone to pay for deployment overseas. One gathers that France, by dint of not putting itself through the wringer the last few years, is now, marginally, the strongest military power in Western Europe--perhaps, all in all, the second-strongest military power in the world. (This is an apples-and-oranges question, but Russia and China have grave weaknesses in their military, and France may be slightly more capable than Japan, by dint of spending a much greater proportion of its GNP on the armed forces.) But Gordon Brown's decision is a commitment to ensure that Britain's current difficulties will be temporary, that it's armed forces will remain capable, on roughly French levels, in the medium- and long-term. (A CV implies a certain amount of air and naval strength in support, and a CV makes possible intervention by ground troops far away, hence justifying an army of a certain size.) I tend to think this will redound to America's benefit--although perhaps these CVs will be the core of an EU navy in twenty years! But regardless of benefit, regardless of the vagaries of politics, we now have a marker for the future: absent catastrophic collapse, the British navy, and the British military, will be players in geopolitics on roughly the present scale until circa 2030. That's good to know.

Irenic Commentary, Part 1

What is wrong with the left?, asked Alpheus, attempting to answer (I think with great success) without personal rancor. And it is indeed difficult to say such things without resort to personal rancor—difficult to phrase one’s ideals, ones loves, without the tone of outrage, rage, hatred. And all comparisons are invidious, and it is difficult to critique other men’s politics without it being taken personally. Then, too, the rhetoric of prophetic denunciation is persuasive—self-confident naming of evil does not just preach to the choir, but expands the ranks of the church. (To extend a metaphor.) And the identification of folly and evil is necessary, both morally and, rhetorically, as a means to summon popular will to action. So for all sorts of reasons, irenic restraint is morally and tactically inappropriate. And yet, and yet … the irenic mode will persuade some people, as other modes might not. The practice of the irenic mode may even be good for the soul—not if used heedlessly, without contemplation that an alternative might on occasion be preferable—but still, the practice of irenic discourse is often good. Among other things, it reminds one that one’s opponents should not be regarded simply as fools or evil men, but also as differing in opinion. (One does need to resort to both points of view from time to time, but neither is appropriate in all circumstances.) So let me try to join Alpheus in naming some of my problems with the left—an unirenic task—as irenically as possible.

One problem is a question of intellectual vocabulary. Here I hide behind the skirts of Alasdair MacIntyre, J. G. A. Pocock, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, all of whom, from philosophical, historical, and modern-polemical vantage points, have identified a great transformation of intellectual vocabulary in the course of the Enlightenment—a transformation from a vocabulary of virtue to a vocabulary of rights, from a starting point of value in God or polis to a starting point of value in individual man. (The vocabulary of society and nation is interestingly blended among these different assumptions.) The most partisan way of putting this is that the heirs of the Enlightenment, the modern left, are 1) incapable of speaking of good and evil, hence are incapable of confronting it; and 2) identify good merely with human will, individual or collective, hence are susceptible either to passivity and license or to genocidal furies. The perceptive reader will notice at once that these two critiques are not perfectly aligned; indeed, to some extent contradict one another. For myself, I would talk of the Enlightenment vocabulary, and political discourse, as sliding from one to the other of these positions without perfect logic and consistency. (But which political position is perfectly logical and consistent?) Now, the vocabulary of virtue, God, and polis is also subject to characteristic flaws, and flawed human beings have managed to draw happily from both vocabularies at once—the Robespierriean regime was a murderous twist on Rousseauian principle, but also a murderous twist on the Republic of Virtue. Political opponents can simply trade accusations of applied intellectual history—Christopher Hitchens can give you the rogue’s gallery of virtuecrats, I or any other conservative can give you the rogue’s gallery of Enlightened butchers, and somehow Hitler always ends up as an example of Enlightened and Virtuecrat evil, because, you know, if he’s bad he must be on the other guy’s team.

This perception of the importance of intellectual vocabulary proceeds from a great deal of conversations since the 1980s, verbal and written, with various members of the left, who on the one hand had a great difficulty saying such things as the USSR is an evil empire, and on the other hand collapsed together virtue and individual will in a great many domestic political issues. Let me set aside for one moment the correctness of these points of view: it became apparent to me over the decades (I am old!) that the political vocabulary itself generated particular ranges of political views—that basic concepts, basic choices of key words, made certain political positions impossible, and others overdetermined. (On the simplest level, consider the use of the slogans pro-life and pro-choice.) The very choice of intellectual vocabulary was itself an argument. And this was true not just among intellectual historians, but in the everyday realm of political argument. Language use is not the whole of political choice, but it is a remarkably large portion of it.

I do find the vocabulary of virtue more convincing, and I do find the Enlightenment vocabulary lacking. I am not entirely sure how to justify this (irenically!), since so much of this depends upon the individual resonance of the vocabulary with the longings of my soul, and so much else upon a perception that such-and-such a skein of wordly events justifies my preferences, when my opponents can justify themselves with such-and-such another skein. I think it comes down to an urge to speak of love, and speak of our duties to other people. The language of reason, the Enlightenment, the individual does not seem to me to articulate either love or our duties to others properly; it is a language of I, and love of self. Virtue, God, and polis all provide me better languages by which to talk of the love of other people. I think at once that some Enlightened reader will say “Not so!”—and perhaps we can discuss this. But that is where my preference for a vocabulary of virtue comes from, my distaste for an Enlightened vocabulary—because I wish to talk of love.

