Poor David Gelernter. I suppose he just cannot see the difficulties in his own argument, as exposed by his own argument. He cannot see that what is right in his argument overturns what is wrong. He cannot see that his most compelling polemics may be easily applied to him. He cannot see, in short, that he is arguing against himself.
The Democrats are not unpatriotic, but their patriotism is directed at a large abstract entity called The International Community or even (aping Bronze Age paganism) the Earth, not at America. Benjamin Disraeli anticipated this worldview long ago when he called Liberals the “Philosophical” and Conservatives the “National” party. Liberals are loyal to philosophical abstractions — and seek harmony with the French and Germans. Conservatives are loyal to their own nation, and seek harmony with its Founders and heroes and guiding principles.
This is certainly true. The derailment of patriotism by ideology is one of the more prominent features of our age. Men delude themselves that ideas are countries, or countries ideas, and thus that patriotism is merely a sincere commitment to philosophical abstractions. But when Gelernter gets around to telling us how we should oppose the Liberal ideology, how to counter the derailment of patriotism, he can only offer another ideology:
Americanism is the set of beliefs that has always held this country together in its large embrace. Americanism calls for liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind. And it urges this nation to promote the American Creed wherever and whenever it can — to be the shining city on a hill, the “last, best hope of earth.” Ultimately, Americanism is derived from the Bible. The Bible itself has been a grand unifying force in American society, uniting Christians of many creeds from Eastern Orthodox to Unitarian, and Jews, and Bible-respecting deists like Thomas Jefferson — and many others who respect and honor the Bible whatever their own religious beliefs.
So really the charge against the Democrats is not their mania for abstractions, but that they adhere to the wrong ones. Their abstractions are not ambitious enough.
Gelernter rages against pacifism, appeasement, and globalism — a kind of unholy trinity of false abstractions. One is inclined to cheer him on in this, but the trouble is that his theory is particularly vulnerable to the derailment he detests. The substitution of ideology for patriotism will always expose this vulnerability. Not matter how vigorously he resists it in his case, ideology is inevitably subject to the whims of ideologists. His “Americanism” may be grounded in our “Founders and heroes and guiding principles,” and above all the Bible, but since it is still a mere “set of beliefs,” still primarily a matter of abstractions, it need not stay grounded in those admirable things. It can be captured by other abstractions. It can be hollowed out by miseducation. It can hijacked by intellectual fashion. It can be undermined by subversion.
There is an analogy that might help illuminate the problem. Early in Christian history a priest named Marcion was convinced that numerous excrescences on Holy Scripture were corrupting the faithful. He sought to reduce it to what he regarded as the pure gospel, undiluted by the narrative jumble of the Old Testament. According to the great historian Jaroslav Pelikan, Marcion’s object was to narrow the Christian Scripture down to a version of St. Luke’s gospel and St. Paul’s epistles. Above all he sought to remove the Judaic influences from Christianity. Encyclopedia Britannica 1911: “His undertaking thus resolved itself into a reformation of Christendom. This reformation was to deliver Christendom from false Jewish doctrines by restoring the Pauline conception of the gospel, — Paul being, according to Marcion, the only apostle who had rightly understood the new message of salvation as delivered by Christ.”
Marcion was excommunicated, labeled a heretic, and resisted with great vigor, by Christian thinkers from Justun Martyr to Tertullian to Clement of Alexandria. His heresy was defeated, though occasional attempts to revive his doctrine reach us now and then. His opponents recognized the danger of a purely intellectual Christian doctrine, a theology narrowed to its purest abstract essence and detached from the narrative history of Israel, and from the sacred polemics of the prophets. It is the danger of ideology, the danger of ungrounded speculation, of a faith fit only for intellectuals. (Indeed, Marcion himself soon became ensnared in tangled speculations, eventually positing that the God of the Old Testament was a mere demiurge, the author of creation and of evil, and that Christ came to free us from his tyranny.)
Not for nothing are the narrative portions of the Bible often the most beloved, especially by simple men bereft of a taste for heavy theology. Christianity is perfectly inconceivable without them. They save us from the treachery of the human intellect; they provide ballast against the winds and waves of false abstraction.
Where do we find such ballast in the American tradition? We find it in our communities, in our neighborhoods, in our churches, in the beauty of our land; we find it in our laws and our history; we find it even in our prejudices, or assumptions, in the questions we have closed and the others we stubbornly insist on keeping open. We find it anywhere but the field of political speculation and abstraction. We find it not in a creed but in a way of life, a living tradition made not by intellectuals but by men and women living their lives in light of how their fathers lived theirs. We find it in America’s “democracy of the dead,” whereby we have refused to submit to that arrogant oligarchy of those who just happened to be walking around, but rather give votes “to that most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.” “All democrats,” continues Chesterton is his famous passage, “object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.”
