Counterrevolutionary Meditations

Innumeracy as Hieroglyph

2007-04-16T14:07:00.000-04:00

One might be forgiven for surmising that sheer innumeracy is a requirement for advancement in the American establishment when even fellows of the Council on Foreign Relations, the establishment of the establishment, as it were, exhibit the vice. Nevertheless, such innumeracy seldom appears unadorned, but requires a bit of intellectual scaffolding if it is present itself as persuasive; a popular form of such scaffolding is the discussion of demographic trends, the type erected by Shannon O'Neil in a recent LA Times piece, in which the effort is made to dismiss concerns about immigration as being somewhat irrelevant.

The reason, of course, is that "Mexico is undergoing a demographic transition." The Mexican birthrate has declined to 2.2 births per woman, with the projected consequence that by 2050, Mexico will "become as old as the United States." With respect to the question of immigration, the aging of Mexico will eventuate in the lessening of migration pressures:

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the economically-active population — which grew by more than 1 million new members each year during the 1990s — now adds just 500,000 annually. Over the next 10 years that means about 5 million fewer new workers compared to the previous decade — a number that's roughly equal to the population of undocumented Mexican immigrants in the United States. This suggests that demography may accomplish what border enforcement has not. In the next decade, the tide of northbound Mexican labor will likely recede.

Laying aside the risible underestimate of the number of illegal immigrants resident within the borders of the United States, it bears mention that "weak job growth" is a euphemistic description of the causes of Mexican economic stagnation and the resultant waves of immigration, which range from the usual sclerosis of a bureaucratic/socialist, and frequently corrupt society, the contraction of the maquiladora sector, and the collapse of small-scale agriculture in the wake of the implementation of NAFTA, to the willingness of the American establishment to utilize the nation as a safety valve for pressures that might otherwise coalesce for reform in Mexico.

There is more, however, to the scaffolding O'Neil erects about the fundamental innumeracy of her argument. America is itself on the cusp of momentous demographic transitions:

The first baby boomers are becoming eligible for Social Security benefits, and over the next 25 years, many will retire. The next generation, Generation X, with 15 million fewer members, doesn't have the critical mass to fill their shoes, much less new job openings. The generation after that, Generation Y — now ranging in age from babies to college students — is larger, so it will partly alleviate the labor crunch. But Gen Y workers are also likely to follow form and be better educated than their elders, which will push them toward high-skill careers.

Now that the scaffolding has been completed, leaving us with a picture of demographic decline in both the United States and Mexico, bearing ominous portents for the prospects of continued economic expansion and the stability of the social welfare system, O'Neil proposes to resolve this dialectical dance of "inexorable supply and demand" by means of an immigration regime that "...balance(s) the pressures of supply and demand", providing "a flexible (emphasis mine) and legal valve on the labor flow", an "efficient guest-worker program that rises and falls with labor needs and also provides a potential path to citizenship", involving "long-term planning with Mexico (and other Latin American nations)."

The manifest implication of O'Neil's proposed system of flexible immigration - adjustable, that is, to the requirements of "economic growth" and public spending - is that such immigration, which she herself distinguishes from the increasingly-skilled labour of Generations X and Y, will be at once both relatively low-skilled and, magically, we must believe, causative of economic expansion. We must be confronted here with an instance of magical realism transposed to public policy analysis, for, as Robert Rector observes:

On average, low-skill households received $32,138 per household in immediate government benefits and services in FY 2004, including direct benefits, means-tested benefits, education, and population-based services. Total benefits rose to $43,084 if public goods and the cost of interest and other financial obligations are added.

By contrast, low-skill households paid only $9,689 in taxes. Thus, low-skill households received at least three dollars in benefits and services for each dollar in taxes paid. If the costs of public goods and past financial obligations are added, the ratio rises to four to one.

Furthermore,

Receiving, on average, at least $22,449 more in benefits than they pay in taxes each year, low-skill households impose substantial long-term costs on the U.S. taxpayer. Assuming an average 50-year adult life span for heads of household, the average lifetime costs to the taxpayer will be $1.1 million for each low-skill household, net of any taxes paid. If the costs of interest and other financial obligations are added, the average lifetime cost rises to $1.3 million per household.

I shall leave it to those conversant with the field of "lies, d*mned lies, and statistics" to ponder how it could transpire that even "flexible" (most probably, this flexibility will assume the form of indefinite expansion) immigration of primarily unskilled labour, a net drain on the public treasury, could relieve the pressures of the entitlement crisis and the felt imperative of economic growth in an era of native population decline. I should like only to note one further detail of O'Neil's argument, such as it is, before proceeding to elaborate its significance and, therewith, the meaning of my title. When O'Neil writes that

..Gen Y workers are also likely to follow form and be better educated than their elders, which will push them toward high-skill careers.

she, and all those who employ arguments akin in form and substance, commit a fallacy of argumentation, a hasty generalization from the fact that some members of Generations X and Y have sought higher-skill occupations to the conclusion that most or all members of the aforementioned generations both have sought and/or will seek, and, furthermore, are capable of seeking and obtaining both the educational credentials requisite to most high-skill positions, and the positions themselves. The argument implies that Americans of these generations are living in a sort of Lake Wobegon world, in which they are all above average, and require the immigration of vast numbers of unskilled labourers, without whom their superior intellects would be incapable of generating anything save stagnation, or, possible, poverty itself. I submit that, if such generalizations are actually taken seriously, there is no more egregious sort of provincialism and elitism, all wrapped up into one tidy package of implicit condescension, in all of our voluminous political discourse. The assumption would also seem to contradict both the understanding of productivity as a cause of economic growth, as well as the individualism of much economic doctrine, not to mention that of the right, generally speaking, but let us pass this over discreetly.

The true import of O'Neil's argument, whatever may be her cognizance or lack thereof, cannot lie in the literal significance of the words and phrases employed, because, strictly speaking, they refer to nothing. There is no possible world in which a population of largely unskilled labourers who are a net burden on the public weal can possibly be causative of economic growth in absolute terms, let alone in a manner sufficient to enable us to meet certain unfunded entitlement liabilities. The argument is, as it were, a referent without an object, sense without reference. In other words, it is a hieroglyph, a linguistic symbol having a position in a type of discourse that no longer refers (or, perhaps, never did refer) to the concrete realities seemingly indicated by the meanings of the terms employed. No, the symbol finds its significance in the reification of such things as "supply and demand" and "demography" into abstract agencies which work upon us inexorably, before which we can either submit, or find ourselves crushed beneath the mighty onrush of Necessity, History, and Progress. It all sounds rather like Hegel, with an accent of Smith, perhaps. Before such abstractions, in the dessicating heat of their glare, the concrete culture of America, the common good of her actual citizens, for which purpose her political institutions once were framed, and even republican deliberation as to the good, all disappear. America has no culture, no identity, if she is naught but an expanding and contracting site of economic endeavour. America's people can have no common good if their good can be reduced, by an ideological sleight of hand, to the operations of an economic system, as though such things by nature yield the good as the addition of two integers yields a sum. America can indulge no republican deliberation if only inexorable necessity, which is to say, fate, stands before her.

There is more, however, to the significance of our hieroglyphs. They are not mere intellectual errors. For even though they be innumerate, even though they fail to refer to realities according to their literal sense, they do, in fact, refer to an actual social process; for they are not symbols of intellectual activity alone, but of something which does occur. It is simply the case that this 'something' is not the thing to which the language itself would lead us. That special something is an increasingly formalized system of private profit and public expense, whereby the profits of the employment of certain forms of labour are subsidized by the transfer of their costs onto the public - the very public who are being dispossessed in their own nation by such policies. One could say many things about this attempt to elide, and then efface, a concrete America with its political and cultural heritage and institutions; let it suffice to state that it ought not be considered inflammatory should Americans determine that it is, ahem, analytically incompatible with patriotism.

The Palsied Invisible Hand, Part Two

2006-12-18T10:15:00.000-05:00

Via Parapundit, an incisive refutation of that hoary old canard of the apologists, propagandists,and courtesans of free trade, the theory of comparative advantage:

First, the current incarnation of free trade is coming under pressure not because people are stupid, but because people are smart. The publics in countries like the United States and Britain have been remarkably tolerant of free trade over the last two decades, because the policy-relevant public "gets it", has been persuaded by economists from Ricardo on down that free trade is a positive-sum good thing. The arguments for protectionism that Chris catalogs are old tropes that we had almost managed to put behind us.

I've done no study, but here's a conjecture: The countries where protectionism is becoming popular are those with both growing current account deficits and shrinking tradables sectors. A shrinking tradables sector is not the same as a declining industry. Declining industries are normal and good. Even the near extinction of manufactures as a whole is okay. But a shrinking tradables sector is not. A shrinking tradables sector means a decline in nation's capacity to produce goods or services of any sort that citizens of other countries want to buy, at competitive prices.

Bear in mind, therefore, that under the conditions of globalization, there are few, if any, goods and services in which America possesses an absolute comparative advantage, such that such tradables could not be produced or provided elsewhere at a lower cost and with a comparable level of expertise. That is what globalization means. This is why both manifacturing is outsourced to Asia and services, inclusive, increasingly, of specialized financial services, are outsourced to countries such as India. The economic conditions of globalization would only be uniformly advantageous if, and only if, America could rationally and warrantably expect to retain indefinitely certain substantive, and derivatively, structural advantages in the production of tradables, relative to other nations - which is risible - or were warranted in assuming that her population were the 'most well endowed', cognitively speaking, such that, on the whole, our people would be in a superior position to benefit from the venture into terra incognita that is the conjunction of the elimination of the material basis of prosperity and its replacement by debt and debt services - which is either the folly of utopianism or utterly disingenuous as advocacy.

Ricardo is dead, and we live in a brave new world where, at least for a while, some countries are willing to trade persistently for debt not backed expanding (if adjusting) tradables capacity on the part of the debtor. This is not a Ricardian paradise. This is economic terra incognito, and citizens are right to be spooked.

Ricardo is taking the dirt nap; and his theory, along with all of its subsequent modifications at the hands of sophisters and calculators, is smoldering on the ash heap of history. Too bad it won't be permitted to rest in peace by all those who will attempt to resuscitate it.

A Random Apothegm

2006-12-16T14:32:00.000-05:00

A people or even an individual man who ask(s) the question, "Why?", with respect to any of the institutions or traditions of their/his culture and society are/is really asking the question, "Why not?", which is already to have walked into the starless night of nihilism.

A Hopeful Vision for the Future of Serbia

2006-12-16T13:34:00.000-05:00

Well, there is another scenario: Serbia keeps the title to her real estate but is prevented from taking possession -- for now. Geopolitical circumstances change, a decade or two from now; there's no more NATO, no EU, no Benevolent Global Hegemon, and Serbia reclaims her temporarily usurped domain cca 2025 or thereabouts. At that time, after all that has come to pass since 1999, the Serbs will have an externally approved blueprint on how to treat their restive Albanian minority: to the same high standards of respect for human, religious, national and cultural rights which Kosovo's Serbs have experienced from Messrs. Ceku, Haradinaj and Thaci under UN/NATO. Since their behaviour has been approved by the international community as exemplary in every respect, and lauded as worthy of independent statehood by Ruecker, Ahtisaari, Haekkerup, Steiner, Burns, Holbrooke, etc, etc... we should look forward to the day when Kostunica's successors will adhere strictly to those same august standards in Serbia's reclaimed province. A corresponding likely shift in the ethnic balance, while regrettable in principle, may well prove to be unavoidable in practice.

Srdja Trifkovic, Chronicles Online.

So let it be written; so let it be done.

The Blood Sacrifices of Multiculturalism

2006-12-16T07:21:00.000-05:00

Both the blood supply:

After years of delays, the Food and Drug Administration approved a test today for a fatal parasitic infection that is common in Latin America and increasingly prevalent in the United States blood supply.

The nation’s major blood banks said they would quickly adopt the test for Chagas disease, which in Latin America is usually transmitted by the bite of a parasite-carrying insect called the kissing bug, but can also be passed from mother to child or through blood transfusion or organ donation.

And the murder rate:

Murder: Hispanic: 72 per 100,000 white: 24 per 100,000

As Randall Burns notes in commenting upon the first item over at the VDare blog, immigration is the sole reason for the increased incidence of this incurable (in those in whom the parasite has incubated for some time) parasitic infection; moreover, there is not even the merest whisper of a possibility of a hope that those Americans, themselves parasitic upon their own people, who profit from the demographic transformation of the nation, will pay the medical bills, lost wages, and death benefits for family members of those felled by this entirely preventable scourge. However, they will have suffered, and some will have died, for no cause more profound than the greater profitability of business undertakings - sacrificed, that is, to multiculturalism and mammon.

As for the matter of the murder rate, just imagine what tranquil felicities will descend upon our once-fair land once the dogma of Zero Group Differences collides with the sickly, base, white guilt-masochism of the American establishment, here exemplified by Mike Huckabee, governor of Arkansas:

“For decades, we treated our state’s African-American population poorly. The Hispanic influx gives us a second chance to prove what kind of people we really are.”

Someone ought to remind this mewling simpleton that the charge of public leadership is a sacred calling, and not a grand psychodrama, a therapeutic session on the public stage. The leader cares for his own people, and his heart bleeds for them, if it must bleed at all, and for no one else.

Who Says Protectionism Doesn't Work?

2006-12-15T22:44:00.000-05:00

Japan’s policy has boiled down to a steady effort to develop the country’s manufacturing base, even if that left consumers paying higher prices and investors getting worse returns. Different systems, different goals—and Japan, despite its supposed “lost decade,” has done a good job—by its own lights. Its current-account surplus, widely predicted to evaporate by the mid-1990s, instead remains the largest in the world in absolute terms. Toyota, which during the “Japan as No. 1” years dreamed of being the world’s leading automaker, will very soon be just that. American economists often scold Japan for its “foolish” emphasis on exports and surpluses at the cost of immediate consumer welfare. But no one who visits modern Japan will think its people look poor. James Fallows, writing in the December issue of The Atlantic.

The Infinite Abyss of the Passions, In Modern English

2006-12-15T22:32:00.000-05:00

Economic growth is desirable because human wants and needs are unlimited.

And, of course:

The need for growth remains, however, even in the rich countries, because human wants and needs are unlimited.

If this be the central, organizing principle of modern societies, may the age perish in which it became so, for in that age man was abolished.

The One Valid Analogy Between Fascism and Islam

2006-12-15T09:35:00.000-05:00

Lee Harris, writing in the October/November issue of Policy Review, concludes his review essay of Andrew Bostom's superb The Legacy of Jihad by positing a crash of civilizations model for the interactions of the West and the dar-al-Islam in the early twenty-first century. Positing neither philosophical nor doctrinal similarities between fascism and Islam, as do the apologists for the vulgar, obsfuscating neologism "Islamo-fascism", Harris argues:

If jihad were being used simply as a means of conducting Clausewitzian warfare, it would indeed be a relic of the past about which none of us in the West would need to worry overmuch. If Muslim civilization only decided to clash with ours, we could clash back, and with overwhelming military force. If we were confronting the armies of Omar or of Tamerlane, there is little doubt which side would secure the victory. But the objective of jihad is not Clausewitzian politics continued by other means. Its objective is the destruction and dissolution of politics as we have come to understand it in the West. The jihadists are not interested in winning in our sense of the word. They can succeed simply by making the present world order unworkable, by creating conditions in which politics-as-usual is no longer an option, forcing upon the West the option either of giving in to their demands or descending into anarchy and chaos.(Emphasis mine.)

Continuing his explication of this theme, and expressly likening Islamic tactics and strategy to that of Nazis in the waning days of the Weimar Republic, Harris writes:

After the failed Munich putsch of 1923, Hitler resolved never again to try to seize state power by force. Instead, the Nazis elected to follow a policy designed to make the Weimar system incapable of governing through normal political channels. Make the system unworkable; make parliament unable to handle crises; force the government to govern through emergency enabling acts; compel the head of state to assume more and more dictatorial powers — do all these things, and before long a situation would be created in which liberal politics was no longer an option and the people, in desperation, would seek an alternative to the clogged and deadlocked machinery of the parliamentary system — just as had happened when Mussolini’s Brown Shirts, a tiny faction of fanatics, made their celebrated march on Rome and vanquished the Italian Republic for which so many nineteenth-century idealists had shed so much blood.

Nevertheless, while this analogy between the tactics employed by the Nazis and those employed by Islam in its present confrontation with the West is certainly illuminating, and could be extended and deepened by an historical analysis of the traditional Islamic institution of the razzia, of which most contemporary acts of terrorism could be seen as present-day instantiations, Harris' argument goes slightly awry when he states that jihadists, like any group of subversives intent upon the displacement of the status quo of political institutions in their host nation,

...need only to make the established order reluctant to use its great strength out of the understandable fear that by plunging into civil war it will itself be jeopardized. This fear of anarchy — the ultimate fear for those who embrace the politics of reason — can be used to paralyze the political process to the point at which the established order is helpless to control events through normal political channels and power is no longer in the hands of the establishment but lies perilously in the streets.

Were are present circumstances characterized merely by a sort of dithering, by a want of will to exert requisite force against our adversaries, perhaps this more thoroughly distilled analysis of the objects of the jihadists and the political dynamics of the confrontation could be sustained. However, the weakness of the West is not merely a want of will; the weakness of the West is merely a modulation of a more originary weakness or defect. Our will is corrupt, deflected from its just objects, our intellect darkened and enfeebled, its capacity to discriminate between those just objects and the objects presented to it by our collective, historical Wormtongue, its malign tendrils coiled round our every intellection and every sentiment, drawing them nigh into fathomless night, debauched and adulterated by our prostitution before this idol - this idol of self-annihilation, liberalism. For our enemy has taken our measure, has weighed us in the balance and found us wanting:

(Tariq) Ramadan insists that Muslims in the West should conduct themselves not as hyphenated citizens seeking to live by "common values" but as though they were already(Emphasis mine.) living in a Muslim-majority society and were exempt on that account from having to make concessions to the faith of others. Muslims in non-Muslim countries should feel entitled to live on their own terms, Ramadan says, while, "under the terms of Western liberal tolerance," society as a whole should be obliged to respect that choice. - Srdja Trifkovic, writing in the December issue of Chronicles

Comprehension of precisely what is entailed, existentially, by the confluence of Islamic doctrine and Western ideals of tolerance should follow upon contemplation of the deteriorating conditions in many of the cities of Europe, and upon the pursuit of a simply thought experiment. Imagine, for a brief, horrible moment, that during the Cold War, we maintained that enclaves of communists ought to be permitted to organize for the actual practice of communism in areas in which they could exert their influence - collectivising property and the lot of it. We would have been addled to the point of madness. No, it is no want of will to exert force, but a want of will to repudiate the ideological framework which, as a parasite, imperils our civilization, a want of the integrity of heart that would come with the recognition that our civilization possesses an historic essence, and that Islam as a public doctrine and practice has no part in that essence, and only then a want of will to act accordingly by proscribing all propagation of the doctrines of jihad and the end-state at which they aim, sharia, inclusive of the many petty manifestations which are inimical to public order and custom as these have always existed in the West.

Our enemies have taken our measure, and known us intimately; and they intend to exploit that knowledge to the uttermost, by turning our public philosophy against us. That is the significance of such incidents as the provocations of the so-called "Flying Imams" and the intermittant episodes of fly-biting from organizations such as CAIR. Fortunately, our public philosophy does not express our most profound traditions, but is a late epiphenomenon, when considered against the broad background of our history. And it is always possible to remove encrustations of repugnant substances, is it not?

When the Invisible Hand Develops Tremors

2006-12-14T16:54:00.000-05:00

Via Parapundit, a report on the release of an interesting Harvard Medical School report on the relative performance of for-profit and non-profit hospitals in the delivery of critical, high-quality medical care:

BOSTON-December 11, 2006 - Patients are more likely to receive high quality of care in not-for-profit hospitals and in hospitals with more registered nurses and advanced technology, reports a comprehensive Harvard Medical School (HMS) analysis published in the Dec. 11 Archives of Internal Medicine.

Such a conclusion cannot but seem counterintuitive to those subjected to high-level doses of market propaganda, to the effect that the profit motive is the only, or the most, efficient means by which resources may be allocated, and information transmitted through the billions of nerve-fibers (consumer decisions) of the free economy. Parapundit comments:

Anyone surprised? I'm not. Quality of care is hard for patients to measure. So the market is not very good at rewarding those who deliver higher quality care. The profit motive is not sufficiently well disciplined by the market in the medical marketplace.

I would suggest that this market failure is perhaps inherent in the structure of for-profit hospitals, inasmuch as optimal care is almost uniformly more costly, which entails that administrators of such institutions have an interest in, well, doling out care of the highest quality with some degree of parsimony. Which broaches the more compelling question of the limits of 'spontaneous' systems of order and exchange, and the degree to which such systems may in fact be artifactual in nature: that is, islands of controlled 'chaos' embedded within larger, ordered social systems. Come to think of it, that neatly expresses the proper relationship of the 'economy' and 'society', of which the economy of market exchanges is but one aspect, and that a partial and underdetermining aspect, society itself being greater than both the sum total of individual preferences and the aggregate of economic transactions.

The Great Education Myth

2006-12-14T09:41:00.000-05:00

Via Daniel Larison, the indefatigable Dark Lord of paleoconservatism, a masterful puncturing of the emerging myth of Obama the Deliverer, the Reconciler, written by David Sirota:

Yes, it is the Great Education Myth - the idea that if we only just made everyone in America smarter, we would solve outsourcing, wage depression and health care/pension benefit cuts that are the result of forcing Americans to compete in an international race to the bottom. As I wrote recently in the San Francisco Chronicle, this is one of the most dishonest myths out there, as the government's own data shows that, in fact, all of the major economic indicators are plummeting for college grads. You can make everyone in America a PhD, and all you would have is more unemployed PhD's - it would do almost nothing to address the fact that the very structure of our economy - our tax system, our trade system and our corporate welfare system - is designed to help Big Money interests ship jobs offshore and lower wages/benefits here at home.

That gets us to exactly why the Great Education Myth is so often repeated by politicians: because it is the one myth that simultaneously looks like an economic panacea to the public and avoids offending the Big Money interests that bankroll political campaigns. Talk of reforming our trade policy to equalize capital protections (copyrights/patents) and human protections (labor/wage/enviro) threatens Corporate America's efforts to use foreign economic desperation to increase the bottom line. Talk of ending massive taxpayer subsidization of job outsourcing threatens the profit margins of the major political donors like General Electric that are benefiting from such gifts. Talk of cutting corporate welfare threatens the corporate welfare queens that write big checks to politicians. Talk of sending more taxpayer dollars to schools even if that prescription will do very little to address the country's structural economic challenges - well, that threatens nobody.

Not only is Obama the Deliverer complicit in this grand drama of misdirection and dispossession; not only are immovable majorities of the political and economic elites invested in the perpetuation of this betrayal; but, in a sense, the entire legitimacy of the political systems of the Anglo-American world is predicated upon legal mechanisms which have as their necessary consequence precisely this incremental disinheritance of the people. John Locke taught that in the state of nature each man had liberty to accumulate as much property as could be created by the admixture of his labour and the resources of the natural world. After a time, however, the inconvenience of this state of affairs having become manifest to all in the difficulties attendant upon the preservation of property so acquired, and in the limitations this primitive cycle of production and exchange imposed upon the quantity of property that could be amassed, mankind would witness the nascence of a finance economy in the creation of currency as an abstract store of those formerly wholly-tangible values. Therewith, mankind in the state of nature would also begin to chafe under the constraints imposed upon their liberties of action and acquisition by the peculiar conditions of the state of nature, the absence of authoritative institutions and the putative right of each man to act as the enforcer of his own claims of 'right'. The stimulus to political innovation, therefore, would be the perceived insecurity and instability of property, and the limitations imposed by such uncertainty upon the accumulation of abstract property in the form of currency. And so mankind, in order better to secure these 'rights', would conceive the idea of the social contract, in accordance with which each man would cede his powers of enforcement to a government, to the end that by the regularization of the laws protecting and securing property, and providing for the routinization of investment, acquisition, and transfer, each would be liberated from the existential burden of facing the unpredictable loss of his property, or the erection of impediments to the exercise of his rights in that property. The impetus of, and justification for, the social contract by which government originates is, on this conception, the maximization of legal security for the unhindered exercise of the 'rights' of property, which is to say, the acquisitive instinct.

Locke's political philosophy was not philosophy properly so-called, but an elaborate exercise in mythmaking, in the invocation of the animating spirit of the emergent politico-economic order of his age; and, if nothing else, Locke's conjurations are symbolic - which is to say that they participate in, and condense, as it were, the foundational logic of the operative political and economic orders of modernity - of the actual processes by which laws governing economic practices (what is forbidden, what is encouraged, what is subsidized, what is financially privileged) are originated. Any society possesses a sort of logic, a trajectory or tendency emergent from its ideals and aspirations, its public philosophies and individual and communal appropriations and modifications of such philosophies, its institutions, laws, inherited customs, and mores. The logic of a rights-claim, on the modern conception of human nature as lacking a telos and as essentially passional, with reason merely instrumental to the fulfillment of desire is of something essentially illimitable, having no inherent, logical barriers to infinitization. The right of acquisition, especially as elaborated in the political philosophies dominiant in the Anglo-American world, has no objectively specifiable limitations, because the right is grounded in the desires of the individual. Desire, considered in itself, is an infinite abyss of longing. Any limitations that an individual might conceive for himself possess no public standing; and any limitations conceived by any group of individuals would, by virtue of their origins in the unrepeatable desire-complexes of the individuals, be incommensurable. This, ultimately, is the reason the elite classes perceive the social necessity of the Great Education Myth:

...because it is the one myth that simultaneously looks like an economic panacea to the public and avoids offending the Big Money interests that bankroll political campaigns. Talk of reforming our trade policy to equalize capital protections (copyrights/patents) and human protections (labor/wage/enviro) threatens Corporate America's efforts to use foreign economic desperation to increase the bottom line....(snip)

All this Tom Friedman-inspired Great Education Myth does is raise public expectations to unrealistic levels while and creating a justification for continuing to sell off our country's core economic policy to K Street lobbyists.

After all, information is knowledge, knowledge power, and power wealth; and therefore, those who possess wealth must, by necessity, possess greater knowledge of the intricacies of the economic processes of the world, by which our condition has been ameliorated. And those economic processes, and the rights of acquisition which they at once represent and instantiate, are the reason for the existence of government, the legitimating factors of government. Hence, the implicit civil religion of the liberation of acquisition from restraint, the divine right of wealth to encounter no impediment to the highest possible rate of increase - even if this should entail the economic disinheritance of the vast middle and working classes of the nation.

Islam and the West: What Ought to Be

2006-12-12T23:00:00.000-05:00

Commenting on the controversy precipitated by the arguments of radio personality Dennis Prager to the effect that recently elected Congressman, and practising Muslim, Keith Ellison, ought not be permitted to swear his oath of office upon a Koran, inasmuch as the Koran and the tradition it represents is utterly alien to the originary sources of Western order, Lawrence Auster writes:

At present we allow Muslims into this society, and of course they have the same rights of free exercise of religion as any other religious group. If a Muslim elected official wants to take his oath on the Koran, there is no legal basis for stopping him. That is why it is ridiculous for Prager, who welcomes all religions and says all religions have equal rights in America, to say that the Koran is forbidden in an oath taking. His position is incoherent.

To figure out what a coherent position would be, we need to go beyond our present circumstances and think about the way things ought to be. Thinking about the way things ought to be is the beginning of politics.

In a traditionalist America it would be understood that Islam is incompatible with our system of government, our Constitution, our entire way of life. This understanding would be enforced by law. There would be no right to practice Islam in America, except under special restricted circumstances defined by law, for example for diplomats, travelers, and so on.

In a traditionalist America, Muslims would not be allowed to immigrate or be naturalized. The Koran would not be allowed any place in our public life. Also, in a traditionalist America with a restored federal Constitution, the individual states would have restored to them their right to have religious establishments if they chose, and to institute restrictions on citizenship, the franchise, and political office based on religious belief, as was true of many states up to the mid 19th century. Obviously, there would not be enough Muslims in such an America for a Muslim Congressman to be elected, but, if there were, he could not use the Koran to take his oath on, because it would be understood that the Koran has no place in the United States and in the several states.

Auster continues by drawing an analogy between the judgment that Islam is alien to our civilization and the judgments rendered in the Mormon cases of the late Nineteenth Century, namely, that polygamy is antithetical to our civilization. Of course, a liberal society can only implement such exclusions and exceptions by acting in a unprincipled manner, ie., contrary to its stated constitutive principles. Nevertheless, liberalism, the ontology of which is nothing more substantial than the whirling, whiling vortex of desires within the centreless individual, cannot fix a limit to the realization of desire, the liberation of passion, through which the individual is; and what follows is that liberalism cannot serve as the organizing principle of a civilization, as it, by its very nature, is inimical to every civilized impulse, which mandates the bridling and mortification of desire and the defense of the particular societal forms that this ordering assumes. To the extent that any particular society endeavours to refashion itself as if to instantiate the nothingness of liberalism, that society negates itself, sometimes as viscerally as in the public assertion of Mohometan allegiances.

No society can survive for long if non-discriminatory tolerance and equality are its ultimate guide.

No, and in the pursuit of a fantasy world of tolerance and harmony, the real world will be lost.

Derbyshire on Libertarians and Immigration

2006-12-11T22:29:00.000-05:00

That Brink Lindsey "Liberaltarians" piece is occasioning an outpouring of commentary, which I can only assume that thoughtful readers - if there are any! - have already absorbed, but John Derbyshire observes that the entire proposal will founder on one - among others - critical issue: immigration.

As to why I think libertarians are nuts to favor mass uncontrolled immigration from the third world: I think they are nuts because their enthusiasm on this matter is suicidal to their cause. Their ideological passion is blinding them to a rather obvious fact: that libertarianism is a peculiarly American doctrine, with very little appeal to the huddled masses of the third world. If libertarianism implies mass third-world immigration, then it is self-destroying. Libertarianism is simply not attractive either to illiterate peasants from mercantilist Latin American states, or to East Asians with traditions of imperial-bureaucratic paternalism, or to the products of Middle Eastern Muslim theocracies.

All of which is so obviously true that it is indicative of the degradation of political discourse in America that it should require the most erudite and articulate columnist for the premier (whether this status is merited or not, I leave to others to determine...) conservative journal of opinion in America to state. However, Libertarian doctrine and policy positions are about neither electoral success nor, shall we say, performative consistency. They are concerned with one thing above all, and that is the ecstasy of rectitude, that frisson of autosoteric grace by which the libertarian identifies himself as a member of the knowing elite, the daring freethinkers who make bold to transgress the taboos of the unenlightened, intellectual impure masses, what with their retrograde adherence to realities which obtain beyond the confines of ideology. Libertarianism is a performance art, a claim to virtue advanced by many who, when put to the test, fail to manifest evidence of any belief that there exists such a thing as virtue, a normative order that binds men whether they will bow or not.

There is no contradiction between maximum liberty within a nation and maximum vigilance on the nation’s borders. Not only is there no contradiction between the two things, in fact, it may be that the second a precondition for the first.

But of course there is, and the immigration and economic policies favoured by libertarians are sufficient proof that the maximization of individual (and corporate) liberty entails the deligitimation and deconstruction of the nation-state. Libertarianism is a philosophical and political narcissism asserted over against the abiding realities of community; it cannot engender order, but can only function as a canker upon what order subsists in the modern age. It cannot create, but it can destroy.

My accent....

2006-12-01T11:51:00.000-05:00

What American accent do you have? Your Result: Philadelphia Your accent is as Philadelphian as a cheesesteak! If you're not from Philadelphia, then you're from someplace near there like south Jersey, Baltimore, or Wilmington. if you've ever journeyed to some far off place where people don't know that Philly has an accent, someone may have thought you talked a little weird even though they didn't have a clue what accent it was they heard.
The Northeast
The Midland
The Inland North
The South
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Truly, I am a product of my environment!

A Pro-Life Argument Built Upon the Sands

2006-12-01T11:12:00.000-05:00

I will not make so bold as to venture any predictions as to the future of the abortion issue in American politics. Well, not quite. I am, being a pessimistic sort of person, skeptical that all of the efforts of conservatives and pro-lifers to secure the nomination of certain types of jurists to the courts will eventuate in the results we expect - or merely hope. The law is a complicated thing - perhaps unnecessarily so, yet necessarily unnecessary, if my meaning may be grasped - filled with many idols. Public opinion is an uncertain thing, manifesting movement away from the sacred totem of Roe yet seemingly unbending in its attachment to unprincipled exceptions, such as those for rape and incest. Public opinion, alas, appears favourable towards that grim, Moloch-like (Because it combines the elements of both sacrifice and commerce, in which the Phoenicians excelled.) research involving the destruction of embryonic life, on forthrightly utilitarian grounds; and that research is an article of religion among its advocates largely because in its presuppositions, externalities, and ambitions, it reposes upon the substrate of the abortion culture. Inconstancy, thy name is democracy.

Even so, I am willing to allow the optimists their due. In an essay published in the inaugural edition of The Critical this past Summer, The Abortion Moment (I, alas, cannot recall whether or where Ben may have posted this piece online..), Ben Domenech discusses the positive movement registered by recent polling on the subject, and the increasingly strident - and ghoulishly off-putting - rhetoric of the party of death, and writes:

The Abortion Moment is coming. It is almost upon us. And it has a great deal more to do with the Elizabeth Andersons (a young women whose mother Ben’s mother dissuaded from having an abortion sixteen years ago) of the world, the members of a generation who could just as easily not exist, than it does with courts and lawyers and C-SPAN cameras.

Should those inclined to a more optimistic assessment of the prospects of the pro-life cause be proven correct, I think that this will be the reason, that a great, subterranean shift in public opinion and sentiment will have be wrought over the years, and that this body of opinion will not forever be denied public expression in the law. And yet, one can enumerate all too many issues in our public life on which the preponderance of public opinion fails to move the political class to corresponding action. The moment for pointed political and legal advocacy has not yet passed.

In this vein, writing in the October issue of First Things, Hadley Arkes provides a synopsis of the legal background to, and potential outcomes of, the current challenge to the constitutionality of the federal partial-birth abortion ban, a ruling on which is pending. However, in the course of his disquisition, towards the end of a consideration of the potentially pivotal role of Justice Thomas in the eventual decision of the Court, Arkes delivers himself of the following precis of the attempt, on the part of some scholars within the pro-life ranks, to ground the pro-life argument in the logic of the Constitution:

Some of us in the pro-life ranks have sought to make an argument that runds back to the axioms of the Constitution and the separation of powers. It involves a slight reworking of an argument offered by Chief Justice John Marshall in Cohens v. Virginia (1821), and it may be condensed in this way: if the Supreme Court can articulate new rights under the Constitution - if it can find, in the Fourteenth Amendment, the right to an abortion - then th legislative branch must be able to act on the same clause in the Constitution in vindicating those same rights. And in filling them out, it may also mark their limits. Congress could plausibly say, for example, that whatever was established in Roe v. Wade, a right to abortion could never be taken to mean a freedom to kill a child at the very point of birth. What cannot be tenable, under the logic of this Constitution, is that the Court can articulate new rights - and the assign to itself a monopoly of the legislative power in shaping those rights.

If, I say, this is the legal and philosophical foundation of our argument against the abortion regime, we would be well advised to raise the white flag and adopt a stance of quietism on this momentous question, for this argument concedes everything of consequence to a usurpative judiciary, only to receive a rich recompense of political failure. The adoption of this argumentative strategy is unlikely to have offspring other than failure, on grounds both structural and, let it be said, mythological.

In precisely what sense this argument is a ’slight reworking’ of an argument advanced by Chief Justice Marshall in a case summarized as concerning the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court to review the proceedings of state criminal cases is a matter best left to lawyers and legal historians. What is salient insofar as the argument is invoked by pro-life advocates is that it is intended as a regrounding of the discourse surrounding a controverted subject in the foundational logic of the Constitution. How, though, can the discourse on the subject of abortion be brought back to the fundamentals of the Constitution when, by the nature of the case, the original act whereby abortion was constitutionalized was itself a corruption of the Constitution, an exercise, as anyone who has ever troubled to read Roe and the cases upon which it built, particularly Griswold, will recognize, in rank textual conjuration? If the Supreme Court can articulate new rights under the Constitution… - if, that is, the Supreme Court may arrogate to itself rights reserved to the people, namely, the right to amend the Constitution and to specify rights to be accorded protection thereunder, by acting through state and federal legislative bodies in accordance with a procedure detailed in the Constitution itself - then the legislative branch must be able to act on the same clause in the Constitution in vindicating those same rights, which, of course, do not actually exist under the actual Constitution, as indicated by the adjective, new, which is applied to them. The reason that the legislature must be permitted a role in vindicating and delimiting the grand conjurations of shifting majorities of the robed eminences of the Supreme Court is, of course, the separation of powers; without such a role for the legislature in acting upon the same clauses in the Constitution - upon which, strictly speaking, the Court, in the type of rulings here at issue, has not acted, inasmuch as the clauses of the Constitution possess determinate meanings which the Court violates in positing new, as in novel and hitherto unknown, rights - the Supreme Court becomes a de facto superlegislature, a privy council wielding as absolute a power as is conceivable under our system behind the facade of republican forms.