The Threat of the Dollar's (Further) Decline

One big news item today, thanks to Drudge, is the London Telegraph story that two leading Chinese Communist Party officials have raised the prospect of Beijing's dumping its dollar holdings as retaliation in the event that the U.S. Congress imposes trade sanctions on China.

Should America be scared? Well, yes. The U.S. economy, with its substantial consumer debt and hiccupy housing market, is not well positioned to sustain a big dollar devaluation and the attendant spike in interest rates -- not to mention the price of oil. So China is indeed in a position to cause us considerable pain. But for some reason -- could it be sheer perversity? -- I'd almost like to see them try to go through with this quasi-threat.

Missing from the Telegraph story is the fact that China would almost certainly suffer much more than we would. Their prosperity is very unevenly distributed, they've supposedly gots loads of underutilized industrial capacity -- both actual and in the process of being created -- and the continued growth of their economy depends upon exports. If the dollar falls against the yuan, Americans will be a lot less inclined to buy China's poison pet food (which will also be more expensive for China to produce because of the rise in oil prices denominated in dollars). And when the poison pet food factories start shutting down, frustrated hopes among China's lower and nascent middle clases will almost certainly translate into political unrest, and a huge headache for the ruling classes.

But what about the political results of America's concurrent recession? Well, if China were to pull the trigger on its "dollar weapon" soon enough, they could probably guarantee the election of a Democrat as president in 2008, but it's an open question whether Hillary -- and who else would it be? -- would be as complaisant with respect to China as Bill famously was. More importantly, a real recession in America (something this country hasn't seen since the early 1980s) might open the door to long-needed reforms: a serious attempt to reduce dependence on foreign oil, for example, or maybe a recognition that the precarious position of America's lower and lower-middle classes has been caused by high levels of illegal immigration. (Of course, the reverse is possible: desperate to maintain their levels of consumption, Americans might decide they needed to import even more cheap labor to make up for the loss of cheap goods from overseas.)

Needless to say, the ideal situation for both America and China would be for policymakers to use the current exchange rates friction between the two great powers as an opportunity to face the fact that the present situation is unsustainable. The United States needs to get past its dependence on cheap imports; China needs to get past its dependence on high levels of exports. Such getting-past will involve pain, of course -- in China's case the pain will be political as much as economic -- but less pain than will result for either side if this process occurs all at once.

Scott Thomas Beauchamp Redux

It's a composite, like New York magazine does.

Still, perhaps we should go gently on him, or he might do something desperate.

A Buttress of the Church

I praise faith, I preach its good, but I'm a lukewarm deist myself--converted from agnosticism by a reading of Hegel, but unable to commit to any particular denomination, and doubtless too lazy to get up on Sunday mornings. Or Saturday mornings--a choice toward which ancestry urges me, if inclination less so. So I justly may be accused of succumbing to the fideist temptation, or mere Tory squirism--urging religion for social peace, without personal belief. I am fond of Protestant evangelicism as a social and political force, in Anglo-American history and at the present time, but I am not one of the evangelicals--I think I am something like the generic National Review writer, who, however sympathetic he may be toward Protestant evangelicism, writes with the sympathy of an outsider. And if I were to say to a believer, as Churchill said, that I am a buttress of the church, supporting it from the outside, he doubtless would regard me with contempt, pity, and no true fellowship. And how could he? So my praise of faith may not entirely convince.

And yet ... when I perceive beauty, a coal of faith flares in me, however briefly. The writing of Tolkien makes me a believer; so too a painting by Zurburan. The beauty of nature too, but it is easier for art to move me. A skein of words in history moves me to love--I hope of God. And perhaps I am a hellish aesthete--a phrase once used by Elizabeth Sifton in her book The Serenity Prayer: "I had a complete crisis of faith—later on, in my adolescence—it arose during an unbearably beautiful sung even-song service in Winchester Cathedral, for I realized I was worshiping the beauty of the service itself, and this was of course pagan blasphemy. I had become a hellish aesthete." (SP, 189-90) But I try not to be-I try to take the beauty of holiness as inspiration, not distraction.

I like to think that I am not unlike a great many other inhabitants of academia, student and professor alike--not open (alas) to forthright appeal, but willing to inch my way toward belief by meditating on intellectual arguments and moments of sublime beauty. And if so, perhaps one thing I can do, as teacher, colleague, and writer, is to point the way toward the works that have ravished me--to select works of human excellence, as an academic should, but with an eye toward the conversion of the soul, with a hope to make other people better believers than I am.

Today in class I illustrated Caroline England with (among others) the following documents: the Petition of Right, the Ship-Money Case, libels against the Duke of Buckingham, the Book of Sports, Puritan denunciations of Sabbath-breaking--and two poems by George Herbert: Prayer (I) and Redemption. I made no sermon in favor of the Church of England, Christianity, or even religion--"By religion I mean Christianity, by Christianity I mean Protestantism, by Protestantism I mean the Church of England as established by law."--since to do so would not accord with my sense of professional ethics. Still, I read one poem, had a student read the other, with some thought that they might plant a seed in one of my students, somewhere down the line--and that strikes me as a legitimate exercise in pedagogy.

And if you, dear reader, have followed the links to those poems of Herbert, that too has been another successful exercise in preaching. I pray you find them at least as moving as I do.