Gelernter tries mightily to embrace this sort of thing, a living tradition, but since his theory hinges eternally on abstractions, it must always remain an ideology. There is no real America in Americanism; it is America the abstraction. A mere “set of beliefs” cannot long hold a country together in this age of ideological fashion. We need more than that.
Our Liberals offer us their pitiful globalism, a universalism of pure platitudinous abstraction; but our right-Liberals, the “authorized” opposition, counter only with a variation on the same. It is globalism, alright, but led by Americans and informed by an abstracted abbreviation of our tradition. As Christopher Caldwell once wrote, letting the cat out of the bag as it were: “Some time before the end of the Iraq crisis, it will become clear that the US 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 US may already have come up with a more serviceable blueprint for a post-national order.” Namely, Americanism.
For the rest of us, a “post-national order” appears as what it always has to Conservatives: a monstrous tyranny in embryo. Over the past few years I have witnessed a really astonishing spectacle. North American politicians gather in negotiation to prepare these “post-national structures” here, most of the economic-integration variety; populist Conservatives react with some annoyance; and mainstream right-wingers sneer at them! Quite as if the object lesson of the European Union were not right in front of our faces. In Europe, thanks to those grand post national structures, it is basically illegal to argue against Islam. A demonstration against the Jihad, scheduled for September 11, was first proscribed and then put down with brutal force. Statements like the following sentence have landed men in the dock: “Islam is a dangerous religion, and we ought to work actively to weaken it.” Such is the fruit of the Post-National Global Order.
In my reading, constitutional government, that is, real limited government, with efficacious mechanisms to check the aggrandizement of the state over the individual, and which perseveres in the face all the rapacious schemes of the sophists and radicals, 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; in ancient times it was even rarer. Now, as the modern age comes to its miasmic and disordered end, we have influential people, many of them near to centers of power, 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 unreasonable to reply that such a project will merely mean the demise of constitutional government.
“The real American is all right,” wrote Chesterton. “It is the ideal American who is all wrong.” Mr. Caldwell’s vision of a post-national order, with Mr. Gelernter’s ideology as its guide, is an attempt to remake the world in the image of that ideal American. 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. Men who fancy themselves conservatives regularly repeat the mantra that one may become an American by assenting to certain ideas about democracy, thereby making American patriotism contingent on a democratic ideology. It is no longer enough that a man simply loves his country. He must embrace an ideology.
Well ideology is the handmaid of tyranny. America was long blessed by the absence of ideology; and it is no accident that she has thus abhorred tyranny. Our creed arose out of a living tradition, not out of the conjectures of intellectuals. Even our Founders were most of them working lawyers, farmers, businessmen, not intellectuals; and in any case the Republic was informed by a tradition much larger than any of them. That tradition cannot be abstracted and fashioned into ideology without fatal violence to it.
Comments (125)
I certainly agree that we can't just (ta da!) make other countries into constitutional democracies. It seems naive to think so. This is partly because many cultures are inimical to such a form of government.
But I get uneasy on the other hand with so great an emphasis on love of home and hearth that it seems that there _is_ no such thing as a set of beliefs, yes, even a set of ideas, that are distinctive of American government, American freedom, etc. I'm happy with the notion that a love of home and hearth can provide "ballast," but even in our prejudices we can and often do reflect certain unstated ideas that are distinctly American. For example, if some small businessman or farmer is impatient with bureaucracy and feels a prejudice against petty rules, this is part of the American notion of individualism and limited government. Perhaps in another country the small businessman or farmer would be more patient with all the red tape.
Then, too, love of home and hearth can apply in countries characterized by tyrannical government, abject poverty, imposed false religion, and horrible cultural customs. What makes American patriotism _different_ from any patriotism in any country, however regrettable that country's set-up? I maintain that while it's true that patriotism cannot be reduced to a set of beliefs that can then be applied automatically to "democratize" other countries by magic (and by force), neither can patriotism be reduced to love of home and hearth. I am proud of America. I am not proud of America _simply_ because I love my home, but also because of what America stands for. There really isn't anything so very bad about being a city set on a hill. And I think we would be fooling ourselves if we tried to pretend that America _hasn't_ been a light to the nations. And why try to fool oneself in that way, anyway? Why not admit an obvious fact that can be only to our credit? There are reasons, and not only reasons of material prosperity, why so many people want to come here. And those reasons do indeed have to do with _ideas_, ideas put into practice in this land, such as liberty of conscience and religion, limited government, and the like.
Posted by Lydia | September 18, 2007 1:33 PM
I agree, Lydia. Ideas certainly do play a role. But Gelernter seems to want to make it only about ideas. So many of our right-Liberals have left the real America behind, vanished into the DC-New York corridor of Americanist globalism, that we simply can no longer trust their native attachment to the country as it really is. To them the country is just a set of ideas.
In short, my heavy emphasis on love of hearth and home is an effect of what is (in my view) a huge and terrible distortion the other way.
