Chinatown

December 30th, 2010 admin

Suppose that:

Ali, a notoriously prickly (perhaps even paranoic) but basically decent fellow who lives in a very difficult neighborhood, is getting beat up on by Tikriti, a well-known thug.

Jake, a compulsive do-gooder from outside the neighborhood, intervenes on Ali’s behalf, and Tikriti runs off at the first blow to his tender backside. Jake leans over Ali to inspect his wounds.

At this very moment, “The Caliph,” a local crime-boss who may or may not have…connections…to the vanished Tikriti (nobody seems to know for sure) appears as if from nowhere. Before Jake even realizes what’s happening, he (i.e., “The Caliph”) sticks a pen-knife into Ali’s rib-cage, before fading once more into the darkness from whence he came – but not before giving Jake a well-aimed spit-ball in the face.

The first thing that Jake realizes, as he recovers his wits, is that Ali is screaming at him (i.e., Jake): “YOU DID THIS TO ME, YOU INFIDEL SPAWN OF A GOAT!”

So this is where you come in. Suppose you happened to be walking by at the time. Suppose you saw it all. Suppose that, on the whole, you rather like Jake. You think he’s a good guy. What do you say to him?

I’m sorry to say that the older I get, and the more I see, the more tempted I am by the reply:

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

If only I could find some sort of remotely plausible moral justification for that reply. But I can’t. I just can’t.

A tough but slender thread

December 30th, 2010 admin

Last night I saw, as I see every year, what I have long believed to be the last, best hope of the West: home schooling parents and children in action. Every year our local home schooling association has its Talent Night on the Friday nearest to St. Patrick’s Day, which of course this year was St. Patrick’s Day. This is one of the only yearly occasions, and the only indoor occasion (the other being a picnic), on which a large proportion of the members of this particular association are all together in one place. For the most part, our activities take place in smaller groups, formed on an ad hoc basis, and related to interests–sports, support groups for particular interests or parts of the town, and so forth. So Talent Night is where you go to see a bunch of us all together, to see what our kids are up to, to see what home schoolers are like in this Midwestern town.

As I am every year, I was struck by what wonderful children we are raising. As I am every year, I was moved and encouraged. And as every year, this year too I realized, “This is where it’s at. This is where a real generation is being raised to hold on to something, to hold on to Christianity, to carry the light into the future.” And if I’d been blogging in some other year when I felt more verbal inspiration than I happen to be feeling this year, I might have been able to convey something of this sense in greater detail.

But last night, I was struck by something else. The church that lets us use its premises for Talent Night is most decidedly Protestant. In every pew was a copy of the NIV Bible, a moderately contemporary hymnal found now in most evangelical churches, and several of those little rubber cup rings I remember so well from my childhood for the tiny plastic cups after you’ve finished drinking Welch’s grape juice for Communion. None of this came as much of a surprise. But off to one side, off the stage, was a large wooden object that had been moved as part of the stage-clearing for the various performances. A teenage boy–not, I think, a home schooler but a member of the host church, on hand to help with technical details of the sound system–was sitting perched on this wooden object, occasionally swinging his legs, throughout the performance. Suddenly I noticed, behind his legs, the words carved along the side: “In remembrance of me.”

It was the Communion table.

Well, yes, so what? Even from a sacramental perspective, this is just a wooden table, not an altar. They don’t have an altar, because they are memorialists and hence don’t have a Sacrament.

But I must say, it shocked me. Even the “real absence” Baptists of my childhood would not have shunted the Communion table off the stage and let someone sit on it while a concert went on. There was a kind of quasi-sacramental attitude toward the church premises in those days. It may have been inconsistent, but even though the church was not believed to be “holy” or “consecrated,” we kids were told not to run in “the sanctuary,” and the Communion table was treated with a certain care.

And then I realized in a new way how the future of the West looks. For sheerly demographic reasons, and even more especially because they are so very good at the Christian formation of their children, home schooling evangelicals and fundamentalists are carrying on. They are the ones raising the kids (sometimes large families of kids) who are most likely, more likely on average than anyone else’s children, to hold on to something in adulthood, to regard Christianity as a torch they are going to pass on to their own children. This group is held together entirely by their beliefs and by their commitment to them. That is not a weak thing. But there is no objective Sacrament to provide any glue beyond that.

Frankly, I’m not sure how important that is, from a purely sociological perspective. All else is rarely equal. If most of these people were Orthodox or Continuing Anglican or Roman Catholic instead of evangelical Protestant, would they have the vibrancy they currently have, with just a sacramental faith added on top? Would their children have (I say this without blushing) the valuable isolation they currently have from the horrific junk they would otherwise get from their peers, or would their parents send them to schools where they would be de-formed rather than formed?

So I’m not going to claim that things would be better, that the future of Christendom would be more secure, if the people in my local home school association believed in consecrated objects and spaces and, as I do, in the Real Presence, if they were held together by objective holy acts as well as by fervent faith. They’re doing a darned good job as it is.

But still, it struck me…It all hangs by a tough but slender thread.

On Immigration & “Republican Voters”

December 30th, 2010 admin

Before I start on the potentially tangential point of whether these immigrants are in some sense potential “Republican voters,” I should note in fairness that my colleague, Leon Wolf, does argue later in the post for enforcement of the law:

All of that said, I am still a law and order guy. And, I support wholeheartedly any proposal that makes breaking the law more difficult, and more effectively deters lawbreaking in general. Bottom line: I support the Sensenbrenner proposal.

Mr. Wolf’s other points, some of which I am going to disagree with, will have to wait for another post.

Even though I grew up in New Mexico, I won’t pretend that I have spent a lot of time “in and around Hispanic culture,” except insofar as that culture permeates the general culture of New Mexico.  I went to school with a fair few Hispanic kids, and we played on the same basketball team, and for the first seven years of formal schooling I went through mandatory Spanish language classes (and this was at private school), but I’m not going to kid anyone that I had close involvement with “Hispanic culture.”  In school, we learned as much, if not more, about Spanish colonialism than we did about English colonialism, and our derivative cuisine was a constant reminder that we lived in Nuevo Mexico, but most of what we did learn about the Spanish and Mexican periods made the arrival of Gen. Kearny in 1846 seem like an unmitigated blessing for New Mexico.  To my mind, the entry en masse of millions upon millions of Latin Americans seems to be quite plainly a reversal of that change and the introduction of the political habits and mentalities of peoples whose political systems are, in terms of constitutional republicanism, hopelessly flawed.  If we want the broken political systems that drive these people out of their countries eventually reproduced here in miniature, we should keep having them come in at the present rate.