Conservative Curricula

Riffing off of Tim Burke’s post on the subject—which itself references a whole nest of previous discussions—some thoughts about different aspects of conservative curricula. As usual, I think there are a number of different subjects here, which get too easily conflated. One is the scanting of the various traditional canons of Western civilization—but I’ve dealt with that in a previous post or two. Leaving that to one side:

One is the question of Great Works from modern times that get scanted in modern undergraduate curricula because they are (taken to be) politically conservative in tenor. This, I think, is unquestionable: it’s not precisely that Rudyard Kipling, Camilo José Cela, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline are unknown, but that somehow they make less of an impression on the syllabi than one might expect, pound-for-pound of literary talent. Some are forthrightly reluctant to put an Imperialist, a Francoist, or an Anti-Semite on the list. (And let us not forget that Albert Camus’ Marxist peers did their best to destroy his literary and philosophical reputation, for his shocking heresies.) Others somehow find it difficult—these authors are so problematic, you see—and the faint impression in the curricula continues, as does the downplaying of author’s conservatism. Let me name a constellation of literary figures: Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Shusaku Endo, Nirad Chaudhuri, V. S. Naipaul, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, John Betjeman, John Crowe Ransom, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and Whittaker Chambers. These are not all equally great—these are none of them unknown—but I have a strong impression (sadly unquantifiable, easily contradictable by another man’s strong impression) that all of their reputations are dimmed in the academy by their association with different strands of the right, that their presence on undergraduate syllabi is lessened. What notable conservative writers are first noted for somehow seems to be non-conservative aspects of their works—T. S. Eliot is known for “Prufrock” and “The Waste Land” before “Four Quartets”, (actually, I think the first two are more approachable, but still,) Dorothy Sayers is a sparkling mystery writer rather than a Christian, W. H. Auden is always a Marxist first and a Christian second, Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel is an embarrassment, Nathaniel Hawthorne is the author of The Scarlet Letter, not “The Celestial Railroad”, and so on. I somehow suspect that Mario Vargas Llosa will diminish in Spanish literature syllabi now that he’s run for president of Peru as a free-marketeer; and Martin Amis may never make it onto the syllabi now that he’s written Koba the Dread. Meanwhile, Sartre’s Stalinist bully-ragging has never dimmed his star; nor has any flirtation with Communism by any notable author—Gunter Grass shilled for the Communists all his life, but that doesn’t matter a speck compared with his youth in the SS. Similar complexes seem to exist in other fields: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt all bear the mark of Cain; deconstruction’s star dimmed when Paul de Man was found out as an ex-Nazi; Paul Johnson will never be acknowledged as a great historian, and somehow Solzhenitsyn is minimized for his historical achievement as well (Anne Applebaum’s Gulag essentially confirmed what Solzhenitsyn pieced together within the darkness of Soviet Russia); Popper, Hayek, Oakeshott, Friedman all are somehow off-center in their various fields. (And while I play a Renaissance man for the duration of this blog post, I imagine there are a great many more such names that I’ve never even heard of.) Somehow it’s “whining about inclusion” when conservatives mention the strange diminishment of a great deal of what is beautiful and intellectually powerful in the canons of academe, for what looks very much like standards of political correctness. This is a dismissal that does no credit to the dismissers.

Second is the question of influence within various disciplinary traditions. Here I think a stronger case can be made by those who resist the conservative critique: it is unquestionably true that most academics of the last few generations have been left-liberal; you cannot construct a syllabus honest to the disciplinary traditions that does not weigh heavily toward them. I suspect that even here there is some weighting—which Genovese books will make it into future history grad school reading lists, Roll, Jordan, Roll or The Mind of the Master Class? This is not the end of the story—see below—but the most scrupulously conservative-minded graduate school reading list in the humanities and the social sciences is not now likely to be very much changed from what one has now. But if the undergraduate curriculum were corrected to replace second-rate leftist works with first-rate conservative works, I strongly suspect that this would cease to be true in a generation or two. Unchain the minds of the young, and nature will do its work soon enough; Hayek will inspire as many literary theorists then as Marx does now.

Third is the question of whether certain disciplinary approaches are stifled by institutional liberal dominance. Unequivocally, yes. Mark Grimsley can whistle Dixie all he likes, but it is difficult to get hired as a military historian nowadays. Ditto diplomatic history, ditto political history to a remarkable extent. I’m less familiar with other fields, but one gets a sense of similar complaints. But underlying this is the question of whether academia’s culture of critique (to appropriate a phrase from that noxious anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald) is inherently liberal—that conservatism is to some extent about assuming certain a prioris, appreciating them and praising them, while liberalism, constantly critiquing, is constantly distancing itself—constantly leaching affection—from everything it observes, not least its host society. If criticism is displaced epideictic rhetoric, then perhaps the modern (liberal) mode is all blame and no praise—unwilling to engage in straightforward aesthetic discrimination and appreciation because that requires praise, and unreserved commitment, rather than mere critique. There is, I think, something to this critique—that modern academia, modern liberalism, assumes universal critique, whereas conservative academia would leaven that critique with unselfconscious love of, and attachment to, tradition, country, beauty. The liberal reader will doubtless say at this point that this is why conservatives don’t belong in academia; the conservative reader may say that this is why liberal gatekeepers distort and limit academia.