Posted by Paul J Cella | September 18, 2007 2:08 PM
An egalitarian empire needs a different and more explicitly ideological justification, than a small and isolationist republic. For the empire's rule to appear legitimate across locales and religious, racial, and ethnic divides, the focus of loyalty must reside in the universal ideology and the state apparatus that constitutes it in the name of representing it. That this veers rather easily into state-worship of the sort you decry, and that Gelernter welcomes, is easily observed.
I think you err, Paul, in perceiving a sharp break between this and American tradition. Gelernter's Americanism is so effective, and so accurately sums up what many or most Americans already believe, because it draws on hallowed parts of the American self-conception. The idea of America as the new Israel is far older than the Constitution, as is the idea of imperial expansion. Wasn't British resistance to westward expansion one of the grievances of the colonists prior to the Revolution? Universality is right there in the Declaration of Independence - written by Thomas Jefferson, who would, with his simultaneous advocacy of an agrarian republic, seem literally to embody this contradiction. None of this is to deny a conservative thread in early American thought, though not very conservative; these men did rebel against their king, after all. It is to say that it's difficult to argue that the America that found inspiration in Republican Rome, Sparta, and the Whig aristocracy is somehow more really American than the early America that found inspiration in Athens and the Roundheads.
Posted by Cyrus | September 18, 2007 2:29 PM
Well expansion on the North American continent is not exactly the same as "democracy for all men." Nor should the Declaration's most famous sentence totally elide the rest of the document, which is much more restrained.
I agree with John Zmirak that there really was a sharp break, that it is pretty recent, and that it is largely a consequence (and even an understandable one) of the effort to erect an ideology to counter Communism.
As I said to Lydia, I do not deny the philosophical content of American patriotism; what I deny is that this forms the primary or exclusive basis of our patriotism. And I must say I am a bit disturbed to see you agree with Gelernter, even if you think it's bad.
Posted by Paul J Cella | September 18, 2007 2:57 PM
I am not sure that our Founders were absent of ideology. I think of the Declaration of Independence, which states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This appears to me to be a global ideology. The rights of men are not limited to race, language or nation, but are intrinsic to all human beings.
Expanding on the ideas inherent in the Declaration of Independence and also the limited government concepts within the Constitution, I wonder if the United States can ever deviate from the true United States, or is the United States always what it is in actuality? Imagine that communism had taken over the United States. The people remain the same, the language remains the same, the body of land remains the same, the name of the country remains the same, and the history remains the same, but something tells me that communism is un-American. Something tells me that it is possible for America to cease to be itself.
I think that America is a nation based on an idea unlike any other country, but I also agree that America is not simply an idea. For example, imagine that Iraq adopts all the principles of “Americanism”. Even if this is the case, the people of Iraq are not Americans and Iraq is not America. While ideology is important to what America is, it is not the sum of America.
Posted by xkvsxe | September 18, 2007 3:08 PM
I think that Burkeans tend to underestimate the role of what they themselves would call (disapprovingly) "ideology" in the founding, and that this is just an historical matter. It just isn't true that (as my Burkean friends used to tell me) the founders of our country were merely trying to reassert their traditional rights as Englishmen and were doing nothing new. On the other hand, it isn't true that the Declaration of Independence is part of the Law of the Land. Which is just as well, as the interpretation of "all men are created equal," while something I might trust Jefferson and Co. on, isn't something with which I want to trust Justice Kennedy and Co. But to my mind it's also just as well that the founders were, in fact, doing something fairly new in their day. If they'd really merely been trying to reassert their traditional rights as Englishmen, I think we would have gotten something less good than what we got.
In short, Zmirak is right insofar as he points out that the America of the founding was hardly a group-equality paradise. (Nor is this a problem.) But he's wrong if he means to imply that America was from the outset just one more very-slowly-changing Old World traditionalist country.
Posted by Lydia | September 18, 2007 4:16 PM
Posted by Cyrus | September 18, 2007 4:16 PM
Oops. I messed something up on that last post.
Posted by Cyrus | September 18, 2007 4:17 PM
I'd assert that no nation that is healthy is based on an idea. A nation will have ideas that are peculiar to it, that are based on the people, the culture, the religion, the traditions.
Saying that "America is a nation based on an idea" (even if the idea is unlike that found in any other country) suggests an image of some men sitting down with this idea and planning out the country. This has actually happened many times, in many places, only the country they were planning already had a country there, in place, right in the way. Hence, bloody revolution.
Posted by Gintas | September 18, 2007 4:17 PM
Fixed it for you Cyrus.
Posted by Zippy | September 18, 2007 4:35 PM
Well, Gintas, there is that story about Benjamin Franklin coming out of the hall from passing the Constitution and being asked, "Mr. Franklin, what sort of government have you given the country?" And he said, "A Republic, if you can keep it." There is a very real and obvious sense in which some men _did_, historically speaking, sit down and "plan a country." That's what the constitutional convention and all the ratifying debates between the Federalists and anti-Federalists were about. But partly because there was no country already there in the way, there was no bloody revolution. It was a fortunate set of circumstances, partly accidental and partly helped along by the wisdom of the men in question.