No one would challenge the work ethic of most of the people in question, nor necessarily their dedication to family and religion, which are elements of the debate that have always struck me as quite beside the point.  Quite aside from the broader questions of assimilating new immigrants and whether or not we should reward illegal immigrants in some sense for having come here illegally, which are the central questions, there is the assumption that Hispanic immigrants should make good GOP voters because they are dedicated to work, family and faith.  This assumption seems to be a case of believing something because it should be the case rather than believing something because it is true.

As Michael Dougherty noted the other day in a conversation, black Americans have the very same, often very strong commitments (as well as having, I might add, a far more potent historical reason to identify with the GOP), attenuated severely as they have been by government policy, crass pop culture and demagoguery, and yet there is no question (and there has been no question since FDR) that on all questions of policy, be they fiscal, economic or social (in terms of government supports), the overwhelming majority of black Americans do not see any necessary connection between work, family and faith and the philosophy of government (allegedly) espoused by the GOP.  (For the purposes of argument, I will assume for the moment that we are talking about the most genuinely conservative aspects of GOP political philosophy and not so-called “Big Government conservatism.”)

As someone who has lived in a state with a plurality of these ideal Republican voters, I remain to this day baffled why anyone would think long-established American Hispanics or new Hispanic immigrants would be likely to become Republican voters.  There is the assumption that morally and socially conservative people have a natural home in the GOP, mostly on account of the radicalism that prevails among the Democrats, but especially among minorities very few of the morally and socially conservative people seem to agree.  Certainly, there is a substantial minority of Hispanics, even excluding Cubans, who support the GOP, and these tend to be successful and middle-class Hispanics several generations removed from any immigration.

Needless to say, introducing vast new numbers of the hard-working, family-oriented good Catholics that Mr. Wolf refers to will be introducing batches of new voters for the Democrats, as new immigrants (except for the occasional very odd exception of German liberals and Protestants in the mid-19th century) have routinely flocked to this party.  The GOP can never compete with the sheer enthusiasm for immigrants that the Democrats have always managed to muster.  Furthermore, even as good Catholics these immigrants will not yet have gone through much assimilation, much less Americanisation, and will in all likelihood embrace the economic and social policies of the Democrats on the mistaken but very frequent assumption among Catholic voters that their religious commitments should lead them to support such measures, which will invariably prove to be more “generous” in their provisions than those the GOP will manage to propose (try as it might in recent years to exceed all previous records of government expansion).

There was a time, immediately after statehood and up until the Depression (less than two decades), when Republicans dominated the state in gratitude for a Republican administration granting New Mexico statehood and when Republicans were the party of relatively more progressive politics.  Consistent with that tendency, the then-majority of Hispanics turned to the Democrats on the national level with FDR and never looked back.  The local GOP had been ousted from the legislature even earlier and has never since held a majority again.  That is the politics of a long Americanised, assimilated Hispanic population free of the pressures and cleavages of minority politics that might tend to push Hispanics leftwards.

If Hispanics in New Mexico remain largely registered Democrats, largely loyal to their party except in an occasional presidential election when there may be some defections, what can we reasonably expect from Latin American immigrants who have far more immediate incentives to support the Democrats?  Viewed in terms of historic voting patterns, there is simply no question that enabling or encouraging mass immigration is a long-term death sentence for the GOP and the sorts of policies that it officially advocated, at least up until 5 years ago.  The GOP can try to follow Mr. Bush’s lead and engage in a bidding war for the votes of immigrants and their children, but it will lose the bidding and also never be able to keep its coalition together in the process.

Cross-posted at Eunomia

Overhearing the Future

December 30th, 2010 admin

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.

Friendship and restraint.

December 30th, 2010 admin

I have not often had occasion to praise President Bush over the course of his second term in office. Of late, I have only found myself increasingly entrenched in opposition to him, and locked in debate with his defenders, some earnest and honorable, others brassbound and full of sophistry.

I extend to him my praise this Monday morning. I believe it merited by his response so far to the crisis on the Israel-Lebanon border. President Bush is doing something unpretentious but utterly necessary: he is enunciating our principles, true and simple. They are, chiefly, two in number. (1) Israel is our ally and friend. (2) Regional war should be avoided, if it is possible to avoid it. The first precedes the second, and thus we must be unabashed in our affirmation of friendship and support. Happily, Israel needs no material or military support; she is perfectly capable of taking care of herself, which is in part why — and sometimes I wonder if Americans realize this — she is such a valuable ally. We share with her not only the affections of kindred, and an accord of interest, but the vigor of independence.

What support Israel needs, in short, is only that natural and unguilty support, and eagerness of support, which friend feels toward friend. In diplomacy, in public utterance, in oratory, whatever of that may be needed, we will calmly maintain our backing of Israel, while working to avoid committing ourselves, awkwardly and needlessly, into a crisis that does not, in point of fact, involve us.

When this crisis first exploded into one — or at least showed itself to be something more than the usual crisis in that unfortunate land — sometime last week, some friends of mine were quick to raise the parallel of the crisis of 1914 in Sarajevo, which became a war that destroyed a world. Well of them to do that, though I have some question whether the raising of such an awful parallel would have the effect they might expect. The point of this parallel, as I see it, is that a small quarrel, reacted to in sufficient folly and truculence, can become a regional war, or even a global war, faster than anyone can defuse it. Now the First World War obliterated the prosperity and hope of the Nineteenth Century; from it came Bolshevism and the first ironclad Communist States, and a proliferation of totalitarian parties, some of which would go on to careers of wickedness beyond imagination; in it was laid the groundwork of the Second War, and its blood and massacre. If you raise this parallel, the lesson you teach is an emphatically cautionary one. As it should be.

Caution, also, President Bush has shown — caution and restraint. He deserves praise for it.

The Siege of Famagusta, 1571.

December 30th, 2010 admin

Crowds of journalists have of late flocked to Cyprus, that storied island nation, and as it happens Cyprus was in the news on this very date — exactly 435 years ago, at the Siege of Famagusta.