I would say here that to make readings in theology more central to these discussions might help carve out a space for conservatives. That is, theologians have applied all the great modern critiques of academia to theology—which fundamentally assumes the existence of an unquestionable Truth in combination with the most sophisticated theoretical critiques. Theological praxis, therefore, points the way forward both for conservative academic praxis and (in a good world) for liberal academic acceptance that this is a legitimate mode of academic inquiry. What’s good enough for Harvard Divinity School, in other words, ought to be good enough for the Swarthmore History Department.

Fourth is a question of political shortcuts. I rather think that any self-respecting intellectual theory does not lead automatically to a given political position; if it does it is simply agit-prop, and unworthy of respect. And indeed, even Marxism eventually gets you to Gramsci, Genovese, and a picture of American slavery which not only led this reader even farther from any belief in Marxist theory, but clearly helped lead Genovese himself out of the Marxist fold. But of course a great many second-rate thinkers—including the originators of some schools of theory—are of the opinion that Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, etc. do inevitably lead you to saying vile things about Pres. Bush and nodding sagely when anything negative is said about American foreign policy, and somehow they convey this false association in their writings and their classes. A great deal of work can be done to unchain these false linkages—I remember, for example, an essay by Peter Augustine Lawler in The New Criterion, deeply respectful of Foucault, and seeking to appropriate him for conservative thought; likewise Habermas pops up in the odd discussion at the National Review Online; I just read an essay by Habermas on Derrida, accusing him of resurrecting rhetoric, which now makes me itch to appropriate Derrida for my own conservative intellectual project. I rather think that, separate from the question of teaching disciplinary traditions, it wouldn’t hurt various professors to make a stab at teaching these theories shorn of political impedimenta, and perhaps even to assign the odd essay that shows that a conservative appropriation of various modern theoretical concepts and languages is possible. The first suggestion is a higher priority than the second.

Fifth is the question of conservative praxis. Well, indeed, it is a good idea. Sometimes, of course, it gets done—Paul Johnson again—and it gets belittled, ignored, forgotten. I rather hope that some of what I do is conservative praxis—but then, I am crippled by this terrible urge to write stuff that is open to non-conservative appropriation, since I think that anything that fails to open itself up to new interpretation isn’t really worth writing. But it still remains a somewhat nasty question—“If you niggers are so smart, how come you ain’t passin’ these here poll tests?” No, there hasn’t been much high-level conservative praxis in academia lately, but it has something to do with liberal academic praxis, which in its pedagogical, administrative and theoretical aspects, is distinctly unwelcoming to the exercise of conservative praxis.

Other People's Faiths

No sooner do I mention Mitt Romney's boring, over-disciplined campaign persona than the man suddenly re-invents himself as feisty and unscripted, first in a videotaped radio interview last week and then at yesterday's Republican debate. I'd say this was proof of how influential Athens & Jerusalem has become in only two short months but, alas, the new Romney's debut on Iowa radio came several hours before my blog post.

Most of Romney's initial burst of indignation on Thursday was prompted by radio host Jan Mickelson's insinuations that he's a bad Mormon, both because of his previous support for legal abortion and because he continues to assert that his political positions don't have to perfectly reflect the moral teachings of his church. Mickelson managed to piss off the usually robotic Romney by endlessly reiterating the same question about how Romney can be a devout Mormon while failing to oppose -- or even supporting -- a practice that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints unequivocally condemns.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the argument that you can judge someone else by the degree to which his behavior as a citizen reflects the dogmas of his faith. Sure, it's logical to say that one should do everything possible -- and I mean everything possible -- to live in accordance with what one believes to be God's will. It's also slightly insane. Normal people make compromises between their life and their faith; they always have. Maybe those compromises spring from human weakness, maybe they spring from well-founded doubts about who God is and what He wants. Either way, once you root out the doubt and weakness, you tend to get extremists who insist on (1) isolating themselves from a pluralist society or (2) trying to impose their values on everyone else. A polity composed of such people is looking at a fairly narrow band of sanity between tyranny and civil war. (Over at at the Weekly Standard, Harvey Mansfield sketches out a case that this "either...or" logic of religious extremism applies, mutatis mutandis, to atheism as well.)

So, illogical (and blasphemous!) as it may seem, I'm all for balancing the human desire to form functioning societies against the revealed Word of God, and I really hope that other folks are going to do the same. I'm certainly not going to suggest that people who belong to faiths I don't myself hold are hypocritical for not trying to impose that faith on others. In fact, I'm really sort of counting on the fact that most of the world's Muslims will decide -- as the vast majority of Muslims have decided throughout history -- not to pursue the utmost application of Islam's crazier tenets. Romney can be an honorable man without being an ideal Mormon, and it's really none of my business whether or not he's 100% dedicated to the doctrines of a religion that, to be honest, I find (like all religions) a little bizarre.

Barry Bonds*: the Culture of Success

In San Diego last night, Barry Bonds hit his 755th home run, tying Hank Aaron's record. Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, who was present at the event, issued a statement describing Bonds's achievement as "noteworthy and remarkable" and pointing out that "all citizens in this country are innocent until proven guilty."

Hardly the most enthusiastic of tributes. It seems quite possible that Selig, who watched impassively as Bonds's homer sailed into the stands and who has reportedly not spoken to the outfielder in several years, was using the word remarkable the way Winston Churchill used to -- with undertones of contempt (as when he described an especially ugly portrait of himself as "a remarkable example of modern art"). Bonds has his supporters, including other top athletes like Michael Jordan, Joe Montana and Wayne Gretzky, but it seems unlikely that he'll ever displace Hank Aaron or the Babe in the hearts of most baseball fans.