I can't myself deplore this. I think they did a pretty good job.
Posted by Lydia | September 18, 2007 4:46 PM
There is a vast difference between planning a government for a nation, and planning the nation itself. It is the former enterprise in which the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were engaged; they proposed to grant to an already-extant nation, possessed of a remarkable degree of cultural and historical unanimity, and having a distinctive identity - albeit expressed in several graduations along a common scale - a republican form of government. Government is neither constitutive of, or identical with, the nation, which is itself simply the people themselves.
Posted by Maximos | September 18, 2007 5:06 PM
They did do a fine job, Lydia, but they were working with materials already available -- for one, a very old tradition of liberty, that is, self-government, which derived from their British ancestry. The American political tradition did not begin with the Declaration of Independence (the whole second half of which does certainly lend support to the Burkean "traditional rights of Englishman" theory). Willmoore Kendall published some wonderful studies of the continuity of this tradition, stretching back to the Mayflower Compact. (And he was fiercely critical of the Burke/Kirk theory of tradition rights of Englishman.)
In my view the abstract or ideological side of the American tradition itself points to concrete, practice reality: namely the reality of self-government. If America can be said to be an "experiment," as some of our scholars are wont to express it, than she is an experiment in self-government; and self-government is not an abstract or ideological thing at all. It is a lived tradition, and day-to-day activity almost.
Somewhere along the line this tradition got derailed, captured by ideologues. Some think it began as a derailment, or maybe that it was derailed with the Civil War; but what seems decisive to me is what Zmirak's article points to -- that during the Cold War even the Conservatives absorbed the derailment.
Posted by Paul J Cella | September 18, 2007 5:10 PM
Great post, Paul. If might jump in here, I will raise one of my standard objections in relation to Lydia's last comment. Lydia, you wrote:
"There is a very real and obvious sense in which some men _did_, historically speaking, sit down and "plan a country." "
I understand what you mean here, but on this question I think precision is vital. The gentlemen in Philadelphia planned out the structure of a federal government to coordinate the common work of other already existing governments, which ruled over their respective countries. There was no Jacobin-style revolution because the war for independence and even the creation of the Constitution did not attempt to uproot the existing institutions to pave the way for a new political system. As I realise we all know, the Federalist system incorporated the existing state governments into a new, more centralised framework. In a similar fashion, the northern provinces of the Habsburg domains in the Lowlands and the cantons of Switzerland organised a level of government for the collaboration of their several constituent polities in a confederation, but they did not in this way "plan" the existence or character of Zeeland or Schwyz, which pre-existed the political arrangements in question. Belgium is an outstanding example of what are arguably two countries (or two distinct groups of old Habsburg provinces distinguished by the language and religion of the inhabitants) being brought together under a common government. Nowadays, loyalty to Flanders and Wallonia is reemerging as being more important. I probably harp on this point too often, but I cannot stress how important it is that we do not mistakenly conflate country with government. You can "build" a nation and "plan" a state, but your country is one of those given realities that precedes you in which you really have no choice. You can even "plan" a family, to use the debased terminology of our time, but you cannot do the same with your parents. I think the difference between government and country is similar.
Posted by Daniel Larison | September 18, 2007 5:12 PM
Government is neither constitutive of, or identical with, the nation, which is itself simply the people themselves.
I am not sure that you can seperate what America is from what kind of government it was created with. We could replace the government and still retain certain aspects of what America is, but we would be losing something fundamental. Is this to say that we can have a communist or fascist America? I sense that if the U.S. Constitution was replaced with the communist manifesto, we would be America in name only.
Posted by xkvsxe | September 18, 2007 5:38 PM
Lydia, darned if there wasn't already a country here, and it was called the United States of America! Looking at just the political level, the Constitutional Convention was a revision (or evolution) of an existing government, not a plan (or a revolution) for a new government. See the Articles of Confederation for the previous government.
Posted by Gintas | September 18, 2007 6:01 PM
I'm sympathetic to many objections that some have made to Paul's thesis, but I stand with Paul in that I meet and see far too many young people, men especially, who are all ideology of one sort or another left or right who do not feel as the poet felt who wrote this:
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung.
Young Libertarian males in their stark puerility never look about them and simply love their nation and people. We know the Left can't even begin to think of this land without utter contempt, and the National Review, inside the Beltway Republicans are not without feeling and sense, but seem to lack poetry and righteous passion for their principles. Everything is reduced to the urbane tones of cocktail party chatter when some occasional, out of the belly visceral anger like Cromwell's "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken!" is called for. But they are more courtiers than Minutemen.
It is in stories that America can live. Paul Revere, the Boston Tea Party, The Charter Oak, Bunker Hill, Nathan Hale, Washington and so on. What they believed is important but what they did is even more valuable.