Cyprus can lay claim to being the first country on earth governed by a Christian sovereign, the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus, converted by St. Paul, along with Sts. Barnabas and Mark, on his first missionary journey. It remained Roman (and Byzantine) for 800 years, excepting a brief period of Arab occupation, until its conquest by the Crusaders under Richard the Lionhearted. By the mid-15th century, when all the Christian world was shaken by the fall of Constantinople, it came under Venetian influence, and soon after became an important possession in that illustrious city’s Mediterranean empire. The coat of arms of the Lion of St. Mark, and the protection of her galleys, preserved the island in Christian hands until July of 1571.
On some pretext, authenticated by a pliant mufti, the Sultan succeeded in nullifying a treaty of peace he had signed with Venice; and he declared, on fine Islamic principle, that since Cyprus had once been Muslim, it should again come under the peace of the ummah. “Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth!” He raised an army of nearly 100,000 men, many of them the dreaded Janissaries, and put it under the command of an ambitious general, Lala Mustafa Pasha, his former tutor. The invasion force landed in July of 1570 in the southern district of Limassol. Lala Mustafa did not expect much resistance. The Greek Cypriots were Orthodox and agrarian, and had little fondness for their Catholic and Capitalist Venetian masters. After a six-week siege, the city of Nicosia, in the center of the island, capitulated on a guarantee that the lives of the Venetian troops and Cypriot townsmen would be spared. But Lala Mustafa betrayed his pledge and put most of them to the sword, many after terrible torture. The young boys and girls were enslaved and sent to the harems of leading Turks. One among their number merits particular mention: Amalda de Rocas by name, she choose death over dishonor and captivity, setting fire to the powder magazine of a slaver ship before it even reached Anatolia.

Famagusta is on the eastern side of the island, a fortress town. Its governor was a proud Venetian, Marcantonio Bragadino, and his resolve was only stiffened by Lala Mustafa’s macabre gift to him of the head of Nicosia’s governor. The Turks laid siege to Famagusta, and commenced a fearsome bombardment; but the town, defended by men outnumbered almost twenty to one, nonetheless resisted valiantly. The fury of Lala Mustafa was exceeded only by the impatience of the Sultan, who had visions of sailing his enormous fleet up the Adriatic to invade Venice itself. The banners of St. Mark still flew over the town nearly a year later. Venice was never more deserving of her emblem the Lion of the Sea. The determination of the Venetians, and their Greek subjects (who now, in the face of a pitiless enemy, we may guess, had set aside their resentment of the Italians), postponed a renewed Ottoman war against Mediterranean Europe, and secured precious time for Pope St. Pius V to organize, through patient negotiation, the Holy League of Catholic Europe, which under Don John of Austria met the Turks several months later in the Gulf of Corinth at one of the bloodiest and greatest naval battles in history: Lepanto.

At last, in July of 1571, a section of the main wall of Famagusta was, after countless costly attempts, blown apart, and the defenders — now reduced to a mere two thousand men — were forced to surrender.

The terms of their surrender were remarkably favorable: military honors, safe passage, and the liberty of the townsmen. Whether Bragadino trusted his enemy’s word, when he rode out on August 4, beaten but unbowed, to deliver the surrender, can only be conjectured; that he recognized his defeat was clear enough. In the event Lala Mustafa, enraged at the pride of the Venetians, turned to treachery again; and, as Paul Fregosi writes, “Now began one of the most horrendous scenes of individual savagery recorded in the history of the Jihad.” The Janissaries fell upon Bragadino’s honor-guard, dismembering them; they cut off Bragadino’s ears and nose and threw him into a dank cell, where he languished for two weeks before being dragged out, beaten and humiliated, and flayed alive. His ruined body, filled with straw, was hoisted on Lala Mustafa’s galley and carried away to Constantinople.

News of this cruelty reached the marines and sailors of the Holy League only two days before the Battle of Lepanto began. Bragadino’s own brothers commanded two of the Venetian navy’s newest innovation: the massive galleasses, capable of delivering six times the firepower of a Turkish galley, which would prove instrumental at Lepanto. Word of the Agony of Famagusta spread throughout the fleet, and hardened the Christians against their enemy. “It is a good day to die,” declared another Venetian. And on that day the cruelty of the Turkish conquerors of Cyprus was avenged, and the menace of the Turk on the Mediterranean delivered a blow from which it would never fully recover. The Ottoman Standard, a banner inscribed 28,900 times in gold with the name of Allah, a treasure once carried by the Prophet himself, can still be viewed — in Venice.

In Defense of a Christian Nation

December 30th, 2010 admin

(This is a follow-up to a previous post, found here.)

I know, it sounds like the title of a book, the writing of which I will leave to another of suitable leisure, ambition and learning. (Paul Cella sounds about right.)

And so I left Charles Krauthammer’s piece wondering which tyranny I ought to prefer, that of the judges or of the people, and, should I choose the latter – assuming the yoke of my fellows’ opinions to be less onerous than that of the philosopher-kings – wondering further when their ‘ethos’ might change, and to what degree, and why I should have to submit to any tyranny at all.

This is a question both Christian and atheist, conservative and liberal, reactionary and progressive, are entitled to ask. I am not concerned here with the practical matters of politics, such as how many senators each state ought to have, whether gerrymandering is constitutional, or how many votes should be required to shut down a filibuster. I am concerned with the moral matter of our constitution’s legal and cultural foundation, with the (and here I use a word that may send some fleeing, as before a cross) tradition that gave it birth, for it is in this arena that the difficulties between the above-named parties become most evident, and in their resolution most crucial to the kind of nation we were, are, and shall (or have) become.

I have seen Mr. Krauthammer described as a sort of sub-species of conservative, though whether it be of the neo, paleo, or whatever variety has lately entered the parlance, I haven’t been able to make out. And this is because neither can I perceive any reference to some version of a tradition enveloping his appeal to the popular will and its ‘ethos,’ which is his only appeal. In his contention that the Marriage Protection amendment would amount to a contravention of a future exercise of the popular will, one longs, in vain, for a feel of where, in his heart of hearts, he stands on the matter, of some truth hovering in the background that would, in its immutability, allow him to acknowledge that, yes, bad things happen, or might happen, but that it is bad and here’s why.

He’s not alone. Others whose conservative credentials are not generally questioned have expressed similar sentiments, though perhaps not for the same reasons. In the July 3rd issue of National Review (sorry, link will only work for subscribers), Ramesh Ponnuru expresses irritation with George Will’s “irritation” with social conservatives, and notes in passing that said annoyances “…do, sometimes, overreach. Will is probably right to consider both intelligent design and the marriage amendment instances of such overreaching. (I would also point to the insistence, by many social conservatives, that America is in some constitutional sense a ‘Christian nation.’)” I don’t know that it’s proper to call Fr. Richard Neuhaus and his colleagues conservative, save in matters theological, but in that magazine’s 1997 publication of “We Hold These Truths: A Statement of Christian Conscience and Citizenship“, written in the wake of “our November 1996 symposium on judicial usurpation”, a not unfamiliar sentiment surfaces. After appealing to the Founders’ invocation of “the laws of nature and nature’s God,” after asserting that “Nations are ultimately judged not by their military might or economic wealth but by their fidelity to” those two things, after claiming that “In the view of the Founders, just government is self-government,” that “Liberty is not license but is ‘ordered liberty’ – liberty in response to moral truth,” the Statement concludes with this: “We reject the idea that ours should be declared a ‘Christian’ nation. We do not seek a sacred public square but a civil public square.”