Nevertheless, Bonds's imminent capture of baseball's most glittering record is "noteworthy and remarkable." It ought to force us to confront not only the issue of steroids in sports, but the larger issue of the gradual perversion of athletics -- and many other fields of endeavor -- in contemporary society.

As a fine article by Joel Garreau in the Washington Post recently pointed out, part of the problem with condemning steroid use by athletes is that there are so many other ways in which achievement in sports now depends not merely on native talent and hard work but on increasingly sophisticated technology and training techniques. The age of citizen-athlete prodigies -- Roger Bannister running on his lunch break or Ted Williams taking years off from baseball to fight in America's wars -- is effectively over. Very few are likely to enter the record books or attain the highest level of excellence unless they avail themselves of the whole range of advantages provided by the modern sciences of sports.

Does this matter? Doesn't it merely mean that the bar has been raised -- that talent and discipline will still prevail so long as everyone has access to the same methods of performance enhancement? This is sometimes used as an argument for legalizing steroids in sports: if cheaters have an unfair advantage, why not remove the unfair advantage by allowing everyone to cheat? James Hughes, a bioethicist quoted by Garreau even has an answer to the objection that steroids are harmful to the body:

"There's a lot of hype around the alleged harm that people do to themselves" with enhancements, Hughes says. "But in head-pounding sports, you face a lifetime of disability. In soccer, heading the ball often enough lowers your IQ. Sports can be bad for people. Why not outlaw boxing? Boxing is proven to be bad for you. It's not just that steroids are good or bad."

On its own terms, the logic of this argument is unassailable. But the fact that logic leads us to such troubling conclusions should lead us to question our premises. And the problem with our premises is not difficult to spot -- it lies in the record-book mentality, the mania for quantification that afflicts modern society and encourages an unhealthy narrowness in the idea of what it means to be the best.

The compulsion to quantify is itself a product of advancing technology. When athletics in something like the modern sense first appeared in ancient Greece, the possibilities for record-keeping were limited. There was no worthwhile way of timing a runner, and it would have been otiose to measure the actual distance a discus or javelin had flown; the crowds at Olympia were only concerned with relative distances, relative times -- with knowing who had won the olive wreath that day.

In the nineteenth century, some sports began to rely on clocks to regulate play. (Indeed, baseball, the oldest major sport, is the only one whose rules do not rely on the measurement of time.) And, once professional leagues were organized, statistics began to be kept. But a handful of statistics were still not widely seen as definitive of greatness. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig would have been heroes even if one had never won the home run record and the other had never achieved the record for consecutive games. And while it's true that both these men held other impressive records, even the list of their records does not fully explain why either man was revered.

But the lure of statistics is a potent one. Glory is hard to achieve, and Barry Bonds was probably not wrong in thinking that his best chance of writing himself into the annals of baseball was to break the home run record. Where he was wrong, I believe, was in thinking that in comparison with that single achievement, nothing else would matter. This judgment of his seems to be in keeping with a whole modern tendency to define success in rather superficial terms.

To return once again to the Greeks: they were no strangers to the desire for preeminence and fame -- quite the reverse. But they were continually reminding themselves that the quest to achieve had meaning only in the larger context of a life well lived. Most of Pindar's odes are admonitions to consider that larger context; it was to be understood that a great athlete who was not also a good son, a good citizen, and a just man was not really a success at all. In fact, according to Greek aristocratic values, a great athlete who was not also acquainted with music was a man who was in some importance sense incomplete. It was remembered that Themistocles, for all his accomplishments in politics and war, had never learned how to play the lyre. The greatest Greek heroes, like Achilles and Odysseus, were good at everything they tried.

Of course, few Achilleses and Odysseuses actually exist. Most great cultures have had to grapple with the tension between the desire for success, which is usually only achievable by devoting lots of energy to one pursuit, and the desirability -- both for society and for the individual -- of a balanced life. (In China, this grappling is probably best respresented by Confucius's famous dictum that "the gentleman is not a vessel.") Steroids are the antithesis of this balanced life, not because they are dangerous -- as Garreau notes, many sports are dangerous, too -- but because they are dangerous and the only reason to take them is to be a bit better at something that one is already good at. They indicate not the willlingness to risk and sacrifice in the interest of testing and expressing oneself (as taking up boxing would), but rather the willingness to slowly poison oneself in order to gain, for a while, an extra edge -- as if that extra edge were so terribly important. Barry Bonds seems to have been willing to become a worse human being -- maybe even a worse baseball player, since his fielding has suffered and he has broken the rules of the game -- in order to become a better home run hitter.

The loss of perspective in the course of the quest for the extra edge in a single sphere of life is visible elsewhere in society: people who neglect their families or friends or health so that they can further their careers, people who care more about being famous than about what they're famous for, politicians who will do or say anything in order to win elections. We're none of us perfect of course -- we all lead lives out of balance to one degree of another -- but I don't think it's mere old-fogeyism to say that the urge to "succeed" by any means necessary, with success rather narrowly defined, is a more prevalent feature of American society today than it used to be.