The argument from the sepration of powers possesses a certain plausibility: surely, it cannot be that under our system of government, an unelected body of jurists with life tenure should exercise any final authority over the meaning of our fundamental law; and so, as a matter of fidelity to the ‘logic’ of the Constitution, the legislature must be able to check the actions of that body. Nevertheless, the argument places the form of a government characterized by the separation of powers before the substance of the law, the process of intragovernmental balancing before the Constitution itself. For the argument invites us to accept the proposition that, under that Constitution, a Supreme Court which has purposed to violate the Constitution and exceed its own authority under the Constitution in order to vindicate rights not identified as such in that document, must, by the nature of the Constitutional system itself, accept limitations imposed upon the perpetuation of that violation by the legislature. That is to say, the argument asks us to accept that it is of the character of a usurpation of authority under the Constitution that it must be limited by the Constitution itself. Which, of course, is to say no more than that the Court, having exceeded its entrusted authority, must limit its illigitimate power when the legislature acts to place limits upon the usurpations of the Court, particularly when cases challenging the authority of the legislature so to act come before the Court. Succinctly stated, it is to say that a Court which acts as though there exist no limits upon its authority must yield to a countervailing authority, merely because it “must” observe the constitutional forms it has already purposed to violate. Which is to pass perilously close to speaking gibberish in the form of mere wishes and hopes.

This is the structural, logical flaw in what is proposed as the basis of much pro-life advocacy. It is a concession of the power, if nothing else, of the Court to alter the rules of the game, and an acceptance of those unjustly revised rules as the new groundrules going forward. Why, though, would a Court bent upon changing the rules, acting beyond the scope of its constitutional prerogatives, willingly limit itself merely because another branch of government has made utterance of its objections? There is another flaw, however, and it concerns the mythos which has been built up around the Court over the generations since the Second World War. That mythos depicts the Court as the guarantor of liberty, the protector of the rights of the people always liable to be trampled by factional passions expressed through the legislature, and it appeals to its great, dramatic narratives of redemption, beginning with cases such as Brown, which all but the staunchest of reactionaries accepts as legitimate. That mythos is not something that can be dislodged by talk of the separation of powers, for the myth itself posits, or at least presupposes, that the Court found it necessary to, ahem, fudge the separation of powers and the authority of the states in order to vindicate the rights of the people; and I would venture that the hold of this myth upon the public mind is stronger than many activists have reckoned. In fact, so deeply lodged in the public mind is this myth that even those who execrate certain of the rulings of the Court still hope to appeal to the Court to limit the scope of its rulings upon a number of controverted issues. They are asking the Court to limit its performance of a role with which the people are quite comfortable, generally speaking. The question of the Congress limiting jurisdiction seldom arises, and when it does, it is seldom accorded more than perfunctory attention. Still less does the possibility of declaring a naked act of usurpation null and void, and declining to carry it into effect.

Finally, there is the practical matter of the vast and metasticizing body of law and precedent, which ramifies throughout the system, and our society, in ways far more complex in the cases of privacy than we are likely willing to admit. Pro-life strategy has emphasized the nomination of a certain type of jurist to the Court, and it is at least plausible that jurists of that stripe might be disinclined to undertake the radical pruning of putrefying precedents necessary to any restoration of the meaning of the Constitution and the separation of powers. As Arkes observes at the conclusion of his essay,

…it has been confirmed now, in the circles of conservatives, that judges will show their fitness as judges by honoring a notion of law utterly detached from substantive judgments of right and wrong. The voters who have backed two Bushes and Reagan, expecting something dramatically different, may discover once again that the judicial world is fixed in a mold that will persistently break their hearts.

Asking the Court to accept real limitations upon its authority in areas of law where its precedents are long established and implicated in thousands of other cases and lesser precedents is perhaps to demand a bit much in the way of the requisite iconoclasm. Is it easier, in the long run, to play a game which depends upon persuading the Court to limit itself, or simply to defy the Court? The pro-life movement has gambled on the former; where the payoff is incalculable, but the probability of success all but imperceptible.

Overhearing the Future

2006-12-01T11:07:00.000-05:00

It is a conversation I hear with increasing frequency, either as a participant or as someone who merely happens to overhear something as he proceeds about his ordinary business. Parents will be discussing their children, usually their young children, for this conversation seems to occur most frequently between parents of children under the age of six, parents acutely conscious of the reality that the developing minds of children are almost uniquely primed to acquire the skills with which they, the parents, are concerned. These parents are concerned that their children acquire, not mere proficiency, but fluency in a foreign language. Fluency, that is, in a foreign language, and not just any foreign language, for the simple joy of entering into the life-world of another people - for this is what language is: the world of a people made logos.

These parents, without exception - even Russian emigre parents who silently mourn their childrens’ incomprehension of, and disinterest in, their Russian heritage - fairly tremble that their children might attain to muturity bereft of a mastery of the Spanish language.

And so it was that last Sunday, after the Liturgy had concluded, and the children were racing about the hall while parents tried both to corral them and to enjoy a few refreshments, that I overheard friends of mine conversing on just this very matter. They nodded, of course, to the imperative of ensuring that their children acquired this knowledge, and ranged over the various means by which it might be imparted to their little dears. What was the proper proportion of reading, audio instruction, educational video, and grammatical instruction in this exigent undertaking? How much time each day? Each week? should be devoted to such study?

I overheard these questions, posed with an insistence and moment that confessed openly a certain state of mind somewhat short of desperation, yet not at all stranger to it. Inwardly, though, rather than an impulse to offer an opinion, I felt a sense of release, of unburdening, for knowing that, having heard similar conversations played out countless times, I could utter nothing that would be received with gratitude, I simply thanked God that my two-year-old son was exceedingly rambunctious and had to be pursued lest all of the refreshments end up on the floor. The reason I could offer nothing that would be received positively by these earnest parents was that the passage of time had transmuted the furtively-expressed subtext of such conversations into text, or perhaps marginalia interwoven with the whole of the text, such that text and commentary had become one. And in that subtext-made-text could be glimpsed the means by which a culture, a people, a nation - for this is another way of saying, a distinct people - having grown old and feeble, perhaps a little senescent, the light behind the eyes having dimmed slightly but perceptibly and unmistakably, passes from this mortal coil.

That subtext-become-text suffuses these conversations as the atmosphere of a place permeates everything located in, or even merely passing through, that place. It has its own substantiality, rooted as it is in the most prosaic of interests. These parents desire that their children will master Spanish not because it is a fine thing to be fluent in languages (were it so, the language in question would not always be Spanish), nor because they are all enchanted by Spanish culture, as though this were a matter of reading Cervantes or Unamuno in the original. They simply wish for their children to acquire fluency in that tongue so that they may be able to make their way in the world that is aborning; they want their children to possess one of the critical tools of success in that world, and fear lest the want of the same should find those children excluded from many of the opportunities by which worldly success is reckoned. They desire, that is, what most parents desire for their children, and that is certainly not an ignoble desire. But neither is it altogether blameless, a matter without consequence for any save those children whose parents are so intent upon having them master Spanish. For there is a difference between the meaning of these desires, which is largely exhausted by the discrete objects of the parents, and the significance of the acts to which they lead, collectively, which, is, in a few words: acquiescence, relinquishment, dissolution, disinheritance.

This is, quite simply, not the manner in which the confident bearers of a culture and heritage comport themselves in the face of an unasked, unsought demographic transformation. Those who possess the confidence of their culture, and exercise that confidence through its institutions, inclusive of their government, do not acculturate themselves to newcomers; rather, they insist, and even command, that the newcomers should adapt themselves to the ways of the natives. They would not conceive of themselves as ciphers for the culture and folkways and language(s) of whatever polyglot mass of people happened to be resident within their borders, but would understand, not at the level of thought, of doctrine or creeds, but existentially, as a mode of being, that their way of life was something positive, not an emptiness or lack waiting to be filled: a substantial reality that could not absorb just anything without becoming something else altogether. And yet.

And yet this is not the dominant posture of Americans, at least not so far as I can determine. Those who have considered the matter at all have apparently made their separate, individual peaces with the future - which, as Daniel Larison has been reminding his readers, authorizes every sort of humbug - and, with gazes fixed firmly upon the prize, have sought merely to position themselves and their children to profit from the general dissolution. Millions of individual decisions, taken for the benefit of their subjects, have as their ineluctable outcome not the benefit of the whole nation, but a sort of capitulation, the self-alienation of the nation from itself. The unseen hand does not coordinate the selfish actions of the many to create an ordered whole, but slowly sweeps a nation into the dustbin.

It may - nay, it will - be objected that in making these remarks I erect an interpretive framework on a partial foundation, that of Americans striving to learn Spanish, ignoring the efforts of native Spanish-speakers now living among us to learn English. The analogy, however, is misleading, even invalid; it assumes a symmetry in the absence of the only fact which renders the contours of the situation visible and distinct: the existence of the American nation, a reality greater than the sum of the individuals who comprise it. It is this reality, and this reality only, that enables the understanding that while it is utterly natural and necessary for foreigners to learn our language, it is unnatural for us to adapt to theirs, in our own country, and that to do so is to lose our country at some tangible level. It will also be objected that my judgments are severe and lacking in charity, or some such thing - that my remarks stand as a condemnation of people who are only striving to make their ways, and the ways of their children, in the world they have been given. To this I can only answer that I am not a nominalist. The subjective intent behind these actions may be any number of things, but the fact that someone may assert them does not alter the reality that the objective significance of these acts is to jettison a cultural and historical identity in the name of imagined prosperity. To lose sight of the broader cultural and political context within which these decisions are taken, perceiving only the individual decisions themselves, is to refuse historical understanding, as if to say that in late antiquity Roman culture and political institutions did not disappear or collapse in the West, only that millions of individual decisions regarding customs, law, language, governance, and so on, were made, and that, mysteriously and ineffably, something new appeared. Those millions of decisions, made by individuals in diverse circumstance, and under a variety of pressures and influences, just were that disappearance itself. And so also is it with us. That something new, whether something defined or a Mexifornian state of becoming, just is the dissolution of the American identity that was; that new something is not the condition of the possibility of the dissolution of an existing identity, but is that dissolution itself.

Finally, it will be objected that I here conflate the people of the nation, who must make do with circumstances as they can, circumstances beyond their power to influence, and those in positions of power and authority who have either connived at this usurpation or bowed to unalterable fate, the “economic laws” that decree the necessity of what is now transpiring. Of course, in the latter case, the salient fact is the vast income differential between America and, primarily, Mexico, in which case one would be reduced to arguing, in effect, that necessity decrees the averaging of the incomes of Americans and Mexicans, since it is the pursuit of higher incomes that brings the latter to America. This is a determinism, even fatalism, so gross as to beggar the imagination. One almost wishes that it would be stated more forthrightly to the American people. In the former case, one would be on to something, but this would not alter in the slightest measure the fact that ordinary people are acquiescing in the world ordained for them, nor that this world abolishes their old identity.

In the end, the future overheard in conversations too numerous to count is nothing more, nothing less, than the culmination of the present, the present in which newcomers, legal or not, are not assimilating to our culture, but we to theirs. This is how a nation dies in the private advantages of its individual members.

If That Is a Bad Road...

2006-11-07T23:47:00.000-05:00

A bad road, that is, characterized by plentiful potholes that seem to form whenever the the people perceive that they are regarded as rubes, bigots, stupid cracker populists, and an altogether low and disreputable rabble by the great and the good, then perhaps the Republicans ought to refrain from driving their sports cars down the road of Ameriphobia. Perhaps brusque dismissals of concerns for national identity (immigration, etc.), indifference to the concerns of those dislocated and socially destabilized by globalization, rote reassertions of now-discredited foreign-policy prescriptions, and plaintive cries that the other party will surpass your own in ineptitude and corruption just do appear to the people as manifestations of exquisite condescension.

There is no necessity of travelling this road. Or is there?

A Blog Like No Other....

2006-11-07T23:07:00.000-05:00

Strangely obsessed by blogging nemeses, and amusingly insouciant about their inability to comprehend literate writing, as evidenced by recurrent complaints concerning sentences written for audiences whose reading comprehension skills surpass the sixth-grade level, a blog collective the output of which is so self-adulatory, so cliquish, so self-referential and so soaked in ressentiment (Note to the anti-intellectual: this is a Nietzsche reference.) that reading it is about as enjoyable as watching a dog lick himself - All. Day. Long. - and still less enlightening: behold, O Reader, the wonders of the contra-conservative conservatives, who, by virtue of their morbid fixations, conjure before the mind's eye nothing so much as the image of the sort of lunatics one might find nattering on to themselves at the back of a city bus.

People with whom you would decline to ride, and at whose intended destination you would beseech a merciful God never to have to disembark.

Thinking About Torture, Again

2006-11-03T18:18:00.000-05:00

My EM colleague, Zippy Catholic, responded to my initial contribution towards a clarification of the concept of ‘torture’ and an understanding of the nature of torture that would enable us to discriminate between instances of torture and instances of other acts that the ignorant and unscrupulous might conflate with torture for any number of less than wholesome reasons. After observing that torture, or the object of an act of torture, cannot be to induce either an externally-observable physical state or a specifiable internal state in the victim, Zippy offers a serviceable, preliminary definition of torture:

I submit that whenever a helpless captive is treated as an object and made to suffer as a means to some end unrelated to his own personal good, he has been treated inhumanely. The person who does this has committed an immoral act, no matter what good end he hopes to serve by so doing.

Furthermore, after a spirited and illuminating exchange with Lydia, Zippy offers the following elaboration upon the conditional expressed in the phrase, “…as a means to some end unrelated to his own personal good…”:

It isn’t punishment or discipline if in principle someone or something else could provide what we are after. (snip) If an inanimate object (say a piece of paper with information on it) is interchangeable even in principle for the suffering we are inflicting on a human person, we are doing wrong in inflicting that suffering.

What I propose to argue is that these definitional statements do not succeed in dispelling the necessity of an attempt to analyze the characteristics or qualities of hypothetical acts of torture (Or the imposition of suffering, extreme or otherwise.) in an effort to distinguish, however provisionally, when mere unpleasantness crosses over into rank torture. As regards Zippy’s first statement, quoted above, I maintain that one could intend at least one object integral to the good of the victim, yet perpetrate acts virtually everyone would concur in designating ‘torture’. As regards the second statement, I maintain that it is confused, although I am unsettled, or undecided, as to the precise sense in which I consider it confused.

Consider the following scenario, in which acts of torture could well be performed upon a victim, not in order to objectify him towards the attainment of some other end, be it “defusing the (largely mythical) ticking bomb” or satisfying the sadistic impulses of the torturer. Imagine a Cathar or Albigensian of medieval times who has come under the power of Catholic authorties determined to extirpate this pestiferous heresy, by which terrestrial peace is perturbated and immortal souls are led away to perdition. Imagine, further, that this medieval manichee, caring naught for the flesh of this life, fairly willingly discloses the identities of his brethren in heresy. However, he steadfastly persists in his heresy, refusing to countenance the mere thought of renunciation of his belief that he is a spark of primal divinity entombed in the matter conjured by a malevolent demiurge. His captors mourn over such blasphemous errors, fearing not only that they may disturb the peace of society, but precipitate the ruin of souls, inclusive of that of the heretic in their custody. Hence, they elect to subject him to a gradual, sliding scale of “inducements”, ranging from the merely unpleasant, such as a cold, damp cell bereft of light and meagre rations, to rank torture, such as the thumscrews, iron maiden, rack, and perhaps even an application of a hot iron. The object of this exercise in what we would all rightly regard, if only intuitively, as gross barbarism is not to reduce our heretic to a mere means to some end, to render his extreme suffering fungible with some specifiable good. The object of the exercise is, on the understanding of its perpetrators, the good of the soul of their victim: his eternal salvation, which is impossible of attainment should he imagine that he is a flinder of the divine essence hidden beneath a carapace of matter.

It seems to me self-evident that what the torturers in the example do is objectively wicked and unjust, and that quite apart from characteristically modern fetishes for ‘autonomy’ and self-determination. However, it cannot be said that their victim is made to suffer as a object or means, unless a coherent construction can be made of the claim that it is possible for someone to be made a means to the end of himself, and that this is unjust. I would suggest that it is impossible to perform the latter operation save by taking into account the composite nature of man: unless there are certain acts which, by their nature, objectify and reduce a man, it is, strictly speaking, not possible to define the illiceity of torture solely by reference to intent, the circumstances that may be indicative of intent (the fungibility argument), and thus to place a wide fence around those acts thought to correllate with the intent to objectify and torture, even to the point of including in the general proscription many acts of coercion and discipline which have hitherto been regarded by most as uncontroversial. We must be able to identify the characteristics of acts of torture in virtue of which they are acts of torture, and that by reference, not merely to the intent of the actors, but also to the physicality, nay, composite nature, of man. While this approach must reckon with the inevitable ’sandpile’ questions, I do not grant that it is, on principle, utterly impossible, inasmuch as we already possess an elaborate body of moral theology according to which certain sexual acts are inherently objectifying precisely because they are performed counter to the teleology of the body and the goods of human personhood.

The second statement of Zippy’s that I have quoted strikes me as confused, although I think it best understood as a corollary, or perhaps an exegesis of, the first: a making concrete of the moral content of objectification. It is that idealistic “in principle” that I simply cannot accept. The trouble with it, as I perceive the matter, is that it evacuates prudential reason from the sphere of moral deliberation, and renders observance of the moral law a mere acting upon abstract postulates and precepts; I think this a truncated view of the moral life, which, like so many aspects of life, is often a matter of asking, “How much?, and “How far?”, and so on. Absent this element of the moral life, the struggle of that life becomes much less comprehensible, as the personal, existential elements have been drained away, or have been reduced to mere background, upon which the moral drama of “Will I or will I not act in accordance with self-evident principle X?” is enacted. The trouble is, that is to say, that I do not believe that a theory of moral obligation can ignore the way categorical norms are applied, embodied, realized, or merely approximated, in contingent circumstances.

We simply do possess differing moral obligations with respect to different categories of persons, as determined by relation, situation, moral colouration, and a host of other factors. My obligation towards the poor does not supercede, or even compete, with my obligation to my wife and children.

And our obligations toward the jihadi are not identical with our obligations toward even serial killers and child molestors, not least when the former is an enemy combatant and the latter are citizens. More generally, the moral status of the malefactor must be a consideration in determining what is and is not permissible during an interrogation; this seems to me to be the presupposition of the bargaining that police and prosecutors engage in with suspects and defendants on a routine basis. There exists no moral right to refrain from disclosing information regarding illicit activities; in fact there exists a positive duty to disclose such information, as such disclosure tends to the good of those who may be spared from harm as a consequence, the good of those others whose apprehension as the result of such disclosures will prevent them from engaging in evils destructive of their own souls, and that of the interrogatee himself, who performs his moral duty by disclosing that information and, if nothing else, by so doing affords himself at least the opportunity of becoming a better person than he otherwise would have been. Hence, in a very real sense, the discomforts, even should they be no more harsh than the provision of PBJs to a man who detests them, are not the currency of illicit coercion (and I find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that, on the understanding I am now considering, that provision of PBJs could qualify as “objectifying” and thus illicit, inasmuch as the unpleasantness of PBJs to the interrogatee is being made fungible with the information he is being asked to provide….) but discipline for failing to perform a moral duty not to conceal evil.

The exclusion of this moral variable from the consideration of the fungibility of suffering strikes me as being of the same order as a syllogism without a second term. Or, perhaps better, as analogous to the fallacies of plausibility in the arguments of a Heather MacDonald to the effect that because one can (hypothetically) construct a conservative political philosophy on a purely rationalistic basis, that the historical genesis of the Actually Existing Western Traditions and Conservative Philosophies somehow slouches off into irrelevancy. The prisoner in these hypotheticals is not being treated as an object, and, in a sense, the question of the fungibility of his discomforts with the information cannot arise; one cannot be treated as an object by being made to perform one’s duty. If one could, then we would shortly find ourselves in the company of the Foucaults of the world, among whom moral ideas are mere expressions of preference, and when “imposed”, illicit acts of the will to power. The notion of fungibility in this context suggests that something illicit is transpiring, that there is something arbitrary, ungrounded, and factitious about it all. But this is what must be proved. There is, I should rather say, short of actual torture, no conversion of suffering/punishment to information, but rather the conversion of the objective moral guilt of the malefactor to observable conditions of his existence. This is the existential meaning of justice. It does seem evident to me that the idea of the fungibility of suffering and information, when pushed too forcefully - in other words, beyond the realm of obvious torture - may rightly be read as implying a right to conceal evil.

Between, therefore, the possibility of at least one instance of the imposition of torture towards the ultimate good of the victim and the duty of the prisoner to disclose his knowledge of plans for the perpetration of evil acts, it remains obvious, to me if to no one else, that we cannot discuss torture solely in terms of intent, or what amounts to objectification in the mind of the torturer, even as inferred from a combination of circumstances. It will not do simply to dismiss the former possibility as ’stupid’. There is a grave error in moral reasoning in any attempt to justify that sort of thing; it simply, so far as I can see now, has nothing to do with treating someone as an object toward an end unrelated to his personal good, or rendering his suffering fungible with some end, itself of lesser value than a human life, that, in principle, could be obtained by other means. That is to say, we must be capable of discussing torture, somehow, with respect to the bodily constitution of man, even his nature as a composite being, and I cannot see that this discussion can avoid the drawing of lines in theory, and not merely as pragmatic, statutory markers of possible ill intent. If this is presumed to be impossible, then we will be left without any clear criteria for distinguishing licit acts of coercion and punishment from acts that are cruel, inhuman, and degrading. The mere fact that people, all of whom are opposed to torture, can discourse volubly on the nature, conditions, and characteristics of torture should suffice to indicate that those broaching the questions and expressing reservations about the declarations of some that ‘what is torture’ is self-evident are not members of some Coalition for Fog seeking to legitimate the illigitimate and justify the unjustifiable.

I do believe that there exists a promising avenue for further analysis along these lines, suggested by Professor Pruss in the comments section of a post at Zippy’s blog. Essentially, the injustice and iniquity of torture would subsist in the attempt to derange the reason of the victim, to unseat his reason and render him a pliable object of manipulation. Such as approach would have to take into account the relationship of the body to the mind, and would take us beyond discussions of intent, although it could not leave them behind altogether.

While I would not wish to dismiss this approach, I do not perceive that it can evade the question of degrees. Clearly there exist licit degrees of ‘bodily mortification’, self-imposed, or imposed by others, that are manifestly intended to either weaken, re-orient, tutor, limit, discipline, or otherwise canalize reason. The ascetic disciplines of the Orthodox Church aim at the weakening of the passions and the re-orientation of the affections towards their right ends; it is at once a use of reason against the body, for the body, and a humbling of reason, so often merely the slave of those passions, before the supra-rational Good of human nature. It would be incoherent to suggest that all of these practices do not aim at influencing the rational faculties, principally by weakening their corrupt expressions. One could say something analogous regarding military training, which both physically and psychologically, aims at breaking down, to some degree, the reason and personality of the individual soldier, to the end that he might be rendered a fit, contributing member of a cohesive unit. And one could also conceive of examples of ‘training’ - hazing, which, like it or not, is at some level an integral aspect of this way of life - which are excessive. And one could also say much the same thing regarding the punishment of the malefactor who refuses to divulge information concerning the evil he and his comrades have plotted. Some punishments simply will aim at breaking down his reason, because his reason is depraved. Leaving aside the question of varying physical constitutions, I seriously doubt that sleep deprivation, for example, is inherently torturous, inherently destructive of reason; certainly, one night of deprivation will not derange reason, even though ten nights certainly would be productive of that effect, just as one drink will not impair one’s faculties, while ten surely will. I do not see, therefore, that the question of degrees, the question of the construction of sandpiles, can be eschewed altogether. It would seem to be graven, not necessarily in certain mistaken modes of reasoning, but in the nature of things. It is still true that

Regulations about exeternal physicalities don’t properly define torture.

And that

… it makes no sense to treat a list of physicalities as what just is torture.

It is just that physicality, defined broadly so as to encompass psychological effects, is necessary, though not sufficient, to a definition of torture, just as an understanding of intent is necessary, though not sufficient, to that definition.

Thinking About Torture

2006-11-03T18:03:00.000-05:00

Our own Zippy Catholic has authored a goodly number of posts on this unpleasant, yet timely subject. In a recent post at his own blog, Zippy generalizes the argument of a recent Alexander Pruss piece, which treated of moral reasoning concerning the act of abortion, and applies his conclusion to the now-controverted question of torture:

….when we decide to do something, as a moral matter, we engage in two stages of reasoning. In the first stage of reasoning, deontological reasoning, we determine whether the contemplated act is permissable at all. In the second stage, we weigh the pros and cons of performing the action to decide whether or not it would be a good thing to to do.

The upshot of Professor Pruss’ piece, assuming I follow it correctly (and in any case this is my own conclusion), is as follows: when an act is morally impermissable, it is wrong to even attempt to engage in the second type of reasoning, the “weighing” of the pros and cons of performing the act. To engage in the “weighing” kind of reasoning - merely to ask the question of what the pros and cons mightbe of performing the act, without presupposing a particular conclusion - is to have already presumed that this is the sort of act which can be weighed according to some moral “market value”.

This extends, in my view, to other kinds of “boundaries” surrounding a contemplated act. To weigh the pros and cons of an act is one sort of non-deontological “weighing” of an act. To attempt to determine how close one can come to an impermissable act without actually crossing the line is another form of non-deontological weighing. The process of weighing an act is the beginning of the performance of the act: it is a movement of the will toward the object of the act, though it may not represent the final choice to actually perform the act.(snip)

….Torture, adultery, and abortion are intrinsically evil acts. They aren’t the sort of act which can be weighed against intentions and circumstances or approached as closely as possible without crossing a line. The movement of the will to approach an intrinsically evil act as closely as possible is a movement of the will toward an instrinsically evil act. To merely pose the question is to already have assented at least in part to torture, to abortion, to adultery.

I hope that I may be pardoned for citing a lengthy passage from Zippy’s own argument, which I though necessary as a preliminary to what will follow. What I wish to argue is that the application of this insight to the question of torture, in the specific sense of rejecting the very possibility of a sort of graduated scale, inclusive of a line drawn somewhere, is mistaken, that it yields counterintuitive and unacceptable conclusions regarding other aspects of ordinary existence, and that torture is, while assuredly a grave and inherent evil, not precisely the same sort of thing as abortion or adultery. I hope, furthermore, to suggest, albeit tentatively, possibilities as to what might account for what I take to be the mistake in this reasoning.

It would probably be well to begin exploring the topic by considering the ways in which torture and abortion are distinct as acts. In the specific sense relevant to present controversies, that is, the sense in which the question has arisen within the context of the interrogation of captured jihadis, abortion and torture may be distinguished by the fact that in the case of the former, the act is, essentially, the end sought, while in the case of the latter, the act is merely a means to a further end - the acquisition of information pertinent to the prevention of terrorist attacks. In other words, there is a sort of unity of the means employed to induce abortion and the end of abortion; when a women ingests a megadose of an abortifacient drug, for example, this is not a means to some third thing, but the act of abortion itself. A woman may have any number of a possible infinity of reasons for procuring the abortion; but this subjective consideration is without relevance to the status or nature of the act itself, which is in no way determined by the possibilities it opens for the actor(s).

One might argue that abortion and torture are analogous inasmuch as both may be portrayed as illicit acts performed with further ends in mind; just as a woman procures an abortion in order, say, to ensure that her breasts will not sag after she has nursed (a common reason among the upper classes during the Renaissance, and beyond, one supposes), the torturer might torture so as to obtain the information vital to achieving objective Y or preventing evil X. One might also argue that abortion and torture are analogous simply insofar as both are inherently unjust. Both analogies, however, whatever they might illuminate, tend in my judgment to obscure the fact that regardless of the means chosen for the performance of an abortion, the application of those means just is the act and end of abortion; it is redundant to argue that the specific type of abortion is the means toward the end of abortion. The question, moreover, of a graduated scale of abortion is utterly incoherent, whereas it is far from evident that the same can be said for a graduated scale of coercion and torture.

The same could be said for adultery: to merely look upon a woman other than one’s own wife with lust just is the act of adultery; it is not the means of adultery, but the very performance of adultery, even if a less grievously destructive performance than the consummation of that mental state. This is to suggest that there exists a scale of moral gravity, even if the commission of the act is itself binary in nature. It seems doubtful that the same things could be said with respect to torture. First, because torture, in the present context - excluding, that is, the question of pure sadism - is conceived of explicitly as a means, and means of this type, by their nature, are generally variable, indefinite, and amenable to substitution. They are not necessary, but vary in accordance with variables too numerous to specify. Second, and more importantly, torture itself is, at least to a degree, relative to the constitution, physical and mental, of the victim. Adultery depends upon a mental state which one either does or does not have, and abortion is an act which is either done or not done, ie. killing an infant; torture, the infliction of grievous physical and/or psychological suffering for purposes of extracting information or illicitly bending the victim to one’s will, would seem to be contingent upon the circumstances, not of a threat, real or imagined, but of the constitution of the people involved.

I do not wish to lay any more stress upon this distinction, as it could be argued that, taken in itself, it merely begs the question of the distinctive character of torture. However, there are other aspects of this mortal existence which may be analogized to torture and, when this is done, suggest that the analogy between torture and, say, abortion, is flawed, and that counterintuitive, irrational consequences follow upon a rigid rejection of the possibility of a graduated scale of coercion/torture. It is this line of reasoning which warrants, in my judgment, the foregoing drawing of distinctions.

If it is indeed the case that to pose the question of how far one may go in coercing a prisoner to confess or divulge information is already to have oriented the will toward an evil act, namely, torture, then there exist numerous, perhaps innumerable, ready analogies from ordinary experience. Consider child abuse. We all agree that the abuse of a child is a heinous, instrinsic evil, never warranted by circumstances, and never justified by the ends made possible by the abuse itself. And yet there exists a relevant question: how far may one go in disciplining an erring child, by, for example, confining him to his room without his toys, or by spanking him, without crossing the line over into the realm of abuse? Assuming, of course, an infraction of sufficient gravity, would it be licit to confine the child to his room for an hour? Two hours? An afternoon? Would it be licit to spank him once? Twice? Three times? With an open hand? With a stick? The critical point is that while we might not be able to adequately specify the conditions under which an act of punishment crosses the line into abuse, we believe that the distinction not only obtains, but that it is also coherent to reason about the location(s?) of that line, and that it cannot follow from the ambiguity of the subject matter that any will-to-spank, presupposing as it does that reasoning about moral lines, is by nature a will toward the evil act of child abuse. It seems manifest, that is, that, on the basis of the types of acts that interrogation and the disciplining of children are, it is morally coherent not merely to speak in terms of a continnuum, but to perceive an analogy between torture and child abuse, and between coercive interrogation and discipline. The difficulty of determining the location of a line does not entail either the nonexistence of the line or the illicit status of reasoning about possible lines.

What would be truly counterintuitive would be a type of moral reasoning which tended to yield the conclusion that the impossibility of determining universally valid distinctions between licit and illicit degrees of various acts entailed that all acts amenable to location on a continuum or graduated scale were therefore illicit. There are too many aspects of ordinary life which fall into precisely this category of graduation and degree. We have already mentioned the disciplining of children. We could analogize the training of military and law-enforcement personnel, quite apart from the issue of waterboarding, the attempt to distinguish between the desire to provide for one’s family and rank avarice, the difference between a healthy gratitude for the gifts of food and sheer gluttony, the point at which self-examination on a point of weakness becomes an obsessive scruple, and a virtually innumerable host of examples to the question of the distinction between mere coercion and torture. Absent the ability to reason in terms of such graduations and shades, we will develop a sort of rigorism that, I fear, will first render illicit many of the distinctions upon which ordinary life depends, and then generate its own nemesis in a reaction against such inordinate rigor, much like certain advocates of torture, who conclude that because it is difficult or impossible to draw universal, objective distinctions, there is therefore no such thing as torture per se, and that anything is permitted in the service of the greater good.

As it happens, there is a line of reasoning which may be employed, first, to distinguish between certain types of gradation, such as that pertaining to gluttony, that possess some cogency, and other types, such as that pertaining to interrogation, that only yield the conclusion of impermissability. That line of reasoning concerns the will, and holds that it is the element of coercion that renders illigitimate all discussion of graduations and degrees. It is not the, for example, requirement of standing for hours on end that is illicit, but the utilization of this technique as a means to induce a prisoner to divulge something he might otherwise conceal that is illicit. I suspect that such a line of reasoning cannot be rendered consistent with the training of military and law-enforcement personnel, or the disciplining of children, without serious qualifications, some of which, it would seem, must be consequentialist in nature, but leave that to the side. It is, on this view, the forcing of the will that is illigitimate. Tom, at Disputations, provides a sketch of the position within the context of the torture debate. After arguing that the entire model of a moral spectrum for a disputed action or class of actions amounts to a sort of sorites paradox, and proposing that the superior model would be that of disjoint sets, complete with nifty visual aids, Tom elaborates:

That is, we change the question from, “How much of X is moral?” to “Is the action Y moral?”, where the action we’re now asking about is considered as such rather than as admitting of more or less.

I haven’t though through the process of converting from “action that admits of more or less” to “action as such”. This may be unworkable in particular cases, but then I’m already convinced questions in terms of the former are unworkable in general.

Notice, though, what happens when I try to convert “making a prisoner stand for some period of time” into an action that doesn’t admit of more or less. I’m not sure how to do this without importing some of the intent, making it “making a prisoner stand in order to get him to talk.”

If this is the proper conversion — note the IF — then don’t I have to put “making a prisoner stand in order to get him to talk” in the red circle, which is to say in the set of immoral acts?

I’ll skip the argument for answering yes to that question, and point out the interesting corollary that the “unquestionably moral end of the spectrum” turns out to be an illusion. If no one would say it’s immoral to make someone stand for fifty seconds, then everyone’s wrong, since it can be immoral if the intent is to get him to talk.

It is clearly the coercion of the will, in this argument, which renders forced standing morally illicit. To backtrack somewhat, I do believe that the conversion can be performed without importing some conception of intent, namely, that it is immoral to intend the coercion of the will of another, but this conversion would then be contingent upon a specifiable range of gradations, as well as a means, at least semi-rational, of discriminating between licit coercions and illicit acts, of torture, even if the results were not such as to possess universal validity. However, it should be plain the the status of the will of the individual is in this argument accorded a certain status of inviolability, and that this status becomes the criterion by which the liceity of any contemplated action of the sort we, as a society, have been debating, is determined. It is this which I consider profoundly mistaken, as it makes a hash of the notions of duty and rights.

We should be clear concerning what is meant when it is asserted that it is illicit to coerce the will, which is the only cogent meaning of phrases containing the language, “to get him to talk”. What is meant is that a man possesses a right to the deliberations and determinations of his will, and that, laying aside the obvious exceptions of circumstances which could issue in immediate harm to others, such deliverances are not to be interfered with, such that, if, in the case of a prisoner, he has willed participation in some illicit act and willed, further, not to divulge any information concerning it, he ought not be pressured to alter that determination of will. Which is to state, in a roundabout way, that he possesses either a claim right to be positively defended in at least the possession of the deliberations and judgments of his will, or a non-interference right to be let alone in the possession of the same, a sort of shadow of the duty of the authority not to perform certain actions. In practice, it is doubtful that the distinction would be of any great consequence; the functional consequence of this view will be that authority possesses a duty to defend, whether by action or indifference, the prisoner in the performance of his determination not to cooperate in the resolution or prevention of criminal and terrorist acts. If it is true that the real distinction is not that between torture and licit degrees of coercion, but that between an always-illicit coercion, of which torture is, presumably, merely an extreme manifestation, and a refusal to “get the prisoner to talk”, by which is meant a respect for the integrity of the will of a prisoner, even where this will may well be evil, then it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that society, on this understanding, is subject to a duty to protect/defend the evil in their non-performance of acts requisite to the maintainance of order, namely, confession of evil intentions. This, then, would be to suggest that society is positively obligated to defend the integrity and inviolability of wills ordered to the destruction of the conditions of civilized existence - a suggestion that strikes me as highly dubious.

We are not discussing obvious evils such as the targetting of noncombatants in war; we are no longer even debating what constitutes, or qualifies as, torture. In the case of the former, there are many things a society may do licitly in self-defense, and there are things it may not do; in the case of the latter, it is obvious that, for example, attaching electrodes to the genitals constitutes torture, and that compelling a man to stand for two days also constitutes torture. What is not clear is whether compelling the same man to stand for six hours constitutes torture, or where the line between coercive standing and torturous standing should be drawn. Hence, it is on the basis of this lack of clarity, and the apparent impossibility of arriving at categorical answers to the question of the demarcation of mere coercion and torture, that it is argued that the question ought not be posed as one of degree, or “How far may I go?”, but as, at least implicitly, “Am I attempting to force his will?” This is likely the only way one can reason morally and evade either paralyzing relativism or cynical skepticism on the one hand, or an utter indifference to moral distinctions on the other, and yet, it seems to me, this line of reasoning renders problematic forms of moral reasoning essential to the routines of daily, civilized life, yields unusual conclusions regarding the duties of public authority, both towards the evil man and to the public, and presupposes an ethic and view of the individual that impresses me, if no one else - although I believe similar things have been said of the New Natural Law theories - as unduly Kantian and individualist in nature.