Well, you’ve got one. Considering the issues that divide us, it’s about as civil as one might expect. And why does Father Neuhaus and his long list of interdenominational eminences reject such a declaration? “Our purpose is to revitalize a polity in which all the people of ‘we the people’ are full participants.” Shades of Krauthammer. They say it in several ways, but it always comes to the same thing. They would prefer that events move in a particular direction, but offer no mechanism by which it might be accomplished. They want their share of the popular will to be heard, but in the end will remain at the mercy of whichever ‘ethos’ holds the greater share.

Fr. Neuhaus et. al were at the time of writing most concerned about “judicial usurpation.” And I hope it will not be necessary to establish the claim, but rather a self-evident fact (and a cause of great rejoicing for some), that, beginning at least with the school prayer decision in the early 60’s, that usurpation has proceeded fairly unhindered, that Supreme Court decisions since have had about them the look of a concerted effort to dismantle the ‘ethos’ that prevailed in previous years and even centuries, and that for a majority of these justices an ethos is a thing most mutable, one being subject to replacement by another, ending with certainty in the moral anarchy of a society that knows no truth. I hope likewise that it is not necessary to establish that this ethos was in its essence a Christian entity (with due homage to its Jewish predecessor), our inheritance from an earlier entity called Christendom, and that it is no burst of paranoia for socially conservative Christians to feel that their inheritance has in modern times come under a relentless and corrosively successful attack – for them to feel that their nation has been taken from them.

The constitution is certainly no Christian document in the same sense as that which might issue from a religious organization. It has nothing to say about the ordering of our religious affairs except to prohibit an establishment of it, and forbidding any interference with its “free exercise.” By Congress. Thus, readers might be interested to know that, simultaneous with the school prayer decision, the state of Massachussetts had on its books a 137 year old law – not merely suggesting or encouraging – but requiring prayer in its public schools, the constitutionality of which law seemed never to have been questioned until the Supreme Court decision rendered it null and void. A majority of the School Board members, the teachers, and parents were initially of a mind to resist, a spokeman for that Board saying things you will no longer hear from any school board in the land: “We will challenge and defy the world movement toward atheism. This is Massachussetts, the cradle of liberty…here is where the first shots are going to be fired.” (Go read the whole fascinating story.)* My, how far the state which now offers its citizens gay marriage has traveled. By now, of course – except for the very occasional surfacing of a figure like Judge Roy Moore – all resistance has collapsed. And that includes any opposition offered by a majority of what once was called “the conservative movement.” The Court’s dispensation has prevailed. It’s all about the rule of law, not “the laws of Nature and of nature’s God.”

In its ostensible neutrality toward religion, are we to understand as settled doctrine the dictate that our constitution has no obligation to any particular set of religious propositions or to any understanding of moral truth, nor any duty at least to protect those propositions which gave birth to a particular culture? That such doctrine need not be considered settled is hinted at in Sandra Day O’Connor’s concurrence with the 8-0 majority which rejected the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal’s effort to eject God from the Pledge of Allegiance. Says she: “Certain ceremonial references to God and religion in our nation are the inevitable consequence of the religious history that gave birth to our founding principles of liberty.” Though I’m sure the irony escapes her, even she of the abortion right knows what’s back there, in the past, what got it all started. It seems to me that Judge Moore’s desire to display the 10 Commandments in his courthouse was no more than one of those “ceremonial references,” but we are not about to accuse the justices of complete consistency.

That whole God in the Pledge of Allegiance mess puts me in mind of something I wrote a long time ago in its immediate aftermath, and which was also a response to the opinion of libertarian Atlanta talk show host Neal Boortz, to whom I was listening while driving to work, leaving my students to wonder why I was in such a sour mood once I got there. Boortz thought

the Ninth Circuit’s ruling [to be] correct because what the “under God” in the pledge accomplishes is to establish the religion of monotheism, something I’d always considered more a philosophical conclusion than a religious one. It may, of course, entail belief in one God, but not because the doctrine of some religious institution requires it. This belief can be arrived at through metaphysical enterprise. Even Aquinas had, so he claimed, several ways of proving it without once appealing to Revelation. And certainly the belief being “established” in the pledge would not be Christianity, for Muslims, Jews and Unitarians do not accept the doctrine of the Trinity as compatible with belief in one God. It seems to me the difference between monotheism and religion is that a religion requires an identifiable institution with some kind of hierarchical structure, rituals of worship, and a body of dogma to be either accepted or rejected. For the government to establish a religion, it would have to create a law compelling membership in this “identifiable institution” with penalties attached for failure to adhere – in short, the forfeiture of those civil rights that normally are the privilege of citizenship. We begin to see that “original intent” is another name for historical context, an idea that does not at all comport with Mr. Boortz’s literal, we might say fundamentalist, reading of the first amendment – to wit, that any mention of religion by the government, any support given to it, is in fact an establishment of it. He treats the constitution as though it came to us fresh from God’s hand, free of all cultural connections. It becomes in effect a divine document. Nothing else is to be referred to. The Declaration of Independence, which enunciates a huge moral and religious principle upon which the Constitution was built, holds no sway. The Declaration flowered in the ground of that great body of Anglo-Saxon law, tilled over many long centuries by what great influence, do you suppose? Need I utter the name of Christendom? Which was itself constructed, by however many fitful and strife-torn efforts, in however many frightfully flawed forms, on what great foundation stone? I think you see where this is leading. If the Supreme Court upholds Mr. Boortz’s position, perhaps our society will continue to evolve in the direction it has been going. Maybe some of us will live to see that foundation stone removed from the edifice of our culture. Mr. Boortz may not like monotheism, but I’d sure like to be around when he gets a taste of full-blown paganism.

(Actually, in hindsight, I’m not sure paganism – which makes room for stoics, ascetics and ceremonial virgins – might not be superior to what’s coming upon us.)