The thought of being hanged for a spy terrified me as a child, but the words of Nathan Hale have never ceased to inspire me.
Well, as I said before about the loss of any sense of holiness now permeating society, so too has the natural regard for country as Walter Scott wrote seems to have fallen by the wayside.
Coming home is always sweet after traveling, but that deep sense of soulful unity with one's land, I fear that sentiment is going undiscovered for far too many of my countrymen, especially the young.
If such feelings are hardly ever spoken or related, then people don't find them in themselves.
Posted by mark butterworth | September 18, 2007 7:51 PM
(Going backwards here in response, because Gintas gets me just a little hot under the collar but the rest of y'all don't.)
Gintas, the ratification of the Constitution was controversial *because* it was notably different from the Articles of Confederation.
Maximos, et. al., I think you have a good point about the difference between planning a country and planning a government. And the state sovereignty issue, of course, is crucial to this point as well, since allowing the states a good deal of sovereignty meant leaving so much in place that affected daily life. Certainly even the most "federalist" of the federalists had a much stronger notion of state sovereignty than anyone does now, leading to the oddity (which some of you may know the origin of--I don't) that now the term 'federalism' _means_ "some notion of state sovereignty," whereas during the federalist _controversy_ it referred to those who favored a somewhat greater degree of centralization than the anti-federalists wanted.
OTOH, I want to echo something that X has gotten at twice, now: If our nation's government were changed radically, there would indeed be a sense in which the essence of the country had changed. I don't think it's possible to identify patriotism with love of family and hearth, love of the "given country" in such a sense that it would and should make no difference if America becomes a communist country or a sharia state. When I voiced this opinion before in a different thread on exactly the same subject, I was told (by Gintas) that this means that I am no patriot. A true patriot, apparently, in his view would find himself just exactly as proud, loyal, and patriotically bound to a Communist or sharia America as to the one we presently have, because this is his given land, the place of his birth, etc., etc. Well, all I can say to that is, if this be treason, make the most of it.
Posted by Lydia | September 18, 2007 8:00 PM
Lydia, I can't help it that my patriotism is more visceral than ideological, it has to be that way when you grow up in conquered, occupied territory.
McGrew, isna that Scottish? You should ken something about that, then.
Yes, there was lively debate at the Constitutional Convention and at the states' ratification conventions, but even Virginia ratified in the end.
Posted by Gintas | September 18, 2007 8:55 PM
Thank you for fixing my formatting mistake, Zippy.
This was decisive for the future of American conservatives and conservatism, perhaps, but not for America, where the trajectory of history had been, and has continued to be with few interruptions, decisively liberal.Jeff:
It's not that simple, though. Peoples, or their leaders, can make governments, but governments make peoples, too. It is not for nothing that it used to be said that forty kings made France, and similar observations could be made of most European countries. They did, but that culturally and historically unanimous America no longer exists. Immigration, industrialization, and the war between the states saw to that. There is continuity, but the continuity is perforce ideological because a non-English, non-Protestant, and very soon non-white country can't be ruled in the name of a long-defunct WASP identity. All that's left is the state and its ideology.Posted by Cyrus | September 18, 2007 9:50 PM
Gintas, I have to confess that I only married the Scottish name. But I also cannot resist saying that my husband agrees with me unhesitatingly on this one. :-)
My own ethnic and regional background is plain vanilla, Heinz 57 Varieties Yankee, from Chicago originally (and I hated Chicago from earliest childhood), with the additional uprootedness of having been adopted in infancy, an event for which I am profoundly grateful, given the alternatives. I came to appreciate southerners deeply by living in Nashville for four years while my husband was in graduate school, but that's the most I can say.
But using my imagination as much as I am able, I'm inclined to say that if I did grow up in a country or region that I regarded as "occupied territory," or if the U.S. actually were conquered and occupied, it would seem to me that my attachment would be more rather than less ideological. That is, my attachment would be to "the way it used to be," to what I considered the place to have stood for and been before it was conquered.
Posted by Lydia | September 18, 2007 9:59 PM
Gintas, I have to confess that I only married the Scottish name. But I also cannot resist saying that my husband agrees with me unhesitatingly on this one. :-)
Then he is not a true Scotsman, is he? ;-)
On the contrary, a deep attachment to the land, it's people and their ways, makes ideology unnecessary, it matters not who is moving pawns and scheming globally in the capital.
I must admit, I've never considered what a person might think who grew up in D.C.
Posted by Gintas | September 18, 2007 10:27 PM
Interesting post. There are many problems with David Gelernter's classifications, which most of you have already pointed out.
First, his view of a "nation" is rather shallow. He claims that liberals are loyal to philosophical abstractions, and then abstracts away any substance from a classical notion of "nation," which as the Latin 'nascere' suggests, implies link by blood. "Americanism is the set of beliefs that has always held this country together in its large embrace" is just propositional nonsense.