While I have gone on far longer than I intended, I would suggest that there are two aspects of this line of reasoning which cause it to yield these counterintuitive results. First, this line of reasoning seems to presuppose that the object of moral reasoning is always to arrive at clear and distinct, categorical answers valid for all persons, and in all places, at all times; that is, it leaves no place for the art of the casuist, who endeavours to apply the principles of moral reasoning to the data of experience that vary - within limits - with relationships, circumstances, intentions and so on. Moral reasoning, I would suggest, involves more than categorical judgment; it is replete with such judgments, as it must be if it is to conform to reality, but also involves many dilemmas of a circumstantial and contingent nature. Stated differently, moral reasoning involves more than a specifiable list of duties and abstentions; it also involves the less-stringently defined matter of virtue and vice as made manifest in contingent circumstances. It cannot be reduced to a matter of systems or architecture, but is also a lived reality - a lived reality that inevitably involves questions of more and less, of degrees and attempts, however halting and flawed, to draw lines between things that appear similar yet are grasped by the intuition as being somehow, subtly, distinguished.

Second, the line of reasoning concerning which I am expressing reservations presupposes a solicitude for the sanctity of the individual will which, when expressed as the idea that it is illicit to endeavour to coerce the will of a prisoner, even by means that fall short of torture, entails the conclusion that such attempts regard the prisoner as a means and not an end. It is difficult to perceive how this view might not devolve into a formal equivalent of a doctrine of autonomy, according to which the fact of willing trumps both the substance of that willing and the web of obligations in which the subject is inevitably enmeshed as a rational being. That this reasoning evidently leads to the conclusion that the integrity of the will of a prisoner is somehow at least a functional priority over the duty of authority towards society only heightens this concern: this is to unbalance the relationship of the individual to the community of which he is a part, or, at a minimum, has come into relationship with, and to privilege the individual in such as way as to suggest that what is fundamental is not his being-within-relationship, but his autonomous will. Again, it is difficult to perceive how this view might avoid devolution into a less-than-entirely-wholesome individualism; it hardly seems correct to state that a prisoner possesses a right to the untroubled integrity of his will towards the harm of society, or that society is bound by a duty to leave him untroubled in his willful nonperformance of acts necessary to the good of society. Yet this would seem to follow upon the rejection of graduated scales of coercion, and of the legitimacy of coercion itself.

In light of all of the foregoing, and in conclusion, it appears to me as though we are stuck with a measure of ambiguity as to where licit coercion ends and torture begins, and I would even go so far as to suggest that the line may actually be bright, at least on occasion, but that the darkness of our understanding precludes easy discovery. Torture must be illicit coercion, where there is also the possibility of licit coercion, just as child abuse, for example, may be understood as illicit and irrational discipline, in contradistinction with licit, healthy, discipline, and the class of illicit coercions will have to be determined on the basis of some reasoned inquiry as to the identifiable characteristics of grievous bodily and psychological harms, where the acts in question seem to fall short of the obvious, such as the pulling of nails and the attachment of electrodes to genitals. Succinctly and simply, we will have to reason as to how far is too far, and how far is just far enough. Perhaps the process might begin with the observation that regarding as an end in itself a will oriented toward evil can constitute objective injustice; to be an end simply is, as in the case of noncombatants, to be a nonparticipant in the threat with which one is confronted. The moral status of the subject must condition the application of the means/end distinction to him. That is, a particular context, analogous to that of being a child subordinate to his parents or a military recruit subject to the direction of those training him, alters his status, such that what would be illicit coercion, if not torture, absent that context, become licit towards the ends of that particular relationship; one is not, in those contexts, so much a means as a subject being trained to conditioned towards the realization of certain of the ends of human nature as it is expressed in various social settings. In the case of the prisoner, that may be something as simple as learning not to involve oneself in evil. Torture, then, might be treatment tending, by reason of its abusive character, away from the ends of human nature, as expressed in the good of both the subject and object of such evil acts. Discerning the good of human nature, the means by which this is realized in concrete situations, and the means by which this is thwarted, is the task of reason. It is a task of judgment, and this is a learned quality of deliberation.

Zippy's Rejoinder, inclusive of an impressive philosophical duel between Zippy and Lydia McGrew.

A Revealing Irony....

2006-09-25T11:10:00.000-04:00

....Courtesy of Paul Cella, over at Redstate:

My father pointed me to an irony that is also a disclosure. We learned last week (if in fact we did not already know) the disposition of the guardians of elite and progressive opinion, and it should alarm us. The Pope delivered a careful criticism of Islam, and he was roundly castigated; a foreign autocrat came to our shores and called our Chief Executive the devil, and reaction to him was muted. In other words, the instinct to shield Islam from censure is stronger among these luminaries than the instinct to bristle at a national insult from a petty despot.

The sickness of Western society may well be the sickness unto death. So incapable are our elites of imagining Western society save through the prism of its perversion in the doctrines and institutional forms of liberalism that they have yet again demonstrated not merely their (by now, willful) incomprehension of our enemies, but also their willingness to court catastrophe provided that they not be compelled to transgress the pseudo-commandments of their ideological illusions. So forceful is the death-grip of liberalism, coiled round the soul of the West, that the extirpation of everything that constitutes the historic and cultural identity of the West is now proclaimed as the essence of the Western Idea - for this is precisely what is entailed by that facile and jejeune universalism which proclaims that the spiritual core of Western civilization is compatible with every other civilization, and that no invidious judgment regarding the Other may be voiced - and there is a sense, conveyed by the spiritual deracination of our elites themselves, as disclosed by anecdotes such as that quoted above, that we would sooner perish than defend the particularity and difference of our own civilization and heritage.

Liberalism: the once and future soporific of Western civilizational suicide.

How to Dress Down a Dopey Ideologue

2006-09-23T21:48:00.000-04:00

Chris Roach dresses down that cloying lackey of globalists everywhere, Tom Friedman:

Why does anyone listen to Tom Friedman? His only skill is repeating cliches about the beauties of free trade. He seems equally delighted every time he discovers two foreign countries might do business with one another. Oh look, Taiwan just made a deal with Chile. World peace is next!(snip)

He does not recognize any limits on trade. He praises destruction as an end in itself, creative or otherwise. Friedman's a propagandist who employs the classic technique of ignoring inconvenient facts. (snip)

At the heart of Friedman's error is a lack of justice and a confusion about human nature. Most people are not would-be managers or flexible entrepreneurs prepared to change careers every two or three years. People work to live, to support their families, and to feel useful and productive. A decent human being is concerned when anyone loses his job and doubly so when that person is his countryman. And it's simply unrealistic to expect people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s to retool for new careers. But, hey, it's important entire regions of America (and the world) are impoverished so that Friedman can have a Starbucks latte with Indians in Monteverde or wherever he is this week.

Chris Roach's excellent take-down of a tired hack is a tonic for those worn out, like Manuel Noriega holed up in a Papal embassy, by the incessant blasting of propaganda to the immaculate glories of free trade, globalization, and the "information economy", that term that remains bereft of meaning unless it is to signify a new economic order in which ordinary Americans will not be afforded a decent living in the ordinary jobs for which they are qualified, their places having been usurped by immigrants if the work is still performed in America, their work outsourced if it is now performed by foreigners not (yet?) resident in the United States, or insourced if it is performed by educated helots willing to toil for wages inadequate to sustain an American in what has always been his accustomed mode of living.

However, there is more that should be said concerning the fetish for trade and globalization, and it is this: free trade of the sort Friedman understands to characterize his flat, featureless world of dreams is nothing more than a utilitarian system propagated under cover of utopian dogmas. It is utilitarian inasmuch as it openly accepts, and often celebrates, the displacement and impoverishment of, often enough, entire regions and entire classes of people, to the end that capital may be more efficiently employed towards gains. If I might be pardoned an indulgence in postmodernist jargon, it is, like all other forms of utilitarianism, a valorization of the holocaust of the particular, an invocation of the sacrifice of those who, let us be honest in our discourse, are among the more vulnerable in our societies, economically speaking, to the end that the marvelous, coordinating, systemic effects of the Hidden Fist might be made to occur more efficiently and profitably for those swinging their fists at the rest of us. This type of trade, therefore, runs directly and immediately counter to that fundamental instinct of the human species which thoughtful conservatives - and indeed, thoughtful people of whatever political persuasion - have never ceased to regard as the precondition of the good life, and the common good of those who dwell together in the larger community of the polity: the preference for the well-being and welfare of those who are near, and nearer, to us, for those with whom we have, by whatever origins, some common share of this life. This system bids us transfer our loyalties from those to whom we are connected by bonds more organic, and of greater richness, than ties of mere exchange, to the system itself and, what is still more depraved, to the idea of the system that by this sacrifice of the welfare of our fellows, we participate in progress towards a better world.

More depraved than even the manifest implications of the utilitarian character of global trade is the nakedly - and transparently fraudulent - utopian propaganda advanced to legitimate this system - a totality, to make recourse once more to that 'postmodern jargon' - according to which the process of trade, once all factors have been calculated and all variables corrected for, uniformly benefits all sentient beings. What other meaning can be assigned to fatuities about 'rising tides that lift all boats', but that this trade benefits even those who are thrown out of gainful employment and compelled by circumstances to endure privation, loss, and chronic insecurity. They are, one presumes, immiserated, yet simultaneously enriched by the onward, upward trajectory of Progress! What a doctrine of charity this is! A man need not take concern for his fellows, but only pursue his private, selfish good, and in doing so, he performs a universal charitable service! Anyone possessed of even only the bare rudiments of sentience is cognizant of the unalterable reality that just as there are winners in the great game (a stacked deck, I hear) of trade, there are also losers; and anyone who deigns to confront the world as it exists outside the dream palace of utopian delusions will often hear the compaints of those who not only are being screwed, but know that they are being screwed, good, long, and hard, by the mandarins of the globalist meritocracy. Confronted by the evidence of senses and intellect that cannot decline to notice a Detroit or the decline of the wages of 'blue collar' labour - and much 'white collar' labour as well - there is but one way for propagandists to transform the lie into truth, and that is by appealing to the long run: well, things are bad for them now, but things will be better for them at some (indeterminate) point in the future. In other words, they can transmute the deceits of the utopian propaganda of infinite, universal Progress into a simulation of the truth by appealing to the utilitarian, 'greatest good' aspect of the system: yes, some must suffer now, in order that others might benefit later. Or, being translated into plain English: some must be reduced and immiserated now, in order that others might wax fatter and grow ever richer. One might expect apologists for the global order of trade to possess greater self-awareness than this, but one would suffer endless disappointment. Either everyone is growing richer and trade is ushering in a new era of peace and harmony (although the world seems to be becoming rather nastier as the distances between us shrink, no?), or they find themselves offering perorations to the glories of what radicals once condemned as the ground of the iniquity of capitalism, and the source of its eventual undoing (and let us not pretend that those radicals did not have problems of their own, problems curiously analogous to those of the commercial utopians... does anyone recall the cliches regarding breaking eggs and making omelettes?).

Against the fantasies and conceits of the commercial utopians, whose arguments have not changed in 250 years (or more), let us rediscover the ancient wisdom of tending to our own gardens, eschewing the delusory belief in indefinite Progress, which is naught but the assertion that the human condition has been overcome, that all human interests and ends have been, or will be, reconciled, that this cosmic reconciliation occursin this world, and that this intramundane process is illimitable by any of the constraints of human nature, the natural realm, and mankind itself. Global capitalism may be preferable to socialism, whether 'global' or 'within one country', but this is only to state that Brave New World, or something like it, is at least endlessly diverting, and therefore to be preferred over 1984. Choosing the mode of one's servility is hardly a meaningful choice once one has moved beyond the superficialities of the means.

Rhythms of Life

2006-09-23T21:01:00.000-04:00

This is, I suppose, a Louisiana turn on Hilaire Belloc's little rhyme: "Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,/There's laughter and dancing and good red wine./ At least I've always found it so./ Benedicamus Domino!" It happened some months ago, but the clipping has just come to my attention. Kraemer is a very small and very poor little town down in the bayou in which people make what living they can from selling alligator skins and skulls. The local paper, the Beauregard Daily, carried the following obituary: "Willie 'One Eye" Kraemer, 91, a native and resident of Kraemer, died Saturday, Dec. 24, 2005. Visitation will be from 5 t0 10 p.m. today and from 8 a.m. to funeral time Thursday at St. Lawrence Church in Kraemer. Mass will be at 11 a.m. Thursday at the church, with burial in the church cemetary." After listing numerous survivors and those who went before, the obituary concludes with this: "He hunted alligators and enjoyed drinking. He was Catholic." Rest in peace, One Eye. ~Fr. Neuhaus, from the August/September issue of First Things

I should not want to propound the view that tippling is essential to the good life, but, all the same, I cannot evade the obvious relationship between feasting and fasting, celebration and repentance. It is not, as the perverse and decadent celebration of Mardi Gras might lead the uninstructed to believe, that revelry must involve acts that call for penitence, but rather that one cannot truly comprehend the lows of life without the highs, the moments of jollity without the moments of sadness. There is something unbalanced and unwholesome in a life from which one of these realities has been excluded, and there is something false and inhuman in a life so spiritually and psychologically featureless as to exclude both realities. Perhaps those who fear that robust Catholic conception of celebration fear it because they also fear the corresponding depths of repentence; perhaps it is a certain shallowness of the understanding of man's lot in this world that engenders a certain indifference towards its blessings.

Yes, They Really Do Talk That Way About the Meritocracy

2006-09-09T12:49:00.000-04:00

Commenting on David Brooks' not-terribly persuasive attempt ($$) to justify the contention that rising income inequality is not reflective of underlying structural problems in the economy, Jared Bernstein writes:

...Brooks claims that workers are just as secure as they were in decades past and that social mobility is unchanged. But even he would agree that there’s more inequality now than there used to be, and unless mobility has increased, we are much further from each other across the economic spectrum, and no more likely to span the increased distances. We need more social mobility to offset rising inequality, and we haven’t gotten it.

Which suggests to me that, contrary to Brooks, the meritocracy isn’t working. One study finds that the intergenerational correlation between fathers' and sons' income has actually increased over the past few decades, though other studies find it’s unchanged.

That reference to an increase in the intergenerational correlation between the income of fathers and sons carries the obvious implication that there is something suspect about the bare fact of such correlations, something suspect that might be remedied, in part, by the application of estate taxes, as Reihan
intimates:

Sharper inequality should at least mean, normatively speaking, that we see more churn in the economy. I happen to Brooks agrees, which is part of the reason he is a friend of estate taxes.

All of which confirms that my portrayal of the role of estate taxation in a pernicious system of corporatist meritocracy was essentially correct, despite differences in the interpretations offered and inferences drawn:

Consider then, the synthetic picture that a consideration of meritocratic support for the estate tax, and support for a particular vision of education, inclusive of affirmative action, affords: a social system in which there is engineered by various means a ceaseless turnover, between and within generations and among different groups, of those at the highest rungs of the socio-economic ladder. Those who have risen so far are to have their heirs cast down pre-emptively, while those who did not rise are to have their heirs groomed for positions of authority and prosperity; and the operation of this system, in its particulars and in its ends, intends the withering away of the particular loyalties and identities of the people, creating a world in which each man is a cipher - a cipher hoping that some force will one day pluck him from his obscure nothingness and bestow upon him the only identity left - sheer quantity, that is, mammon and the means of amassing mammon.

Nevertheless, from rejection of estate taxation as a means of redressing structural imbalances and inequities in the economy it does not follow that there exist no problems worth discussing. Structural and policy shifts in the economy have occurred, the effects of these shifts in stagnant middle-class incomes and skyrocketing upper-class incomes are manifest, and these effects not only merit discussion when considered in themselves, but also insofar as they are the inevitable consequences of processes which are exerting, and will continue to exert, other political and social pressures on the body politic. One thing is certain, however, and that is that any two analyses which not only yield such contradictory policy reforms as those of Brooks -

What’s needed is not a populist revolt, which would make everything worse, but a second generation of human capital policies, designed for people as they actually are, to help them get the intangible skills the economy rewards.

And Yglesias -

The "skill premium," for example, could be easily diminished by importing more skilled professionals from abroad.

While yet leaving untouched some of the phenomena responsible for the undesirable socio-economic effects, namely globalization and the economic concentration it facilitates, even to the extent of presupposing and relying upon them for those reforms, probably miss the point entirely, proposing superficial solutions to a profound alteration in our modes of life. In Brooks' case, those reforms would evidently involve government subsidization of the acquisition of the skill sets privileged under globalization, furthering the logic of a system which socializes costs and privatizes profits, while in Yglesias' case, the reforms would involve, in part, an exacerbation of the effects of globalization, those effects being redirected against a different segment of society.

Perhaps it would be more sensible to direct attention to the thing-in-itself as opposed to striving vainly to canalize certain of its consequences, yes?

Let's Step Back - That's Where Some Neocons Are Headed

2006-09-04T20:36:00.000-04:00

And that, as always, is a near-infallible indication that one is treading the broad path that leads to perdition. Lawrence Auster, commenting on the preposterous and nihilistic utterances of Hammasa Kohistani, now concluding her year as Miss England, writes:

Muslims’ resentful reaction, including their threat to turn terrorist, in response to our reasonable request that they help us against the terrorists proves beyond doubt that they are not on our side, they are on the terrorists’ side. And therefore we should announce that we will hold Muslims collectively responsible for any jihadist and terrorist acts performed against our society. Nothing is off the table, from the closing of mosques and the mass deportation of Muslims to (as Tom Tancredo has cogently argued) the nuclear destruction of Mecca and Medina.

Well, some things must be taken off the table, lest we, to the ruin of our souls and, ultimately, our civilization itself, succumb to the temptation to will evil that some good may come of it, to act in accordance with the (false) belief that the nobility of our ends sanctifies any means we choose toward their realization. Yes, moderate Islam is largely mythical, a moderate Muslim being what would otherwise be known as an apostate or heretic; yes, most of those Muslims who now feign moderation, or create the impression of moderation by their manner of life and their nuanced speech, will ultimately declare for the jihad; yes, Islam, both as a religous doctrine and as the life-ways of its adherents, is utterly inimical to Western civilization in any of its expressions - even so, we should not indulge, however great may be the depths of justified outrage at the unending parade of provocations committed by adherents of the "Religion of Peace", in discussions of the circumstances under which nuclear genocide might be contemplated. Rather, we should observe Auster's wise counsel from January of 2005:

If we pursue the course of ecumenism, we will embark on a decades-long attempt to turn Muslims into moderate Muslims. The endeavor would become the central political project and moral commitment of our society, an obsessive, irrational quest that—like the Oslo "peace" process—we could never permit ourselves to abandon, no matter how many times it had failed. In the process we would empower Islam and lose ourselves.

If we pursue the course of civilizational defense, we will unstring Islam as a global force by decreasing Muslims' presence in the West and containing them within their historic lands. Once the two civilizations are no longer in each other's faces, our freedom and safety will no longer depend on our begging, cajoling, and bribing them to give up their deepest convictions.

Which path is more promising? The path of civilizational realism, in which we recognize Islam as our eternal adversary and act accordingly, or the path of the civilizational peace process, in which we look on a billion Muslims as moderates who have somehow failed so far to realize that they are moderates, but who—we devoutly believe—will somehow discover that they are moderates if we keep trying hard enough to convince them of that fact?

The rigourous exclusion of Islam and its adherents from Western lands is a morally licit solution to the dilemma of Islam and its fundamental incompatibility with even a Western civilization lapsing into its senescence. It is the only means by which we can avoid losing either our civilization or our souls (and then our civilization).

In A League of His Own

2006-09-04T20:17:00.000-04:00

Daniel Larison, that is. Larison has probably posted over one-thousand entries this summer, a prodigious feat of blogging that is rendered all the more remarkable by the fact that among that unfathomable number of entries, there is not to be found even one clanker. Even the posts consisting of extended quotations from noteworthy books and authors are more illuminating than just about anything you'll read elsewhere. Steve Sailer remarks:

Sometime this summer, Daniel Larison's Eunomia blog kicked into overdrive. If you graphed all the foreign policy and political philosophy oriented blogs with quantity on the horizontal axis and quality on the vertical axis, Eunomia would be in the extreme upper right corner.

Larison is a Ph.D. student in Byzantine History at the University of Chicago and he knows an enormous amount about West Asia, which, as you may have noticed, is in the news a lot these days, and, as you may also have noticed, is not at all well understood by most commentators.

Beyond sheer knowledge, Larison (who is, I believe, a convert to the Greek Orthodox church) possesses an old man's wisdom rare in someone young enough to have that much energy.

I freely acknowledge my indebtedness to Larison, who has provided an example of erudite, eloquent reaction to a world characterized more by delusion and fantasy, in senses approaching those of ascetic literature, than by sober reasoning.

On The Other Hand....

2006-09-04T15:18:00.000-04:00

When the Derb is wrong, he can be really wrong:

I suppose there are social conservatives who find Playboy objectionable on moral grounds, but it all seems pretty harmless to me. I don’t think I’ll be buying any more issues, but it’s strangely comforting to know that it, and its progenitor, are still around, fixed points in a changing world. Ner’s [Hugh Hefner] revolution was of the kind that, once accomplished, requires no further changes—insists, in fact, that no further changes be made, for fear of losing the affections of what must be a fairly stable market segment. In that respect, Playboy is a conservative magazine. With that in mind, from an employee of one fifty-something conservative magazine to the founder of another, I offer belated birthday greetings to Ner. Party on, guy.

This is a rather bare and dessicated sort of "conservatism", according to which the bare persistence of a thing through time somehow bestows upon it legitimacy and even prescriptive status. By this standard, an innumerable host of barbarous and inquitous practices, from abortion and infanticide to suttee and human sacrifice, might be stamped with the imprimatur of "conservatism". Of course, there is nothing conservative about the mere temporal endurance of a practice; conservatism concerns the consonance of things with a tradition of reflection on the highest, and thus, constitutive ends of human nature, and by thisstandard, Playboy and the other practices mentioned fail to measure up, being practices and institutions destructive of the goods in which, and through which, human nature realizes itself in the good.

Hat tip to Lawrence Auster of View From the Right for the link to the Derb's birthday tribute to the founder of Playboy magazine.

When The Derb Is Right......

2006-09-04T14:34:00.000-04:00

He's really right:

We’re hearing a lot about this — Lou Dobbs runs a regular segment on it. I think the real war is on the working class, who are being priced out of jobs by floods of illegal immigrants. Of course, nobody much cares. In a modern meritocracy, all the articulate members of the working class — the kind of people who might organize, agitate, and make trouble — are siphoned off into colleges and law schools at an early age, to become members of the elite, agitating for elite interests. Those left behind can eat cake, or welfare — that seems to be the general attitude, certainly the elite attitude.

The lower-middle and middle classes really do seem to be hurting, though. I mean, I live among such people, and I hear about it. I don’t care how many feelgood pieces Larry Kudlow posts on NRO, telling us how wonderfully well the economy is doing. It may be doing fine by Larry over there on his gated private estate, but I’ve never heard so much grumbling down here on Main Street.

The following is not an original observation, but it’s one worth repeating: Much of the talk we hear from economists and government financial panjandrums nowadays treats the national economy as a thing in itself, to be egged on and expanded and caressed and cherished, without any concern for the actual citizens of this country. Sure, I’d rather live in a rich country than a poor one, and a healthy economy is a jolly good thing; but “expanding” is not necessarily synonymous with “healthy,” not for economies any more than for waistlines. A swelling economy is not ipso facto a good thing. It might lift all boats; or it might just lift a few and swamp the rest. It depends how things are organized. As Oliver Goldsmith noted: "Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey,Where wealth accumulates, and men decay." That’s about where we’re at, it seems to me. And no, it’s not a leftist remark; Goldsmith was a Tory.

Three words suffice: Immigration. Outsourcing. Globalization. The fundamental economic law of supply-and-demand has not been repealed; an increase in the supply of labour, and particularly the supply of labour willing to toil for sub-American wages and compensation, naturally and inexorably results in an overall stagnation, and then outright decline, in the value of labour. The only circumstances in which this could not be true of the American labour market would have to be those in which Americans, individually and collectively, were all Well Above Average, and able to effortlessly retrain and relocate for higher value-added forms of employment. But that would be the Economics of Lake Woebegon, not reality.

A tip of the hat to Rod Dreher for the link to the Derb's August diary.

Against Meritocracy

2006-09-04T14:18:00.000-04:00

Conservatives, particularly, seem to be operating under an altogether too-easy assumption that by meritocracy is meant a system, or social order, in which those best fitted by aptitude, as manifested in achievement, rise to positions of prominence, influence, and authority. On such an assumption, policies and programs such as affirmative action and preferences of various types, vindicated by the Robed Masters in the Grutter decision, are regarded as straighforward violations of the strict principle of merit, as they afford perferential treatment to the less-qualified, displacing some number of the more-qualified.

There is, if the pun may receive its reprieve, some merit in this view of the matter; but it is, ultimately, altogether too superficial to penetrate to an understanding of the deeper logic of meritocracy, and of affirmative action, as these operate in our society. Its merit, not at all to be minimized, consists of the fact that it does identify and critique an apparent incoherence, an incongruence of stated ideological rationales; its superficiality consists of the fact that it fails to grasp the specific nature of the particular type of meritocracy our society has evolved, and the integral relationship of affirmative action to that meritocracy.

One may be moved to understanding, in propitious moments, by even the smallest, most meagre things. And so it was last evening, as, following work, I drove to the market (Whole Foods, for those anti-crunchies out there!) to meet my wife and sons for a bit of shopping, when I happened to hear a brief commentary on NPR’s Marketplace program offered by Clive Crook. Crook, addressing the death of the American Dream, delivered himself of the following fatuities:

If the American dream were alive, your family’s income would not predict your own that well: In a meritocratic society, the children of the poor get rich by working hard, and the children of the rich fall back if they are idle.

Well, on that measure, America is now less the land of opportunity than France, than Germany, than Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway, and Denmark. The only other rich economy that the U.S. outscores in this respect is - you guessed it - the UK. Abolish the estate tax and America will be a serious contender for the bottom of the opportunity league.

How did that happen? Education. America’s failing public schools are leaving the poor stranded.

Now, there are many things that could be observed against these fatuities. First, it is eminently logical that family income will determine personal income, precisely because it is a natural human tendency to strive to ensure that one’s children will have access to as many of the good things of this life as possible, and not even the meritocratic blather of the age has fully extirpated this natural loyalty. Second, there is a correlation between intelligence and wealth, and intelligence is, in large measure, though not entirely, heritable. Third, it is mysterious precisely how the idle rich squandering their inherited assets unproductively impedes the advancement of the lower orders: if the rich are dissipative, then that very dissipation just is the opportunity of the ambitious. Fourth, it is a little jarring to read that the American dream not only involves the poor getting rich, but others becoming poor, which is what this “analysis” entails. Some dream, yes? Finally, however, what is most salient in this “analysis”, if it might be dignified with that term, is the association of the estate tax with the availability of opportunity, and the identification of the campaign to abolish the tax, along with the failure of the public schools, as causes of the death of the American dream, for it is these assertions which enable one to grasp that the meritocracy of Crook is not the meritocracy of conservatism, and that its character is subversive of everything that conservatism strives to conserve.

In order to perceive the nature of the distinction between them, and to grasp the deep logic of meritocracy, it is essential to consider the operation of the estate tax in American society, if only at a general level. The estate tax is, perhaps perversely, quite regressive in operation, inasmuch as the wealthiest strata of society possess the capacity to expend the inordinate amount of resources required to structure assets and investments so as to minimize exposure to the tax, and to leave a substantial legacy to those they designate as their heirs. On the other hand, middle and upper-middle class families possessed, on paper, of assets sufficient to subject them to this tax, typically lack the means to undertake such costly preparations, and so are often compelled to liquidate assets - homes, businesses, farms - in order to pay the tax, suffering disinheritance as a condition of compliance with the law. That liquidation of assets, or transfer of income-generating property, be it a company or farm, will more often than not involve the transfer of that property to a larger concern, be it a corporation or group of investors. The estate tax, therefore, functions as an engine of consolidation, as smaller concerns, more likely to be vested in the hands of families with ties to a community, are absorbed by larger concerns, and products and services tied to that community are increasingly displaced by products and services marketed over a wider geographic area, drawing resources from a wider area, and depending upon labour drawn from a wider area. The specificity of a market is replaced by a market more mass-oriented, more commodified, in nature - more dependent upon those specific, technocratic skills of organization, adminstration, and marketing characteristic of what James Burnham referred to as the managerial class, upon the expertise of which business in increasingly dependent as it grows in size, scope, and extent. The operation of the estate tax, that is, faciliatates the increasing demand for the special skills and expertise of this technocratic class, and thus, the increasing power of this class to shape our society, our liberty of action, our ways of life.

Seen slightly differently, the exercise of the expertise of the managerial class involves, and the ideological rationales for the policies and practices of this class entail, a significant measure of hostility towards those natural locii of human allegiance, loyalty, obligation, and piety: family, place, custom, tradition, history, rootedness, and stability are all alike either scoured away or levelled out, homogenized and rendered confromable to the exigencies and necessities of what is essentially the great analogue of the centralization of political power in the age of the nation state: the increased concentration of economic power, and real power to order the affairs of men, in the hands of technocrats, managers, cosmopolitans.

The role, then, of the estate tax in shaping the conception of meritocracy current among members of this managerial class, is twofold: it not only, as many have observed over the years, preserves those who have attained great wealth, usually as members of this class or as contractors of its expertise and services - a form of dependency likely to engender a harmony of interests and outlook - from upstart competition, but establishes as a de facto condition of achievement either a reliance upon the providers of the managerial expertise required for success in an increasingly globalized, consolidated economic environment, or mastery of those techniques and procedures oneself. The cosmopolitan managers become gatekeepers of a sort, such that the attainment of wealth becomes contingent upon a condition of dependency: upon those who possess the skills, those who impart them, those who exercise them for pay. Increased consolidation, and an increased scope of operations - globalization, let us say - necessitates reliance upon a roughly-defined class of cosmopolitans, deracinated and feeling more loyalty to the techniques, processes, and forces which they exercise and manage, and which afford them their positions in society, than to any more parochial identities by which the rest of us define our places in this world. And the estate tax functions as a barrier which only they can enable one to surmount, whether by contracting for their services or becoming enmeshed in the form of order they have created: by, that is, becoming in some measure detached from one’s particular identities.

The nature of this form of meritocracy may also be grasped, and an understanding of it expanded, by considering the significance of education for the world-picture of the managerial class, the post-national elite. The failing public schools, Crook assures us, are failing the poor and serving as impediments to opportunity; they are the grinding gear in the machinery of meritocracy: who can fathom what reserves of talent, ambition, and intelligence have been squandered on account of the sub-mediocrity of many American schools? Presumably, public schools operating as the incubators of meritocracy will strive to prepare each student for life in the world created by managerial technique, a world increasingly globalized and transitory, in which, as a former president assured us, each person could expect to hold 10 or so different jobs over the course of his working years; this world would be the Nietzschean realm of perpetual indeterminacy, of retrain!-retrain!-retrain! to run in place!, save for the eternal recurrence of the same, the fact that an identifiable class of cosmopolites will possess the power to order the world, and the vast majority of people will have no choice but to either go along or be left behind. In the course of that labour of preparation, the talented and gifted would be gradually drawn out from among their peers and afforded increasingly specialized and intensive preparatory training and instruction intended to render them fit examples of the meritocratic elite; and this process would, of course, begin, most probably, in the earlier years of schooling, and extend through the university and graduate levels.

At this stage of the argument, the objection naturally might be raised: “What of affirmative action and other schemes of preferences? Do they not violate the principles of merit?” However, as this argument has attempted to show, a meritocratic, managerial elite, substantially identical with the elites thrown up by the economic processes of consolidation and globalization, will be an elite hostile, in some measure, to all traditional sources of authority and objects of allegiance, and will, by the exercise of its authority and influence, strive to displace, even subvert those independent centers of authority, rooted as they are in particularlistic loyalties and identities that circumscribe the sphere of action of managerial elites and create institutions that, in their health, can function as barriers to the extension of their power and authority. The estate tax is, it has been argued, one such vehicle of subversion, by which the transgenerational wealth and stability of middling families can be broken up, by which their business can be forced into the control of managerial types and rendered mere cogs in larger corporate machines, by which therefore, their communities may be subjected to forces of flattening and homogenization, stripped as they are of the material bases of exercising significant control over their destinies. Affirmative action functions in this context as a complimentary process. The natural human propensity toward in-group loyalties would most logically lead to the formation of somewhat parallel institutional and economic structures as between groups; something of this nature existed during the large part of the Twentieth Century with associations of African-American businessmen and the like, and things of this nature do persist, and outside the economic sphere often assume more particularistic, identitarian forms. Affirmative action, therefore, operates to incorporate the best and the brightest of minority populations, the elites of those groups, within the managerial structures of society, regardless of the merits of those minority elites relative to the elites of the majority; for by this means does the managerial order achieve a higher degree of expansion and consolidation, encompassing ever-greater numbers of people, cultivating ever-expanding markets and masses of consumers, to which particular identities, and the exclusion, by whatever causes, of certain groups, could represent only obstacles. Identity, remember not only embraces, but excludes; the broader the identity, however etiolated it might be, the more abstract the identity, the greater the sphere of operations and the greater the influence, authority, and power of those who manage the institutions of society.

Affirmative action, moreover, by drawing into the ranks of the managerial, professional class those who might well have been excluded had standards been more evenly applied during selection and evaluation processes, has a displacement effect: those who otherwise would have risen to higher levels of professional achievement are compelled to accept lower statuses, or, at best, to attain higher statuses only by means of more circuitous routes. Affirmative action, therefore, facilitates the lowering, even abolition, of cultural boundaries that would otherwise stand as impediments to the increased consolidation of societal institutions that have now transcended nationality, ethnicity, and national boundaries; it thereby displaces the particular and constitutive identity of the American people, substituting for it a necessarily abstract identity which can encompass a diversity of cultures. Multiculturalism, however, is not the thing-in-itself here; it is merely the legitimating ideology of the class which has transcended, and the process by which it transcends, the particular, parochial, traditional identities, of people, place, and faith.

Affirmative action, then, is not so much an incongruous element of the meritocracy, but an integral aspect thereof; the meritocracy depends upon skills and techniques, and applications for them, that not only do not depend upon traditional loyalties to family, faith, and place, but require for their exercise and increase the diminution of these traditional sources of authority and identity. Affirmative action, as an aspect of the cosmopolitan, globalizing tendency, definitively establishes a society in which, by fiat, these traditional boundaries are overcome. It does not represent the limit of merit, but one of the crucial means by which a particular regime of merit - that is, a particular class having a particular conception of merit which justifies its status and authority - overcomes the limits that natural orders of society impose upon it; it is one more dagger thrust by the cosmopolitan into the heart of ‘provincial’ society.

Consider then, the synthetic picture that a consideration of meritocratic support for the estate tax, and support for a particular vision of education, inclusive of affirmative action, affords: a social system in which there is engineered by various means a ceaseless turnover, between and within generations and among different groups, of those at the highest rungs of the socio-economic ladder. Those who have risen so far are to have their heirs cast down pre-emptively, while those who did not rise are to have their heirs groomed for positions of authority and prosperity; and the operation of this system, in its particulars and in its ends, intends the withering away of the particular loyalties and identities of the people, creating a world in which each man is a cipher - a cipher hoping that some force will one day pluck him from his obscure nothingness and bestow upon him the only identity left - sheer quantity, that is, mammon and the means of amassing mammon. This system is Nietzschean in its relentless flux; and like Nietzsche’s thought, it has its very own eternal return: the perpetuity of the managerial class of cosmopolitans, upon whom the remainder are dependent should they wish to undertake the sacrifices requisite to escape from uncertainty, as the attainment of wealth is increasingly contingent upon services and modes of ‘knowledge’ only they can impart. Membership in the meritocracy is the truest source of security in this system; of the remainder it must be said that, as they have open to them ever fewer means of shaping their own destinies, they are being reduced to a state of servility, especially as escape from this state necessitates incorporation into a system which wars against inherited identities.

It might be objected, in conclusion, that this is an ideal image, albeit a negative one, and the objection would hold - but in a particular sense only: it is the self-conception of the modern Western elite, and the image of the world in terms of which, and by means of which, they govern and order our affairs. Members of other groups, ethnic, national, and religious, have scarcely any intentions of abandoning their inherited, primal identities, as witness the rise of European Islam, undercurrents of Latin irredentism in America, and the more general resurgence of religious, racial, and cultural identities throughout the world. Let us speak forthrightly, then, and not conceal from ourselves the truth as do men already servile in spirit: this meritocracy of cosmopolitan, managerial elites is but another aspect of the Suicide of the West, Western civilization’s loss of belief in itself and its own constitutive ideals and institutions, religious and philosophical, cultural and historical. The various ideologies, intellectual fads, spiritual postures, and economic quackeries which serve to legitimize the processes by which this is being brought to pass are merely the base self-deceptions of decadence, by which we delude ourselves that dissolution is triumph and nihilism, virtue. It is all impiety, in the profoundest sense, prideful transgression of the order of being.