In general I was attempting to defend

a serious claim that citizens outraged by the pledge decision simply take for granted: that our people and the culture that defines their very lives is more than the Constitution. The culture gave birth to the Constitution, parent to the child. The document is an artifact of that culture, not its discoverer. It was formed to protect that culture, not to eviscerate it, and therefore cannot be considered the enemy, nor a neutral arbiter, of governmental beneficence toward a specific notion of civic or even moral virtue, of monotheism in general or of Christianity in particular, from whence that virtue arises. Could the Founders be asked, I believe they would declare that our institutions – the public schools, the Congress, even the Courts – ought to be warriors in defense of this virtue, of what is commonly called the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that their banner of battle is the Constitution itself. As long as no man is compelled to “pledge allegiance” to this faith as a condition of citizenship, no establishment has been accomplished. If you don’t think the Constitution was meant to protect that tradition, I ask you to imagine what our country would be like if, by some warped twist of events, another tradition supplanted it, say, Islam. The societies that currently practice it are not big on “separation of church and state.” The process of debate as to whether or not a certain thing ought to be considered obscene, for example, they would find blasphemous. The process of amendment they would find crushingly laborious. The Constitution wouldn’t last two weeks.

But now I think I would like to see judges and holders of political office made, if not to pledge allegiance to that faith, at least prevented from demonstrating their “neutrality” toward it by in fact destroying it. At the risk of offending Mr. Krauthammer’s aversion to “pockmarking” the constitution with many amendments, I propose we crater it with one declaring this a Christian nation. The legalese of its wording I leave to those with a taste for it, but it might proceed along the following lines:

–The Christianity referred to would have to be that which has historically been shared by Protestant and Catholic alike (that is, anything prior to the Lambeth Conference of 1930) and dogmatically asserted in, and only in, the Nicene Creed; and that moral tradition depending from it about which Blackstone wrote in an inspired way:

This will of his Maker is called the law of nature…This law of nature, being coeval with mankind and dictated by God Himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this…Upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation, depend all human laws; that is to say, no human laws should be suffered to contradict these.

(It used to be that when a man spoke like that, most people understood what he was talking about. It is a matter for rediscovery.)

–The constitutional prohibition against a test for religious office would not be abrogated, every man remaining free to believe and worship as he sees fit, but rendered powerless to overthrow by statute or judicial fiat the aforementioned moral tradition. He would not be asked to swear allegiance to the faith, but only to uphold in law its precepts. If he finds this to be a burden of hypocrisy upon his soul, he should seek another outlet for his ambition.
–And, consequent to the foregoing, no establishment of religion will have been promulgated, as there is no such thing as The Christian Church. You can’t show me the cathedral in which it is headquartered, nor the clergy which preside over it.
–No member of the clergy of any facet of Christianity, including members of religious orders, will be permitted to hold office, the conduct of public affairs belonging properly to the sphere of the secular citizen who, though he may share the faith of his guides and inspirations, occupies from them a station in life different in kind. Pat Robertson will have to ward off hurricanes from the security of his television studio, not with Abe Lincoln looking over his shoulder.

That’s just to get us started. Obviously, such an amendment would require the immediate reversal of any number of Supreme Court decisions, though it will have come too late for Nancy Cruzan, Terri Schiavo, many millions of aborted babies, and the many more millions of our young people (and adults) whose souls have been corrupted by ubiquitous pornography courtesy of our Supreme Court’s esteemed neutrality, the cowardice of local zoning boards, city commissions, state and federal legislatures, and the apathy of our fellow citizens.

I live a rich fantasy life, but am not naive. In this temporal vale there is no escaping the “popular will”. Such an amendment could at any time be repealed, and in the current atmosphere would not only not reach the floor of our Republican controlled Congress, but would probably be stomped into it. But there might be some pleasure in the effort of bringing it forward, as your fellow citizens – the overwhelming majority of whom identify themselves as Christian – would be made to show their collective hand.
________________________

* A hat tip to Paul Cella for steering me (us) to the ISI archives of Willmoore Kendall. I did not read the recommended essay, but found another equally rewarding: American Conservatism and the “Prayer” Decisions. Mr. Kendall’s piece is long, absolutely riveting, and entertainingly prescient in its critique of conservatism and the consequences yet to come (e.g. battles over crosses in the classroom, creches in city hall). Part of his thesis involves a solution similar to my own, for he too wishes to mess with the constitution, though in a different fashion: he wants us to stop what he calls “agu-barguing” with the Court, and urges us instead to – get this – repeal the 14th amendment, to whose continuing presence he attributes many evils.

American immigration: who gets in?

December 30th, 2010 admin

Also at SwordsCrossed.

“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

America prides itself on being a land of immigrants. “Give me your tired, your poor,” begins Emma Lazarus’ poem. For most of American history, the immigrants were remarkably similar to their predecessors: trans-Atlantic migrants, Christian (or, in the case of Jews, from majority-Christian societies), and European. Prior to the Second World War, the only significant exceptions to this rule of thumb were the Chinese and Japanese of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the miniscule numbers of Christian Arabs who began settling in places like Dearborn, Michigan. Their numbers were not enough to make a difference in the popular conception of this country, nor in the idea of the citizen’s duty toward it.

And so America has never truly had to face existential questions of what immigration might do to a nation. This is not to say that it was not at points a burning concern: the Know-Nothings of the mid-19th century were profoundly worried — the point of mob violence — at the Catholic influx; and the Exclusion Acts targeting Asians were reflective of the racism of the period. At bottom, though, we know that the attendant fears were unjustified. America and the American identity stayed broadly the same: rooted in Judeo-Christian concepts of morality, Anglo-Saxon concepts of governance, and what Max Weber would consider a “Protestant” ethic. This did not appear to change no matter how many Italians, Irish, Greeks, Norwegians, or Russian Jews were added to the mix.

How things change.

The old pattern of immigration had two things in common: first, it was almost wholly legal, cross-oceanic smuggling being then and now perilous and rare; second, it was allowed according to a very different set of criteria than we have today. The primary concern of the drafters of immigration law prior to the Second World War were concerned with basic questions of pragmatism and identity: Whom can we absorb economically? Whom can we absorb culturally? The result was a quota system that allowed in, relative to those wishing to immigrate, disproportionate numbers of Europeans. The Immigration Act of 1924 allocated immigration quotas by country specifically in proportion to preexisting communities within the United States. While this is not necessarily an ideal methodology (and certainly the 1924 Act itself had some objectionable provisions and premises), the bottom line remains that its framers sought to preserve the existing makeup of American society as a means of preserving existing American identity. Immigration was therefore framed to bolster the ranks of the self-identified American — not merely politically, but culturally — and the distances traveled meant that the separation from the mother country in an era of steam and coal seafaring was usually a permanent one.