The mindset I'm talking about is certainly visible in academia. Some students, including some of the most ambitious undergraduates, seem to treat cheating as routine. The old line used to be that they were only hurting themselves. That's not true, of course, they're also hurting others -- but they are hurting themselves, too, if they leave college having learned little more than how to game the system.

Sometimes I wonder if graduate students and professors aren't worse in this regard. The obsession with the CV (or resume, as it's called in the "real world") leads, almost as a matter of course, to the neglect of teaching and collegiality for the sake of publishing, the neglect of quality for the sake of quantity, and the neglect of breadth for the sake of a specialization that will permit one to churn out new publications with a minimum of new bibliography. In the academy, it's fairly easy to see the ways in which the displacement of quality by quantity is associated with an unbalanced approach to life. (Many of the great writers of classical Greece -- a civilization I now mention in this post for the last time -- seem to have noticed the tendency for quantification to be associated with loss of perspective. Croesus and Xerxes in Herodotus are examples of this tendency.)

I'm convinced that my critique of modern society has something to it, and unfortunately I have no wise suggestions for reform. But the good news is that most people still seem to understand that one should only go so far in one's pursuit of success, and that still more to be desired even than success is excellence. Barry Bonds has been generally condemned, and condemned most of all, I think, by people who really love the game of baseball. He will never be beloved or idolized as Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron are idolized; he will probably not even be remembered as Ty Cobb is remembered -- as a rather bad man who was nonetheless a great baseballer.

Many people, including myself, mocked the extended attack on athletes' use of steroids in George W. Bush's 2004 State of the Union address. Given the current controversy surrounding Bonds and the scandals of the latest Tour de France, Bush's decision to use the bulliest of bully pulpits to call attention to the problem now seems almost prescient. And Bush was correct, too, in pointing out that the ultimate problem with steroid use by athletes is that it sends the message that "performance matters more than character." I would only reword this for the sake of clarification: the message society too often seems to be sending is that success matters more than excellence.

Unexpected Consequences

It’s fascinating to see how the unxpected consequences of international conflict work their ways through the world. America, for example, is facing a challenge from Iran and its allies both conventionally (via their intervention in Iraq) and against America’s nuclear non-proliferation policy. Now, they may eventually defeat America in their chosen grounds, but the immediate effect of their challenge is to reduce American force elsewhere in the world. That is, we have drawn down our forces in South Korea and Europe to man our Iraqi army, and I have a sneaking suspicion they may never return—that the Iranian challenge in Iraq has hastened our permanent, strategic withdrawal from Europe and East Asia. Likewise, the Iranian nuclear challenge has led us to give less priority to punishing Pakistani and Indian nuclear proliferation—indeed, to provide institutional acknowledgement of their nuclear programs. Unexpected consequences, as I say, fascinating to observe.

Welcome to the Republican Party

There was another article recently, I believe on Politico, about how Sen. Lieberman was considering again when and whether to switch to the Republican Party. To which I would say, as I would say to all people who would consider this switch: Welcome! I’m glad you consider yourself to have something in common with the Party’s range of beliefs, and I don’t demand that you march in lockstep with the rest of the Party’s policies. If, like Sen. Lieberman, you are a domestic liberal—well, you have just made those policies that much more attractive in my eyes, and I will consider them afresh. In all honesty, I should tell you that your views are as yet a minority within the party, and you can’t expect to have a determining influence on Party policy at once—but you are now part of our conversation, and we will give you a respectful hearing. You have changed us by joining us; you will change us more by joining our internal arguments. And perhaps we will change you in turn—perhaps it will be mutual.

But please don’t be a Mayor Bloomberg—someone who joins us for convenience and leaves us for convenience. That really would be heartbreaking.

The Issue’s More Complicated

Never trust people who say that. This is usually an excuse to do nothing, or do what they want to do anyway. A few months ago I heard someone say, “the issue’s rather complicated,” before he preceded into a disquisition on why amnestying illegal immigrants was necessary. Oh, what a tangled web of words followed.

Lawyers love to say issues are complicated. So do academics. So, in fact, do elites of all sort, who have verbal facility, and the ability to portray the complications in a favorable way. (Engineers, accountants, and other less verbal elites vary interestingly from this pattern; recollect the interesting analysis that Republicans in 2004 disproportionately attracted the numerate elites and Democrats the verbal ones.) And, non-elites, I think, have (and should have) a presumptive distrust of all arguments that involve “the issue’s more complicated,” because they (should) realize that this is a preliminary to picking their pockets. The resistance to amnestying illegal immigrants was, to my mind, a triumph of willful simplicity over trickstering, huckstering, defrauding complication. The resistance to free trade draws on a similar, simplifying resistance. Now, I generally favor free trade, but I very much sympathize with the distrust of it. The arguments for free trade have the same tricksterish structure—and, frankly, the costs of free trade are disproportionately born by the poor, and the benefits disproportionately enjoyed by the rich. Still a good thing, but not nearly as good as the proponents of free trade make out with all their guileful words.

I remember some book reviewed in the New York Times maybe fifteen years ago, condemning deliberate stupidity as the ultimate sin. But perhaps deliberate stupidity is a defense tactic—a refusal to listen to the glibly intelligent, since somehow the plans of the glibly intelligent end up favoring themselves most of all. If so, then I would rather be of the party of stupidity—the party of common humanity defending itself as best it can against its word-mastering elites.