On Wal-Mart and the Two Roads

2006-08-30T09:13:00.000-04:00

A reply to Chris Roach
Those sympathetic to Wal-Mart or, at least hostile towards its critics - call them the anti-anti-Wal-Mart crowd - asseverate that Wal-Mart is competitive, that it operates in a competitive marketplace in which there are not merely competing establishments, but others 'waiting in the wings' should Wal-Mart falter. This, I suggest, is a rather dessicated and nominal definition of 'competition', one that, so far from positing an hypothetical state of perfect competition, simply takes a snapshot of a marketplace in which giant conglomerates struggle for market share, deems the picture one of 'competition' and poses no questions. It is not even anti-idealist. It simply has no interest whatsoever in the question whether there are any flaws or inadequacies in the world the picture represents; it is, therefore, incapable of critique, averse to any sort of collective self-examination, the consideration of a people whether they are ordering rightly their worldly affairs.

But there is more. It is a strange definition of 'competition' which would hold that Wal-Mart's business practices, which consist of squeezing suppliers by means of the leverage of market share, positioning, and distribution, and squeezing the economy as a whole by reliance upon inexpensive imported goods, often of questionable quality and provenance, constitutes a 'competitive' environment. What, percisely, is competitive in utilizing the coercive power of market share and the like to compel suppliers to provide goods and services at rates which do not enable said suppliers to prosper?- a practice at which Wal-Mart excels. The notion of competition more naturally suggests, not such practices, redolent as they are of certain of the aspects of monopoly, but a state of affairs in which businesses appeal to the customer on the basis of the ostensible excellence of products and services. The notion of competition suggests, not employments of economies of scale that, by their very operation, subvert the fundamentals of the economy of the nation they are ostensibly intended to benefit, as do the outsourcing/offshoring practices which are hollowing out the American economy, but endeavour within a defined system or context: the Wal-Mart business model, convenient as a trope for the dominant contemporary American business model, is rather analogous to an alteration of the rules midway through a sporting event, to the distinct advantage of one of the teams.

More generally, however, the notion that Wal-Mart is 'competitive' in some normative sense that we must respect, and that to question the full legitimacy of the business model of which Wal-Mart is at once the most visible and successful exemplification is to indulge in un-American, unconservative, even leftist posturing, merely begs the question, not of whether we should maintain a system of free enterprise, but of the nature and structuring of that very system. There is nothing in the tradition of free enterprise or free markets which necessitates the desirability, virtue, or sacrosanct status of great agglomerations of capital and corporate power - for, contrary to what most seem to comprehend in all of this, power is what we are concerned with. If nothing else, cognizance of the emergence of markets in medieval Europe, an age in which real property was more widely diffused than presently, ought to chasten us in our altogether anachronistic assumption that free markets and private property rights entail only those limits upon acquisition that might be imposed by the operations of markets themselves. We should be discussing what manner of free markets we wish to preserve, for no one proposes the abolition of markets; in this regard, all too many conservatives presuppose that any wavering of faith in the legitimacy of present economic organization constitutes an inclination towards some or other form of collectivism. However, we are not discussing real socialism - does anyone still propose the nationalization of the means of production? - or even social democracy, but mere laws for the regulation of a market system, laws that may be wise or foolish, prudent or rash, but which yet presuppose a common framework of free enterprise and markets. I suspect, though, that even among conservatives, we may have in this issue a conflict of incommensurable theories, not merely of political economy, but of the status of economics within a broader political philosophy.

Whatever might be said in favour of, for example, the futures markets which mitigate some of the uncertainties to which agricultural production is subject, I suspect that we are referring to distinct sense of 'independence'. In an economic order in which real, income-generating property, be it land, small businesses, or whatever, is more widely distributed, the property owner has at least the independence that such property bestows upon him. Whereas in the present economic order, the ordinary person lacks that independence, but finds his conditions of existence more dependent upon the decisions, machinations, and fortunes of larger conglomerates and forces which he is altogether powerless to influence. I rather seriously doubt whether the increased prevalence of such things as 401Ks, stock ownership, and home ownership fundamentally alters this reality. The small investor, and even many larger investors not only exercise no real control over the enterprises in which they are invested, but cannot exercise such control, and are, in consequence, at the mercy of the directors and executive who do exercise real control - the managerial class, that is - rendering 'investment' more an act of trust, or even an instance of high-class gambling. Moreover, the widespread phenomenon of investment, of the emergence of the investor class, has arguably exacerbated, in corporate management, that lamentable but ineliminable human tendency to concentrate upon shorter-term returns and prospects, often at the expense of the longer-term health of both the enterprise and the nation of which the enterprise is but one expression. The entire set of phenomena falling under the headings of offshoring and outsourcing are, I think, dispositive on this account. Yes, they enhance short-term profitability, but they assume far too much, and ignore much else, where the future is concerned. Yes, the percentage of GDP captured by manufacturing has been declining, but the 'solution' of the service economy is a week reed upon which to base the prosperity of the nation.

Reassertion of control over our borders, and over the broader immigration and visa system, which wants only for sheer will for realization, will only accomplish so much. Persumably, lower-ladder service positions could become slightly better remunerated in the absence of teeming masses of immigrants willing to fill those positions for less than an American will accept, but those positions will hardly suffice as a basis of national prosperity. Food service and meat processing cannot secure the prosperity, or even some relative degree of economic security, of great numbers of middle-class Americans. Neither will an increase in the compensation afforded those in the construction industry suffice; the industry is subject to too many cycles, and, in any event, the success of the economy cannot be predicated upon building over more and more open spaces. The problem of a service-based economy is twofold: it requires high value-added contributions on the part of those providing the services, and, in the context of globalization, is highly unstable, requiring almost incessant retraining and retrenchment on the part of those caught in it. And let us speak forthrightly about the first aspect of the problem: high-value-added typically equates to high intelligence, rendering this a strategy perhaps suitable for young cosmopolites and savants, but, shall we say, structurally prohibitive for the average American - for the average person of whatever nationality or citizenship. If anyone is curious as to the underlying causes of the increase in multiple-employment, and of the increase of indebtedness among average Americans, this is one often-overlooked structural factor: average service sector jobs for average people typically provide crappy remuneration, whereas the very machinery of the manufacturing economy added the value that eventually resulted in an increase in standards of living and compensation for average people. As to the matter of instability, this not only engenders a widespread sense of disquiet (why do we think that Americans tend to proffer pessimistic opinions on the prospects of the economy, even while those proffering said opinions may be doing reasonably well when they proffer them?), but militates against a great many things that conservatives regard as essential to the perpetuation of a fourishing society, to the realization of the good life. Eventually, however, people tire of that instability; few people, even among the elites, have the desire to live as Nietzschean supermen of the global economy, forever surfing the chaos of destructive creation in search of that next great wave of ephemeral profitability.

I might note, as I draw this missive towards a conclusion, that the comparison of Wal-Mart with small businesses is gratuitously invidious. Yes, some small businesses jack around their employees, but can the contrary be said of a Wal-Mart which provides an average wage of eight bucks an hour, which often schedules its employees for the maximum number of working hours that will fail to qualify them for benefits, which offers benefits to some, but which benefits consume excessive percentages - necessarily - of the meager wages earned by employees, and which, by means of all of these practices - effectively privatises its profits while socializing many of the costs of sustaining its helots? At least in the case of small businesses, both employees and customers have alternatives; in the case of the Wal-Mart economy, they, increasingly, can take it or leave it. Wither freedom? The freedom that matters is the freedom of communities to preserve themselves - their customs, traditions, habits, patterns of life, and so on. In the Nineteenth Century, the great corporate and moneyed interests supported the tariff, because it was favourable to them, while the cause of the small communities of the nation, and particularly the South, was bound up with free trade. In contemporary America, the inheritors of the legacy of those moneyed interests support globalization and 'free trade' - because it enlarges their already engorged substance, while the cause of small communities and established ways must be bound up with opposition to, and the placing of limitations upon, globalization. The irreducible given must be the sanctity of the community, of the American people and their ways of life, and not in any economic nostrums which, whatever their utility in defined circumstances and conditions, are merely tools the value of which is contingent upon particular, and malleable, circumstances.

While I am slightly mystified as to what any of this has to do with an undue sympathy for the analyses of Marx, save as a confirmation of the perspicacity of his insight that finance/corporate capitalism tended to profane everything holy, overturn every fixity, and so on, I should conclude by noting that the fact that Wal-Mart has become a sort of cultural totem among some conservatives and Republicans ought to impress us as a disturbing development, not merely on account of Wal-Mart's practices, but because that elevation of Wal-Mart to totemic status signifies that conservatives are in thrall to a series of long-dead controversies, and are prone to jousting with ghosts. To oppose Wal-Mart is not to invoke Marx or the specter of social democracy of one sort or another; it is not to propose some sort of collectivist solution. Conservatives, however, seem to be obsessed with the great controversies over socialism, communism, planning, and centralization of the middle years of the Twentieth Century, as though the outcome of the Cold War were somehow equivocal, and as though the neoliberal/globalist economic order were identical with the old free markets that conservatives praise (it isn't), such that to question it is necessarily to posit collectivism as the solution. They are stuck in a time-warp. The global economic order is generating its own problems and instabilities, and unless conservatives reckon with them, and develop solutions, the middle-term future and beyond will belong once more to the left: people will not endure what has been foisted off on them indefinitely. What is curious, however, is that conservatives defend in economics a process of centralization which they would otherwise repudiate in politics; and yet, the process of economic centralization (increased economic power and scope of multinational corporations) is precisely analogous to the processes of centralization that brought into being the modern nation-state: the war of the distant sovereign against the mediating institutions and authorities, cloaked in the dissimulation which held that the process was undertaken in order to liberate the individual or provide him with some benefit denied to him under the old regime. That conservatives inveigh against concentrations of power in government, yet valorize them in corporations, when the power exercised by such agglomerations is every bit as destructive of communities and stable relations as any power exercised by any non-totalitiarian, but interfering, state, is, I say, a curious lacuna in their thought.

This state of affairs will not endure; conservatism will either confront the realities of the age, or it will continue to prepare the conditions of its own impossibility.

The Thatcher Legacy, Exposed In All Its Nakedness

2006-08-29T21:43:00.000-04:00

Did you ever wonder why all those little estates of 'Park Homes', actually trailers, have sprung up on the edges of cities everywhere? I suspect these are the survivors of negative equity, fallen forever from the property ladder. We ought to know about the disaster of the 'Single European Act' and the blizzard of Euro-regulation which fell upon small business. And then there was the messed-up economic policy of the early 80s, meant to squeeze the public sector but actually devastating to the private sector and manufacturing industry.
(snip)
Yes, Mrs Thatcher defeated the trades unions, or rather Norman Tebbit did, with the aid of some very clever civil servants who used political judo on them - keep your immunities only if you behave. But ( and here I speak as a former Labour correspondent who spent much of his life writing about strikes and unions between 1977 and 1983) most of them were on their last legs anyway. They had largely destroyed the industries in which they operated, which may well have been the purpose of the Communist industrial organisation which was so effective in those days.

A new form of union power, based on the public sector, was born out of those times. It does not paralyse the country with strikes and secondary pickets, just lobbies for greater and greater public sector job security, and higher and higher levels of public employment. Oh, and by the way, what was the reward for the decent, courageous miners of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire who refused, at great cost, to back Arthur Scargill's wretched political strike? Why, they were put on the dole soon afterwards, a funny sort of 'thank you' to the men and families who may well have saved the British constitution through their bravery. Hostility to the Tories in the formerly industrial areas of England is not necessarily irrational.
(snip)
History shows that it is the Tories, more than any other party, who have in practice dismantled most of Britain's national sovereignty over the past 40 years.

It was a Tory government that first tried to enter the Market, in the early 1960s. It was a Tory government that finally succeeded, in 1972, selling out our fishing industry and much of our agriculture, not to mention the Commonwealth, to do so. It was the Tory party's support. including that of an enthusiastic Margaret Thatcher, which clinched victory for the pro-Marketeers in the rigged and dishonest 1975 referendum. It was Mrs Thatcher who sacrificed huge chunks of sovereignty for the Single European Act (see above), and John Major who bullied Tory MPs into ratifying Maastricht. Compared to this record, Labour's Euro-crimes (though bad enough) are relatively small.
(snip)
And remember, as well, the 'Single European Act' which she agreed to, apparently barely aware of how much national independence she was giving away.

It is reassuring to learn, from Peter Hitchens, writing in the Mail on Sunday, that when I wrote the following regarding the Thatcher legacy -

In the end, the legacy of Thatcher was to draw Britain into an ever-closer economic and cultural embrace of the Continent, and of many worlds beyond; and as can be observed at a more advanced state in Britain that in America (as of yet…), such integration slowly and inexorably dissolves the cultural, political, economic, and national particularities of a people, as it once did to America\’s regions, for that matter. There is more than one way to destroy the traditions of a nation: one way is to socilize it, to apply the criteria of ideological rationalism to the bewildering variety of customs and institutions which gave texture to society, centralizing everything. The other is to render \”England\” a mere cultural and political outpost of a Continental superstate, and an economic outpost or fief of a global economy which is not so much centerless as it is possessed of a mobile, abstract center. In either case, whether internal centralization or transnational centralization, the recognizably English withers, and England becomes a place to be distinguished solely by cartography, and not by anything that rouses the fire of loyalty in a man\’s breast. Neither path, too, has any objection whatsoever to the importation of the Mohometan fifth column, nor to Londonistan; and the multiculturalism increasingly allied with the latter path of globalization positively embraces it.

Thatcher revived an economy; but so far from reviving the spirit, did enough to ensure that the spirit of England might not be revived.

- I was fairly close to the mark in dismissing the Thatcher years as merely another episode in the decline of Britain. There is no joy, however, in observing the self-negation of a kindred nation, only a profound sorrow.

On Imperialism

2006-08-29T17:14:00.000-04:00

Imperialism is a condition, a state of decayed responsibility with implications for every part of society. Its ravages are evident everywhere in America.
(snip)
It is not a question of redistributing a given quantity of "power". Imperialism should be looked at within the framework of republican responsibility. The imperialist arrogance of Washington and its minions and the decay of will in the community go hand in hand.
(snip)
Power has been shifted away from the voters and officers of the community, but responsibility has not gone with it. Washington is not "responsible" to those it rules, because the ruled cannot reach it, cannot exercise any effective authority over it. They are subjects, not citizens. (snip) And Washington is not responsible in the sense of governing effectively either. None can be found to take responsibility when the directives prove to be onerous. From representatives expressing the will of their people, the local fathers have become leaders in securing acquiescence in what nobody wants but nobody seems to know how to avoid, in what government (and the great corporate agglomerations - Maximos) does to us (emphasis mine).
(snip)
But the decline of power and will in the community, the transfer of local authority and responsibility out, does not have a benefit in the increase of the individual liberty of the citizen vis-a-vis the community. Ordinary citizens have never been less secure in their incomes and persons, never had a harder struggle to maintain a spehre of decency for their families, never had less freedom to come and go without fear, never had less liberty and means to undertake enterprises independent of government authority. They are less free and happy, their aspirations in humane terms are lower than when affluence was much less in evidence. (Perhaps this is because the old republican tradition, and the Christian tradition as well, were correct to maintain that luxury is an ennervating force in human affairs. - Maximos)
(snip)
Another indicator of the state of decay which is imperialism is the shift of emphasis from production to consumption, from work to amusement, such as has taken place since the middle 1960's. It reflects an assumption of power by an irresponsible court party. "Aristocrats" concern themselves with what is due to them, not with the sordid details of providing it.
Clyde Wilson, from the essay Citizens or Subjects?, reprinted in From Union to Empire (Buy the book!)

(And it is this ethic of deference that lies like a malign force behind the economic policy decisions of the era of empire: the elites conceive of themselves as entitled to the greater wealth which accrues to those who eat out the economic substance of the nation by outsourcing it, and likewise consider themselves entitled to the labour of an immigrant helot class willing to toil for wages beneath the dignity and maintainance of Americans, while the masses, by and large, pause not a moment to contemplate the high costs of low prices, so impervious are they to an understanding of the connection between the monomaniacal pursuit of reduced costs and outlays and their increasingly perilous financial conditions - which parlous states are the inexorable outworking of the economic visions of the elite class, all propaganda to the contrary not withstanding. - Maximos)

A Little Bit of Humour - At The Expense of Neoconservatism

2006-08-29T14:20:00.000-04:00

Hilarious send-ups of neoconservatism, courtesy of Daniel Larison and Michael Brendan Dougherty.

Yes, indeed, neoconservatism is a denizen of the left half of the political spectrum; and yes, neoconservatism does seem to be more than a little sanguinary. And if we cannot laugh at lefties passing themselves off as rightists - and that with some fair measure of success! - and postulating War! War! War! as the great palliative for all of the ailments of the global system, what, then, can we laugh at? In fact, were I a conspiracy theorist - which I am not - I might be tempted to explain neoconservatism as a cunning leftist plot to discredit conservatism by fixing in the public mind the association of conservatism with jejeune, feckless, and morally illicit policies. Were I a Machiavellian leftist, I would cook up something like neoconservatism in order to accomplish just this feat. That no such scenario has, in fact, unfolded, bringing the neoconservatives to prominence as the respectable conservatives (perhaps no longer) and ushering them into the corridors of power, only demonstrates that reality, perhaps, is more bizarre than even the most outlandish possible bizarro world.

A Tale of Two Prisoners

2006-08-29T11:07:00.000-04:00

A tale of two prisoners. Nelson Mandela specnt many years under arrest. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent many years in a slave labour camp, as a fugitive and exile, and as a nonperson.

Mandela resisted a mildly repressive regime by terrorism. Solzhenitsyn resisted a brutal totalitarian state by heroism and eloquence.

Mandela sought the bestowal of benefits and privileges. Solzhenitsyn sought liberty to work, worship, and think.

Mandela was freed by bringing to bear the power of giant empires and media oligarchies on his own small country. Solzhenitsyn was freed by years of harrowing maneuver against an omnipotent but incompetent state, helped by the attention of handfuls of people in various free countries.

Mandela represents an alien, at bottom incomprehensible culture. Solzhenitsyn represents the deepest and noblest aspirations of our own culture.

Mandela is a very skilled politician. Solzhenitsyn is one of the greatest artists and most eloquent prophets of our age.

In America, Mandela is fawned on by Congress and the President. In America, Solzhenitsyn is avoided by presidents and other politicians.

What does this tell us about America?

Think about it.

Clyde Wilson, circa. 1990, as reprinted in From Union to Empire.

As much as it pains one to concede the fact, the lamentable truth is that the crusade against the Apartheid regime of the old South Africa was not so much a crusade for justice as a crusade for the racial self-assertion of the majority population, and an exercise in liberal ego-stroking, as the liberal ideals of equality and multiculturalism were imposed upon a foreign nation - for its own "benefit", of course. The political maturity of the majority population, its cultural habituation to the norms of a democratic society, and the conformance of liberal ideology with the intransigent realities of the Real may be judged on the basis of reports such as this one, an author's perhaps idiosyncratic perspective on an episode in what James Burnham rightly termed the suicide of the West.

Liberalism's Consent Problem

2006-08-25T12:46:00.000-04:00

Liberalism, the prevailing cultural ethos and thought-world of the modern age, whatever men might be disposed to say to the contrary, has a problem. Actually, its problems are legion, ranging from philosophical incoherence, nonconformity with intransigent facts of human nature and history, pragmatic inconsistency - which is to say, utter arbitrariness in operation, and its corrosive effects upon civilized and humane values, to the intellectual and spiritual exhaustion of the complex of ideas even in the ostensibly capable hands of its priestly caste of ideologues. However, I propose to direct attention to but one of the multifarious problems of liberalism in the contemporary political and social milieu. I propose that we prescind from the weightier questions of liberal theory, for while I consider it well-nigh self-evident that J.S. Mill’s “Harm Principle” is inconceivable absent the foundation of Locke’s political individualism; that Locke’s political individualism is likewise inconceivable absent the foundation of Hobbes’ philosophical anthropology of affects and drives; and that Hobbes’ anthropology is also inconceivable absent the preparatory conditions of the earlier nominalist problematization of a rationally-knowable human essence and telos, there remains a certain utility in confronting the phenomenon of liberalism as the thing presents itself to us in everyday life - more as an animating spirit of a (declining) civilization than as any of the arcane and etiolated articulations wrought from the materials of this principle and crowned with the unmerited title of “philosophy”.

Liberalism, as it presents itself to us in the minutia of daily life, is an inarticulate sense of straining at limits, at surpassing and transgressing them as restraints of the self, constraints - fetters - upon the exercise of the will. It is a spirit of defiance and assertion, a refusal of authority and all inherited norms, save as the bearer of “reason” has been able to justify these things to himself. Which, perhaps, is merely a evasive way of saying that liberalism, as popularly practised and promoted, is simply the repudiation of authority, an “I Will!” uttered in opposition to anyone or anything, or indeed any event, that suggests that the individual might not in all circumstances be the best judge of his own most profound interests and goods. Liberalism is the shattering of the good, and the absorbtion of its shards and fragments by the fetid slough of the passions: good(s) is (are) the fulfillment(s) of desire(s) because, in the ultimately tautologous formulations of all liberalisms, such goods are the only ones that may be known to exist. Good can only be realized in the fulfillment of desire because the fulfillment of desire is the only good there is.

Liberalism, then, as an animating spirit, is nothing more, nothing less, than the idea of doing what one wills, for ends one has chosen, for one’s pleasure. It is the notion of doing one’s own thing, of being bossed by no one, of having it one’s own way. To be sure, liberalism-as-animating-spirit now requires the mediation of philosophy - of a sort - to preserve itself from itself, from its own and only tendency to promote dissolution and decadence, for if all were to do as they desired, why, there would be anarchy. And so, the deliverance of philosophy, now the eunuch of the passions, is that one may do as one wishes insofar as one does not interfere with others’ doing as they wish, whether by harm or interference. One might denominate this the “Harm Principle” or any number of other things, but the idea is basic and inescapable: this is the Golden Rule of liberalism - although to refer to it as such is to sully the name of a holy and venerable principle. Suffice it to say that it is the principle of reciprocity which serves as the linchpin of liberal ethics and the first, glaring inconsistency of liberalism. This principle of reciprocity presupposes, obviously, an equality among desiring subjects, for reason of the fact that all, or virtually all, men may be said to experience various desires; but this cannot but be the first of liberalism’s unprincipled exceptions, for nothing is more evident as regards the matter at hand as that desires vary in intensity and duration as between subjects, or even within a given subject, depending upon various contingencies - and surely, if man is a desiring being, then differing quanta of desire will distinguish men as certainly as will the objects of desire. Desires are unequal, even in the absence of a scheme by which they might be rank-ordered. Liberalism wishes to define man by the phenomenon of desire, but only admits certain aspects of the phenomenon as definitive, thus implicitly affirming what it denies - that man possesses an essence of some sort that transcends the evanescence of the passions. Only thus can the equality of men as desiring subjects be preserved. It is the philosophy of “have it your way” even as an intellectual tradition unfolding its arguments. But I digress.

Liberalism has a consent problem. It proclaims a societal ethos of “doing your own thing”, and seems particularly enamored of sexual liberties - some desires, and some ways of doing your own thing, are apparently more equal than others, as witnessed by families intent upon the inculcation in their children of traditional moral norms who, like the Massachusetts parents who sought to have their 6-year-old son exempted from indoctrination into the wonders of “alternative” sexualities, will be informed that their rights do not extend to opting out of instruction The Enlightened deem essential. Their children must be forced to be free - free as defined by the Liberated - their own desire to see their own traditions imparted to their children being of no consequence beside the desires of the Knowing and the attitudinal complexes that the Knowing regard as essential to the maturation of the young. But I digress yet again.

The salient point is that our atmospheric liberalism places as peculiar emphasis upon sexual liberation, historically an indicator of personal and societal transcendence of inherited moral norms. So obsessed with sexual liberation is the devotee of liberalism that he will, more likely than not, applaud the provision of even graphic sexual information to children, early and often. When children, then, engage in what he would term “experimentation” at younger and younger ages, this scarcely fazes him, although, if he is of the sort inclined to obsess over the rigours of the meritocratic world of the globalized economy, he may fret that such children imperil their prospects of worldly success. Fortunately for his sense of altruism, there is always the availability of the central sacrament of the liberal, abortion - the sign, seal, confirmation, and presence-to-us of liberalism’s state of grace, autonomy.

It is here - with the provision to children of information regarding sexual practices and the nonchalance with which the increasing sexual precocity of children is typically regarded - that liberalism encounters its problem with the notion of consent. For liberals, most of them, at least, still recoil - and this no small thing in itself, although it is quite a small thing within the context of the many things the liberal indulges - in horror at the prospect of sexual dalliances between the children they seek to liberate from their innocence and adults, however defined. Sexual activity, the liberal insists, must be consensual - must be, that is, the result of informed and rational judgment passed by persons who freely will to engage in an antecedently specified range of activities. Surely adults are capable of fulfilling the criteria of ‘consent’; the frequent recourse of the liberal to the mantra of “consenting adults” will be vacant of meaning otherwise. And surely the liberals’ precocious children are capable of consent; the relative indifference of liberals to the increasing prevalence of sexual activity among children will likewise remain unintelligible except upon this presupposition. Yet, we are informed, children and adults cannot mutually consent to sexual congress.

We are confronted here by a profound mystery. Children, we are informed - not necessarily by an articulated doctrine, although one might, perchance, find such a thing in obscure journals of childhood education or sexuality - are capable of grasping the nature and import of sexual acts, and, indeed, of consenting to engage in them with other children. Again, liberal practice is utterly unintelligible save upon precisely this assumption. If, moreover, one of the constitutive traits of adulthood is precisely the ability to grant and withhold consent, wherein lies the difficulty? Could the sticking point have something to do with differentials of age? Age - the greater knowledge, self-awareness, and facility in interpersonal relationships might well be thought to provide the predatory adult with an insuperable advantage relative to even the precocious youth, and it might well be of this that the obstacle to consent consists.

The easy recourse to differentials of age, however, is unpersuasive. In the first place, it strains credulity to imagine that children, familiar from the earliest moments of consciousness with differentials of age, and dwelling in social environments the complexity of which often bewilders adults - social environments replete with a diversity of groups, cliques, social types, and patterns of interaction between groups and cliques, as well as between age groups - would somehow, on the assumptions provided by liberalism, cease to comprehend together two things they readily comprehend separately. The relationships of children, inclusive of those involving adults, are quite complex and rich in nuance; and, we are given to understand, children have no difficulty in assimilating knowledge of human sexuality. How knowledge, when added to knowledge, results in exploitable ignorance, is a alchemical trick best left to its practitioners to attempt to explain.

In the second place, there is the problematic nature of the assumption that in any hypothetical instance of sexual interaction between a child and an adult, only exploitation will suffice to explain the occurrence. This is merely to beg the question, to presuppose an inability on the part of the child that does not necessarily obtain in all cases. Children can be conditioned to want and expect certain things, while the more precocious among those liberated by the educators of the liberal regime may actually conceive the desire of themselves, absent any prodding. Curiousity is a powerful behavioural motivator, is it not? I suspect that any prolonged exposure to the literature of pathology and abuse will confirm that, whatever the origins of the behavioural patterns themselves, there are cases of children who, in certain circumstances, seek certain types of interaction with adults.

Finally, consider the nature of the things themselves - sexuality and the dealings of children with adults. Children deal with adults, as I have stated, from the earliest moments of consciousness. There are few things more familiar to a child than the proprieties and requirements of interaction with adults. Adults provide, teach, reprove, console, and structure the lives of children in ways to numerous to determine; there should be nothing, really, more comprehensible for the child than how to behave around adults. Sexuality, on the other hand, is something so frought with mystery and potency that adults scarcely grasp it; its numinous character defies attempts to plumb its depths and render it comprehensible. Liberalism denies this - hence, its obsession with the widest possible dissemination of information regarding sexual practices and its uniform tendency to precipitate a reduction, in the minds of the populace, of sexuality to its brute, biological aspects alone - and strives to impart its dessicated understanding of sexuality even to children. But let us look at the things themselves, laying aside the illusions of liberalism: sexuality is mysterious, even terrifying; differences of age and - for this is what we are talking about, and what liberalism ceaselessly evades in this matter - authority are not, being among the most obvious, natural features of all social environments. Liberalism, therefore, expects us to swallow the risible fiction that what is dark and mysterious may be understood by children, but what is limpid and manifest confounds them. This, I submit, is more than the minds of reasoning beings can be expected to accept; it does not merely strain credulity, but tortures it until, weary, it submits merely to gain surcease of its sufferings.

Liberalism, then, has, upon its own presuppositions, no rational, consistent basis for opposing that which even the darkest minds realize is despicable and base. That most liberals do oppose it is a credit them as persons, and a shame to their professed dogmas. Liberalism’s consent problem, then, is this: an absence of a rational basis for a moral prejudice all sane persons recognize as being of the essence of civilized norms of behaviour, combined with a tacit invocation of the very values with which its entire theory is at war: authority and the necessary expression of authority, responsibility. One of the many necessarly expressions of the authority and responsibility of adults towards children just is to refrain from sexualizing them, either as objects of desire or as objects of “enlightened” educational policies intended to mold them into specimens of liberated humanity. Liberalism wishes to retain the form of the obligation while evacuating its substance; in order to preserve itself from the obvious consequences of its dubious theories, it must make an unprincipled exception: traditional authority and decorum are pernicious, except when we say they are not.

This, in case any should wonder why I have troubled to express thoughts upon so loathsome a subject, will be the ultimate reason - coupled, of course, with its affirmation of homosexuality, which includes a manifest cult of youth, and finds its probable origins in the traumas of youth - for the inability of liberalism to resist the furthest, most debauched consequences of the sexual revolution which now labours to overthrow the institution of marriage. Liberalism lacks a principled basis for stopping at the final frontier of depravity, and eventually, determined passion will overcome the absence of reason. It always does.

Alert! Outbreak of reason at NR on the War!

2006-08-09T07:04:00.000-04:00

If there is one bedrock conviction underlying President Bush’s foreign policy, it is that freedom is the desire of every human heart. Bush repeats the phrase at every opportunity, and it is the premise of his push for democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere: Given a free choice, it is assumed, people will choose freedom and the political system best suited to foster it.... (snip)

The problem with Bush’s freedom rhetoric is that it appears to not be true. Hezbollah and Hamas, and the populations that support them, desire the destruction of Israel above all, and are willing to endure warfare and dysfunctional societies to bring it about. The Sunni insurgents in Iraq want power more than anything else, and are willing to kill and maim to gain it. The Shia militias, in turn, desire revenge against the Sunni.

All around the chaotic and violent Middle East, human hearts are yearning for many things, but freedom isn’t high on the list.

An evangelical Christian, Bush couches his belief in the universal hunger for freedom in religious terms. He often says that freedom is God’s gift to humanity. But it sometimes seems that he neglects what, for a Christian, is a central event in understanding human motivation, the Fall. Pride and hatred and fear are as likely to drive human behavior as any hunger for freedom.... (snip)

And while, all things being equal, people surely prefer to live in freedom than under a dictatorship, culture ensures that things are never equal. Someone living in a tribal or traditional culture will view the world differently, and have different values, than an atomized individual in the West. He might value sexual purity more than freedom, thus insisting on the repression of women. He might value his religious conviction that all of the Levant should be Muslim-controlled over freedom and life itself. He might hate the dishonor of foreign occupation more than he loves anything.... (snip)

Rich Lowry, Nation Review Online, August 8, 2006.

It would appropriate, however, in lieu of something so theatrical as an apology for all of the hype of the war policy, and all of the fevered denuciations of the critics as appeasers and crypto-traitors, for NR to publish, say, a retraction of the infamous "Unpatriotic Conservatives" piece, accompanied by an analysis inclusive of both the unwarranted assumptions and delusions that informed the war policy and the actualities that so confounded the fantasies of a Middle Eastern democratic revolution. National Review, with or without warrant, remains a, if not the premier publication of the conservative movement in the United States, and it would behoove the editors of so august a publication to undertake all measures necessary to remove the albatross that a misguided exercise in democratic utopianism has hung about the neck of conservatism.

Update:

Daniel Larison comments at length on Lowry's piece, eviscerating Lowry's apparent need to console himself for the failure of a policy he supported by condescending to the Other:

For the dedicated Hamas and Hizbullah types, destruction of Israel is probably high on their to-do list, but I think we would make a terrible mistake if we assumed that this is what even many of these fanatics desired “above all.” (snip)

Thus it is with most men. Rare is the maniacal lunatic who simply wishes to keep acquiring power; most seek power and use violence to achieve certain ends, of which the destruction of their enemies may be only one and perhaps not even the most significant. Most often we can tell what motivates a man by looking at his loyalties, associations and actions. Hizbullah has changed and morphed over the years to become a Syro-Iranian front group, no doubt, but its members and sympathisers presumably see in it something more than that and understand their allegiance to it in terms beyond the old “death to Israel” motto. Whether they are profoundly mistaken or not does not matter if we are trying to understand their motivation–even if they are profoundly mistaken, as indeed they are, they have committed themselves to an idea that will not permit them to so easily acknowledge this in any case. And so we must try to understand what function this allegiance plays in winning the loyalties of so many people.

Take Hizbullah, for example. Why would someone belong to it, much less fight for it? Do we suppose that it is simply rooted in the “pride and hatred” of fallen man, or could it possibly be that men may be driven by good desires that they corrupt by foul means? It seems entirely likely that the desire for the destruction of Israel stems from some powerful loyalty, some important feeling of belonging and devotion that gives meaning and purpose to what these people are doing. The destruction of Israel, if they could realise it, would only be incidental–what they want, I suspect, is some sort of status or dignity for themselves and their people that they feel is lacking and that they believe Israel has taken from them (or, at the very least, that if Israel were gone they would be able to reclaim what was supposedly rightfully theirs). In any event, that is what they desire above all.

Precisely. A large segment of the Islamic world is aggrieved by the existence of the Jewish state of Israel in the midst of the Middle East, not merely on account of the military failures of the Arab states in their attempts to dislodge Israel, and surely not on account of the ideological threat that the ostensibly free and democratic Israeli society poses, by virtue of its existence, to 'autocracy', but because there, in the midst of a region once conquered by the sword of Islam - and, having been thus conquered, regarded as the perpetual inheritance of the Ummah - there exists a Jewish state, a wound to the honour of Islam, and a Jewish state, moreover, against which, they believe - rightly or wrongly - that they possess a variety of political and economic grievances amenable to expression outside the categories of Islam.

And this is, of course, to say nothing of the various sectarian and clan-based interests that Muslims throughout the region seek to vindicate and realize, whether in Lebanon or Iraq - interests that would obtain regardless of the existence or nonexistence of the "Zionist Entity". Indeed,

There is something sick and perverse in the idea that if every man does not desire “freedom,” he is therefore primarily be out to bludgeon in his neighbour’s skull or be bent on killing Jews, as if the range of human motivation was so limited and as if there were no diversity of human motives beyond these starkly opposed poles.

Alas, we dwell amidst the ruination of an age that no longer regards the claims of many human goods as worthy of recognition, that, perhaps, no longer finds them comprehensible, because to recognize them, and to understand them truly, might entail recognition of the necessity of contextualizing "freedom", that is, limiting it for the sake of higher - transcendent - goods. And in our blindness, we behold the Muslim, adjudge him a fanatic - for he is sometimes that - and declare, not that he has corrupted something noble and true, but that he is a fool for failing to recognize the overriding importance of "freedom", which is to say, the overriding importance of believing, and organizing society on the basis of the belief, that nothing is sacred. Nothing.

Would A Stupid Party be One That Pursues Its Own Obsolescence?

2006-08-08T23:12:00.000-04:00

Conservatism - if such a thing still exists in a meaningful sense - ought to be capable of addressing more than the passing moment, the exigent, the ephemeral. Not, of course, in the sense that it ought to embrace a vision of the consummation of history, but in the sense that conservatives, reasoning upon the principles of a conservative philosophy and tradition, ought to be able to judge, by the exercise of prudential reason, the probable consequences of alternate courses of action in the present.

Alas, the conservative movement, such that it is, affords scant evidence of such capabilities, prescience being a casualty of the obsession with the requirements of party-based electoral politics. This is a deficit of analysis not limited to the failure of the Iraq policy and the alacrity with which conservative pundits volunteered to rationalize a policy so calamitous that the question of whether the planning or execution was worse is fundamentally undecidable. It is an analytical deficit seemingly endemic to contemporary conservatism in its entirety - at least, that part of conservatism that claims mainstream respectability.

Consider, for example, the following excogitation of the noted sage, Jonah Goldberg:

Still, we live in a cosmopolitan time. The word “cosmopolitan” - coined by the Greek philosopher Diogenes, who explained that he wasn’t a citizen of any nation or city but a citizen of the world - means more than the ability to name various foreign cheeses. It is an outlook that sees national boundaries and geographic loyalties as quaint and even backward.