Something happened in the 1960s to change all this. As part of a broader loss of cultural and national self-confidence, the idea that immigration policy should prefer Europeans, Christians, Jews, or other readily assimilable groups was dropped in favor of more equitable quotas for almost every nation in the world. Now, despite the protestations of those who equate Americanism with whiteness, let it be said that this specific policy change has not meaningfully harmed America.

Not yet.

But it could. We have been blessed with two phenomena in the wake of this policy shift. First, our immigrants, for the most part, come to work, and to partake of a concept of a preexisting America that they actively wish to join. Second, our free market system (comparative to most of the rest of the world, anyway) dulls and sometimes supplants the cultural differences that might otherwise be a source of conflict.

Still: dulls, not erases, and sometimes, not always. Man is not, with apologies to the libertarians, a purely economic animal. The truth is that as we let in increasing numbers from communities that do not share the same cultural premises as the American mainstream, the chance for conflict increases proportionately. We need only look to Europe to see the grim results of an alien cultural bloc transplanted into the heart of a society at odds with the values and mores of the immigrants’ homelands. Islam and the tribal ethic together, placed into the post-Christian context of a socialist Europe, have given us insurrections in France and Belgium, the ritual slaughter of public figures in the Netherlands, rush-hour massacres in London and Madrid, 9/11 killers from Germany, and dire threats to Danes everywhere. The list goes on. Now, Europe is not an exact parallel to the American experience: Muslim immigrants there, especially in Germany, have long been something of a helot class, unable to aspire to mere citizenship. If America has escaped the worst of the European experience, it is partly a factor of numbers, and partly a factor of the drive to Americanization.

But as that drive falters, the danger from those who would be affected by it grows. When Germans sank American ships in 1917, popular pressure virtually erased overt German culture from the United States within the year. Fast-forward to this decade: when Muslims massacred 3,000 Americans, the President rushed to a mosque, and Yale subsequently enrolled the spokesman of the atrocity’s sponsoring regime. None of this is to yearn for a society that would dub the humble pita Freedom’s Flatbread. But it is to note that the social impulses which force the assimilation of even the most alien of immigrant communities is fading, and has been for some time.

This is not simply an academic concern. We already have examples of troubling behavior from Muslim communities in the United States. If we are not in Europe’s straits, why tread that path? If we cannot bring to bear internal and informal mechanisms to ward off this problem, why not external and formal ones? With that in mind, why not simply demand that new arrivals from the relevant faith take an oath, enforceable in a court of law, that they do not and will not support the concept of violent jihad, the idea of the dhimmi, the killing of Jews, et cetera? Surely this is a reasonable request to make of a person.

The objection will be raised that this is discriminatory and hence unjust. It is assuredly the former. But the latter is the result of a construct of the recent past that needs to be discarded. If there is a case that predisposing or prejudicial beliefs are somehow exempt from the judgmental gaze of government, it is yet to be made. The FBI surveys groups espousing white supremacism for a reason: why not groups espousing jihad? Does the religious nature of the belief place it under the protections of the Constitution, even as it seeks to destroy the very liberties of that Constitution? Is there any precedent in American history for this singling-out of a faith?

Yes.

The precedent is the 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act, which effectively disestablished the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints until that entity gave up its doctrine of polygamy. The Mormons were effectively declared an organized-crime outfit: their properties were confiscated, and their leaders were driven underground. It took three years, but in 1890 they abandoned polygamy, Utah became a state, and the Mormons, despite Krakauer, have been good, patriotic, and peaceful Americans ever since. One, Mitt Romney, even has a shot at being President shortly. They were forced to join the civilized world by the United States government, which cared more for the norms of American culture than the values of the Mormon faith — and rightly so. Looking back, it is difficult to deny that this vigorous action — in which no American was killed, deported, put into camps, or hunted down — was to the ultimate benefit of the country and the Mormons.

If we could act with that degree of sanity, self-preservation, and humanity in 1887-1890, why not now? If we cannot, it is not because Muslims now — or any other immigrant community now — are worse than Mormons then: it is because we have lost the self-confidence to do it.

Who gets in? Who gets to come into the United States? Who gets to become an American? We must have immigrants. We need them. But we need the right kind. Peter Schramm, founder of the John Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs, tells a particular story of his youth. He and his family fled the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. As they prepared to leave, he asked his father where they were going. “America,” came the reply. “Why America?” asked the young boy. “Because,” said his father, “we were born American — just in the wrong place.”

That is the kind of immigrant we need. This essay, no doubt, seems to be mostly about Muslims. Do not miss the more fundamental point: that the United States has every right, and a positive duty, to ensure that new Americans are the right kind of Americans. And the right kind of Americans are the ones who share our values, aspire to our norms, and wish to live among us as us. There are plenty of those, and they are not confined to any one race, color, or country. If we know where many of them are not, well, we would be remiss to not regard those corners with due caution.

Having asserted the right of the United States to control its borders as aggressively as it sees fit, the reader may note that the crux of the immigration issue in America remains unaddressed: not Muslims, whom we address here as instructive example, but Hispanics. They are an issue and a plight unto themselves, and I will turn to them shortly.

A strange turn for the Right.

December 30th, 2010 admin

From the Archives: Here I reprint an old essay that, it seems to me, has aged pretty well. I have revised it many times and offer now an update for those EM readers who are interested.

+++++++++++++++++

Some years ago, while wandering the grand and fantastic landscape of the Internet, I stumbled upon by chance a truly remarkable piece of journalism by Mr. Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times (“Desperately Seeking Hamilton,” March 4, 2003). In it he attempted to assuage European fears of American “unilateralism” in the build-up to the second war in Iraq, by assuring his readers that American hawks are, in fact, “joining the European quest for a post-national global order, but on their own terms.” I nearly fell out of my chair when I read that line. Mr. Caldwell is supposed by most to be a Conservative; and it should not be a matter of indifference when Conservatives talk like that. His argument was either advanced disingenuously, as a kind of emollient pre-war sophistry, or it reveals something quite sinister. And since it is only fair to regard a serious man like Mr. Caldwell as serious in his contentions, I must register here, again, my astonishment at what he wrote; and my creeping dismay at what it reveals.

If one were to idly open The New York Times and discover in the pages of that aging institution furious anathemas pronounced against homosexual marriage, one might pause in puzzlement. If a leisurely viewer were to note suddenly that Sen. Hillary Clinton had lapsed, in the midst of a very typical campaign event, into a passionate and strident defense of free enterprise, a kind of anti-socialist harangue that would stir the hearts of every Austrian economist in earshot, the viewer might sit up in his chair rather sharply. This is exactly the effect that Mr. Caldwell’s column had on me that day.