"Americanism calls for liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind. And it urges this nation to promote the American Creed wherever and whenever it can — to be the shining city on a hill, the “last, best hope of earth.”"
What is most interesting about this article is that it is indicative of EMPIRE, as empires breed such propositionalism, resulting in multiculturalism and seemingly universal creeds. A humble republic would shun at such idealistic - and utopian - classifications.
Posted by Bede | September 19, 2007 6:34 AM
That's a fine comment, Bede.
Lydia, I have no difficulty saying that the republican form of government comprises an important aspect of the American identity; and that if this were taken from us, we would be a lesser people -- a broken, subjugated nation. There is even a clause in the Constitution that insures a republican form of government for every state.* In Burke's terms a Communist or Islamic America would lose much of her loveliness, and therefore would be more difficult to love.
But it does not follow that the purely theoretical structure of the republican form of government is the primary or exclusive content of American patriotism. Yet this is precisely what the right-Liberals argue: that a "set of beliefs" about democracy (they won't even maintain the distinction between republic and democracy that was not vital to the Founders) is would constitutes our patriotism.
I realize that "blood and soil" talk alarms you a bit, Lydia, and were there a danger that America was becoming a pure "blood and soil" nation, I might join with you in that alarm; but what I would like to impress upon you is how emphatically I feel that the pressing danger comes from the exact opposite direction.
_____________
* Which clause (it seems to me) presents a possible angle of approach against the agents and agitators of the Jihad. Since most Muslim organizations (even the "moderate" ones) purpose to replace this republican form with a shariac form, we ought to, at the very least, label them primarily political not religious organizations. I would go farther than that of course -- I would label the promotion of sharia sedition -- but this would be a good first step.
Posted by Paul J Cella | September 19, 2007 7:59 AM
Paul, I suppose part of the practical issue for me is this: While I agree with you that there are real problems with saying that (say) being an American is entirely constituted by believing a particular set of propositions, and that saying that seems to lead to other errors--about the ease of transporting American constitutional republicanism, about the ease of assimilation for immigrants--the clear and present danger to America in terms of the facts on the ground right now seems to me to come chiefly from people who believe the wrong sets of ideas. I could be, and probably often have been, an ally with a person who holds to some of the metalevel propositions Gelerntner does but who had his specifics right--on abortion, say, or on the threat of Islam in the U.S., or whatever. If all you told me was whether a person answered "yes" or "no" to the statement, "America is a propositional nation"--where this was fleshed out in roughly Gelerntner-esque terms--this wouldn't tell me how much I'd have in common with him overall as a conservative. Either answer would merely allow me to put up question marks about other things and wonder whether we'd disagree or agree. They'd just be different sets of other things that I'd be wondering about for the person who said "yes" and the person who said "no." And I could end up in the end have much more serious problems with the person who said "no" than with the person who said "yes." It would just depend.
Posted by Lydia | September 19, 2007 9:29 AM
Gintas, I realize your “true Scotsman” comment was partly in jest, but it seems revealing to me in any case.
Are you suggesting that Mr. McGrew, who presumably is a lifelong American citizen and permanently removed from Scottish soil, should remain a Scottish patriot? That he should rightly be neither plainly American nor “hyphenated-American”, but plainly Scottish, though living permanently outside of Scotland? Surely you are not suggesting that.
Would you explain how, in your view, an immigrant rightly changes his loyalty from the old country to the new? And why you would expect that Mr. McGrew would retain an understanding of patriotism that Lydia or I, as "plain vanilla" Americans, might lack?
Posted by John Savage | September 19, 2007 9:52 AM
I am not sure that you can seperate what America is from what kind of government it was created with.
Except for the fact that America was not created with her present form of government, whether this is conceived, nominally, in accordance with the Constitution, or functionally, as a managerialist, bureaucratic state; America antedates her forms and mechanisms of government.
Moreover, I think that we would all do well to eschew the sort of meta-level ratiocination that seems to characterize this debate. Republican governance is, first and foremost, a specified social practice, and not a disembodied, abstract discourse concerning the relations of propositions; when we discourse over the forms and requirements, the presuppositions and structures, of republican government, we are - or at least ought to be - referring to concrete social practices integral with the American way of life. America would be altered, perhaps irrevocably, were she to fall under the dominion of some communist tyranny, or even the superficially benign, but substantively malignant, bureaucratic dominion of a "North American Union". This, however, would be because political architectures of these types would functionally abolish the (tenuously) existing republican forms of governance in America, and not because the ideational expression of concrete practices would have changed. Seriously, now, this repeated jousting and parrying with epiphenomena is wearying, inasmuch as it obscures the thing itself with the idea of the thing.