Although conservatives (rightly) celebrate economic one-worldism, when it comes to trade and the like, liberals have fetishized cultural and political cosmopolitanism. The impulse to create a “parliament of Man, the Federation of the World,” in Alfred Tennyson’s words, informs every debate about the United Nations, global warming, or human rights. For many liberals, globalization means empowering the transnational elites who get together at Davos or the Clinton Global Initiative to eat fusion cuisine while discussing the political fusion of the planet.

The inanity of this passage is so great that one can feel intelligence draining away with each moment one spends in the fruitless endeavour of attempting to understand how anyone could advance such absurdities with a clear conscience. In the first place, consider old Diogenes: he may have declared himself a citizen of the world, or the cosmos, for all I care, but his claim would never have been recognized in, say, Persia. To the contrary, he would have been regarded as a Greek, and may have been treated accordingly, had he ever ventured as far as Persia. Perhaps Goldberg would argue that Diogenes was the wrong sort of cosmopolitan; however, if the essence of cosmopolitanism is as Goldberg describes it, then whether one declares oneself a citizen of the world or a capitalist of the world, the kicking against the goads of reality is still occurring. There is also the risible claim that the Davos confabulations afford the transnational elites a forum for bruiting their schemes for political fusionism - as though the Davos forum, whatever the nature of the political discussions that unfold there, did not also concern proposals and general brainstorming about schemes of economic fusion, and as though such cosmopolitan economic nostrums were not, in the minds of the participants, integrally related to their fantasies of political unification. There is, additionally, the quaint and oddly charming notion that economic and political/cultural globalization can be distinguished, and that the line dividing the one from the other is also a political, philosophical one. Perhaps it is cosmopolitan to celebrate the cultural and political vitality of one’s own nation or city while remaining jauntily indifferent as to its economic prospects under the ravages of globalization, but how a conservative reconciles with his contempt for humanitarians and cosmopolites, who love mankind while recoiling from the particular men with whom they interact, a solicitude for the culture and political fortunes of his fellows mingled with utter indifference to the effects upon them of economic cosmopolitanism, as though he wants their city to flourish while being sucked dry and impoverished, uprooted, by the gales of creative destruction, is a mystery the resolution of which I leave to those possessed of intellects subtler than my own. Which brings us to the most preposterous of all of Goldberg’s deliverances - the notion, quaint and charming, in an odd, retro, the-real-struggle-is-between-capitalism-and-communism-forever-and-ever-amen sort of way, that conservatives celebrate economic one-worldism, and that rightly.

That conservatives ought to remain highly sceptical, a best, regarding the coherence of a political creed which embraces, all at once, traditional loyalties to culture and polis/polity, and a utilitarian universalist disregard for the economic welfare of such localities and their inhabitants, already has been suggested. Traditional loyalties of the sort that are under seige by the elites of Davos are rooted in the love for particular people, places, habits, institutions, customs, beliefs, and ways of life; they are not instrumental towards the realization of the greatest good of the greatest many, or of the “good” of the alienated individual for whom they may be sacrificed. They are the goods of a humane, civilized, flourishing human life, considered in themselves and for themselves. Utilitarian universalist conceptions of the good seek the benefit of the greatest number of de-socialized individuals - in theory, at least - without regard for the particularity of the communities that may have to be scoured away in the name of progress, efficiency, and profit. So far from being an accidental feature of certain expressions of the idea, this is necessary to it, a connotation of the concept, as is evident not merely from consideration of the meaning of a general or universal good - which is what such theories ostensibly aim at, yes? - but from the operation of such systems or policies in the everyday world of international trade. Were it not so, globalization never would have arisen as a political question.

Nevertheless, there is a reason of greater import than the discomfiture of philosophical incoherence for resisting the temptation to embrace economic cosmopolitanism as a conservative good, while consigning cultural and political cosmopolitanism to the outer darkness of liberalism: economic cosmopolitanism cannot be embraced singly, in isolation, but engenders cultural and political cosmopolitanism by virtue of its inherent logic. One hopes that Goldberg reads the Weekly Standard, something I typically do only under extreme duress, for it was on the website of that magazine that there appeared an article which, despite its author’s own tone of gee-whiz-who-would-ever-have-imagined amusement, exposes Goldberg’s provincial yes-but to cosmopolitanism for the untenable conceit that it is. Irwin Stelzer, in a brief article bearing the suggestive subtitle, Free trade is bringing international law closer and closer to home, wrote:

Economics drives the law. Globalization is about more than cheap sneakers and Indian call centers. It is about pressures forcing the legal systems of every nation to take account, somehow, of what is going on in the rest of the world.

Stelzer proceeded to illustrate his thesis by discussion the cases of three British bankers allegedly complicit in the frauds perpetrated by Enron being brought before a Texas court, the legal wrangling over the IPO of the Russian oil company that received the assets of Yukos after the Khordorkovsky conviction, anti-trust tussles between America and the EU, and the reach of Sarbanes-Oxley. In fine,

We now live in a world in which the rules of one nation govern activities in another.

All of which ought to have been obvious, if not from a rational consideration of the nature of laws governing economic relations, then from a consideration of the course of European unification. Economic harmonization necessitates legal harmonization, which, preferably and by the very nature of the case, must, to the greatest feasible extent, be undertaken beyond the reach of representative politics; and such movement in the direction of legal homogeneity is nothing other than de facto political federation, as political and economic elites act in concert in the pursuit of shared ends, evidencing the truth that the public household is coextensive with the scope of deliberation.

So much, then, for political particularlism, which economic cosmopolitanism is showing to be a retrograde allegiance. What of cultural particularism? That, too, will go the way of all mortal things, for reasons anciently given by the leading personages of the so-called good Enlightenment: the constant interactions among representatives of different societies and cultures as they engage in trade, in the reciprocities of enlightened self-interest, will engender a softening of mores, customs, and habits, as the rougher contours of particular cultures are eroded under the pressure of the necessity of facilitating smoother commercial transactions. There is no necessity according to the logic of which such erosion must be undergone equally by all parties; but someone’s cultural particularities will, at a minimum, be effaced in order to make straight the path of profit. Neither is there any necessity of pressing the argument further, for there are few things so manifest as that those whose world consists of such cosmopolitan surroundings often have more in common with one another, regardless of their national origins, than with those provincials with whom they share a nationality. So much, then, for cultural particularism.

Whither, therefore, conservatism? Shall conservatism be reduced, theoretically and pragmatically, to a ratification of the ceaseless flux of creative destruction, as if to asseverate that the burning question of political life is abstention from interference with the coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be of contingent economic relations, all within the context of an economic process or state of becoming that is ever new, yet ever the same - the eternal return of the same? Shall conservatism be nothing more than the idea that conservation is merely the letting be of the eternal revolution of our modes of being in the world? - nothing more than the preservation of the rights of the innovator, revolutionary, and progressive to deny us the fixities by which we locate ourselves in the world? That for the sake of mammon, we will sacrifice all?

If so, let us confess manfully that conservatism is nothing more than another doctrine of interests, that it does not concern the preservation of a precious legacy, the stewardship of a heritage of inestimable value - because it is ours - but that it is naught but a vehicle of arbitrary self assertion: now for the particular and traditional, because this suits us presently, now again for the revolutionary, because this enriches us and gratifies us. There would be some consolation in consistency: at least Diogenes was a fool. As for the inconstant and lukewarm, they will, as we have on good authority, be spewed out and forgotten, as are all temporizers and would-be conciliators of the implacable.

On Derbyshire on The Party of Death

2006-06-09T07:44:00.000-04:00

Ramesh Ponnuru's fine work on the fealty of many intellectual and political elites, particularly on the left side of the political aisle, to a life-negating culture, The Party of Death, despite its status as a lucidly written and cogently argued presentation of the Culture of Life position on our ongoing cultural and political struggles over the relationships between and among science, progress, autonomy, law, and human life, has failed to garner much critical attention from those who reject the Culture of Life, yet decline to concede membership in its antinomy. This unfortunate phenomenon has been noted at Redstate, and has occasioned much spirited dialogue on lefty blogsites - to which I refuse to link - and at Ross Douthat and Reihan Salim's blog, The American Scene, these two threads running to well in excess of 50 comments apiece, totals which, while not entirely unprecedented, are at least atypical for highly literate, wonkish blogs.

However, there has been at least one serious attempt, on the part of a non-Culture of Life partisan, to reckon with the argument of Ponnuru's book. John Derbyshire, hereafter to be referred to solely as the Derb, has published a verbose, sprawling review for The New English Review in which he attempts a rebuttal of Ponnuru's thesis.

For those who are willing to brave the pitiless savageries of ennui in order to wade through the entire coma-inducing review, in which nothing of the argumentation, save the particular forms of several sneers, appears to be new, there will be much to say about its numerous inadequecies of argument, its deficiencies of judgment, its superficial philosophizing, its supercilious hauteur, and, to reiterate, the state of bored stupefaction that its more-of-the-same quality induces in the reader. Nevertheless, having determined that a detailed refutation of the Derb's argument would require, consistent with the gravity of the subject matter, a contribution in excess of 10,000 words, and that a competent fisking, which its spirit richly merits, would entail approximately 5,000 words, I have purposed to pass over, in dignified abstraction, the soporific details of his review in order to concetrate upon its distilled essence, for, this being itself gravely mistaken, everything predicated upon it must in necessary consequence be reduced to a stupendous farrago of mere assertion.

Leon has identified the money shot in the Derb's argument:

Ponnuru says that it is unjust to regard some instances of the human organism as less alive than others based on how we feel about them. (Another RTL-er once derided this approach to me, in conversation, as "Barry Manilow ethics" - the worth of another human life judged by our own feelings, wo wo wo feelings.... I offer this designation for Ramesh Ponnuru's future use, free of charge.) Unfortunately most of us do so judge; and feelings, wo wo wo feelings, are a much more common foundation for our social taboos than are Natural Law principles, or indeed any abstract principles at all. Why, if a woman's husband dies, should she not use his corpse for garden mulch, or serve it up with mashed potatos and collard greens for dinner? I cannot think of any reason well rooted in pure philosophy, though there might be a public health issue to be addressed. we do not do such things because of the disgust we feel - we feel - at the mistreatment of human corpses.

We likewise feel that an adult woman's life, even a few months of it, is worth more than that of a hardly-formed fetus; and that the vigorous, usefully-employed, merrily procreating Michael Schiavo has a life, a life, more worthy of the name than had the incurably insensate relict of his spouse. Those life Ponnuru who think differently are working against the grain of human nature, against our feelings - yes, our feelings - about what life is.

There is a veritable wealth of philosophical impoverishment in these words, and so many aspects of that impoverishment that could be teased out and exposed, in all of its nakedness and shame; and yet, quite apart from the specific failures and grotequeries expressed therein, its gravest failing is that it is ultimately, and utterly, a stranger to coherence. When read in connection with the Derb's penultimate paragraph, the incoherence of his thesis will be made manifest:

For RTL is, really, just another species of Political Correctness, just another manifestation of the intellectual pathology, the hypertrophied and academical egalitarianism, the victimological scab-picking, the gaseous sentimentality, that has afflicted our civilization these past forty years. We have lost our innocence, traded it in for a passel of theorems. The RTL-ers are just another bunch of schoolmarms trying to boss us around and to diminish our liberties. Is it wrong to have concern for fetuses and the vegetative, incapable, or incurable? Not at all. Do we need some hard thinking about the notion of personhood in a society with fast-advancing biological capabilities? We surely do. (And I think Party of Death contributes useful things to that discussion.) Should we let a cult of theologians, monks, scolds, grad-school debaters, logic-choppers, and shoolmarms tell us what to do with our wombs, or when we may give up the ghost, or when we shoul part with our loved ones? Absolutely not! Give me liberty, or give me death!

There is a manifest, and profound, incoherence in this manner of philosophizing, which tends to reduce it to the lowest state of incogency (yes, that may be a neologism, but it fits, and I like it.). In the first place, it is historically anachronistic, which, I confess, is a polite way of stating that with respect to the history of Western thought, it is historically illiterate, inasmuch as while the Derb wishes to affirm an amorphous, indeterminate, and frankly pagan type of freedom from the tyranny of the rigid intellectualizers, it is the rigid intellectualizers, the ideologues and terrible simplifiers of our philosophical and political history who visited the modern doctrine of freedom-as-liberation upon us. Whether the sophists of the Enlightenment or the modern inheritors of the jacobin legacy who clamour for personal liberation from every moral constraint upon personal conduct that has been integral to civilization, it is the simplistic and jejeune cry for an unconstrained, illimitable freedom that has been accompanied by rigid dogmatizing and the annihilation of our innocence.

Second, for all of the prating in his review concerning the stability of our taboos and the lack of necessity that attaches to the rational examination of them, there is an obvious incompatibility between the contention of their stability and relative permanance, and the exaltation of freedom, sweet freedom, which permeates the review. That freedom means little if it cannot be utilized to question the taboos. Call the Derb's philosophy, then, a performative inconsistency.

Third, and most critically, anyone who endeavours to take of the materials that the Derb has provided for our repulsion and fashion of them an approximation of a philosophy will be confronted by an aporia resulting from the disjunction between the celebration of feeling - let us say, instinc, in order to more nearly approach the inner meaning - of our first exerpt, and the damnation of those who would infringe upon Our Liberties, Dammit! - in the second exerpt. For the former is a crude caricature of the conservative doctrine which holds that much of what constitutes a civilization is not amenable to the endless rational dissections of the philosopher and the terrible simplifier, while the latter is the war-cry of those who, in the name of free thought, have sought to undermine and overthrow the reign of those inherited ways that the conservative always sought to protect from the nihilating gaze of the ideologue.

If one is at all inclined to discuss the forms of civilization in general terms, one is confronted with essentially two possibilities where the formation of the common habits of thought requisite to civilization are concerned. One may, on the one hand, side with the legacy of the radical Enlightenment and demand that each man Dare to Know! for himself, and may even institute some sort of educational regime for the inculcation of the habits of mind necessary to `thinking for oneself'. Conservative philosophy has always looked askance at this radical demand that everything be subjected to the bar of some dessicated critical rationality, and made conformable to some number of abstract principles which seem self-evident to a handful of intellectuals, and history vindicates this scepticism towards the radical rethinking of society, whether the project of an elite, as in most revolutionary dogmas, or of the masses, as in modern liberalism.

One may equally well, on the other hand, recognize that while there are things about which we must reason together, that there are vast numbers of things about which it is perilous to reason, and on which it is better to defer to the collective wisdom embodied in custom, tradition, and inherited practices, many of which, by the nature of the case, will be sustained and justified by recourse to authority, even religious authority. Which is to say that there are non-rational modes of knowing, and that the incursion of reason into their realms is an act of intellectual violence which bodes ill for society. Man must learn to think, yes; but as for the foundational precepts of his civilization - these he must receive as he receives his breath:

Human reason reduced to its own resources is perfectly worthless, not only for creating but also for preserving any political or religioius association, because it only produces disputes, and, to conduct himself well, man needs not problems but beliefs. His cradle should be surrounded by dogmas, and when his reason is awakened, it should find all his opinions ready-made, at least all those relating to his conduct. Nothing is so important to him as prejudices. Let us not take this word in a bad sense. It does not necessarily mean false ideas, but only, in the strict sense of the word, opinions adopted before any examination. Now these sorts of opinions are man's greatest need, the true elements of his happiness, and the Palladium of empires. Without them, there can be neither worship, nor morality, nor government...

Joseph de Maistre may well have overstated the case, and yet it remains unassailably true that most of us do not reason ourselves into our most fundamental convictions, but arrive at them as the result of a process of slow acculturation, where they work unconsciously upon our minds until, when conditions of life may be propitious, they arise to the foreground of awareness. Most simply do not reason deeply about the weighty issues of human existence, but absorb and emote opinions on them on account of a legion of non and sub-rational processes. The Derb is correct to that extent.

Nevertheless - and herein lies the aporia - one cannot at once demand that the intellectuals leave the masses to their untutored, uncritical feelings about things, their unsophisticated, unphilosophical, often quite arbitrary and incoherent emotions, and demand that they be liberated from the `tyranny' of schoolmarms, busybodies, and the other parasites the Derb claims to perceive in their toils for the Culture of Life. Either one will demand, and to some real extent, strive to teach, everyone to think for himself, or one will strive to inculcate in all a reverence for authority as this is embodied in custom, tradition, inherited norms, folkways, the Church, and so on. What one cannot reasonably do is maintain, as the twin poles of a neopagan ethos of nonthought, that people ought not be subjected to the authority of those institutions and persons who have been the embodiments of wisdom in a culture, and must be left to the imagined sanctity of their utterly untutored, unelevated, wo wo wo feelings. Men must either think for themselves, and that deeply, to the depths - and conservatives have always been sceptical of both the process and the results of this - or they must yield, even bow, before some authority; but what they cannot do - what they should not attempt, for it is the peril of any civilization - is to wall themselves within their uncultivated feelings and urges, refusing to think about them save in some narrow, unspecifiable sense, and within some undefined limits, while repudiating the wisdom of those who may have, of whatever origins, some superior insight into the matters on which they are content merely to ejaculate their ignorance, as though feeling something intensely were equivalent to either thought or knowledge, however obtained.

This, contra Derb, is the real frigid and pitiless dogma: the nihilistic solipsism that, trapped within its endless inward folds of nothingness, refuses to think, refuses to learn, only to feel and to assert itself, lashing out with peurile fury at those who would dare to interrogate its unmerited self-satisfaction, ever crying, "You're not the boss of me!" Any society that assents to the Derb's dogma as the expression of its vital principles will eventually learn that some are indeed, the bosses of them. For such societies perish from among the world of men.

A New Declaration

2006-06-09T07:24:00.000-04:00

Or, An Experiment in Immigration Esoterics: The Logic of the Current Controversy.

When confronted by enormities cloaked in anodyne language that scarcely, if ever, rises above the euphemistic and obfuscatory (Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act? - few legislative monikers are further divorced from the actual content of the bills to which they are appended…), thoughtful observers often manifest an unfortunate tendency to analyze such proposals in a spirit of detached, clinical rationality, which is too often to concede the framing of the controversy, and the terms that may rightly be employed in carrying it forward, to those engaged in the original acts of linguistic and legislative legerdemain - which is a polite way of stating that someoneis engaging in acts of violence against truth. It seemed to me, therefore, better to refrain from offering, given the inverted nativism decried by John Derbyshire, as well as analyses such as that of Robert Rector, a dispassionate analysis of the convergence of interests which has disgorged this piece of lunacy, eschewing as well, for the present moment, a descriptive account of what such transformations portend for American society and government. Things of great magnitude must first be felt before they can be assimilated by reason, for reason cannot of itself encompass what amount to movements of the spirit of an age, that spirit being the source of the objects of reason.

Herewith, then, The New Declaration…

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one Ruling Elite to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with the people of their nation, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and superior station to which their exalted social and moral endowments entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, and to those of their own people, does not require that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation; nevertheless, that Our greatness should be evinced to all and proclaimed among men, and Our prerogatives made the more secure, we do declare and affirm:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that some men are created more equal than others, that these are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Lives of Distinction, Liberty of Rule, and the Pursuit of Factional Happiness by means of public policy. — That to provide for these rights a field of exercise, Peoples are constituted from among men, deriving their identities and rights from the Consent of their Governors, — That whenever any people becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Governors to alter or abolish it, and to constitute a new People, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its sufferances in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Security and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Peoples long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shewn, that the Better Parts of mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Peoples to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under the fetters of republican liberty and the requirement of the preservation of their forms of life, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such a people, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of We Elites; and such is now the necessity which constrains Us to alter Our former Societies and Peoples. The history of the present People of America is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of a scheme of republican liberties, by which the forms of life of the People may be secured and maintained, and by which We, the Virtuous, may be enchained. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

-They have refused their inner Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necesary for Our good.

-They have sought to prevent Us, their Governors, from passing Laws of immediate and pressing importance to the Security of Our Interests, unless suspended in their fullest operation until their noisome clamour for the integrity of the Nation be satisfied; and when such measures as they importunately demand are proposed by Us to placate them, neglect to receive Our blandishments with due mental submission.

-They have refused to countenance the passage of Laws for the accomodation of Masses of Foreign-Born People, unless those People would consent to relinquish their Native and Superior customs, rights and glories inestimable to them, and formidable to retrogrades and perturbators only.

-They have expressed their malignant opinions to Us at times and places, and in manners, altogether inconvenient and inexpedient for Us, for the sole purpose of fatiguing us into compliance with their interests, so contradictory to Our own. They have even sought to displace Us from Our seats of Privilege repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness their invasions on the Rights of Rule we bear in Our Persons.

-They have refused for a long time, after such oppositions, to countenance the enactment of Laws conducive to Our Interests, reframed so as to mollify them; whereby the Legislative Power, incapable of alienation from Us, has, on these paramount questions, fallen utterly into abeyance; the State remaining in the meantime being denied the legitimation of a benevolent invasion from without, and the salubrious convulsions within, all of which conduce to the perpetuation of Our Rule and Prosperity.

-They have endeavoured to prevent Our repopulation of Our States, for that purpose attempting to resist Our Laws for the Preference of Foreigners; refusing to approfe further migration hither, and imposing new conditions upon the Reconstitution of the People.

-They have endeavoured to obstruct the adminstration of Justice, by having the temerity to critique the manner in which Our Bureaucracies have elected to interpret and decline to enforce the Laws for Our Benefit.

-They have, by means of their incessant and impertinent advocacy, sought to render Our Rule dependent upon their will and consent, even for the tenure of Our very Offices.

-They have erected a multitude of new media, and sent hither swarms of communications to harass Us in Our solemn Majesty, to prevent Us from increasing Our Substance.

-They have agitated for the maintainance, even during times of peace (the conceit being most utile during times of war as a tool of policy), of a common culture and way of life.

-They have affected the imposture that the People are independent of, and superior to, Our Rightful Power.

-They have combined amongst themselves to assert the illigitimacy of any jurisdiction not deriving its powers from the provisions of the Constitution, a mere scrap of parchment all but unacknowledged by Our Laws, according respect only to such statutes as are justified thereby:

-For asserting a right to perform duties which We, in Our Sapience, have declined to acknowledge.

-For the temerity of their assertion that their efforts in this regard are in no respect violations of Human Rights, the Sacred Abstractions which serve as the Symbol of Our Rule.

-For seeking to limit, or to establish themselves, the conditions of trade with all parts of the world, which are Our exclusive Jurisdiction, not to be subject to their scrutiny, and to the fruits of which they possess no just claim.

-For cavilling at the implicit modes of subsidy for Us that Our most Condign Policy requires they provide.

-For depriving Us, in many cases, of the monopoly of discourse which is Our Unalienable Right.

-For refusing submission of the intellect to Modes of Governance which entail both the dissolution of their idol of ‘National Sovereignty’ and the diminution of ‘Representative Governance’ for We Who Govern, and those Represented, are One and the Same.

-For striving to abolish the informal system of Administrative Laws, by which We have purposed to facilitate the emergence of a New People, in Our Border States, establishing therein motives towards a Government of Duties to them, enlarging it as a precedent so as to render it at once an example and a fit instrument for the promotion of the same Rule of the Base into other States.

-For petitioning for the abolition of the operational Charter of Our Prosperity, the abolition of Our most Profitable Practices, and the alteration of the fundamental forms of Our Governance in Our Interest.

-For proclaiming ‘We the People’ as a Power superior to that of Our Legislatures, and declaring themselves the original possessors of the Power wherewith We legislate for them.

-They have renounced by these reckless and rebellious acts their lived Consent to Our Rule and Protection, and by waging War against Our Right, have rendered forfeit any claim upon Us.

-They have blighted Our Seas, Coasts, Towns, and cossetted Lives by the meanness, commonness, and prosaic character of their flyover ‘culture’.

-They are at this time assembling and petitioning for the completion of their works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy against the Other scarcely paralleled in this Age of Enlightenment, and totally unworthy of the People of a Civilized Elite, and the Beneficent Rule of the Same.

-They have constrained Our fellows, dependent upon the approval of the populace for their livelihoods, to proffer opinions contrary to their Interests and Ours, as members of One Class; to become the political and philosophical foes of friends and Brethren, or to abjure their own Consciences in acts of false consciousness, betraying their special dignity as a People Apart.

-They have excited domestic political turmoils, and by this restiveness have endeavoured to resist the migration of the inhabitants of Our Frontiers, and indeed of the World as a Whole, whose logic, conducive to Our Power, Prosperity, and Virtue, is an undistinguished levelling of the distinctiveness of their base and contemptible ‘culture’.

In every stage of these Oppressions, We have Petitioned for Redress in the most appropriate terms - by decrying the bigotry of our antagonists: - Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated insubordination. A people whose character is thus marked by every act which may define the Uppity Servant, is unfit to be the People of a Free Elite.

Nor have we been wanting in attentions to Our American brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their noisome advocates to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the conditions of Our Entitlement and Preeminence here - Our superior Knowledge, Skill, and Virtue. We have appealed to the artiface of justice and self-abnegation we have endeavoured to inculcate in them, and we have conjured them by the ties of our mutual history of Progressive Liberation from the Injustice of Their Heritage to disavow these usurpations and impertinences, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and Correspondence as Rulers and Ruled. They have been deaf to Our voice of Justice and Historical Progress. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces Our separation, and hold them, as we would hold any others of mankind, Enemies in Insubordination, in Peace Valued and Dutiful Subjects.

We, therefore, the Rightful Elites of the United States of America - that is, the embodiments of the National Idea - in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Authority of the Good People of these States, namely, Ourselves, solemnly publish and declare, That We Elites are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent Governors; that We are Absolved from all Allegiance to the Substance and People of America, and that all representative connection between Us and the people, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as a Free and Independent Class, We have the Full Power to reconstruct the People, Constitute a New People, Contract for the Importation of a New People, establish Commerce for the Furtherance of Our Rightful Prosperity, and to do all other Acts and Things which Governing Classes may of Right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection afforded by Our Possession of the Instruments of Power, we mutually pledge to each other Our monopolies of Virtue and Rectitude; Our guidance of the Organs of respectable Opinion; Our mastery of the Arts of legal writing and manipulation, bureaucracy, and administrative discretion; Our command of vast wealth; Our indomitable conviction of Right; Our immovable resolution; and the Honor to be accorded Us in the Future We have Ordained.

After the discontent of the Spring
The Elites of both business and state
Had speeches made and editorials published
Implying that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

A Glimpse of the Future....

2006-05-31T15:15:00.000-04:00

....Courtesy of the Derb, who has been in fine form of late, denouncing the corruption, ignorance, recklessness, and arrogance of the Senate and the consensus immigration policy of the American elite.

A nearby family has a sweet little girl aged 6 or 7, currently attending kindergarten or 1st grade (I'm not sure) in the local elementary school. She's taking all her lessons (except English) in Spanish. It's an option the school offers. Her parents are pleased: "She can already speak a lot of Spanish!"

No offense to anyone, but I think this is awful. I wouldn't mind if it were being done with some other language—-Latin, say, or Hungarian, or Sumerian, or Chinese. Since it's being done —- and ONLY being done —- in Spanish, it's hard to resist the conclusion that this is part of a deliberate program of Hispanicization on the part of our political and bureaucratic elites.

The logical end-point of this path will be the situation in Quebec, where a person not bilingual — in our case, in English and Spanish — will be at a disadvantage in the job market. Is this a thing Americans actually want? Did anyone ask us?

When stuff like this is seeping in even to drowsy middle-class outer suburbs like mine, bilingual America is well on its way. Our masters are sick or our boring, unimaginative monolingualism, and they mean to do something about it, whether we like it or not.

Such boundless self-hatred, such contempt for the people of this once-great nation, are the natural issue of that pseudo-patriotism which consists of the veneration of ideals and abstractions, and indeed, the negation of the existent realities of the concrete American nation as so many obstacles to the instantiation of the Idea in history. Nevertheless, there is more to this indifference towards what is our own; but of these things it is forbidden to speak. We may only intimate the contours of the underlying reality by stating that we have been conditioned, for several generations, to perceive virtue in the disparagement of that which is our own, and of that which we have been, now are, and will be - if we indeed continue at all - and in the embrace of that which is Other - irreducibly, unassimilibly Other - as the condition of tutelage by which we will attain to the enlightenment of ceasing to be who and what we are as an historical people. We are the Cancer of History, and we shall only - so we are told, implicitly, by every item of the sort the Derb recounts - atone for the injustice that our existence simply is by ceasing to be. This is "liberation".

Suicide has apparently been appended to the table of the virtues.

Acceptable Hatreds

2006-05-22T18:17:00.000-04:00

The May issue of that journal of exceptionally-uneven quality in the discussion of religion and the public square, First Things, includes a review of Richard Pipes' latest foray into the interpretation of Russian history and culture.

The gist of the review: Pipes ought not have bothered. Trees were felled needlessly to produce this ream of birdcage liners, from the draft process to publication.

Daniel Mahoney, in a review apparently to be denied to those who have not antied up the funds for a subscription, argues, persuasively, that Pipes has located his analysis squarely within the Orientalist school of Russian studies, and in so doing, has

....designate(d) Russia and the Russian political tradition the permanent European instantiation of Asiatic depotism.

Russian political culture has never, on Pipes' reading, succeeded in transcending the legacy of what he terms patrimonialism, according to which

....sovereignty and ownership are radically collapsed and where the "owner-ruler had no notion that his subjects had legitimate interests of their own."

This interpretive conceit has led Pipes, in the past, to press the bizarro-world argument that Soviet communism owed more to the legacies of the despotic Tsars than to revolutionary ideology, a risible claim for someone supposedly immersed in the literature of the Soviet past, and one that must entail that the Bolsheviks, for all of their protestations of revolutionary novelty, were still somehow acting at the behest of some subconscious Russian Will-To-Despotism:

Pipes' one-sided emphasis on patrimonialism as the "cause of causes" finally lacks all sense of proportion. He has an essentialist conception of the Russian past and present that leaves little room for responsible moral or political agency.

In the interest of refraining from potential copyright violations involving a review essay not available free of charge, suffice it to say that this essentialism as applied to the interpretation of Russian political history ill serves Pipes, leading to the conflation of outright theorists of patrimonial despotism and defenders of what would have amounted to a sort of constitutional autocracy not at all unlike some of the Western regimes of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, and to a sense that none of the reform movements within Russian society prior to the revolution could have averted the re-emergence of a grotesque authoritarianism - Russia's historic destiny. Pipes, as Mahoney notes, curiously attempts to bolster his thesis by appeal to what is thought to be Russia's current political state. But, as Mahoney notes:

"Managed democracy" in Russia certainly leaves much to be desired. Putin has certainly done little or nothing to support vigorous local self-government. He has consolidated the state's control of national television (because the TV stations were formerly the property of the oligarch class, a sort of cross between mafiosi and Ayn Rand uber-capitalists - Maximos) while allowing hundreds of independent newspapers and radio stations to flourish. ... To his credit, Putin has had the courage to challenge the criminal oligarchy and he has had some success in marginalizing the Comnunist party. He has also gone some way to restoring the confidence of many ordinary Russians in their nations' future after the predatory capitalism of the 1990s.

As Mahoney ably illustrates, Pipes' interpretations verge on outright contempt for the Russian people. Were a scholar, of whatever repute, to publish a work in which it was argued that, with respect to the Jews, there is virtually no scope for moral or political responsibility, and that they cannot help but seek to subvert the societies in which they find themselves a minority; or that Africa will always remain dysfunctional, because blacks are destined to remain in thrall to the primitive tribal politics that mires the continent in poverty and lurid violence, he would rightly be denounced for a bigoted sort of essentialism. Yet, it is acceptable, as it is acceptable to denounce Christians, to portray Russians as irreducible, irreformable despots and oppressors. It is almost as though such pieces of, ahem, scholarship are intended as ideological set-pieces, prefabricated justifications for some real world policy....

And here is something that goes a long way towards explicating the significance of Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study In Political Culture. One demonizes those whom one has given oneself a need to disregard, and one disregards and dismisses those who must be marginalized for the realization of some end one has set for oneself. The question, then, is what ends are served by a group dedicated to the easily refuted proposition that the Chechen conflict has nothing to do with jihadists attempting to establish a sharia state along the under belly of Russia. One does not lie about something so obvious, and demonize a people in the course of that lie, without good reason. What, then, is the reason for this untruth, and this "scholarship"?

Just asking.

Don't Say That About My Place In This World!

2006-05-22T13:20:00.000-04:00

Over at the Reactionary Radicals group blog, dedicated to the discussion of Bill Kaufman's new book, published by theIntercollegiate Studies Institute, Reactionary Radicals: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists, Darryl Hart, formerly of Westminster Theological Seminary and now of ISI, opens a post by referring to my beloved Bucks County as an 'armpit'.

That will simply not do. Not at all. Bucks County, as late as the early 1990s, excepting, of course, the lower fifth of the county, lost to overdevelopment since the 1950s, was a gorgeous landscape of small farms, small towns, and rolling hills. I grew up in Warminster, which, through the 1980s, was just about the northermost of the relatively developed suburbs; across the road from my neighbourhood was Northampton Township, and from there stretched to the Delaware River a sumptuous tapestry of farms and open space, sprinkled with quaint little tows and hamlets, while to the north, there was only a little development in Warrington, then countryside all the way up to the county seat of Doylestown.

If Bucks County is now a reeking armpit, that is not because it has always been such, but because the collusion of developers and tax-greedy politicians, coupled with the gauche tastes of the upper-middle renter class has resulted in the transformation of what was once a little bit of an idyll into a grotesque, monotonous, sprawling facsimile of everything that is ugly and wrong in New Jersey, hideous, oversized and underbuilt McMansions blighting the land I love.

The Tribal Competitive Imperative

2006-05-22T13:03:00.000-04:00

Last week, Steve Sailer entertained a fascinating discussion of Tom Wolfe's illuminating conception of the Fiction-Absolute, a sort of collective thought-world, having no necessary relation to reality as it is apart from this imaginative realm, which, if universalized as a normative scheme of values for all persons and social groups, would result in the social supremacy of the group responsible for the elaboration of the conquering Fiction-Absolute.

For my part, I found the term, 'egocosmos' most suitable, inasmuch as it captures the elevation of the primal drives of anxiety and the will-to-power of subjects into social norms to which others are made, by various means, to conform. Sailer eventually, after entertaining a number of stimulating suggestions from readers, came up with 'tribal competitive imperative', defined as a sort of analogue of Kant's (in)famous Categorical Imperative:

Act so that if the maxim becomes a universal law for all rational beings, your group must be seen as best.

The concept of the 'Tribal Competitive Imperative' certainly captures, to a high degree of accuracy, the core of Wolfe's original idea. Nevertheless, I must offer but one minor demurral: the TCI is much too anodyne and clinical, much too descriptive, in that while it captures the reality of pervasive conflict amongst bearers of incompatible schemes of social values, it fails to capture the all-too vivid sense in which certain schemes of values represent, shall we say, retrogression and barbarism by comparison to others. The values of the ghetto, the barrio, and the university, to mention but three examples. In short, the evaluative element must be preserved, for in the realm of culture and civilzation - above, that is, the level of survival - success bears no necessary relation to worth. Islamic civilzation succeeded the Christian in Anatolia, after all.

Mordant Reflections on Tancredo and America

2006-05-09T17:28:00.000-04:00

I am glad Tom Tancredo is fighting immigration in the House, tooth and nail, and I wish we had more like him in politics. He is fighting a fight that we must fight, if only for the sake of honorable resistance. But he - and the Minutemen - are not fighting for the most important thing: the real, the true, the lost America. If they were fighting for that thing, then it would mean we already had it, and the immigration wars would have been won, and the immigration question settled - on our terms - a full generation or two ago.

Alas, Chilton Williamson Jr., writing in the April issue of Chronicles here touches upon a despressing reality of modern American life: disappearance of the colourful, regional, local, particularistic cultures that once flourished within the broader American nation. Now vanquished by a host of deracinating influences, from the expansion of Federal power, the proliferation of modern mass media, and such things as the Interstate Highway System and the automobile, to the decline of vital religion, the acceptance of purely material considerations as decisive in political and social organization, and mass immigration, these cultures alone were the social bulwarks which, by tying men to particular places and particular people, rooted them in the Permanent Things and enabled them to comprehend that the Good is always the good of these men, and not of some abstraction, mankind, or more deceptively, all men of a specific country.

On Culture and Condescension

2006-05-09T17:11:00.000-04:00

This is the second version of an essay against the suppression of culture in the immigration controversy. It originally appeared at Redstate.

From time to time, one of the regulars here at RS, having read one of my comments on the immigration question - most frequently, one having to do with the inevitability and undesirability of the cultural fragmentation that is the logical consequence of the present immigration regime - will note my tagline and query me concerning my pessimism. My tagline reads:

My harp is turned to mourning, and my organ shall speak with the voice of them that weep. Spare me, O Lord, for my days are truly as nothing.

The tagline, for those not familiar with the great liturgical music of the Western Church, is a translation of a conjunction of two verses from the book of Job found together in the texts of the Requiem My interlocutors, then, wish to know whether my pessimism might have a corresponding remedy, whether I envision anything that might be done to avert the 'mourning' part.