“It is a commonplace,” writes Mr. Caldwell, “that, in an era of globalization, nation states lack the reach to solve important economic, ecological and military problems.” A commonplace, eh? Let us assume then, arguendo, that this proposition is indeed a “commonplace.” Let us further assume, again arguendo, that this commonplace constitutes something new under the sun — and not something natural and perennial — as Mr. Caldwell’s mention of the “era of globalization” seems to suggest. It still does not follow that (1) this proposition points to something desirable; or that (2) it points to something inevitable. In short, the nation-state might indeed be limited in its reach, and yet still valuable in its place. A “post-national global order,” however conceived, might still, whatever limits we acknowledge as binding the nation-state, be a thing to be espied with a choke of horror.

There is a finely-wrought scene in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, a scene which does not, I think, appear in the book but which surely comports with the story. The hobbit Frodo, the Ringbearer, falls while climbing up a snowy mountainside; and he discovers that he has lost the terrible One Ring that he has set out to destroy. His companion Boromir, a great warrior, whose corruption by the Ring has already been hinted at, picks it up, and seems to fall into a kind of trance while gazing upon it. The Ring has perhaps ensnared him. But another of Frodo’s companions, the Ranger Aragorn, heir to the throne of Gondor, calls out, “Boromir! Give Frodo the Ring.” And Boromir relents, returning the Ring to its Bearer in a somewhat strained good humor. But the cunning director of the film allows us a final telling shot. Aragorn’s hand has strayed to the sword sheathed at his waist: he was prepared to draw the blade against his own friend, fearing (rightly, as it turns out) that the seductive power of the Ring has consumed him.

This is the kind of thing one feels when one reads serious men talking breezily about the demise of the nation-state: The Ring of Power is driving them mad.

But what is really interesting about these strange arguments emanating from a man of the Right is what they reveal: namely, that replacing the nation-state is now a project of some of the most influential members of the American Right as well as a commanding portion of the international Left. Just like that, we are told, we should jettison the nation-state (or, more precisely, we are told that the jettisoning has already begun); and with it a lot of other stuff most of us always thought of as decent and venerable. The principle of decentralized government, of diverse sources of authority with compass only over those with whom they are familiar, which Roman Catholics call subsidiarity; the principle variety, in economy, in political arrangement, in social state, in religious establishment, in vision and ideal; the principle of resistance to uniformity, of defense of eccentricity, of multiplicity of cultural attachments — these are all good, solid, rousing Conservative principles. They endure because they approach and reflect the truth of the nature of man and society. Mr. Caldwell’s vision of a “post-national global order” would cast them aside like depleted old vessels, the remnants of strange archaic fashions and crazes. “As America sees it,” he writes, “there are two obvious problems with the UN as a world government. First, it is incomplete.” Incomplete? No: first, it is monstrous. Mr. Caldwell must know that leveling force of the State will not be reduced by broadening its jurisdiction and its authority; he must know that in this country the slow obliteration of the principle of federalism (sometimes by self-inflicted wounds) has effected a steady diminution of ordered freedom. He must know, in short, as our Fathers in America knew, that to make the State larger, and its authority less limited, is to make human liberty more meager and debased.

Mr. Caldwell continues, “Some time before the end of the Iraq crisis,” by which he means the build-up to the second Iraq war, “it will become clear that the U.S. differs with Europe not over the need for post-national structures but over how those structures should be built. A nasty shock could be in store. By the time Europeans realise they do not have a monopoly on multilateral thinking, the U.S. may already have come up with a more serviceable blueprint for a post-national order.”

This is a quite thoroughly revolutionary vision; to deliver with such glibness a proposed overthrow of the entire constitution of our civilization, which rests in part on the sovereignty of the nation-state, is a spectacle that . . . well, that inclines one to reach for one’s sword. If you thought the European Union betrayed menacing despotic tendencies in its rush to consolidate uniformity of government, this new project will make that look like child’s play. Mr. Caldwell makes a few obligatory concessions to constitutional principles — “Americans assume it is too risky to move to post-national structures without a separation of powers of the sort that England developed and Locke, Montesquieu, and the American founders taxonomised” — but forgive me if I harbor doubts that all the despots of the world will make the same concessions when a stake in the new “post-national” bureaucracy is proffered to them. In my reading, constitutional government, that is, real limited government, with efficacious mechanisms to check to aggrandizement of State over the individual, and which perseveres in the face of all the rapacious schemes of the political brigand, is a peculiarly evanescent achievement. In the modern age, outside of the British Isles and North America and a few other isolated places, it has hardly ever existed. Now, as the modern age comes to its miasmic and disordered end, we have influential people who seem to fancy that this precious commodity, this delicate achievement assembled on a mass of human knowledge and wisdom astonishing in its range and profundity, can be simply imposed, following the effacement of that troublesome structure the nation-state, on the globe from the lofty heights of a world government. It does not strike me as unreasonable to reply that such a project will merely mean the demise of constitutional government.

Mr. Caldwell’s essay contains a certain candor; not often do men of the Right so baldly advocate the dismantling of the nation-state and replacing it with some chimerical world order. But the vision he adumbrates is detestable; it borders on madness I think. “The real American is all right,” wrote G. K. Chesterton. “It is the ideal American who is all wrong.” Mr. Caldwell’s vision of a “post-national order” is an attempt to remake the world in the image of that ideal American. He imagines that some improved version of the UN will emerge as the world’s legislative body, replacing in a stroke, or at least emasculating, all the august parliaments and assemblies and congresses by which human liberty has been preserved for five hundred years and more. He imagines America as the executive, but more nearly she would simply be the executor, or maybe the executioner. And whence would come the judiciary? Perhaps the International Criminal Court.