Posted by Maximos | September 19, 2007 10:52 AM
Lydia, commitment to any expression of propositionalism entails commitment to any number of dubious, and incontrovertibly concrete, policy positions, and this without regard to the cognizance, or lack thereof, on the part of the propositionalist. Propositionalism does entail certain things with respect to immigration and national identity, not to mention cultural integrity, to mention but a few examples, regardless of whether an individual propositionalist succeeds in deducing the (formally) correct positions from his commitment to ideological expressions of Americanism. This, therefore, may well be the primary cause of wonderment as one contemplates the possibilities attendant upon answers to the propositionalist question.
Posted by Maximos | September 19, 2007 11:23 AM
Except for the fact that America was not created with her present form of government
You are right that the United States existed before the creation of the U.S. Constitution. It also existed before the creation of the Articles of Confederation. However, under the Articles of Confederation the United States was hardly united. It was simply a bunch of loosely connected states. This led to a convention to amend the Articles of Confederation, but what happened instead was not an amendment of the articles, but its replacement with the U.S. Constitution. This has since been the supreme law of the land and the essence of how America should be governed. I am saying that this legal contract is fundamental to what America is, but it is not exclusive.
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that abstract principles tell us nothing about actual social practices and that it is the social practices that define what America is. I agree with this, although I think our legal principles vastly help define our social practices, such as the American principles of individual liberty (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness). It is the case, however, that we could have a republican form of government and be a radically secular country. We could have a republican form of government and have Spanish as the national language. We could have a republican form of government with legalized drugs and euthanasia and so on.
I am not sure if I am interpreting you correctly, but maybe you are saying there is a problem with upholding certain abstractions without any care for actual government policy or social norms. This reminds of people that believe the abstract principle of freedom of speech necessarily means that nothing anyone says can ever be wrong. As a result, they end up defending the most ignorant and disgusting rants, not from government interference, but from public criticism. It is the idea that if you criticize what anyone says you are interfering with their “right to free speech”.
Posted by xkvsxe | September 19, 2007 1:14 PM
Cyrus, your criticism is reasonable and just; governments can, and often have, remade the peoples they purport to govern/rule. The repugnant regime in power in China, the worlds first politically mature fascist state, according to some political scientists, even now engineers a new people in Tibet; and our own establishment is engaged in the generational undertaking of constituting a new, more pliant, ethnically-diverse, but culturally homogenized and economically stratified, populace - ye shall know Empire by its works, for they are wicked. My argument is the (probably formal) one that such policies on the part of a regime towards a people presuppose a distinction between the rulers and the ruled - between the regime and the country/nation/people - along with the substantive and normative judgment that such disjunctions are abominations, inasmuch as they negate the very purpose of political order, namely, the preservation of the people and their inherited way of life. A government that strives to negate the very community which constitutes it is engaged in a low, base form of treachery.
Posted by Maximos | September 19, 2007 1:24 PM
Well, it actually doesn't seem correct to me to say that the propositionalist position _deductively entails_ an incorrect position on immigration. For example, you can believe that it's sufficient for someone to be an American that he believe certain propositions while realizing that some people probably don't believe those propositions. There are few things farther from the set of propositions in question than sharia, so if a certain group of potential immigrants wants to establish sharia, they don't believe those propositions and won't make good Americans.
Similarly for the establishment of constitutional republics similar to America elsewhere. Suppose that one defines "a constitutional republic with a governmental structure similar to that of America" in terms that make no reference to culture. To be honest, this doesn't seem such a stupid thing to me to do as a purely conceptual matter. But it doesn't follow that a properly functioning government of that sort can be established just anywhere. You can define "car" in terms that make no reference to the entire process of steel manufacture, but you then don't have to be stupid enough to think that you can make a car with two sticks and a ball of twine.
Posted by Lydia | September 19, 2007 3:26 PM
Also, dare I say it: Immigration is not _the_ most or only important conservative issue. I know, Maximos, that you've had some sympathy with the (in)famous First Things symposium on legitimacy some years ago, related to the Supreme Court and the abortion issue. But the Chronicles folks (who, I assume, have all their immigration ducks in a row, then and now) were very unsympathetic. They said that by raising the question of legitimacy, the FT writers were being ideological! And I'm sorry to say that in the article in question they rather pooh-poohed the abortion issue. In fact, not all paleos are as staunchly pro-life as I could wish. Sometimes they seem too focused on other issues, and perhaps part of the problem is an underlying disdain for evangelicals, who tend to be both strongly pro-life and "mainstream conservative" rather than distinctively paleo.
With whom am I going to have more in common: A strongly pro-life evangelical or Catholic who is wishy-washy on immigration and who is inclined to think of the U.S. as a "propositional nation" or a paleoconservative who spends most of his time talking about the evils of hawkish neocons and foreign policy, is strongly anti-illegal immigration, and cares little, if at all, for domestic life issues and thinks it was the right thing to do to dehydrate Terri Schiavo to death?
I'm sorry to be so blunt, but these are some of the things we need to keep in perspective when we talk about what a dangerous thing the "propositional nation" idea is.