First, however, allow me to state forthrightly that while the inspiration for the use of those verses as a tagline was hardly limited to concern over immigration, if the question before us is immigration, then my concern is emphatically with the unity, integrity, and viability of a recognizably American national culture. This, and not simply a sense of the unfairness of illegal immigration is, I maintain, the submerged and, of necessity, given certain unfortunate memes circulating amongst political commentators, furtively expressed basis of the opposition of many Americans to the present immigration regime.

Culture is one of the primal requirements of human flourishing; it the expression of a people's sense of itself and its place in the world and the order of things. Culture is man's humanization of the ordinary things of his temporal life, his investing of them with significance; culture, therefore, is mediate between the routines of mundane existence and some conception of man's telos, of life as it ought to be lived - that is to say, of some conception, however implicit, of a transcendent order.

It would, however, given the history of the human race, be altogether too much to claim that cultures have been wholly spontaneous, that their development has been largely or wholly random. Cultures tend to develop as organic, integrated entities, and it has usually been the case that what began as an unconscious working-out of some unified ideal, once it has risen to the level of consciousness, becomes an object of intentional action: pressures formal and informal may be brought to bear for the perpetuation of a way of life constitutive of the life and communal health of a people. Because a culture arises out of the complex intersections of historical, geographical, environmental, religious, ethnic, linguistic, and other factors, it is always, in some sense, regional or localised; and, therefore, there is a limit to the number of foreign cultural elements that a given culture can tolerate without simply ceasing to be itself. In other words, a culture, as a more or less unified entity expressive of the communal life of a particular people, must possess a certain autonomy, a liberty to be what it is, free of the imposition of external, ideological criteria; free, that is, to remain what it is and to assimilate foreign influences organically, as expressions of its own inner essence, and to assimilate those influences in its own time, and in accordance with the measure deemed requisite to the continued flourishing of the culture itself. When abstract criteria - criteria ungrounded in the specificity of a pattern of life indigenous to a people - are employed in any manner bearing upon the functioning of a culture, that culture is deprived of its liberty, its integrity, and ceases to be what it is - in fact, may well simply cease to be altogether. The importance of cultural freedom, then, is that a people are thereby enabled to preserve their sense of place and home in the world: they are not alienated from themselves by the imposition of external schemata.

It is something of this sensibility that, I believe, lies like a subterranean sea beneath of the surface disturbances of our controversies over details of immigration policy. If the question be put to me, whether I can conjure some degree of confidence regarding the continuance of a distinct American culture, I am compelled to state that the signs are unfavourable, and that the probability of our being able to avert the gradual dissolution of the America we grew up in, and of being able to bequeath it to our children - the absence of which ability is the very essence of disinheritance and dispossession - diminishes perceptibly with the passing of each day. The reason for this is a peculiar blindness to the reality of culture in the present wrangling over the specifics of immigration policy.

The specific blindness exhibited by defenders of the President's mislabelled brand of immigration reform concerns the inevitability of massive cultural shifts that overwhelming majorities of the American people will likely find unwelcome. Immigration defenders will object, and that volubly, that the problem lies not with the fact of immigration, considered in itself, but with the want of a will to compel immigrants to assimilate to the American culture. This is a valid consideration, as far as it goes. The trouble is that is no longer goes very far at all, for a host of reasons. First, let there be no naivete here, among those reasons is the fact that multiculturalism is now the de facto ideology of the American establishment, the regnant ideology in terms of which we are encouraged to understand not only ourselves, but the nation of which we are citizens. Multiculturalism is entrenched in innumerable ways throughout our society, from universities and their curricula, to programs for bilingual education and multilingual ballots; from the immigration lawyers' associations to the bureaucrats who staff the ICE; from the ethnic grievance lobbies to the social service agencies; from media and popular entertainment to institutions of so-called high culture. To imagine that we have the capacity to make an end run around this entrenched ideology and its acolytes and practitioners in high places by instituting English-language requirements and imposing some sort of civics examination upon prospective new citizens, blithely eliding the vast difference between mastery of a set of dessicated facts and adherence to a common culture and way of seeing the world, is, in my estimation, to surrender oneself to idle fantasy, to replace thought with wishes and reason with mere emotion. Does the fact that African-Americans share a common language with white Americans preclude the sort of cultural separatism that the establishment promotes among them? Does their knowledge of the same facts of American history preclude such agitations among them? No, overcoming the debilitating and divisive pathology of multiculturalism would require much more than steps toward the imposition of linguisitic uniformity; it would require steps we are not even prepared to contemplate, even amongst the like-minded, let alone implement as public policy and law.

Second, large swathes of the corporate establishment, sharing as it does in the managerial-bureaucratic culture of government, are fully invested in the multicultural project. Corporations - American, foreign, multinational - all regard the proliferation of a pullulating variety of cultural identities as an opportunity to develop and exploit new markets, new demographics, and to market new identities to deracinated consumers who are no longer capable of knowing themselves save through the media of things bought and sold. Will anyone seriously propose proscribing, say, Univision, as the patently divisive cultural medium that it is? Proscribe marketing conducted in Spanish and targeted at those for whom Spanish is a primary language? I didn't think so.

Third, contemplate for a few, brief, and for some, awful, moments, the zombie-like persistance of affirmative action, known under a variety of aliases, but amounting under any rational accounting to a racial/cultural spoils system for those who are intent upon asserting identities distinct from, and at odds with, that of simple American citizenship. What are the realistic prospects for the abolition of even the most egregious manifestations of this ideology of perpetual European-American guilt, and its imperative of self-abasement before the demands of The Other, now that the invidious practice has recieved a constitutional imprimatur? What are the prospects when even the elites of the ostensibly conservative party in American politics connive at the importation of millions of immigrants of another race and culture, and then agonize over the fact that it receives, routinely, a lower percentage of their votes than it does from whites, essentially creating a problem which it then uses to flagellate the very electoral base that told them not to create the problem in the first place?

Massive cultural change is in the offing; it is all but asolutely certain, and that because the political, media, intellectual, and corporate establishments have been preparing for and implementing this change for two generations. This change is inextricably bound together with a host of political and material interests, as well as with a particular form of secular piety, according to which one manifests virtue by repenting of the misdeeds of one's ancestors (although we do not, and that quite rightly, hold a man guilty for the crimes of his father, or Jews for the Crucifixion of Christ) and by conspicuously advancing the interests of those groups against which those ancestors were supposed to have sinned, even should such advancement displace one's own people. One's own children. And if one should vainly imagine that the cultural changes will be inconsequential, I shall pose but one question: do you really believe that what an Anglo understands the term honour to comprehend is identical with what a Latin understands it to comprehend, and that in both cases, the circumstances, conditions, and ends encompassed by that term are so close in meaning, not in the dictionary sense, but in the existential sense, that on that issue and the millions of others, there will be no substantial difference between present-day America and the America of the late-twenty-first century, which will be more than 50% Latin? If your answer to that question is yes, I would suggest that you simply travel abroad. Different peoples do possess different cultures, and those differences, from the overt to the subtle, are, if not strictly innumerable at least unamenable, in many instances, to precise, scientific demarcation.

It is this blindness, perhaps willful on the part of some, to culture that accounts for the strange disingenuousness of all too many immigration enthusiasts. Given the inevitability of massive cultural upheaval, two possibilities remain open for those who wish to either justify or minimize the significance of what is now transpiring. First, immigration enthusiasts may argue that culture is a mere epiphenomenon upon the substrate of the dynamic, liberating ethos of the Propositional Nation of equality, liberty, happiness, and free markets, mere flotsam upon the surface of the deep, roiling sea of Creative Destruction. Should defenders of immigration opt for this attempt to vindicate the unsought changes they are forcing upon the nation, they will have evaded the charges by simply defining them away; not culture, but ideological abstractions and economic forces, are constitutive of society. Hence, their critics should fall silent, keeping reverence in holy fear before the mystery of the ages.

In other words, Heads, they win.

Second, immigration enthusiasts might well embrace the changes, explaining and justifying them in the only coherent manner left to them, namely, as improvements and enrichments of a necessarily somewhat impoverished cultural foundation, as the substance that will fill the voids and inadequacies of America. Hence, opponents of mass immigration must submit to remediation of their faults, and the poverty of their culture; they must be re-educated by The Other. Call this the Peggy Noonan defense.

Tails, you lose.

In fine, then, what defenders of mass immigration assert is that either culture is largely illusory, in which case we are obliged to cease our anxieties over it, or, culture is a many-splendored thing, in which we discover who we are, in which case we must become ourselves more fully by becoming more like The Other. In either instance, the actual American culture becomes a sort of absent presence, unspoken, unacknowledged, and quietly repressed.

Of course, there is yet another rhetorical strategy to which the defender and enthusiast of mass immigration may repair when challenged: excommunication and denigration. William Kristol embraces this strategy in a contemptible piece published in the Weekly Standard, Y is for Yahoo, in which those who oppose the importation of prospectively limitless streams of immigrants from certain third-world nations are caricatured and slurred as ignorant, redneck louts, the implication being quite obvious: that to decline such a transformation of America is tantamount to bigotry. On display in this fulsome piece of rhetorical offal are many of the tendencies of all too many immigration apologists, with one notable addition: the urge to excommunicate and purge. So far from accepting the reality of widespread opposition to their programmes of social reform, representatives of this misnamed faction of conservatives will hurl their fiery anathemas against dissenters from their holy orthodoxy, fatwa after fatwa piling up against those who have the temerity to believe that American identity cannot be reduced to the mere status of being a consumer resident within the (arbitrary) borders of some nation called America, or to some diffuse multicultural/multilingual state of becoming. Should their efforts at excommunication prove less than fully successful, they will likely continue to subvert the wishes of the constituency they claim to represent, undermining conservatism and Actually-Existing America in the name of the abstractions and illusions to which they have pledged fealty, just as they have done over the course of the past generation. However, we are well within our rights - perhaps we are even obliged - to question the philosophical credentials of those ($$$, if the link works) who have all along advocated a policy regime opposed by the mainstream of American conservatism, and now, as the consequences have become manifest, and the problem of such great magnitude, hector conservatives with taunts to the effect that the only viable option left to them is to acquiesce, to capitulate to the "inevitable".

And who knows but that they will succeed in that subversion, and in their retention of the mantle of conservatism, given that the conservative base might well be so terrified by the prospect of another Clinton occupying the White House that they will accept as the price of protection further betrayal of their professed ideals, and the continued redefinition of conservatism as something more accurately described as the right flank of a still-hegemonic leftism. And with the passage of time, those who dissented will be forgotten, save as curiousities, like monarchists, or as pariahs, like Klansman and Know-Nothings; given the passage of but a little time beyond that, and their opinions will be regarded as symptomatic of mental illness.

This, therefore, is the reason for my pessimism, for my contempt, for my - yes - anger: By and large, all too many immigration enthusiasts either explicitly or implicitly disclose that they either regard America as little more than the instantiation of a set of abstractions and economic propositions, or as a cultural backwater requiring the ministrations of Others in order to attain wholeness and health; and when challenged, all too many of them attempt to read me out of, not only conservatism, but America itself. If I have anything to demand of them, it would have to be a little honesty, for a change: cop to the charge of economism and reductionism, or forthrightly and manfully own your contempt for Actually-Existing America. What, then, I demand of the Kristols, Brooks, Podhoretzs, Jacobys, most conservatives of a certain neo persuasion, and a sizable contingent of immigration apologists is this: Refrain, when challenged, from affronted protestations of love for my country; confronted by the magnitude of what is occurring to that country, abetted by policies you have favoured, and by your refusal to countenance as legitimate the existing law, as well as the sentiment of the American people themselves, let it be sufficient to say that your words are hollow. Cavernously so.

An earlier, somewhat more polemical version of this essay appeared at Enchiridion Militis.

Postscript: Although no direct quotations have been lifted from the essay, some of the thoughts and phraseology pertaining to the idea of culture have been inspired by Richard Weaver's essay, The Importance of Cultural Freedom.

A Is For Arrogance, Among Other Things; or, It's the Condescension, Stupid

2006-05-09T17:09:00.000-04:00

This was the first version of an essay against the suppression of the cultural question in the immigration debate. It originally appeared at Enchiridion Militis.

I am occasionally queried concerning the nature and extent of my pessimism regarding the immigration question. From time to time, a Redstate regular will read one of my comments on the subject, usually one emphasizing the undesirability of the cultural fragmentation that is the inevitable and inexorable outworking of the present immigration regime, and note my tagline, which is a translation of a Latin conjunction of two verses from the book of Job often found together in the texts of the Requiem:

My harp is turned to mourning, and my organ shall speak with the voice of them that weep. Spare me, O Lord, for my days are truly as nothing.

The question put to me typically involves some level of wonder as to whether I consider the mourning part unavoidable, or whether there might not be something that can be done to mitigate the circumstances that precipitate the mourning.

Let me simply state that the signs are unfavourable, and that the probability of our being able to avert the gradual dissolution of the America we grew up in, and of being able to bequeath it to our children - the absence of which ability is the very essence of disinheritance and dispossession - diminishes perceptibly with the passing of each day.

While entire volumes have been, and could yet be, written on the subject - and of the making of books in this age, there will be no end - what I propose to do presently is articulate a justification for my pessimism, and for the contempt in which I hold many - though not all - of those who are ranged opposite me on this matter of paramount importance for the future of our nation. Many advocates of mass immigration, and defenders of the President’s amnesty and all-American-jobs-open-to-any-third-worlder-willing-to-underbid-an-American guest-worker proposals exhibit a curious, albeit predictable blindness, and that blindness - or is it a willful turning-away? - results in a frankly duplicitous mode of argumentation in which regardless of how the coin flip ends, they always win.

The specific blindness exhibited by defenders of the President’s mislabelled brand of immigration reform concerns the inevitability of massive cultural shifts that overwhelming majorities of the American people will likely find unwelcome. Immigration defenders will object, and that volubly, that the problem lies not with the fact of immigration, considered in itself, but with the want of a will to compel immigrants to assimilate to the American culture. This is a valid consideration, as far as it goes. The trouble is that is no longer goes very far at all, for a host of reasons. First, let there be no naivete here, among those reasons is the fact that multiculturalism is now the de facto ideology of the American establishment, the regnant ideology in terms of which we are encouraged to understand not only ourselves, but the nation of which we are citizens. Multiculturalism is entrenched in innumerable ways throughout our society, from universities and their curricula, to programs for bilingual education and multilingual ballots; from the immigration lawyers’ associations to the bureaucrats who staff the ICE; from the ethnic grievance lobbies to the social service agencies; from media and popular entertainment to institutions of so-called high culture. To imagine that we have the capacity to make an end run around this entrenched ideology and its acolytes and practitioners in high places by instituting English-language requirements and imposing some sort of civics examination upon prospective new citizens, blithely eliding the vast difference between mastery of a set of dessicated facts and adherence to a common culture and way of seeing the world, is to surrender oneself to idle fantasy, to replace thought with wishes and reason with mere emotion. Does the fact that African-Americans share a common language with white Americans preclude the sort of cultural separatism that the establishment promotes among them? Does their knowledge of the same facts of American history preclude such agitations among them? No, overcoming the debilitating and divisive pathology of multiculturalism would require much more than steps toward the imposition of linguisitic uniformity; it would require steps we are not even prepared to contemplate, even amongst the like-minded, let alone implement as public policy and law.

Second, large swathes of the corporate establishment, sharing as it does in the managerial-bureaucratic culture of government, are fully invested in the multicultural project. Corporations - American, foreign, multinational - all regard the proliferation of a pullulating variety of cultural identities as an opportunity to develop and exploit new markets, new demographics, and to market new identities to deracinated consumers who are no longer capable of knowing themselves save through the media of things bought and sold. Will anyone seriously propose proscribing, say, Univision, as the patently divisive cultural medium that it is? Proscribe marketing conducted in Spanish and targeted at those for whom Spanish is a primary language? I didn’t think so.

Third, contemplate for a few, brief, and for some, awful, moments, the zombie-like persistance of affirmative action, known under a variety of aliases, but amounting under any rational accounting to a racial/cultural spoils system for those who are intent upon asserting identities distinct from, and at odds with, that of simple American citizenship. What are the realistic prospects for the abolition of even the most egregious manifestations of this ideology of perpetual European-American guilt, and its imperative of self-abasement before the demands of The Other, now that the invidious practice has recieved a constitutional imprimatur? What are the prospects when even the elites of the ostensibly conservative party in American politics connive at the importation of millions of immigrants of another race and culture, and then agonizes over the fact that it receives, routinely, a lower percentage of their votes than it does from whites, essentially creating a problem which it then uses to flagellate the very electoral base that told them not to create the problem in the first place?

Massive cultural change is in the offing; it is all but asolutely certain, and that because the political, media, intellectual, and corporate establishments have been preparing for and implementing this change for two generations. This change is inextricably bound together with a host of political and material interests, as well as with a particular form of secular piety, according to which one manifests virtue by repenting of the misdeeds of one’s ancestors (although we do not hold a man guilty for the crimes of his father, or Jews for the Crucifixion of Christ) and by conspicuously advancing the interests of those groups against which those ancestors were supposed to have sinned, even should such advancement displace one’s own people. One’s own children. And if one should vainly imagine that the cultural changes will be inconsequential, I shall pose but one question: do you really believe that what an Anglo understands the term honour to comprehend is identical with what a Latin understands it to comprehend, and that in both cases, the circumstances, conditions, and ends encompassed by that term are so close in meaning, not in the dictionary sense, but in the existential sense, that on that issue and the millions of others, there will be no substantial difference between present-day America and the America of the late-twenty-first century, which will be more than 50% Latin? If your answer to that question is yes, I would suggest that you simply travel abroad. Really.

Therefore, to return to the theme of the duplicity of all too many immigration enthusiasts, given the inevitability of massive cultural upheaval, two possibilities remain open for those who wish to either justify or minimize the significance of what is now transpiring. First, immigration enthusiasts may argue that culture is a mere epiphenomenon upon the substrate of the dynamic, liberating ethos of the Propositional Nation of equality, liberty, happiness, and free markets, mere flotsam upon the surface of the deep, roiling sea of Creative Destruction. Should defenders of immigration opt for this attempt to vindicate the unsought changes they are forcing upon the nation, they will have evaded the charges by simply defining them away; not culture, but ideological abstractions and economic forces, are constitutive of society. Hence, their critics should fall silent, keeping reverence in holy fear before the mystery of the ages.

In other words, Heads, they win.

Second, immigration enthusiasts might well embrace the changes, explaining and justifying them in the only coherent manner left to them, namely, as improvements and enrichments of a necessarily somewhat impoverished cultural foundation, as the substance that will fill the voids and inadequacies of America. Hence, opponents of mass immigration must submit to remediation of their faults, and the poverty of their culture; they must be re-educated by The Other. Call this the Peggy Noonan defense.

Tails, you lose.

In fine, then, what defenders of mass immigration assert is that either culture is largely illusory, in which case we are obliged to cease our anxieties over it, or, culture is a many-splendored thing, in which we discover who we are, in which case we must become ourselves more fully by becoming more like The Other.

Of course, there is yet another rhetorical strategy available to the defender and enthusiast of mass immigration: excommunication and denigration. William Kristol embraces this strategy in a contemptible piece published in the Weekly Standard, Y is for Yahoo, in which those who oppose the importation of prospectively limitless streams of immigrants from certain third-world nations are caricatured and slurred as ignorant, redneck louts, the implication being quite obvious: that to decline such a transformation of America is tantamount to bigotry. On display in this fulsome piece of rhetorical offal are many of the tendencies of the immigration apologist, with one notable addition: the urge to excommunicate and purge. So far from accepting the reality of widespread opposition to their programmes of social reform, representatives of this misnamed faction of conservatives will hurl their fiery anathemas against dissenters from their holy orthodoxy, fatwa after fatwa piling up against those who have the temerity to believe that American identity cannot be reduced to the mere status of being a consumer resident within the (arbitrary) borders of some nation called America, or to some diffuse multicultural/multilingual state of becoming. Should their efforts at excommunication prove less than fully successful, they will likely continue to subvert the wishes of the constituency they claim to represent, undermining conservatism and Actually-Existing America in the name of the abstractions and illusions to which they have pledged fealty, just as they have done over the course of the past generation.

And who knows but that they will succeed in that subversion, and in their retention of the mantle of conservatism, given that the conservative base might well be so terrified by the prospect of another Clinton occupying the White House that they will accept as the price of protection further betrayal of their professed ideals, and the continued redefinition of conservatism as something more accurately described as the right flank of a still-hegemonic leftism. And with the passage of time, those who dissented will be forgotten, save as curiousities, like monarchists, or as pariahs, like Klansman and Know-Nothings; given the passage of but a little time beyond that, and their opinions will be regarded as symptomatic of mental illness.

This, therefore, is the reason for my pessimism, for my contempt, for my - yes - anger: By and large, most immigration enthusiasts either explicitly or implicitly disclose that they either regard America as little more than the instantiation of a set of abstractions and economic porpositions, or as a cultural backwater requiring the ministrations of Others in order to attain wholeness and health; and when challenged, all too many of them attempt to read me out of, not only conservatism, but America itself. If I have anything to demand of them, it would have to be a little honesty, for a change: cop to the charge of economism and reductionism, or forthrightly and manfully own your contempt for Actually-Existing America. But please refrain from protestations of love for my country; confronted by the magnitude of what is occurring to that country, I can no longer believe you.

The Ultimate Significance of Kant and "Enlightenment"

2006-05-08T10:07:00.000-04:00

(For) Exile is possible within the beauty of the infinite only by way of an exilic interiority, a fictive inwardness, where the creature can graps itself as an isolated essence. Hell is, one might almost say, a perfectly "Kantian" place, where the twin sublimities of the star-strewn firmament above and the lofty moral "law" within remain separated by the thin tissue of subjective moral autonomy: where this tissue has become impervious to glory, the analogy of the heavens is not the transforming voice of God but only a mute simile, an inassimilable exteriority, and so a torment. Hell is the perfect concretization of ethical freedom, perfect justice without delight, the soul's work of legislation for itself, where ethics has achieved its final independence from aesthetics. Absolute subjective liberty is known only in hell, where the fire of divine beauty is held at bay, where the divine apeiron miraculously divests itself at the peras that, in Christ, it has already transgressed and broken open, and humbly permits the self to "create" itself.

From David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite.

Zippy Catholic Rocks

2006-05-06T13:29:00.000-04:00

This easy-to-follow flow chart, detailing the reasoning process the natural law tradition urges upon us, is pure genius. It might be "for dummies", but genius is required to simplify something so lucidly and succinctly. This should actually be used, no later than junior high, to teach children the rudiments of moral thought.

Why I Am Not A Libertarian, Again

2006-05-06T12:35:00.000-04:00

Via Daniel Larison once more, I come upon this:

The problem with American conservatism is that it hates the left more than the state, loves the past more than liberty, feels a greater attachment to nationalism than to the idea of self-determination, believes brute force is the answer to all social problems, and thinks it is better to impose truth rather than risk losing one soul to heresy. It has never understood the idea of freedom as a self-ordering principle of society. It has never seen the state as the enemy of what conservatives purport to favor. It has always looked to presidential power as the saving grace of what is right and true about America.

Lew Rockwell, author of the above-quoted invective, was once on my short list of must-read political commentators. I was an early subscriber to his Triple-R newsletter, and relished its scintillating analyses of the political scene - at least until the paleos and the libertarians parted ways, Lew founded his website, and the libertarians become ever-increasingly shrill and detached from even a tenuous grounding in the realities of human existence, which cannot be expressed in terms of market-exchanges and their analogues.

While I'll leave to Daniel Larison the task of differentiating libertarianism from a proper, Old-School conservatism, I'll not stay my hand from mocking the asininity of that libertarianism:

The problem with American libertarianism is that it hates the state more than the delusions of modernity that have razed the traditional communities libertarians might actually find more humane than the Leviathan State, loves a deracinated abstraction of 'liberty' more than the rooted traditions of ordered liberty of a whole people, feels a greater attachment to a Jacobin ideal of autonomy than to an historical community persisting through time, believes self-interested market-exchange is the answer to all social problems, and thinks it is better to deny men the opportunity to live the truth in their existences as social beings than to risk losing one millionth of an iota of precious self-will - that nihilating, nay-saying refusal to countenance any social limitation upon avaritia and superbia. It has never been able to see modernity and markets as enemies of the vituous lives at least some of them purport to favour. It has always looked to any social force destructive of real communities of memory and sentiment as the saving grace of what is right and true about America.

Pfui! There are places on this earth cursed with the absence of a state - Somalia and Afghanistan come to mind - and the libertarians are welcome to them. But if they believe that Americans would ever care to experiment with their sordid, Blade-Runner vision of spontaneous order, they should lay off of the legalized narcotics for a while.

Replacing a People and Their Culture for Fun and Profit

2006-05-06T11:51:00.000-04:00

For that reason, I say, be kind to the illegals as we do our best to ship them back, and save your anger for Walmart and the other massive corporations who lure them here to do their dirty work. Perhaps the worst enemies of the american people are the apologists for free trade and open borders who call themselves conservatives and libertarians.

While I have already been beaten to the punch by my estimable Enchiridion Militis colleague, Daniel Larison, this Hard Right piece by Thomas Fleming is just too good to pass over. Indeed, we should reserve our ire for those corporations and the ideological interests who legitimate them. Look here for listings of these, ahem, less than fully patriotic corporations.

Things That Make You Go... Hmmmm.

2006-05-06T11:30:00.000-04:00

(French) Republicans formed a broad and fractious movement that could be rallied around a few core beliefs derived from the republican phase of the Revolution, or at least a heavily mythologized version of it. These beliefs were regarded as synonomous with being 'French', a convenient way of insinuating that anyone who held other views was disloyal. Republicans believed in popular sovereignty, provided this was informed by the exercise of critical reason, which largely explains their obsession with education as the universal panacea for society's ills. They thought that society and its institutions could be perfected in accordance with the principles of progress, science, and rationality. They believed that the values of the Revolution were universally valid, and hence sought to impose them at home and export them abroad, increasingly through the medium of overseas imperialism since export opportunities were limited in a Europe where France had been eclipsed as a major power. Neither of these last two assumptions consorted altogether easily with their belief in individual liberty or other people's sovereignty, for where did that leave their domestic opponents or those foreigners upon whom those values were imposed? They were intensely and militantly patriotic, since something had to fill the void left by the Revolution's destruction of France's historic institutions. (All emphases mine)

Michael Burleigh's description of the state of French Republican thought by the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in his marvelous account of the clash of religion and its secular epigones in modern Europe, Earthly Powers, is curiously redolent of the thought of another ideological grouping, this time of the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first centuries in America. But who could they be? The mind boggles. History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, and every time thereafter - many times - as farce.

Self-Loathing Evangelicals

2006-05-06T11:19:00.000-04:00

With regard to a certain Evangelical publishing concern, a Catholic friend wrote, “I don't understand [its] fanaticism on inclusive language. What do they get from it? What gives? Do they also send Gloria Steinem a birthday card? Why in the hell should they care what feminists think of them? Or are they run by a bevy of feminists themselves?”

My answer was the old, and I think entirely correct, fundamentalist observation that the inner dynamic of the main stream of the Evangelical intelligentsia has from its beginnings in the forties rested upon the desire, both rabid and unadmitted, to prove to the liberal establishment, to the Menckens and Fosdicks and their progeny, that it is NOT fundamentalist--that it is, by the criteria that establishment establishes, bright, learned, and urbane. The upper portion of Evangelicalism has a permanent crick in its collective neck from looking over its shoulder to see if the liberals approve, exulting over every bone thrown from that table. When feminism came along as a central feature of that confession, these Evangelicals, as one would expect, grabbed every bit of it that they could possibly jam into the "biblical equality" bag, dragged it home, and began stuffing it into their children.

What has this gained them from their masters? By and large, condescending tolerance, tolerance as one might tolerate a flatulent spaniel that is, his aroma notwithstanding, an excellent retriever.

S. M. Hutchens, writing in Touchstone's blog, Mere Comments, masterfully characterizes and holds up for deserved scorn a tendency that vexed me sore during my years as an evangelical: the tendency of evangelical intellectual elites to strive mightily to ingratiate themselves with a secular intelligentsia that would, in reality, never accept them and honour them as equals unless they were to reliquish the remnants of their Christian faith. Some of them, of course, will eventually accomplish precisely this ignoble feat, deluding themselves all along the way that they are reaching the Cultured Despisers of the Faith; but like Nineteeth-Century liberal theologians, they will merely exchange the precious birthright of the faith for, not even a mess of pottage, but a steaming pile of excrement - the excrement that is modern, secular culture.

Ideas Without Consequence

2006-03-11T00:16:00.000-05:00

One of the noblest aspirations of the founding generation was that for the cultivation of a spirit of public sentiment bereft of the dangerous political vice of faction, the elevation of sectarian, or sectional, interest, above the interest of the nation considered as a whole. Indeed, it was a noble aspiration; and a naive one. The spirit of faction is inextirpable from human nature; one need only flit lightly through the pages of history, or train a wizened gaze upon the present political landscape of America, or even simply watch a few John Hughes films from the 1980s, contemplating, in true postmodern fashion, the lessons of the archetypal American high-school experience: cliques and discrete, invidiously defined and grouped social formations are inescapable, save in the most extraordinary circumstances.

Hence, one ought not be bewildered by the appearance or persistence of factions within the conservative movement itself; a movement that has traditionally reverenced those things that are permanent and adiding, most especially those truths that bear upon the human person, cannot very well imagine, or indulge the illusion, that human nature has been overcome through its ministrations, the vice of faction eliminated and the virtue of unanimity realized. Now, this is by no means to urge upon the reader the notion that faction is always and everywhere a vicious thing, or that unanimity is everywhere and always a virtue. Surely, examples could be multiplied, nearly without limit, of some lonely and heroic figure standing against the tides of his age, or of some groups which, in point of fact, did possess greater perspicacity than others at some crucial juncture of history; conversely, examples could with equal ease be multipied, of instances of unjust and vicious uniformity, of disquieting conformities which have entire societies plunging headlong into some abyss of unreason and depravity. It is only to suggest that perhaps the incipience of a conservative crack-up is a permanent feature of the landscape, an ineliminable characteristic of the movement.
One is, however, fully within his rights, to remain vexed, piqued in his discomfiture, at the appearance of factional sentiment utterly bereft of rational pretext, all but wholly devoid of substantive objections to the phenomena it subjects to its preening condescension. Such, I submit, is the case with respect to much of the vituperation with which Rod Dreher’s book, Crunchy Cons, was received by some in the mainstream of American conservative thought: a spasm of denunciation and invective which, when rationally analysed, reduces to the claim that because some thing is not instead some other thing, that it is therefore a bad thing, as though, for example, the problem with a Cocker Spaniel is that it is not a Mastiff.

It is scarcely necessary to belabour the point. The interested reader may browse, at his or her leisure, the commentary on offer at National Review’s Corner, taking particular notice of the recondite musings of JPod on the CC concept. Those shattering contributions to intra-conservative dialogue may be seen as representative of the kerfluffle precisely insofar as they merely recapitulate criticisms Dreher himself fielded subsequent of the publication of his original articles on the concept several years ago:

The mail I got from my crunchy-right articles was overwhlemingly positive, but there were more than a few missives from right-wingers who were equally passionate in their rejection of crunchy conservatism. These folks took it personally. They believe crunchy conservatives are phonies, and to say anything critical about strip-malled America is to tip your hand as an elitist snob who hates the free market and the common man.

They may also, for those who care to read them, be seen as representative insofar as they could stand as sneering distillations of the incomprehension and this-is-not-of-my-tribe-therefore-it-must-be-threatening cogitations of even those who have attempted intellectual engagement with CC, such as Jonah Goldberg.
Again, as there is no necessity of belabouring the point, I wish to spend the remainder of this exercise by offering an irenic, apologetic - in the old-school sense - appreciation of CC, explaining, to the best of my ability, what animates the external manifestations of the sensibility, and offering reflections on what sublimated motives lie beneath much of the controversy. For where there occur such unreasoning fulminations, one may be certain that there are sacred cows; and not necessarily free-range bovines, either.

A few years ago, as I drove from the office to my home for lunch, I happened to hear a standard Rush Limbaugh rant against liberals and the trappings of their lifestyle. Into the rant were tossed references to Birkenstocks, preferences for natural and organic foods, Whole Foods Markets, a few details of personal appeance that escape me now, and a bizarre aside on the transportation favoured by such people: Volvos, Audis, etc. And I chuckled. Not at myself, for while I am positively reactionary by the standards of a Limbaugh, I wear Birkenstocks, as I have for more than 10 years, prefer organic foods, shop at Whole Foods Paycheck, show the physical aspect of a stereotypical liberal - what with my tall, slender build, glasses, beard - and drive - surprise! - an Audi. No, I chuckled at the utter absurdity, inanity, and positive superstition of the fixation upon such matters as totems revelatory of a liberal sensibility or system of belief.

And that is precisely the point. For if those touting CC have asserted anything at all, they have asserted, with much vigour, the claim that their articulation of a way of life is not ideological, but rather, a sensibility, or, better yet, a critique of aspects of modern society felt to be disordered and unnatural. While certain indicators may correlate with the CC sensibility, it is hardly the sort of thing that one simply is by virtue of certain external indications or signifiers. Apropos of the subject matter, it would be well to differentiate ideology and sensibility by way of analogy:

…Thus, the immense and innumerable host of passions invades men’s life. Their life becomes in this way deplorable. For the human beings honor the very cause of the destruction of their existence and pursue themselves, without knowing it, the cause of their corruption. The unity of human nature falls into a thousand pieces, and human beings, like beasts, devour their own nature. In fact, in trying to obtain pleasure and avoid pain, instigated by his self-love, man invents multiple and innumerable forms of corrupted passions.

That is St. Maximos the Confessor, from the prologue of the Questions to Thalassius. St. Maximos here speaks, by way of summation, of the cause of man’s plight in this life: man turns from the transcendent orientation of his being - toward God - to the things of this world, loving himself and those things more than Him who made them and bestowed them as gift, guided by the disorder of the passions to pursue pleasure and flee pain, even to the uttermost of the fragmentation of his being. Now, Christianity has traditionally prescribed a regimen for the overcoming of this disordering of human nature, for its restoration to wholeness, ranging from faith to the sacramental life of the Church, and the life of repentence, itself characterized by sorrow over one’s misdeeds, a purpose of amendment, good works to displace the bad, and, for those of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, some disciplines which might be termed ascetical. It is principally in the areas of moral conduct and asceticism that the analogy obtains; for while all Christians are called to the same standard of holiness, and, at least in the Orthodox Church in the present time, the canons regarding the disciplines of the fasts and the like are well defined, it nonetheless remains that, as each Christian confronts the failings of his nature, he does so in a manner suited to the conditions of his own struggle against sin; and as each Orthodox Christian observes the fasts and disciplines of the Church, he does so insofar as he is able, under the guidance of his spiritual father. This, therefore is the analogy: ideology, in the case of the struggle with sin and the passions would entail a rigid program of conduct without regard for the specificity of a Christian’s personal failings, or, in the case of asceticism, a regimen fixed without regard for physical infirmities that might render certain acts or abstentions inadvisable. It would also tend to collapse the potential distance between a person’s acts and his inner states, as though it were the Pharisee, and not the Publican, who went home justified. A sensibility, though the term is not precisely suitable, allows for the application of prudence in the realization of, or the striving toward, the defined end of holiness. So also is it with regard to CC; it is not intended as a scheme which admits of no variations or adaptations to particular circumstances, an ideology demanding a slavish replication of a universal pattern, but rather as a prudent sense of how one might embody respect for certain values amidst the fluctuating circumstances of life in all its permutations. A sensibility, too, allows for the recognition that there may be some conceptual distance between an act and the meaning of the act for the agent; the heart is deceitful, one might say; or, still further, that one cannot judge a book by the cover, but only by its content, as a totality.
In a sense, therefore, critique is the natural expression of the sensibility, and in this the analogates overlap (CC is supposed, in most, though surely not all cases, to originate in a religious approach to the world): human nature is disordered at some level, and that disorder is mirrored in the world, which mirroring itself often enough exacerbates the original disorder and fragmentation. In order to attain to wholeness - of the entire person - one must grasp the causes of the fragmentation, its effects and manifestations, and strive for wholeness as a person; one cannot know the answer until the question has been posed. A critique, as opposed to a rigid, ideological construct, can be focused on a problem without succumbing to the illusion of a unifrom approach valid for all circumstances.
It is this, moreoever, which enable us to perceive the silliness of the mockery of externals, as though one either knew in advance their significance or knew them to be inherently indifferent, as well as the utter poverty of the ‘alternative consumption’, or ‘narcissism’ argument against CC. It misses the point, and its failure is twofold. The first aspect of its poverty is formal, and may be expressed as follows: the alleged CC, or the Christian, for that matter, claims to be eschewing the values of the autonomous self, the self which creates value solely in the act of choosing, and for whom the power of choosing is the supreme value and expression of the human essence; but what else is the CC, or the Christian doing, exactly, when he affirms his way of life; when he opts for natural foods over McMeat or self-denial over indulgence, fasting over self-satisfaction? Is he not choosing, and by choosing, thereby, whatever his protestations to the contrary, affirming the centrality of the value of choice, proving by his act what he denies by his confession?
Again, much of the criticism has never risen above this imbecility, which, I submit, makes about as much sense as the criticism I fielded when I became Orthodox, and gave as a reason to some friends that the whole DIY, independent Protestant thing wasn’t working out because it had left my spiritual life without form and void, and received the retort that I was still doing it my way, because, after all, it was me who was choosing to not do it my way, but to observe a tradition in such things. Trite little equivocation, that. One might as well argue that I am, de facto, choosing not to commit suicide each day that I continue living, and that, therefore, I am still affirming that the value of my life is contingent upon my choice.