It is noteworthy that in this Post-National Global Order there is no room for patriots, only ideologues. Patriotism rooted in home and hearth, in actual places and actual people, in particular things rather than tedious abstractions; patriotism of this sort will be crushed. I do not say that patriotism is only about “home and hearth,” but I do say that without those things it is little more than an ideology. It must be tethered to reality by concrete things; in the language of philosophy, it must have it Aristotelian ballast against its Platonic ideal. Already there are signs that patriotism, as a natural human sentiment, has fallen in to disrepute — as when people say that one becomes an American by assenting to certain ideas about democracy, thereby making American patriotism contingent on a democratist (almost Jacobin) ideology. It is no longer enough that a man simply loves his country. By making the love of one’s country dependent on some sophisticated set of propositions, subject to the depredations of the intellectual classes, we will have, in Burke’s memorable idiom, “subtilized ourselves into savages.” By giving patriotism over to the empire of ideologists, we will have called forth our ruin. Where is the place for the man of unpretentious intellectual aspirations, whose intelligence, quite potent in its own way, is dedicated to things practical and textile, in this scheme of national constitution? Where is the place for the carpenter who knows little of federalism or judicial restraint, but knows America, and loves her dearly? for the fireman who hasn’t read his Harry Jaffa, but is moved to tears by the sight of Old Glory? If these men cannot love their country because she is their country; if, instead, they are asked to love ideas, and call them a country, then we have gutted patriotism, and replaced it with ideology. Chesterton apprehended the gist of this dreary trend long ago; and it has rarely been more sublimely rendered than in the following digression, from the grand genius of digression, in his biography of St. Francis of Assisi, which I quote in full:

War had broken out between Assisi and Perugia. It is now fashionable to say in a satirical spirit that such wars did not so much break out as go on indefinitely between the city-states of mediaeval Italy. It will be enough to say here that if one of these mediaeval wars had really gone on without stopping for a century, it might possibly have come within a remote distance of killing as many people as we kill in a year in one of our great modern scientific wars between our great modern industrial empires. But the citizens of the mediaeval republic were certainly under the limitation of only being asked to die for the things with which they had always lived, the houses they inhabited, the shrines they venerated and the rulers and representatives they knew; and had not the larger vision calling them to die for the latest rumours about remote colonies as reported in anonymous newspapers. And if we infer from our own experience that war paralysed civilisation, we must at least admit that these warring towns turned out a number of paralytics who go by the names of Dante and Michael Angelo, Ariosto and Titian, Leonardo and Columbus, not to mention Catherine of Siena and the subject of this story. While we lament all this local patriotism as a hubbub of the Dark Ages, it must seem a rather curious fact that about three quarters of the greatest men who ever lived came out of these little towns and were often engaged in these little wars. It remains to be seen what will ultimately come out of our large towns; but there has been no sign of anything of this sort since they became large; and I have sometimes been haunted by a fancy of my youth, that these things will not come till there is a city wall round Clapham and the tocsin is rung at night to arm the citizens of Wimbledon.

And what then, we might go on to wonder, will become of us when even our large towns have given way to global “post-national structures”?

Thoughts on war.

December 30th, 2010 admin

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight
But roaring Bill who killed him
Thought it right.
— Hilaire Belloc

What have the last four and a half years taught Conservatives about war? One thing is that a treacherous and spectacular attack against her will make a republic more warlike. This rather platitudinous statement is nonetheless lost on a surprising number of people. I am certainly more sympathetic to the Old Right, with its isolationist and pacifist tendencies, than perhaps anyone else around here; but even I think the remnants of that strident and vigorous faction have made themselves blind on this point. As have the “pale Ebenezers” among our Liberals. The caricature of hawkish principles erected by these characters is positively stultifying of fruitful debate. Consider this simple theoretically problem for pacifism: There is, I think, justice and nobility in a man refusing to defend himself, in essence laying down his life in the name of peace. There is no justice, and indeed great injustice, in a man refusing to defend those for whom he is responsible. If I am home alone and a man enters my home with murderous intent, I am free, if I have the courage, to abjure resistance. I have no such freedom when my wife and children are there with me. Not to resist, when resistance might very plausibly prevent violence against the innocent — and specifically the innocent in my charge — is, it seems to me, a vicious act of presumption. How a principled pacifist is to escape this dilemma I leave to some skillful sophist to disclose; but I can attest that I have personally debated people who really think the dilemma can be dismissed merely by the assumed righteousness of the pacifist position.

Oh, but we have learned more than this.

We have learned (though relearned would be a better word for all of this) that the Old Right was emphatically on to something when it declaimed against the tendency of war to expand the role of the Servile State, to drive out private enterprise, to enfeeble self-government — in short, to truncate liberty. We have seen, and are seeing, the emasculation of this libertarian wing of Conservatism (not the sort of libertarianism that confuses itself with libertinism, but rather the sort that reveres free enterprise, fears the State, holds dear the liberty of local community, and venerates greatness and excellence). And whatever differences we may have with this wing (I for one have many), no historically self-aware Conservative can imagine American Conservatism without it.

We have learned, in short, that what we need is not more war but less. Totalitarian Islam is at war with us, and will be at war with us until one or the other capitulates or is destroyed. This is a fact, unmovable and bleak. But how we carry out our defense need not take the form of “war” as we know it. I have called for an immediate end to all Muslim immigration, or, failing that, for additional oaths of loyalty, taken on pain of perjury, for Muslims seeking to immigrate here: in fine, for institutionalized discrimination against the Islamic religion in our immigration policy, to put the matter in its starkest form. I have called for this in part because Europe is showing us, as a kind of omen, just how easily the growth of large Muslim populations can carry a society rapidly toward civil war. Is the prospect of civil war implausible? Only to the blind. I have proposed the introduction of specific sedition laws that mention the Islamic religion by name, taking note of the uniquely pressing threat of totalitarian Islam. Again, I think such legislation justified in part because throwing a man in prison for two years on a wrongful sedition conviction is indeed an injustice; but it is a pittance compared to what injustice might await that same man, and his family, when legislation is no longer an option, when anarchy and civil war are upon us. I say “in part” because there are other justifications as well: justifications not premised on the speculation of civil war. One is that totalitarian Islam, quite aside from its threat to us, is a wicked doctrine and should not receive the protection of our laws. Another is that we can fight totalitarian Islam by prohibiting it, by letting its stand naked without the shelter of the civil liberties which it seeks to obliterate.

We have learned, moreover, that a country can be dragged into war decidedly against its will. More: that a country can be dragged into religious war against its will. Roaring Mohammad who killed him thought it right. Five years after September 11, when calculating men, reasoning from the premises of their faith, rendered parts of Lower Manhattan a mass grave — and still it is fiercely controverted that we are in the midst of a religious war. But what wants repeating is that only one side need launch war for war to be. Totalitarian Islam desires religious war; our most fervent desires to the contrary mean nothing: religious war is what we have.

We have learned, finally, that terrible lesson about war as hell. Say what you will about the justice of the Iraq war (and I say nothing here on that head), there will be unexpected and ugly consequences, beyond what we have already seen, from the exposure of our fighting men to the fanaticism and bloodletting of that ruined country. That exposure may have been a dreadful necessity, but it will not be without cost. Violence and mayhem do terrible things to some men. Whatever comes of our collision with totalitarian Islam, we will emerge from it certainly less innocent and likely less free.

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