Rank Punditry: More Campaign Musings

I've been wondering who's going to profit most from the early start to the current presidential campaign. I'm starting to come to the conclusion that the absurd length of the process is probably going to benefit the Republicans -- this time around, anyway.

Among the Democrats, Clinton both benefits and suffers from the longue duree: she's the candidate best equipped to win a marathon as opposed to a sprint, but her early solidification of front-runner status means she becomes a target for wannabes like Edwards. (Obama is also beginning to look like he's slipping into wannabe territory.) More importantly, I think there's going to be real Hillary fatigue by November, 2008. She's already been in the national spotlight for almost sixteen years and if voters go into the elections wanting change, as they usually do, then that's going to be a bit of a problem.

On the other side, the Republicans would be imperiled by the possibility that they're going to wait too long to make their decision, but the early primaries next year -- New Hampshire may hold its primary on January 8 -- will save them from such an outcome. The Republican nominee will need the time to catch up with Hillary's fundraising juggernaut. ("Catch up to a juggernaut"? Does that make sense as a metaphor?) And if the Republican nominee is Giuliani, as I expect and as polls increasingly tend to suggest, he'll need the time for other reasons.

History suggests that whomever the Republicans nominate will become the target of strongly unfavorable coverage in the mass media. Giuliani is especially vulnerable to such negative coverage. His past contains plenty of fodder for criticism, and his wives, former and current, are just the beginning. If Rudy gets the GOP nod, we're going to hear a lot of revisionism in 2008 about the revival of New York City. The revisionist narrative will probably revolve around tensions between the Mayor and African Americans, disconent among municipal employees, and Giuliani's unfair claiming of credit for other people's accomplisgment. Clinton, of course, has plenty of dirty laundry, too, but it's all been on hanging the line for many, many years and she's long since become a master at dealing with unfavorable stories in the press. With Rudy, on the other hand, there's always the possibility that, confronted by an avalanche of attacks, he'll allow his famous temper to get the better of him. The long interval between the primaries and the general election will both mitigate the effect of media "revelations" -- i.e., things most voters hadn't heard a lot about -- and give the Republican candidate time to discipline himself to face the rigors of the campaign.

Of course, Mitt Romney already seems to be disciplined, and I suspect there aren't a lot of revelations there (leaving aside the tenets and practices of the Mormon Church). Romney, in fact, could be the one Republican hopeful who is so inherently boring that voters will actually tire of him by election day.

College Endowments

Tim Burke discusses college endowments over at Easily Distracted; with reference to earlier comments by Margaret Soltan at University Diaries. Both discussions are somewhat dubious of the status quo of particularly well-endowed universities and colleges, with some thought that they should be spending more of their endowment some way or another. I’m somewhat hesitant to urge universities to be more spendthrift—I think an endowment might be quite fragile, and that it might be difficult to calibrate between endowment growth and catastrophic decline. But the discussion has sparked some thoughts on college endowments on my part.

1) I do like the idea that there are many tightly limited funds within each university’s endowment. On the one hand, I don’t trust college administrators to play with funds as they will—partly because I think they’ll do PC things with the money, partly because I’m leary about letting anybody play with too much money without control. But also, there is something wonderfully conservative about having the past—alumni, particularly dead alumni—control the present, to institutionalize particular educational priorities rather than Education, undefined and undifferentiated. The multiplicity of such legacies is even more marvelous—each specified endowment makes education, makes each college’s education, that much more individual, quirky, historically specific, traditional, conservative, wonderful! And, ideally, it states the priorities of the educated rather than the educators—witnesses the enduring influence of education on the student body in general, rather than the ideological fancies of the professoriate and the college administrators. All in all, a good thing.

2) I don’t object to growing college endowments, per se, but I think they do register an unpleasant concentration of donor money in enriching existing educational institutions rather than founding new ones. I believe I read once that new colleges popped up regularly in America until World War II, but that the number of new foundations has diminished radically since then. Now, the public university systems have opened many new campuses since then—but their publicness does make for a certain homogeneity of educational experience, to speak nothing of mediocrity. I rather think that the best educational experience is in small classes, in lightly administered institutions—in small liberal arts colleges—and I wish that educational donors would found new institutions rather than contributing so heavily to old ones. Furthermore, the more new private colleges you found, the more quirky, individual systems of education you found—the more variety, the more experimentation, the more particularity and locality. More of this, please! And as for the Harvards with their $30 billion endowments—have them donate a $1 billion to spin off a new college, a Harvard franchise. Multiply the number of colleges, in preference to goldplating the existing ones.

3) Set up endowments that can fund particular programs in state schools, but independent of state control. This may require changing a few laws—but do something that can infuse particularity into the generic state school system. And indeed, if you think school administrators and faculty in public or private colleges are going to distort your bequests in PC fashions, set up a funding system under independent control, so you can grab back the money if they start to do fishy things. Mind you, these endowments in turn can get seized by liberal bureaucratic types—see the Ford Foundation et al—but this system at least puts off the evil day for a while.