This is not the only failing of the ‘alternative consumption’/'narcissism’ argument; it fails substantively, because it simply misses the point of what it attempts to refute, never penetrating to the heart of the matter, namely, the formation of the soul. Permit me a few remarks by way of explication. That the spiritual habits and disciplines of the Christian aim at such formation, the cultivation of virtue and the pursuit of holiness, ought to be obvious; when a Christian abstains from some evil act, it is for reason of the deformity such an act would introduce into his being. Moreoever, when, say, an Orthodox Christian observes the fasting season of Lent, he does so as an act of piety and obedience, yes, but also because, given his beliefs, it is an eminently rational or logical thing for him to undertake. If one believes that human nature is pulled hither and tither by the stimuli of pleasure and pain, and thereby rent into pieces, dominated by multitudinous passions attached to sensible and imaginary things, then not only petition for mercy but abstention from objects and acts that enkindle the passions becomes a logical and spiritual therepy for the disorder of one’s being. One’s travail is not an ordeal of the intellect alone, but is existential, involving the whole of one’s being; one must then not only refrain from an excess of attachment to things intellectually, but actually, for what inner detachment can a man cultivate if he never really detaches himself from the pursuits, the inordinate loves of things, that disorder him?

So also is it with CC. IF one believes, for example, that each natural thing possess a nature, an essence or telos which tells us what sort of thing it is and how it exists in this world, or if one believes that each created thing is a logos of some divine reason, some tangible manifestation of the ineffable beauty and goodness of its Creator, then one will respect those things, according to them the dignity they possess in the hierarchy of God’s works and regarding rightly their ends in the use he makes of them. So, for example, if one believes this, one might look upon factory farming as a violation of the telos of those animals, and refrain from buying meats produced in such a manner. Proceeding further, if one believes that human beings, too, have a rational telos, and that that telos cannot be summed up by the phrases ‘economic man’ and ‘rational self-interest’, one might be led to respect the human scale: the small, particular, local, and personal in one’s dealings, and not mere calculations of efficiency, financial or otherwise. And in so doing, one might well be led to look askance at big-box stores, the proliferation of McMansions, and a host of other things representative of our present economic condition. Moreover, in either case - that of spiritual formation and that of social existence - one would be acting in such a way as to embody, in one’s person, the convictions one affirmed intellectually. One would be, as they say, “walking the walk”.

Therein lies the golden thread which binds the two spheres together: ideas must have consequences. A man cannot coherently proclaim the necessity of self-restraint, of self-discipline, and self denial, if he never actually restrains, disciplines, or denies his own desires - if he never restrains himself.

Whence, then, the vitriol against the CC concept? There is a peculiar species of nostalgia in the air, I think, a nostalgia which brings to mind the opening of Irving Kristol’s 1973 essay, Capitalism, Socialism, and Nihilism:

Whenever and wherever defenders of “free enterprise”, “individual liberty”, and “a free society” assemble these days, one senses a peculiar kind of nostalgia in the air. It is a nostalgia for the time when they were busily engaged in confronting their old and familiar enemies, the avowed proponents of a full-blown “collectivist” economic and social order.

It is this kind of nostalgia, I think, that accounts for the baroque, nay, antique quality of some of the responses to CC, the responses that revolve around the axis of that hoary notion, Progress, and are illuminated by quaint asides about the incipient Marxism of anyone who questions, as do CCs, some of the deliverances of the market. It is this antique sensibility, this dwelling amidst the ruins of intellectual controversies long past, that accounts for the disquieting anyone-to-my-right-must-really-be-to-my-left feel of the Goldberg piece linked above. Confronted by a critique of certain aspects of contemporary society, but made to shudder by the proposed remedy, and perhaps even by the mere mention of the critique, as though questions of legitimacy were at stake, some hasten to make recourse to the forms and substance of controversies long since buried, in order to assimilate to them a new ruction, all the better to dismiss it as beneath them. But this is an act of nostalgia. And nostalgia has a way of becoming kitsch; in this case, conservative kitsch.

The kitsch of which I write is the tendency among even conservatives to survey the present economic order, concede that there may possibly be some tradeoffs and, ahem, sacrifices that might have to be made if we are to profit from its efficiencies, but then advert to the comfortable confines of gib assertions of the impossibility of rolling back Progress. Why, Progress has made things less costly, and by incorporating other values into our arrangements, things might become more expensive! Poor dear, you must just cope with the loss of something you hold dear, for, after all, things cost less, and that is Progress! It is this economism, this - let us be frank - ideology, in the strict sense of the reduction of measures of social value to ‘one simple principle’, or, at best, one principle to override them all in the event of a conflict, that CCs find, well, stultifying. Irving Kristol, again:

What do I mean by “thinking economically”? I have found that it is very hard to convey this meaning to economists, who take it for granted that this is the only possible way for a sensible man to think - that indeed, thinking economically is the same thing as thinking rationally…. One of the keystones of modern economic thought is that it is impossible to have an a priori knowledge of what constitutes happiness for other people; that such knowledge is incorporated in an individual’s “utility schedules”; and this knowledge, in turn, is revealed by the choices the individual makes in a free market. This is not only the keystone of modern economic thought; it is also the keystone of modern, liberal, secular society itself. This belief is so deeply ingrained in us that we are inclined to explain any deviation from it as perverse and pathological. Yet it is a fact that for several millennia, until the advent of modernity, people did not believe any such thing and would, indeed, have found such a belief to be itself shockingly pathological and perverse…. Now we know from our experience of central economic planning that this premodern approach is fallacious - but if, and only if, you define “happiness” and “satisfaction” in terms of the material production and material consumption of commodities. If you do not define “happiness” or “satisfaction” in this way, if you refuse to “think economically”, then the premodern view is more plausible than not. It is, after all, one thing to say that there is no authentically superior wisdom about people’s tastes and preferences in commodities; it is quite another thing to deny that there is a superior wisdom about the spiritual dimensions of a good life. (Emphasis mine.)

One might add, as well, that, as we have seen, those ’spiritual dimensions of a good life’ might well require embodiment in the concrete conditions of man’s social existence in order to be meaningful as more than the mental tics of a few eccentrics. Their meaning is inseparable from their lived reality, and therefore, a further truth is disclosed: at some level, the presuppositions of the modern economic framework, fecund though it is, are at variance with crucial affirmations of the conservative temperment; namely, those that pertain to the Permanent Things of family, community, friendships, the sense of rootedness and place, self-discipline and sacrifice, a sense of craft and integrity that transcends mere utility, and often enough, simple and honourable toil at a calling. At once grant this - which I think that no one sensitive to the traditionalist persuasion can refuse to grant at some level of awareness - and the CC manifesto, so galling to a Jonah Goldberg or a Jim Geraghty, follows as a matter of more or less strict deduction.

The debate over CC, then, arises for reason of the poverty of the dominant strand of liberal modernity, its poverty consisting of the fact that it repudiates the idea that any transcendent measure of value, any prescriptive norm, should be instantiated in our social and political worlds, sullying the seamless garment of abstract proceduralism in politics and economics. What then of the repeated protestations of affronted mainstream conservatives that they are being caricatured, that they do, in point of fact, think of the Permanent Things and forbear to bow at the altar of materialism? Perhaps such indignant defenses do possess a ring of truth; perhaps there is a measure of caricature in the CC portrayal of the tendencies and allegiances of the mainstream conservative. Then again, a caricature is a caricature of something, is it not? It is not a portrait created de novo, and, in good nominalist fashion, merely assigned to a thing as its representation or sign. A caricature is an exaggeration of actual, natural features for illustrative purposes; when we behold one, we, if we know the person depicted, behold the exaggerated likeness with a shock of recognition - if, that is, the caricature is at all competent.

And I am afraid that the CC caricature - if such it is - of mainstream conservatism does elicit that shock of recognition, not because each conservative who looks askance at CC and those associated with the concept is a crystalline distillation of the sophister or calculator who knows nothing save the price of everything, but because the caricature captures something of a dominant tendency among the most influential faction of contemporary conservatives. More than anything else, it is the reaction to CC that demonstrates this. Browse slowly amidst the peaks and valleys of the sprawling Goldberg jeremiad against the thing linked above, and you will find references to the injustice of claiming that

Mainstream conservatives believe that a merchant or a manufacturer owes no loyalty to his community, nor the community to the manufacturer. Other motivations for support of the free market - say, liberty, or skepticism in the government’s ability to glean the “better way” - are given little to no serious consideration.

This is an objection so dull-witted and unimaginative that the mind boggles, literally. For consider, conservatives will often proffer the rejoinder that concerns for liberty and scepticism of government, as well as the desire for “a more efficient utilization of capital” justify, say, the offshoring of manufacturing, whenever someone has the temerity to suggest that a manufacturer owes some loyalty to the community, and the community some loyalty to the manufacturer. If this is not an assertion that no loyaties whatsoever are owed in such circumstances, it is, at a minimum, an assertion that the purely economic considerations have an overriding value; and that is a passable facsimile of the CC complaint, on any rational reading.

If you continue grazing in Goldberg’s piece, you will also find the objection that Dreher

….is also saying that (mainstream) conservatives are fools, suffering from a kind of Marxist false consciousness, if they deny that they are only concerned with wealth and power. Because, you see, “that’s not how they live” - because Rod says so.

However, as we have already seen, there is a sense in which any affirmed ideal or conviction must be instantiated, must be lived in order to possess meaning; and if the substance of a man’s conservatism involves or encourages appeals to liberty, freedom, and prosperity whenever objections, to the effect that the privileging of those values or ideals is destructive or subversive of other values ostensibly held by the conservative, are advanced, then, if greed may be too invidious a term, it would not be unwarranted to suggest that perhaps one loves prosperity-in-general more than the prosperity and well-being of specific persons. There is, moreover, an argumentative failure involved in the easy appeal to certain principles, such as liberty and scepticism of government, as refutation of objections to this or that aspect of an economic arrangement: a begging of the question. When, for example, someone like Dreher objects to a particular feature or process of the market, the response of a Goldberg appears merely to consist of ritual incantation of the terms and phrases, “liberty”, “freedom”, “free markets”, “government is bad”, and the like. What this involves is an illigitimate appeal to general principles, or abstractions, as justificatory of particular arragements; that is to say, this maneuver simply posits that the contested arrangements follow unproblematically from the abstract ideal, begging the question of the arrangements themselves by declining to actually condescend to argue specifically for them. Might, say, outsourcing or factory farming be deleterious in some way; might they produce certain efficiencies, but only at the cost of other values and customs we might wish to preserve - that we might find it necessary to preserve? Who knows? All the critics, like Goldberg, are willing to do, is chant their mantras and asseverate that because their opponents, the CCs, cite a few leftist authors, their objections are suspiciously Marxist, compounding an underwhelming argumentative display by throwing in a few ad hominems.

There is, nevertheless, a further depth to the incomprehension with which CC has been greeted by an oftentimes hostile mainstream, a depth that opens up in the following passage of Goldberg’s philippic:

….there’s this whopper of a statement: “Adam Smith and Karl Marx are two sides of the same coin: they define man as primarily economic man.” Putting aside the groteque slander to Smith, who was one of the great moral philosophers of the last three centuries (sic.), it’s simply untrue that the free-market is rooted in materialism or that Smith’s intellectual descendants define man in economic terms (Von Mises would be delighted to refute you, Jonah.). Classical liberals root their case for laissez-faire in the autonomy of the individual, the primacy of freedom, the faith that virtue not freely chosen isn’t virtuous, and in a deeply religious conception of the individual conscience (another sorely missing voice in Rod’s book is Michael Novak, the world’s leading authority on the intersection of market economics and Catholicism).

Goldberg’s litany of classical liberal pieties notwithstanding, the very substance of his appeal could stand as a concession of the manifest fact that there are indeed conservatives, like the CCs, who question the primacy of economic analysis in our deliberations about the ordering of our common, public life, and that there always have been such conservatives. Perhaps this is what is so disconcerting for the critics. When has it been a conservative position to assert the autonomy of the individual, the right of the solitary dissenter, renegade, malcontent, or even visionary, to determine for himself the nature of social realities, even to the extremity of undoing what the community from whence he has arisen has constructed, labouriously, over generations? When has it ever been a conservative position to affirm the primacy of freedom, the alleged right of the individual to be free from the authority of received customs and traditions, where these received ways embody a wisdom no one man could conceivably amass as an individual, determining how he will live, even to the detriment of that prerequisite of all social goods, right order? When has it ever been a conservative position to fixate upon the notion that the social observance of virtue must be authentic (hypocrisy, I say, is a great social virtue, if not a private one), and that, therefore, every man must be left to himself, to reason with himself as to whether it is in his interest to practice virtue? When has it ever been a conservative affirmation that the conscience of the individual is to be accorded preference over the considered judgment embodied in the wisdom of tradition, in that great community of the dead, the living, and those yet to be born? When, for that matter, has it ever been conservative to cultivate a studied indifference to the manifold ways in which the economic order has undermined the mediating institutions of society upon which those of our persuasion once rested their case for a humane social order?
And, apropos of the appeal to Novak, what can one say of the project of seeking the consonances between market economics and religion - a project that, to be certain, has generated some valuable insights - save that, if it cannot encompass the broad tradition of Christian ethical reflection on the relation of the individual to society, a tradition which embraces a sense of obligation that cannot, by any rhetorical or philosophical legerdemain, be expressed as the valorization of the individual conscience, the rights of the individual, and the effective nonexistence of something called society, it is naught but the faith of a technocrat or engineer of the soul, who will retrofit and refashion religion so that it might, thus reconstructed, be made to serve as a prop for his preferred vision of the immanent order - a veritable striaghtjacket for the soul?

Let us return to a point earlier established: that the cultivation of the virtues, and the healing of the wounds of man’s nature, require, not merely elevated ratiocinations, but practice, habituation, and embodiment in forms of life. For it is here that we are enabled to glimpse the reductionism and ideology that underlie something of the present controversy over CC. The reductionism does not consist merely of the fact that there is a tendency to privilege the economic, or to reduce religious social ethics to those precepts most affirimative of the economic system as presently constituted, but also of a peculiar modern fable: the fable of the bees, the fable of rational self-interest, as exercised by each individual in the pursuit of his own calculations of utility, generating a marvelous concinnity of social effects and transmuting private vice into public virtue. The doctrine is not without its explanatory merits; but it is but a fraction of the truth about man. The balance of the truth about man is that the elevation of rational self-interest and free choice to the status of the values that rule them all - as is surely done in the reflexive economism on display in this controversy - undermines the practice of the virtues by means of a great subtlety: continual pursuit of one’s interests as one defines them for oneself in one sphere of life, and the belief that this is a natural right, habituates one in a mindset, not of self-discipline, but of self-indulgence, and that for reason of a fact about man that liberal thought has taken great pains to deny, namely, that we are not rational beings simply, even primarily, but complex, composite beings having ties of sentiment, kinship, and affection, none of which can be expressed as rational principles, but in point of fact precede reason in the order of our lives. Succinctly stated, we are embodied beings, are our bodies in an important, Christian sense, and the relations we have with our fellow men, and the works we perform in the flesh have as much of a formative influence upon our rational faculties as those faculties have - or can have - upon the direction of our lives. What a man does echoes, not only in eternity, but in his own soul; and a man habituated to the pursuit of his interest in preference over those ties and obligations that ought to bind him to some degree constructs a soul turned in upon itself, stunted and withered, just as man who speaks of the need for self-restraint but never exercises it constructs a soul oriented toward self-indulgence. And such souls construct societies blind and deaf to the Permanent Things.
One may elect to refer to this phenomenon, as have others, as a cultural contradiction of capitalism, a tendency of the system to subvert the virtues upon which it originally depended for its functioning; but the tendency is existential: one cannot elevate freedom to overriding status without imperiling the social status and existence of the concrete Permanent Things without which our lives are beggarly and mean indeed. CC, if it has accomplished nothing else, has cast light upon the ways that a consumerist, free market society ill-disposed to acknowledge the claims of other values and other orders not only gradually subverts its own foundations, but flattens, like the steady movement of the sea upon the sand of the shore, the many small orders and relations of society by which only do we achieve a sense of home in this life, insofar as this is possible. It is, considered in that light, a plea for sanity, a plea for balance, and a cry of indignation against ideology.

Concluding Postscript:

The controversy here discussed at great length does carry implications for the broader question of Western identity in an age of decline. Perhaps this connection is not immediately evident; but it is there nonetheless. Consider the following:

The withering of the French soul has another obvious cause: the economic development of France. The French consumer enjoys consumption, irrespective of anything other than his enjoyment, while, at the same time, he is after any goods he may like, and particularly new ones. The French citizen as a consumer is a citizen of the world…. Technical progress achieves the same enfranchisement; consumer reports ignore borders and advise one to buy the best object for the lowest cost regardless of its origin, while the jeans-clad, Converse-sneakered French youth listen to radio, TV, and the internet for news not of France but of the world. Individual economic interest calls for France to be ever more dependent upon imports and ever more a nondescript part of an international market flooded with ever-cheaper goods, produced by foreign slaves under supervision of international conglomerates following the rules of the “free market”….

Local life, local communities, traditional local customs, and antiquated laws make for a nice tourist show, but, when the curtain falls, everybody hails the benefits of globalization… Between French identity and what is called the “economic development” of France, there is an ever-widening rift.

Claude Polin, a professor of the Sorbonne, writing in the February issue of Chronicles, may be dismissed as a reactionary or chauvinist, a crank publishing in a haunt of cranky paleoconservatives and rank reactionaries fighting battles long since decided against them; but one should perhaps pause to reflect, eschew the ready recourse to the ad hominem and the impulse to impute error by association, and contemplate the possibility that those reactionaries may have a point. For the act of consumption unbounded by anything so parochial as the products of the labours of one’s fellows or a national border does involve, when it is cognized, and its logic unfurled, a process of abstraction; instead of the Frenchman or the American, with all of the ties of kinship and citizenship, nationality and sentiment, we have the consumer, who stands as a singularity defined, not by what he is by birth and relation, but solely by his preferences. Does not one sense a certain commonality of this notion and the political anthropology of a certain species of political philosophy? One can see, then, that the perpetuation of an identity requires sacrifice: the sacrifice of foregone goods, foregone not because they are goods falsely so-called, but because acceptance of some goods might well undermine other goods, goods that enable us to perceive who and what we are. So far from being an unconservative notion, this is close to the essence of conservatism: we impose upon ourselves the sacrifice of limitation, for out of the innumerable things we could choose to be, or at least attempt to be, we affirm the limit that is the identity we have inherited from those before us, out of respect for them, our act suffused with that piety that is a gracious acceptance of one’s place in the order of all things. And one can perceive the danger inherent in doing otherwise, or, at least of doing otherwise too frequently, for experience will, in the end, trump all of the claims and rationalizations of reason, being the unyielding master of men; and men accustomed to thinking of themselves as disconnected selves and consumers - utility seekers - may well suffer the evanescence of a sense of identity that is merely given, unchosen. But it is no chosen identity that sustains a nation, a people, a civilization, and a political philosophy that is heedless of this reality will be, not an idea without consequences, but an idea without consequence.

*All apologies for the length, and all props to Daniel Larison, whose many posts on the ongoing CC conversation enabled me to clarify my own thoughts on what is a more revealing moment in conservatism than could have been anticipated.

Reasoning Oneself Into Dhimmitude

2006-02-20T22:11:00.000-05:00

The spectacle - at once bizarre and bewildering to Western eyes, yet oddly calculable, as though its occurrence were a matter of adding two quantities - of the cartoon jihad has disclosed to the perceptive observer the profound spiritual abasement of much of the West before Islam, a sort of mock kenosis in which many of our countrymen and civilizational brethren empty and offer themselves up, not for the life of the world, but simply that they may offer themselves. It is doubtful that they could articulate their deepest motives, the wellsprings of their actions and words, let alone cognize them, for there is more to this state of abasement than a few acts of cowardice, a few acts of ritual abasement, and a few jarring, new paeans to the wonders of respect for religion. From the acts of craven, obsequious submission, we may turn away, feeling the shame that others may not, and from the petty hypocrisies we may deduce a cowardice that has not yet reached its allotted measure. Yet acts rooted in cowardice, and acts of transparent hypocrisy, remain failings or absences, and cannot explain how there could have arisen the circumstances in which they seem fitting. They certainly cannot explain the alacrity with which respectable opinion leapt to the defense of the affronted honour of Islam.

This is a complex phenomenon, one with an antecedent that could be identified as the whole of the dominant form of life in the West of the past several centuries; as such, it provides rich material for reflection. For the present, it will be well to concentrate upon two of the intellectually credible - in the sense that they do not obviously partake of the base hypocrisy and cringing cowardice of most of the justifications for refusal to defend the West in what is a comparatively minor, albeit revealing matter (and who is unfaithful in little will scarcely be faithful in much...) - apologies for the repudiation of the offending cartoons and the defenses of our traditions, however exaggerated, of free speech, to see whether they draw the veil from those deeper sources of our self-abasement, even self-hatred.

Conveniently, the arguments are not only related,but can be found gathered together in one blog post. The second, and much less interesting argument, is that we ought to be engaged in a dialogue of civilizations and religions, exercising charity toward those in error and ignorance, and that the cartoons

....weren't part of that dialogue. They said nothing intelligent about Islam's falsehoods or the shortcomings of religion as a whole; they simply mocked Islam with the same crude tactics mockers of Christianity use when they run out of (or have never acquired) intelligent comments to make about religion.

Which is true, in a somewhat superficial sense, but also a case of missing the forest for the expressions offury that have attended this affair. A dialogue requires at least two interlocutors, and, if anything, the cartoon jihad and an innumerable host of other incidents have demonstrated that, on the Muslim side, few figures are interested in any sort of dialogue beyond the call to submission. Muslim figures interested in genuine dialogue are either marginal figures or, like Tariq Ramadan, are veiling their true objectives in vague platitudes, sly asides, and clever hedges.

Beyond the unavailability of a genuine, representative partner for dialogue, there is also the actuality of the civilizational "dialogue" that has passed between the civilization once known as Christendom and the dar al Islam: the aggression of the latter, the contraction of the former; the belated response of the Crusades, the martyrdom of the Christian East, a few stunning Western victories, the slow contraction of Islam, and the violent resurgence of the past generation. I say this not to be glib, nor to be cynical, but it seems well nigh self-evident that 1400 years of conflict have expressed more of the essence of the divide that could possibly be bridged by conversations between Westerners and unrepresentative Muslim scholars. Dialogue will occur at the margins, but it will not, and cannot, be at the center.

There is also the issue of the origins of the cartoons at the heart of this controversy in the insistence of Muslims that non-Muslims essentially conform their social customs and perhaps even their laws to the requirements of Islamic custom, but leave that to the side.

As for the question of religious mockery, that leads into the first, and stronger, argument that may be isolated from the above-linked impassioned plea for charity, understanding, and conversation:

Islam cannot be mocked, as it is now being mocked, without striking at the heart of the Christian message.... Christianity is truth revealed by God about all things and, as such, it applies to all things, not just things which visibly and distinguishably pertain to Christians. So, if Christianity teaches that man's need for holiness may not be made into an object of derision, then it is wrong for anyone to do so - whether he is a Christian mocking Islam, a Muslim mocking Christianity, or a secular materialist who mocks the other two.

There are two errors bound up in this declaration of ostensible religious principle, one which might be expressed as the claim that

...mockery and skepticism have been the weapons of Anti-Christianity since Montaigne and Voltaire...

to quote an essay which actually provides a perspective quite different from that of the one with which I am concerned. The trouble with this claim is that is overstates the influence that religious mockery has had in undermining belief in the Western world and preparing the Western world for its present ordeal at the hands of Islam. Religious mockery and satire have always, I would imagine, been present; one touches upon no new ground to note that there were instances of irreverence even during the great Age of Faith. Religious mockery, then, does not become a force corrosive of belief until the grounds for it to become such a destructive force have been prepared elsewhere; and that is the case in our own history. Montaigne and Voltaire wrote after the Western world had passed through the epochal changes of Renaissance and Reformation, and Voltaire wrote as that world was yet in the midst of the phase of history that would come to be known as the Enlightenment. The philosophical and theological legacies of nominalism had made God a more distant divinity, and the mind's grasp of of order in the universe more tenuous; the flood of literature from the East, particularly subsequent to the fall of Constantinople, had led to a prevaling sense among scholars that there was an enormous amount of truth accessible to natural reason of which they had long been deprived; modern science had had its beginnings; the Reformation had shattered the sense of Europeans that they inhabited a common Christendom; and the first stirrings of rationalistic biblical criticism had been felt. Religious mockery, in fine, did not become either pervasive or potent in influence until the spiritual foundations of Christian society had already been shaken, leading to a sense of uncertainty, alienation, and a widespread sensibility that venerable Christian doctrines and assumptions could not be rendered fully consonant with the new philosphies and science. Candide could not have produced the effect it did had not the welter of changes in the preceding centuries left Western man with a weakened apprehension of divine order in the universe, had not the philosophy of Leibniz, itself a product of those intellectual developments, been so at odds with what many regarded as the obvious implications of the news ways of thought.

We ought not ascribe to modern cynicism, scepticism, and mockery a causative role, given that these were, and remain, largely epiphenomenal upon a base of broader intellectual and spiritual changes; they will only corrode belief where that metal has already been prepared.

The other error involved in this declaration of religious principle is the notion that mockery of a specific religious faith, tradition, or expression is, either implicitly or explicitly, mockery of the religious impulse itself. Were it true that to mock a particular expression of faith would be to mock the idea of, and desire for, holiness themselves, then the game would be up, and we would be bound, as a matter of logic and coherence, to denounce the cartoons straight away, not even pausing to refer to our traditions of free speech; for what, after all, is free speech when laid beside the coherence and dignity of the Faith which is formative of our very being as men of the West?

However, the minor premise of this argument is mistaken, almost to the degree of absurdity. To claim that mockery of a specific religion is effectively the mockery of the religious impulse itself, the desire for the holy, sui generis, is essentially to claim that, were I, say, to mock Karl Popper for failing to demonstrate, in his The Open Society and Its Enemies, a rudimentary grasp of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, but only of liberal caricatures of them, I would thereby be mocking the discipline of philosophy itself; and not only that, but that I would be denigrating the faculty of reason itself by dismissing one particular employment of it. Which would be arrant nonsense.

Now, this is by no means to advance the notion that mockery is an integral element of intellectual discourse, an indispensible companion to the labour of reason, at least not in the case of religions. Mockery does, however, have its place even there, as a reading of Against Heresies will confirm. In that work, at once wearied by and amused at the absurd cosmological genealogies concocted by the gnostics, Irenaeus mocks them, saying (I paraphrase) that they may as well state that there was a Cucumber, and an Utter-Emptiness. Some things, after all, are so ludicrous, so risible, that mockery is appropriate; perhaps, though, the trouble with the cartoons is that humour is altogether too slight a thing with which to treat the career of Islam's prophet.

I should hope that some hint of the cause of the Western tendency towards self-abasement has emerged, if indirectly, from this discussion. We must press beyond the simplicity of the call for dialogue, to the core of the rationale for dialogue itself: respect for the dignity of all men as rational beings. The contemporary expression of that affirmation of truth is a bit different, though: We do not demonstrate that respect unless the respect itself is bestowed upon all equally. The religious gloss discussed above only confuses the issue, since one can quite easily maintain a disposition of respect for the human dignity of the Muslim, and refrain from mocking his sincerely-held faith, without also maintaining that were one to scoff at the claims of Islam,, one would be slighting the human dignity of Muslims, or falsifying the very foundation of one's own faith, or, in fact, doing anything more than displaying a lack of courtesy. There is in our own religious heritage an abundance of the right sort of intolerance or disrespect, precisely in the dealings of the Church with heresies and errors, and not once did a theologian suspect that in approaching the erring firmly, even harshly, she failed to honour them as fellow bearers of reason and falisfied her own essence. Stripped, then, of the incoherent religious reference, and articulated in a form comprehensible to the secularist mind, that equal respect translates to the notion that we are false to our own beliefs, commitments, and principles if we act from the conviction of their superiority, and disrespect ourselves in the act of showing disrespect for the beliefs of others.

A civilization that will not assume its own side in an argument is a civilization that will always yield ground, in the end, to those who are full of passionate intensity and devotion to their creeds and cultural forms; and that is how one reasons oneself into dhimmitude.

An Immigration Protest as the Proverbial Whimper

2006-02-20T20:12:00.000-05:00

It was a desultory affair, all things considered, given the ostensible volatility of the immigration issue. Local media here in Philadelphia and its environs had hyped the planned Valentine's Day "Day Without an (Illegal) Immigrant" protest for at least a week or so, with the usual feigned objectivity. Pre-event reporting would typically open with an acknowlegdement of the illegal status of the labourers, who would be protesting in order to raise awareness of their presence and contributions to the way of life we all enjoy, and to raise consciousness of the "injustice" of H.R. 4437, the House Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act. Those reports would end with citations, intended to be poignant and heart-rending, of illegal immigrants proclaiming that we should pay no mind to the means by which they entered the country, but only to the claims that "They only come here to work, that they "Are equal people", and "have rights".

As it happened, the total draw of the protest amounted to some 1000 souls, with a reported six counter-protestors from the local affiliate of the Minutemen. They were likely the same six people my wife and I observed protesting a Home Depot store about 10 minutes from our home approximately two months ago (Home Depot is reputed to have a sizable contingent of illegal labourers). And it is with this observation that a protest like many other protests that ordinarily escape my notice become more interesting; perhaps it became interesting only because it happened to transpire in my own backyard, so to speak, but it set my mind to work.

What is interesting about the protest is not so much the now-rote assertion of the economic benefits of all immigration, even that which is illegal, nor even the absurd statements to the effect that efforts to counteract these migrant flows, reflective of the considered judgment of the American people, as exercised through their elected representatives, would by nature violate the "equality" and "rights" of the illegals. No, what is interesting is that the entire affair had the quality of an event that could have been staged for the purpose of demonstrating to a patriot that his society, his nation, his way of life, would end, not with the fire, chaos, and passion of grand drama, but with the proverbial whimper. An atmosphere of indifference and resignation suffused the thing: 1000 illegals showing themselves in a public protest is no mean demonstration, but, to be realistic, there are likely at least 10 times that number in the immediate area who could have put in an appearance, yet did not. And the protest for the "rights" of the restaurant world's "dirty little secret" drew a mere half-dozen counter-protestors, a pitiful showing indeed.

Therein lies the larger meaning of the protest and the feeble counter-protest: it is scarcely even necessary for the illegals to make such a show of numbers and solidarity, for their point has been established, assimilated, and embraced by the dominant society. They need not show up en masse; they need only conduct a few interviews and send a press release to the local chapter of the ACLU, and all will be well with them. Their cause, despite the unease some of them, has apparently triumphed, and many of them likely already know this, in much the same manner as Muslims in Europe know, intuitively, that if present trends should continue, they have already triumphed but for the waiting period. A mere six people could be found to protest this manifest subversion of our laws and the integrity of our society, high and low together; and this is evidence, once more, of the truth of a poetic maxim: the best lack all confidence. Lacking confidence, they will not rise against the usurpation of their nation and their rights of self-government until the hour is too late for the application of any remedy save those that will then appear to be too draconian, too uncaring, to meet with any realistic prospect of success. Beyond the fact that most politically-aware citizens are knowledgeable about the complicity of the leaders of both political parties in the resistance to the deliberate sense of the people, the overwhelming majorities of the American people who oppose the current immigration regime cannot be motivated to act in concert to ensure that their voices are heard and their judgments made effective. Perhaps I am cynical, more than usual. Nevertheless, it seems to me that resistance to this immigration regime and the societal disorder it represents is a case of too little, too late, compounded by a sense of guilty vacillation, as if to say that we know what must be done to resolve the problem, but lack that stomach for the border closings and deportations that would entail. So we complain, and a few protest, but we do not act concertedly, as a bloc, to compel action on the part of our elected officials; we are resigned, many cannot even rouse themselves beyond the awareness of the immediate to think about what this all portends for our future, and we will likely flinch when the moment of truth arrives.

Still, there is more at stake here, more even than the fate of a people and their identity, and the integrity of their political system. Something more is occurring. The modern liberal order is dissolving itself, and immigration is one of the issues corroding it. This is not merely a matter of the resistance to popular opinion; it is more profound, even structural. The entire modern political order of nation-states has come to express itself as a regime of procedures, formalities, and legal constructs according to which diverse peoples, having nothing in common save what their autonomous, thinly-constituted wills conjure from the nothingness of free volition. Throughout, however, that modern, liberal order has still retained an awareness that the procedures themselves - the structures which serve as the framework of interaction for autonomous individuals - are necessary; that without them, the project will collapse into something a bit Hobbesian. Citizenship, and the attendant privileges thereof, inclusive of full participation in the economic structures of the nation, have been key constituents of that framework. Thus, in the immigration question and the refusal of the 'system' to act, we observe not merely the refusal of liberalism to defend the culture that generated it (for liberalism always sees only the culture of the other), but also liberalism's loss of belief in even its proceduralism. So far from contenting itself with the dissolution or erosion of cultures in a regime of procedurally-guaranteed individual autonomy, liberalism no longer really believes in its own proceduralism, formalism, and legalism, for, obviously, a regime of procedures is also a regime of requirements - of those qualifications one must meet to be eligible for the full panoply of procedural freedoms.

What this all means is that the liberal order of the modern West is dying by its own hand, replacing itself with something that nature of which is opaque to us now, but will be revealed, in the fullness of time, as the bearer of the mythic core of liberalism into a future from which the carapace of yet another set of contingent, and thus arbitrary social arrangements - the forms of the nation - has fallen. Liberalism turned its hand against our cultures, then turned its hand against the very proceduralism with which it fought our cultures. It is giving birth, in its death, to something else, and we know not what it is, for what comes after the nation-state and the procedural republic? Dust and shadow?

Even A Blind Chicken Occasionally Finds Corn

2006-02-11T00:29:00.000-05:00

I hold John Locke in low regard, on account of the perniciousness of his myth of the social contract, as well as his simplistic and reductive account of the purposes of politics, natural law, and rights. Nevertheless, even the blind chicken will have some corn: William Rees-Mogg, who holds Locke in higher esteem than I, writes:

governments have repeatedly come up against these limits (of toleration - Maximos). Locke did not believe that governments could always tolerate "opinions contrary to human society, such as manifestly undermine the foundations of society". It is not clear what Locke had specifically in mind, but terrorism would surely be covered. In the 20th century both Nazism and Leninism were "opinions contrary to human society" in this sense -- they were simply intolerable. (.....)

Seventeenth-century Islam was included in the criticism. "It is ridiculous for anyone to profess himself to be a Mohametan (sic) only in his religion, but in everything else a faithful subject to a Christian magistrate, while at the same time he acknowledges himself bound to yield blind obedience to the Mufti of Constantinople, who himself is entirely obedient to the Ottoman Emperor." Fortunately, the Papacy no longer claims the right to excommunicate and depose monarchs, there is no Ottoman Emperor, and if there is still a Mufti of Constantinople he certainly has no universal authority in Islam. But Osama bin Laden really is a dangerous man who does claim obedience of his followers.

The entire essay may be found here and is well worth reading despite the adulatory approach to Locke. The threat of the present hour compels us to consider afresh the perennial questions of the limits of toleration, and of the viability of a society which tolerates the propagation of views inimical to the continuance of that society. And to those questions, it would seem, Old Locke may prove to be just the right tonic.

There is no Pre-Social Human Nature

2006-02-10T16:12:00.000-05:00

The present time is one beset by a seemingly interminable dispute over the relevance of human nature to current political and geoplotical questions. That may seem an absurd, slightly portentious declaration, but there it is. Its truth is evidenced by the fact that we find it necessary to engage in vigorous disputation of the question whether larges swathes of the Muslim world may not desire 'freedom', 'liberty', 'democracy' and other cognates of the Western political tradition, or, at the least, might not comprehend by such terms what we comprehend by them; for, let any man gainsay the proposition that all men alike, without disinction, are desirous of liberty and democracy, and even our own elected officials will move to declaim that to express scepticism concerning the desire of all men for these things is to succumb to the dark lures of racism, ethnocentrism, and sheer inhumanity.