Withywindle Commonplace Book, #1

Much of what I blog repeats what other people have said, except less eloquently. Sometimes I'd rather just let people get it straight from the horse's mouth. So I'll put in stuff I've just been writing down in my own notes, which strike me as particularly pithy, interesting, apt, etc. I like to think that this is the equivalent of providing a link to somebody on the web--I'm providing a link to the library! So to begin:

Charles Davis, “Revelation, Historical Continuity and the Rationality of Tradition,” in Charles Davis, Religion and the Making of Society: Essays in Social Theology (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1994), 108:

In the course of his argument [in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?], [Alasdair] MacIntyre develops the concept of tradition. Tradition is constituted by a conflict of interpretations of the tradition itself. It embodies the narrative of an argument. Constantly threatened by the danger of lapsing into incoherence, it is rescued by an argumentative reconstruction of its narrative. At certain periods traditions need revolutionary reconstitution for their continuance. Far from excluding conflict, tradition presupposes the omnipresence of conflict, both within each tradition and between traditions, and the conflict itself has a history susceptible to rival interpretations. To belong to a tradition is to enter into an argument and to make the continuous argument intelligible by narrative.

American Interest, Japanese Apologies

Over at the National Review Online Corner, Mark Krikorian asks

Why on Earth are we telling one country to apologize to another country for something that didn't involve us? Whether or not Japan apologizes to South Korea for the "comfort women" outrages of World War II is the very definition of "none of our business."

For which the answer is: aside from the non-trivial moral issues involved, it's in our interest. As I said earlier, recantation of your sins is a very powerful assurance that you will not commit similar crimes again, and Japan--one of the great powers of the world--has not yet provided that assurance. This renders them permanently dangerous to us. More to the point, it renders Japan not only permanently odious to its neighbors, since it will not make a forthright apology for its sins, but also permanently dangerous, since its rhetoric clearly reserves the right to commit them again. And this matters very much for American foreign policy, because we are (or ought to be) trying to manage the rise of China by setting up a string of allied states in alliance with us and with each other--Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, maybe Vietnam--and this alliance will be unsteady so long as Japan, the linchpin of the system, refuses to say the necessary words of apology. So Congress' moralistic resolution, urging a Japanese apology, is a component of our foreign policy aimed at containing China, and very much to be endorsed on prudential grounds.

Scott Thomas Beauchamp and Tommy Atkins

The whole Scott Thomas Beauchamp imbroglio is interesting--aside from the question of the truth of his reportage!--because it does reveal a continuing debate as to the nature of soldiers, and whether the default assumption is that they are vicious or virtuous. Basically, I would take the view of soldiers as vicious to be the more widespread view--I might even say the more traditional one--whereas the idea that soldiers are virtuous rests on the more tenous citizen-soldier model.

More longwindedly: traditionally--certainly in early modern Europe--most elites took soldiers to be the scum of the earth, necessary but loathesome. (And occasionally to be cheered as patriotic heroes, but only occasionally.) Peasants took them to be outcasts from peasant society who, armed locusts, seized food from starving peasants for themselves. Both of these views had considerable truth to them. Soldiers very often were this sort of ferocious scum. ("Desperate and poor," if you prefer.) Not that elites or peasants were sweetness and light--soldiers starved as their officers stole their pay, and their consequent mutinies were then put down in blood; meanwhile, soldiers who lost battles and threw away their weapons as they retreated often found themselves massacred by peasants. The negative image of the soldier has a very long history.

Against that, the ideal of the citizen soldier--the militiaman--the nation in arms--the draftee--everyman in arms, one of us, who has all our virtues and none of our vices. The Greek or Roman farmer-soldier, idealized by Machiavelli as a citizen in arms, and actually brought into some sort of common practice in Europe and America between the American Revolution and the Vietnam War. The Grand Illusion has the French everysoldier; so do a host of British and American war movies. A lighter tradition, all in all, but one with great power in recent times.

The Scott Thomas Beauchamp debate is very much about which image is our default--and I do think it is an old debate. I would say that the switch from a draft army to a volunteer army provides more intellectual space for those with a negative image of soldiers--it is difficult, intellectually and politically, to think of a national army in a democracy in negative terms; a volunteer army allows the old image of "mercenary scum" to re-emerge. It also does allow for a somewhat pollyanna-ish view of soldierly virtues to emerge among civilians who have never served. The positive attitude towards citizen soldiers by those who have served, past and present, is generally, I think, more wryly aware that even good men are humanly frail.

Some present deviations from tradition are worthy of note. First, the old negative stereotype against professional soldiers, the scum of the earth, was the flip image of the praise of the citizen soldier--that such soldiers didn't care for liberty, would happily support a general as he made himself dictator; their vices were also political, and a threat to liberty. This old association is soft-pedaled nowadays--I think there is a "Seven Days in May" trope that keeps alive the old fear of military intervention in a democracy, but it seems to be directed at officers rather than at enlisted men. Soldiers are perhaps blamed for passively following orders of such generals--but this is a radical muting of the old critique. Partly this is because democracy doesn't allow room for a widespread critique of its citizens; partly because the critique based itself upon open championing of aristocratic virtues, also difficult nowadays. An interesting change.

Second, the praise of soldiers is now increasingly linked to their professionalism--the argument that, independent of their natural tendencies, both officers and soldiers are professionals trained to avoid immoral behavior. This reflects not only the continuing transformation of officers from noble/warrior codes to professional codes (a centuries-old process now) but also the extension of such professional codes and aspirations to the enlisted men--which I think may only date to the post-Vietnam era. This is, I think, a real phenomenon, of a remarkable democratization of professional virtues--themselves originally rather socially exclusive in nature--both in aspiration and in practice. Is it happening elsewhere in American society? Is it confined more to the military? Whichever, it is a change of real note, and it plays a role in this current debate.