Yet the proposition according to which the calls to freedom, democracy, and liberty resonate in the souls of all men is mistaken, and mistaken at a quite elementary level, albeit one which typically modern conceits and myths are liable to render obscure. That error is the belief that there is such a thing as a pre-social human nature. More exactly, it is the belief that there exists a common human nature which is available, or given, as an object of immediate expereience in social relations, and that this common human nature is prior to, and above, the mediate human nature which we encounter in our routine dealings with our fellows - the sort of human nature manifest in the habits, mores, and customs of particular cultures and traditions. It is, that is to say, the notion that a common human nature is available to us an an immediate object of experience, insofar as we abstract away the particular contingencies of time, place, history, and identity that attach, as accidents, to those with whom we are dealing. But this is, I reiterate, an illusion. It is an illusion fostered, ironically, by the Enlightenment, a development of Western culture, and its dream of a universal reason, unsullied by the messiness of historical contingencies, those particularities so apt to embarass the good cosmopolitan.

What is one to say or do when something so obvious to all who have considered the historical record and the evidence of the senses is summarily dismissed as mere bigotry or ideological heresy? Well, in the first instance, there is the curious fact that the notion of a universal humanity always seems to be connected with particular historical circumstances: the ancient Stoics, whatever their other virtues, had a similar idea, and yet that idea would hardly have suggested itself to their minds had it not been for the experience of a multitude of nations incorporated into the Empire. The very concepts of a universal humanity, of citizens of the world, and of a natural law that transcended the diverse cultures of mankind, being manifest in a manner adapted to the circumstances of each, would not have arisen absent the necessity of the disclosure of a means whereby diverse peoples could be embraced within a singular political entity. There is, further, the matter of the Enlightenment itself: the Enlightenment occurred in a particular civilization, at a particular moment in historical time, when the idea of a peculiar type of reason became vital to that civilization. Western peoples had passed through a harrowing period of religiously-inspired conflict, after their inherited traditions of philosophy had gone into eclipse in controversy and the appearance of vanity and fruitlessness. The newer tradition of reason emphasized methods that began in abstraction from the particularities of circumstance; whether one elects to emphasize the Method of Descartes or later developments in empiricist philosophy, themselves inspired by the development of modern scientific method, itself conceived as independent of any inherited tradition of philosophy (rather, in opposition to much of the inherited tradition) and capable of universal application, the salient fact about these modes of rationality is that, while they were animated by an impulse towards universality, they arose within a particular civilization as that civilization struggled to adapt to the dissolution of the old orders, certitudes, political structures, social norms, and intellectual ideals. Like the ideal of toleration that began its slow ascendancy at approximately the same time, the newer Western doctrines of reason represented attempts to hold together the multifarious aspects of human life that seemed poised to fly apart in fissiparous and centrifugal abandon.

Nevertheless, such historical reflections are not dispositive, but merely suggestive. The origin of a thing is not necessarily an exhaustive explanation of that thing. However, a second consideration is that it is incumbent upon us to reflect upon the question of whether we ever, in fact, encounter a man bereft of a culture, a man stripped of the accidents of circumstance, such that we would be warranted in holding that here is a man in whom we experience human nature, not mediately, through the forms and effects of a particular culture, but immediately, as it is in itself, the noumenon of humanity itself. And the answer is that, while we may indeed encounter many men who pretend to such detachment, to such cosmopolitanism, what we encounter in such men is the culture of a particular place, the cosmopolitan city or society - of which the world cannot be said to consist in its entirety - and that, therefore, we do not encounter such specimens of humanity. They are impossible, an illusion of reason akin to the optical illusions of MC Escher. No man can determine the circumstances of his birth, the place, society, religion, family, or culture into which he is born. In his early childhood, he cannot even escape the influences of the environment created by his family and the wider society of which they are part; he will absorb the ethos of that family, and, less directly, that of the society into which he was born. As he matures, he will develop the capacity for criticism, of self and society, and the faculty of detachment and abstraction; he will develop the ability to compare differing norms and ideals, and may even cultivate the ability to imagine himself having been born into circumstances utterly other than those to which he was born. But in all things, he will never possess the power to sever himself significantly, let alone totally, from the forms of life and thought inculcated in him from infancy; he will never have the capacity to stand wholly outside the mode of experience that his historical existence simply is. He may develop enormous sympathy for some other society, and strive to incorporate in his own life and the life of his people some norms drawn from that other society, but he can never attain to the simple experience of what it would mean to live and perceive as an inhabitant of that other culture without the interval of distance that his origins inescapably are: the mere knowledge of difference suffices to ensure this.
There is, then, no pre-social human nature. That is perhaps a bald manner of stating it; but it is not identical with the claim that there exists no human nature whatsoever: that we are infinitely different and infinitely malleable. Rather, it is simply an acknowledgement of the reality that human nature is given to us in the form of various cultures, civilizations, and human types, and that we can no more touch the essence of humanity back of these contingencies than we can touch the archetypal chair or dog. Perhaps we may attempt to define these terms, but this is an act of generalization, of abstraction, an operation of the intellect, and not a mystical apprehension of eternal "chairness", "dogness", or "humanness". There are, that is, universals, if I might indulge my fondness for the old ways of thought, but we grasp them in and through the contingent particulars. There is a human nature, as our science lately confirms for us, but we only encounter, experience, and apprehend that human nature in particular men, who are the products of particular combinations of historical circumstances. There is a human nature, but not a common expression of human nature.

As to the geopolitical questions of the age, then, the most one should venture to assert is that many men will value liberty and democracy under some understanding, and at some level of affection, but that the things they comprehend as connoted by those terms will differ widely, and that, perhaps, what they will mean in the end is something like the liberty of their societies to be what they already are. Some, as we now see, will not value them at all, not even the barest, most meagre and deathly formalistic versions of them that we devise. Given, then, that there exists no common expression of human nature, we ought not be astonished that there are those who are not like us, and who desire other ends, and that history has no end, in the sense of an immanent teleology by which all will converge upon a form of society valid for all ages. The past cannot be annihilated, and thus the future cannot be uniform. The very thought that it could be is redolent of entropy, of death, and the Last Man, and we are fortunate, even in our travails, that it cannot be so.

Scientism, Fideism, and the Disappearance of Philosophy

2006-02-10T12:33:00.000-05:00

Catholic intellectual circles lately have been roiled by a bit of a kerfluffle over the theory of Intelligent Design, the claims of Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, and the relationship of both to traditional Catholic theology and philosophy. To an editorial penned by Cardinal Schoenborn and published in July in the New York Times, in which the good Cardinal argued that the Church does, in fact object to the Neo-Darwinian declaration of the unplanned and unguided nature of the development of life, Stephen Barr responded with this essay in the pages of First Things differentiating senses and employments of such terms and concepts as "randomness" and the like, as well as legitimate and illigitimate inferences from the scientific evidence of random mutation and natural selection. Cardinal Schoenborn responded in the pages of that same journal, arguing that his critique was not an unwarranted extension of theological categories into the field of science, but rather a philosophical objection to notions of randomness according to which those random mutations and the operation of natural selection are entirely uncorrelated, and thus, bereft of teleology. This exclusion of teleology is a function of the methodological limitations of modern science, which purposely excludes formal and final causes from its purview. Too often, Schoenborn suggests, scientists then turn about to proclaim that what they have excluded is unreal, committing a variety of fallacies of reasoning in the process, but thereby exalting their discipline as the summit and source of knowledge. Alas, he also suggests, too many Catholic thinkers who ought to know better have embraced this reductive mode of thought, thereby committing themselves to a form of fideism as the sole means by which the provable claims of science may be reconciled with the unknowable claims of religion, those claims being unknowable not merely because they are impervious to scientific method, but because the means by which philosophy might demonstrate them to be consistent with reason have been deemed, a priori, unreal.

Now. This is a curious impasse. It would be gravely injurious to the intellectual and spiritual integrity of institutions beyond the Catholic Church were many Christian scientists and intellectuals to embrace just this sort of neo-Averroist schema, reducing all that lies beyond the purview of science to mere assertion. Positivism, the notion of the supremacy of the natural sciences over all other fields of inquiry, and even their status as the only sources of knowledge, has never been a friend either to religion or human community generally, as should be obvious to anyone who has contemplated the course and end of logical positivsm and its offshoots in the Twentieth Century. With those things in mind, here are the wise considerations of Tom at Disputations:

Such theistic scientism results in both a false dualism and a false fideism. The dualism opposes the natural and the supernatural on the basis of science's exclusion of the supernatural. It holds that natural causes are absolutely sufficient to explain natural effects, to the degree that if a natural cause is found, there is no supernatural cause.

The fedeism is the medium in which the tensions between theism and scientism are resolved: We believe in all sorts of things that aren't scientifically perceivable. Why? Well, we just do. Such belief is not true (i.e., scientific) knowledge, and must be prepared to adapt itself to whatever new natural causes science might uncover. Still, a belief can be true without us really knowing that it's true.

Theistic scientism uses physics as its metaphysics, then allows for religious faith to fit around it as best it can. This basic error of taking the part for the whole, one perspective for the objectively normative perspective, can lead to all sorts of nonsense....

It is high time for Christian philosphers to revert to the great tradition of Christian metaphysics, rediscovering and elaborating the rich doctrine of secondary causes, and banishing, insofar as they are able, the baleful notion that there can be a Master Discourse predicated upon the methodology and limitations of one particular discourse.

Of Derb, the Death-Eaters, and Conservatism

2006-01-30T08:15:00.000-05:00

It's not so much that I have some sort of grievance against the Derb; it's rather that I am disappointed. To be certain, disappointment is perhaps something that we should expect from everyone as we tread this mortal sphere. All the same, however, knowledge of the inevitability of disappointment does little or nothing to lessen the experience of disappointment when it does come to us.

And the Derb has brought it to me, and in so doing, he has ironically enabled us to perceive something about the nature of conservative thought. Allow me to elaborate.

Several years ago, I conversed with a long-time friend who has, over the course of the past decade or so, abandoned what he considers to be the fallow fields of contemporary conservatism for paleoconservatism, discussing, among other things, National Review. His grievance against the magazine was that it had purged the serious intellectuals (namely, the paleoconservatives) from its ranks of contributors, editors, and affiliates, and moved ever more deeply into the embrace of neoconservatism. I was of the opinion, paleo- and neo- controversies notwithstanding, that the magazine had become altogether too topical and reportorial in converage; that it had become, in a sense, a bi-weekly conservative news magazine more than a journal of ideas, and that this portended ill for conservatism. If ideas have consequences, then taking one's ideas for granted too will have consequences, and those will more likely than not be unfavourable for the fate of what we refer to as 'conservatism'. Perhaps the free-spending malaise of the past few years is at least a partial vindication of a criticism of a mindset of which the evolution (devolution?) of National Review seemed to me to be somewhat emblematic.

Nonetheless, my criticism of National Review was not without nuance. Among other things, I did praise John Derbyshire as one of the more conservative writers affiliated with National Review. His writing embodied an engaging combination of crusty reaction, historical awareness, ready anecdotes from both Britain and China, and keen wit.

For all of those virtues, however, Derbyshire sometimes seems not to understand conservatism at a profound level, and has in fact been calling into question the soundness of my judgment that he was a reliably reactionary counterweight to some of the occasionally unbearable lightness over at National Review. His most recent piece, The Wood Has Been Made Into A Boat, could serve as a textbook-perfect illustration of the Derb's own occasional unbearable lightness, detachment from conservatism, and of the perils of conceptualizing conservatism as a mere preference ungrounded in appreciation for the permanent things.

The idiom from which Derb takes the title of his piece is intended to convey a sense of irreversible historical change, and bearing in mind both that the piece was published on the date of the annual Right to Life march in Washington, and that it ultimately turns out to be a qualified defense of Jeff "Forget About Abortion" Hart, one receives the impression, upon a close reading, that Derb would rather the whole impolitic, gauche question of abortion simply vanish. However, neither his sensibility concerning the viability and tastefulness of opposition to abortion, nor his manner of defending a cultivated insouciance to the barbarity of the abortion regime manifest habits of mind that could even be deemed 'conservative' by exaggeration.

First, however, it would be well to clear away one insalubrious confusion from Hart's ill-starred piece. Regarding the politics of abortion, Hart wrote:

This has been a focus of conservative, and national, attention since Roe v. Wade. Yet abortion as an issue, its availability indeed as a widespread demand, did not arrive from nowhere. Burke has a sense of the great power and complexity of forces driving important social processes and changes. Nevertheless, most conservatives defend the "right to life", even of a single-cell embryo, and call for a total ban on abortion. To put it flatly, this is not going to happen. Too many powerful social forces are aligned against it, and it is therefore a utopian notion..... Roe reflected, and reflects, a relentlessly changing social actuality.

Setting aside Hart's utter incomprehension of Burke (Why would Burke's politics be termed a politics of prudence, if there were no enduring values which the stateman must strive to preserve amidst the surge of the complex tides of history?), his almost-sneering condescension and mischaracterization of conservative anti-abortion politics, and his seeming embrace of that shibboleth of progressive politics, the inevitable unfolding of history, his usage of the descriptor 'utopian' for conservative opposition to abortion is just about the most malignantly stupid employment of that term imaginable. One could have said of slavery in 1820, that it reflected relentless changing social actualities, and that powerful social forces were aligned against the abolitionist movement; would abolition then have been 'utopian', thus blameworthy? Nonsense. No, Mr. Hart, utopianism involves ideological conceptions of human nature, usually reducing that nature to one or two of its aspects, and grand schemes for the reconstitution of human nature and society on the ostensible basis of such corrupt understandings of human nature. By that standard - the standard just about all consevative intellectuals and philosophers accepted throughout the twilight struggles of the West with Fascism and Communism - opposition to abortion, though and thankless task, is about as utopian as telling people not to kill or steal, even though some still will do those things.

Indeed, conservative opposition to abortion is a paradigmatic case of that politics of prudence, in which conservatives attempt to impress upon an age which has forgotten the fact, that the sanctity of human life is a fundamental value of our civilization, without which it simply ceases to be our civilization. Opposition to abortion is the prudent adaptation of the principle of the sanctity of human life to the changed circumstances of the modern age, in which scientific advances have served to confirm of the earliest stages of human life what was hitherto apprehended only in recondite philosophy. Derbyshire, however, will equate what is for Hart starry-eyed utopianism with blind reaction, and it is worth exploring the trail he follows to that destination.

Derbyshire wishes to maintain a distinction between the grand-scale shifts of sensibility and the like, and small-scale changes in fashion. It is, alas, difficult to perceive that the distinction, while real, is either as deep as Derbyshire imagines, or as enduring as he would like to imagine. At the same time, neither does his differentiation of the two types of change accurately capture the real distinctions between those things susceptible of change and those that are not, nor present a clear and cogent picture of those things which are permanent. This want of conceptual accuracy and clarity is a want of conservative imagination.

The great tides of history, too, seem to be irreversible. It is difficult to imagine an advanced society taking up slave-holding, for example, or human sacrifice, or foot-binding. Those practices were rooted in ways of life and styles of sensibility that have disappeared. Those disappearances were not some shifts of fashion or technological tweaks: They happened because we advanced morally, and also - though the causal link, and its direction, are much disputed - because we found better ways of getting work done, addressing the Supernatural, and conducting relations with the opposite sex, ways that invloved less human suffering.

It is doubtless true that such historical reversals as these seem irreversible, and it is incontrovertibly true that such changes represented enormous advances in morality and religion. The fact that they have apparently proven so enduring would also seem to indicate that they were no mere shifts of fashion or whim. And yet something is amiss in all of this, and that something may be seen in the following manner: should we conceive of such changes as the results of moral and social advances, or of some more nebulous concept of "progress", in which human things are conceived as advancing cumulatively and correctively, as in the natural sciences? If the latter, then we shall have to contend with an enormous body of evidence to the contrary, namely the viscissitudes of history; more pertinently, we might simply adduce abortion as a disproof of the idea of straight-line progress in human affairs. If, however, the former, then we are in the sphere of morality, which is a sphere of obligation and volition, and, as such, admits of the possibilities of progress and regress; in which case, it is eminently possible that certain sensibilities thought long-dormant might be revived to attach themselves to altered conditions of social organization. Consider: no one in the developed world imagines that we will again take up chattel slavery or resume sacrificing infants to Moloch; but there are theories of human dignity, that fall under the rubric of 'personhood theory', and maintain that said dignity derives from the accidental distinguishing characteristics of humanity, such as evident rationality, volition, self-awareness, and capacity for interpersonal relationships, all of which are manifest only in degrees. And if human dignity and the rights grounded therein are to be justified by reference to characteristics which can only be grasped as existing in degrees, as on a sliding scale, then there really is no logical basis for maintaining that human rights themselves do not exist along such a sliding scale, but only unprincipled exceptions intended to save the theory from its obvious self-reductio. Consider further: while we are not about to resurrect the grotesqueries of ancient pagan religion, it is beyond cavil that an unborn fetus is human, and that in aborting that fetus, the 'mother' is sacrificing it to the realization of other interests, whatever they may happen to be.

The point is that modes of organization, social or otherwise, are at most oblique to forms of sentiment that relate to fundamental matters of conduct; they may suggest, but not determine; constrain, but not definitively preclude. For, where human conduct is concerned, each act may be seen to embody one or more ideals (or anti-ideals) of human well-being, ideals which may be instantiated in nearly innumerable particular instances or forms, changing form with the changing of circumstances, but never really changing in essence. These are the changes, therefore, that are at once profound and incredibly superficial; profound for the obvious reasons, and superficial for the more consequential reason that none of them possess the power to change, much less repeal, fundamental human nature. The peril of ethical regress is as much a possibility as that of advance, and we delude ourselves if we believe that we can conceal this fact from ourselves by throwing up a rhetorical veil of appeals to changed societal conditions.

Turning from the macro-level to the micro-level, Derbyshire continues:

Once you get away from technology, though, and from the grand-scale shifts in sensibility and "modes of production", it is surprisingly hard to identify any social change that is clearly and obviously irreversible. Will adult men one day, once again, as they did until about 50 years ago, fell themselves ill-dressed if they go out of doors hatless? Will promiscuous smoking make a comeback?... Clearly in some areas the swinging pendulum is the norm. Libertinism and Puritanism take their turns...

The trouble with this observation, as with the last, is not that it is void of truth, but that it is a part of an overdrawn contrast. Those grand-scale shifts in social sensibility have not altered human nature; neither have they negated the moral realities at stake in both those long-ago surpassed social structures and in certain of our present fixations. That being the case, they have not introduced into reality any sort of inevitability or necessity, save on the comparatively superficial level of social organization, and have not erected insuperable barriers to change. Where morality is concerned, there are no such barriers. The contrast is not as profound as Derbyshire imagines; and being rather less profound that he thinks, it cannot be so enduring. We can and will have moral change on the grand scale; the only difference between that change and the sort of change involved in shifts of fashion and taste is that that the former processes require lengthier intervals of time. That Derbyshire fails to acknowledge the permanence of the great moral questions, subsuming them under historical processes, or effacing them altogether by portraying them as the epiphenomena of those processes, evidences an historicism supine before blind fate.

It is a trustworthy observation that a man who proclaims something inevitable does so because he wishes to secure something from critique and grant himself a rhetorical advantage in the process. This case is no exception from the norm. Derbyshire imagines that he can distinguish conservatism from mere reaction in the following manner:

Standing athwart history crying "Stop!" is conservative; hopeless longing for what is irreversibly gone (if it ever existed in the imagined form) is reactionary.

True, and utterly beside the point. For what we have seen is that moral changes are nothing if not eminently reversible, given sufficient time and the dedication of those committed to their attainment, but that changes in the outward forms of society may well be irreversible. It is therefore, anything but reactionary to long for the restoration of moral ideals which have ebbed; it is the essence of conservatism to tell a society to "Stop!" when that society, in the onrush of formal change, casts aside the hard-won moral insights by which we distinguish ourselves from brutes and savages, for the prudent politics of the conservative will ever strive to embody those permanent things in the new forms of organization which history brings before him. Conversely, it is anything but conservative to yield to alleged inevitabilities, as though the movement of history were always "onward and upward", as though history had a direction and telos immanent to itself, allowing us to grasp the logic and end of history; and the essence of reaction is to imagine that with the passing of the form the ideal itself has passed away, and that, therefore, the outworn form must be forced upon a world that has simply moved on. The conservative, therefore, acknowledges the permanence of moral truth, and the continued pertinence of the great moral questions. The forms of society are important, being the means by which the permanent things are mediated to us and made concrete to us, but they are obliquely related, inasmuch as they may undergo great development while we strive to maintain the truths and realities they contingently present to us.

Derbyshire goes on to inquire how we tell the difference between conservatism and reaction, and admits that he does not know, while also expressing his agreement with the 'thoughts' of Hart. If he is incapable of distinguishing them, on account of his apparent historicism bereft of a transcendent dimension, he cannot coherently state that the abortion regime is so entrenched that to oppose it is to engage in sentimental reaction. Moreover, if he does not grasp that the difference between conservatism and reaction lies precisely in the ability of the conservative to grasp the essence of a moral, or even institutional, ideal and imagine the various ways in which it both has been, and can be, embodied in a diversity of developing social forms through time, then it ought to be obvious that he does not grasp the core of conservative thought, and that his conservatism is, in consequence, one of preference and not principle.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Derbyshire adduces reasons for holding his opinion on the solidity of the abortion regime: the lack of shame and disgust with which abortion is regarded, and the claim that the American people do not accept the notion that the embryo is a human being. As to the former, there is cetainly room for doubt that abortion is regarded as a matter of indifference, and not as a matter of disgrace. As to the latter, well, what could it possibly mean to say that a human embryo, a complete, distinct, enduring organism possessed of the power to internally direct its own development in accordance with its own genetic information, is not plainly and incontrovertibly a human being, at least not as we are, and that there is therefore room for doubt? The statement is, logically and scientifically, gibberish akin to stating that when a scientist clones a sheep embryo, he does not really have an organism falling under the species 'sheep' until he has an animal with a wooly coat. Incontrovertibly, the embryo is genetically human; it is not a mollusk. Also incontrovertibly, it is a human life existing at a level of development appropriate to its temporal location on the line of human development, a location once occupied by each one of us. Therefore, there really is no room for doubt, unless, strangely for Derbyshire, one is to cast science to the dogs and seek refuge in the barmy incoherences of personhood theory. There is, however and alas, room for dissimulation and temporizing appeals to that primitive aspect of human consciousness that is apt to question the humanity or rights of those who don't quite 'look like us'. Truly, the apogee of reason and enlightenment, that. Nonetheless, we are in the deep waters of morality, self-interest, and knowledge here, where necessity holds no purchase and deep shifts of sensibility may be envisioned, as Derbyshire concedes:

Some great shift of sensibility, following some social or technological change I have not imagined - perhaps cannot imagine - could conceivably send the pendulum swinging back.

So, is the abortion regime, as Derbyshire wants to argue, in agreement with Hart, a idee fixe in the modern world, akin to a refusal to resurrect pagan rites of human sacrifice or take slaves? Or is it an historical contingency, influenced, yes, by changes in social organization, but not determined by them, and open, as are all such matters of conduct, to the suasion of normative ideals? Why suggest that opposition to abortion is the hallmark of reaction, as though progress, history, and technological change have forever slammed the door on its prohibition, and then close one's argument by suggesting, "Or not"? Why suggest that some unforseen, incomprehensible shift in sensibility might undo the abortion regime after positing the idea of irreversible change and intimating that abortion may be one of those fixities?

Why indeed, unless one wanted to suggest that conservatives do nothing, the implication being that the things that are done in opposition to abortion are so gauche, much as the opposition of some conservatives and Christians to certain of the pronouncements of the scientific priesthood is so vulgar, so unwashed. And unless one had a subconscious urge to make a demonstration of one's inability to distinguish conservatism and reaction, the manner in which a grasp of conservatism and its relationship to history had eluded one's thoughts, and one's ignorance of the difference between the knowledge of the transcendent and rank utopianism.

No moral wood is ever made into a boat; it may ever sprout afresh, and show to be living what was wrongly thought to be dead and dessicated.

Unintentional Irony, Perhaps?

2006-01-27T07:49:00.000-05:00

I had nearly passed over it, in between long, stressful days at work, and long, sleepless nights with my son, who has been teething and suffering from respiratory infections of late.

And there it was in the Atlantic, a striking and perceptive essay on the oral-sex mania which seems to have swept our schools, written by Caitlin Flanagan. In that beautiful piece of work, she traces the genesis of the mania, as she sees it, to an incident in an Atlanta suburb subsequently distorted all out of proportion by a PBS documentary. That documentary may well have led to an editorial decision to commission the genuinely vile little book, The Rainbow Party, about which Flanagan writes:

The book's sole effective literary technique is achieved unintentionally: The Rainbow Party is so leaden and formulaic, so completely deadened to any of the possibilities of fiction, that it mirrors the way girls are said to feel about fellatio - jaded and shockproof. (It's not just Hunter and Perry's high jinks in the restroom (here, she refers to an act of fellatio between two boys discussed earlier in her piece - Maximos) that put one in mind of bathhouse culture. Almost everything about the current blowjob craze - the randomness of the sexual encounters; the fact that they're apparently devoid of meaning beyond the immediate gratification of male desire, that neither party is inclined to say "no", that little consideration is given to female desire, or even female anatomy - suggests a strain of gay male sex more than it does traditional male-female relationships.)

Do tell. Non-procreative sexual acts, acts which ignore the natural functions and teleology of the reproductive organs, involve others - and others understood simply as bodies and not as persons - as means to gratification and not as personal beings, contain no true elements of mutuality and reciprocation, and possess no apparent meaning beyond their terminus in the male orgasm, put one in mind of gay male bathhouse culture? An analogy, a similarity between heterosexual and homosexual licentiousness, suggestive of underlying order?

I think this is an example of what I might term, Being Slapped in the Face by the Natural Law. The Rainbow Party might be the oddest place to find it, but there you have it: an indirect evidence for the philosophy of law and the human person long championed by the Catholic Church. That is probably the only aspect of the whole sordid tale about which one might crack a smile.

The Difference Between Patriotism and Its Counterfeit, In A Word

2006-01-25T17:30:00.000-05:00

Scruton:

What conservatives object to is the desire to rationalize national loyalty through the myth that 'we' are somehow superior to 'them', and therefore entitled to destroy them. Patriotism is an altogether quieter view of the matter: it is, simply, the recognition that we stand or fall together, and that we therefore owe it to each other to maintain the customs and the symbols of our common membership.

Much more could be said, much more that would merely stand as exposition of the insight contained in this brief passage. Suffice it to say only that patriotism is a far sight removed from that warrior creed whose adherents imagine that they incarnate the meaning of history, the Truth hidden from the foundation of the earth, the end-state of evolution towards which all others are obligated to trend. Difference is good. Some differences should simply be kept apart.

Why I Am Not a Libertarian - The First of an Infinite Series!

2006-01-23T06:47:00.000-05:00

I once counted myself a libertarian, for reasons I suspect would be similar to the reasons that would be given by others who made that self-identification, were they to examine their motives with sufficient depth. I valued highly - as I do now, albeit with qualifications - the liberty of the individual, and believed that a political system which privileged this value as the foundation of political morality was the only bulwark against the totalitarian perversions that made the Twentieth century a theater of bestial slaughter.

Circumstances, however, have a way of compelling one to acknowledge the existence of other values, and other threats to the realization of those values, than can be encompassed in a reductive political doctrine. There are more things in heaven, and particularly, on earth, than those which receive their due in libertarian thought; and the maximization and protection of individual liberty is not, and cannot be made to function as, the master key of political morality.

Terrorism is one of those "other things", as are the methods requisite to the struggle against it. Consider, then, the money quote of this comparison of the French and American approaches to counterterrorism, in which the pseudonymous Jane Galt argues that the Bush adminstration apparently wishes American law were more like the French, and then concludes:

....I am more than willing to posit that the French system may do a vastly superior job of breaking up terrorist networks. But who cares? Vesting that sort of intrusive power in one person would do more damage to America than any terrorist are likely to inflict (barring the - IMHO extraordinarily unlikely - possibility of a nuclear attack.)

Forbidding everyone to drive would do a dandy job of eliminating car accidents, but the cure is worse than the disease. Likewise, building up the apparatus of a police state in order to catch a few crazies would kill the very thing that makes America (if I may say so) the best damn country in history.

....As bad as terrorism is, there are worse things in the world, and governments that spy on their citizens, and torture them, and imprison them without trial, are among those things. Undoubtedly, if I ended up dying in a terrorist attack, I would wish we had done more. But hey, if I was killed in a car accident, I'd undoubtedly wish that the guy who hit me had had his license pulled. This would not be an argument for shuttering the interstates and making everyone get around on Shank's ponies.

Now, it is deliciously tempting to respond to this sort of analysis in the following manner:

...I am more than willing to posit that the French system may do a vastly superior job of breaking up terrorist networks.

Now why might that be? Perhaps the French, having a longer historical experience with movements of the sort that now bedevil the world, have learned that even the de facto extension of certain civil liberties protections to those involved in, or suspected of involvement in, terrorist activities is a severe impediment to the protection of the lives of the law-abiding? Couldn't be that, could it?

But who cares?

Oh, I don't know. Maybe millions of Americans who are more concerned with their rights, and the rights of those they love, to continue living, and aren't terribly concerned that Americans who consort with al Qaeda might not be extended every last ludicrous benefit of a doubt.

Vesting that sort of intrusive power in one person would do far more damage to America than any terrorists are likely to inflict

Intrusion can only be defined by the ends sought and the context within which they are sought, so a question is being begged here. And 'would do'? Such clairvoyance! Such certainty that powers exercised by American Presidents in past conflicts, which did not cause the fabric of the Constitutional order to unravel then, would surely do so now. And this would be more destructive than any damage terrorists are likely to inflict? More damaging than a biological attack? More damaging than a detonation of a dirty bomb? Than the appearance on our shores of the suicide bomber? Really? More damaging to whom? To the innocents who lose their lives? Again, Galt really doesn't know the balance of probabilities in play here, and so asserts as seemingly self-evident her preferences in the matter. I rather suspect that those in the know, intelligence-wise, would beg to differ.

Forbidding everyone to drive would do a dandy job of eliminating car accidents....

Except, as one of her commenters points out, the relevant analogy to the surveillance of Americans who receive international calls from known and suspected terrorist operatives would be the proscription of all electronic communication. But the use of that analogy would make obvious the absurdity of the paranoia in play here.

Likewise, building up the apparatus of a police state in order to catch a few crazies would kill the very thing that makes America (if I may say so) the best damn country in history.

Translation: America is the best damn country in history because her late-twentieth-century jurisprudence on privacy could be invoked to demand that Americans consorting with terrorists by means of electronic communications media, such as single-use cell phones, that by their nature provide little in the way of evidence admissible in a criminal trial, be permitted every benefit of the doubt by the intelligence and law-enforcement communities, even though a few crazies might slaughter thousands. Better thousands die than one suspected terrorist be wiretapped and held incognito. Truly, the apogee of greatness.

As bad as terrorism is, there are worse things in the world

Like the world defined by Sharia and the Caliphate that our enemies have envisioned. And the status of those us who do not intend to convert to Islam in such a world.

....and governments that spy on their citizens, and torture them, and imprison them without trial, are among those things.

Except that we are not at all talking about the emergence of a new Naziism, or a new Soviet Union here on American soil, but rather the exercise, in contemporary circumstances, of wartime powers exercised by past presidents, which powers are inherent in the executive in any event. And spying on a few Americans of dubious loyalty who happen to receive international calls from terrorists, or detaining them without trial for reason of the nature of evidence that could not be admitted in court without compromising national security, do not a universal police state make. This is rank paranoia, as any glance backwards at the Soviet Union, or sideways and the Norks, would make manifest. But hey, flay that strawman if it makes you feel alright.

Undoubtedly, if I ended up dying in a terrorist attack, I would wish we had done more.

Of course you would, because you would be dead, and experiencing second-thoughts about the balance of liberty and security in the world you had just left. Death has a way of bringing one around to the realization that without life, other 'rights' are pretty much meaningless.

But hey, if was killed in a car accident, I'd undoubtedly wish that they guy who hit me had had his license pulled.

Except, the weakness of the fundamental analogy aside, there are reasons for which one can have a license revoked, just as there are reasons for which one might be subject to scrutiny and penalties above and outside the normal provisions of the justice system.

This would not be an argument for shuttering the interstates and making everyone get around on Shank's ponies.

Of course it wouldn't be such an argument. But that is adiaphoral here, as the true analogy would be to the proscription of electronic communications, and requiring that everyone simply write letters the old-school way. But the misguided analogy to driving is necessary, I suppose, as obfuscation of the fact that this argument essentially reduces to a false antinomy: either we have a totalitarian police state, or we accept terrorism as the price of civil liberties. In most areas of human endeavour, the existence of but two options is usually indicative of a pre-packaged ideological interpretation of circumstances; that is, a loading of the dice.

Now, it would indeed be tempting to respond to the post in the foregoing manner, and to leave matters at that. However, something more is taking place in that post, and the what and why of that something go to the heart of the title of my entry. What that something is, is an sort of inversion of the order of the old liberal-libertarian political philosophy. In that old philosophy, descended from Locke and mediated through Mill and a host of lesser luminaries, the function of government, the reason for which, in the hypothetical contract, citizens yield their natural sovereignty to the artificial sovereignty of the state, is the protection of the fundamental rights of life and liberty, the security of which would be quite doubtful if, in the state of nature, each saw fit to redress offenses against his rights in the manner he thought best. Liberty was typically taken to encompass the rights of property, freedom of religion, freedom of association (within limits), freedom of thought and publication (within limits, as always), and the like. Nowhere in this corpus of political thought will one find these thinkers articulating anything that corresponds to the modern conception of privacy - not even in Mill.

And yet, what is manifest here is precisely that concern for 'privacy' so emblematic of late-twentieth-century liberal/libertarian thought. The specific form of the concern is that eavesdropping on American citizens who receive phone calls from terrorists abroad is a violation of 'privacy', and that the apparatus brought into existence to violate 'privacy' in this matter is itself the nucleus, or perhaps even the reality, of a police state. 'Privacy', however, is but a tertiary right, if even it is a right at all. A primary right would be something like the rights to life and property, while a secondary right would be the right to be free of unwarranted searches and seizures in/on one's property. 'Privacy' is, however, a sort of abstraction or emanation of this secondary right, and attempt to grasp as a generalization something that, in reality, was quite concrete and specific in its origins and applications, as is evidenced by the very fact that our modern concept of privacy owes much to specific legal struggles to limit the traditional prerogatives of the community over ostensibly private actions thought to be injurious to the common good. Times of war, moreover, and considerations of national security, were always special cases, in which those exigencies could set aside, temporarily, those provisions and implications of primary and secondary rights which would otherwise impede the successful prosectution of the conflict.

What, then, is occurring in the linked post, and in many other similar analyses of the legal balance between liberty and security in the so-called War on Terror, is that a tertiary consideration - one that is, moreover, an abstraction at some remove from the actual history of law and the realities of society, both in an out of wartime - is being elevated to primary status, displacing even the claim Americans have upon the state to secure their lives and property from assault by foreign and subversive powers or elements. For no other sense can be assigned to claims that it would be preferable to suffer the attacks of terrorists than to live in a nation where the state has the authority to monitor the conversations of its citizens with known terrorists, since such monitoring of communications is the essence of the police state. I leave aside the question of torture, for I do not support it, and do not take the adminstration, in its arguments for certain harsh forms of interrogation, to be advocating it. The question of the indeterminate detention of Americans in league with enemy powers is not a different question, since it involves the same sort of inversion as does the elevation of 'privacy': the elevation of the secondary rights of a particular criminal-justice system over the primary rights of life and property.

This is what liberalism and libertarianism have come to in this age: the depreciation of primary rights, in favour of tertiary considerations, out a fear than a failure to genuflect before even the absurd assertions of the tertiary considerations will entail the emergence of totalitarianism - which is itself absurd. There are more considerations in statecraft than can be encompassed by such theorizing, and that is why I am not a libertarian.

Might Modern Mexico Be An Anti-Western Civilization?

2006-01-21T14:16:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Lawrence Auster's View From the Right, consider these reflections on Mexican perfidy and resentment written by Howard Sutherland. Of particular interest is the following:

...On another front, much more than other Latin American countries Mexico has made a point of utterly rejecting its Spanish colonial heritage. This had led to anti-clericalism, but also means that when the Mexicans look for past glories, they cannot celebrate Cortes or any other conquistador or viceroy, however worthy. They have to look farther back, to half-clad, human-sacrificing, cannibalistic pagans - and pretend to themselves that those old Indians were worthy warrior-ancestors. They have to turn their backs on their European heritage in a way that Argentines, even Cubans, find absurd. Then they have to reconcile the fact that those storied Indian ancestor's empires were utterly destroyed by a few hundred Catholic Spainiards - more humiliation.

Perhaps immigration enthusiasts who insist that all will be well in the end, even if the flood of Mexican immigrants should become a veritable deluge, since Latin American culture is a variant expression of Western civilization, should be a bit less sanguine. Such historical resentments, stoked and stroked by mythology, could easily be turned to anti-Western purposes among immigrant populations, as indeed is the goal, not only of certain agitators such as the proponents of MeCHA and the Aztlan fantasy, but of all too many American elites and academics, who see in those immigrant flows the fulfillment of the old leftist wet-dream: dissolving the American people and 'electing' another in their place.