Posted by Lydia | September 19, 2007 3:53 PM
Here is the problem, or a problem, it seems to me.
Every nation has a civic religion which will in part consist of abstract doctrines. Even though a great variety of propositions may be compatible with a particular nation, some are clearly not. Every nation suppresses heresy. The modern liberal state does so every bit as much as the medieval, and arguably takes a more comprehensive approach to the activity. Conservatives deride the modern suppression of heresy as "political correctness" or "thought police", etc.
But the problem in the abstract is not in the (prudent) suppression of heresy per se. Every community must suppress heresy in order to survive as itself, to avoid being destroyed or equivalently remade into something else entirely. The problem rather is twofold: (1) that the modern liberal state suppresses heresy without being honest with itself that that is what it is doing, and (2) much of what the modern state suppresses as heresy is in fact the truth.
I think the propositional nation business arises not because of the existence of doctrines and heresies per se, and the support of the former accompanied by suppression of the latter, but because we refuse to acknowledge them for what they are: a refusal which in itself is a doctrine of liberalism. Every concrete community has its doctrines and heresies in addition to being these people in this place with this history.
Posted by Zippy | September 19, 2007 4:23 PM
There are few things farther from the set of propositions in question than sharia
Really? On what grounds can you say that, Lydia? Why aren't the Liberal set of propositions -- egalitarianism, multiculturalism, globalism, all of which together disarm us against sharia -- the right ones?
The reason, of course, is that they are alien to our tradition; indeed together they amount to a falsification of our tradition. But we have to appeal to our concrete, lived tradition to demonstrate this.
Propositions are abstracted from the tradition, and without it they have no real substance, and we are at the whim of ideologists.
Now I'm not really interested in getting into the neocon-paleocon debate. I am interested in arguing against an aspect of Liberalism (against which this site has squarely set its feet) that has, as it were, penetrated deep into Conservatism. Our Liberals, as even Gelernter realizes, long ago relinquished their grasp on the authentic American tradition. It would be a shame if Conservatives followed suit.
The FT symposium is to me an important fissure point in this very dispute. There, a bunch of Christian Conservatives, like Aquinas when he settled the Manichees, gave the table a good hard wack, and declared that as the Court has subjected us to its alien Liberalism, we are going to deny its legitimacy, at least among ourselves. The Court has derailed our tradition by its tangled speculations, its damnable propositions; and we're going to call it lawless and illegimate.
It was mostly the propositionists of the Right who came unglued at this statement.
Posted by Paul J Cella | September 19, 2007 4:43 PM
Paul, by "the set of propositions in question" I meant specifically the ones that I'm guessing a conservative "propositionist" would say are constitutive of the American nation. For example, I would guess that such a person would refer to something in broad terms like equality before the law, which is denied by the aspect of sharia according to which a woman's testimony counts for less than a man's, a husband has the right to beat his wife, and so forth.
As for the FT symposium, I think it really is worth pointing out as I did that there were some who definitely were not "the propositionists" who came unglued at what FT did. And one of the reasons they were did so is that, frankly, they didn't seem to care that much about the slaughter of the unborn, whereas the FT folks, who are themselves probably "propositionists" in some measure, did. And this is relevant to the question of how dangerous propositionism might or might not be: Again, if you have a propositionist, sort-of-propositionist, semi-propositionist, whatever, who stands firmly against abortion/euthanasia and against judicial tyranny, that's two big points in his favor. It seems that the chief areas in which propositionism is a danger are immigration and foreign interventionism, but these aren't the only highly important issues out there in the multi-dimensional space of politics. And I say that as (as you know) a real load-em-up-on-the-buses-tomorrow immigration hawk.
Posted by Lydia | September 19, 2007 5:05 PM
Lydia, the belief that subscription to a set of propositions concerning the American system of rights, free markets, individualism, and democracy suffices to identify one as "American" manifestly does entail certain policy prescriptions regarding immigration: to believe that such a creedal confession is sufficient is to believe that any assemblage of random third-worlders, if only their convictions may be construed as affirmations of individual rights, democracy, and markets - which is a rather loose sort of propositionalism, but the only sort with which we are ever confronted - may be deemed Americans. Moreover, as innumerable neoconservative polemics have demonstrated, and as numerous personal conversations with neoconservatives have confirmed, this merely creedal affirmation will often bestow upon the confessor a greater claim to the title of "American" than that accorded to a dissenter such as myself. We've all heard the phraseology concerning those immigrants who are "more American than native-born group x, y, or z"; and there is no value in pretending otherwise.
As regards the Chronicles article which you have referenced, I am not conversant with it, and so cannot comment. For my part, and in the interest in stimulating - hopefully - further conversation, I will lay my cards on the table, so to speak: even were it the case that continued mass immigration from Latin America, tending toward the gradual submersion and eventual dissolution of the native, Anglo culture, would inexorably and necessarily result in the reversal of Roe v Wade and the institution of a regime of abortion prohibition, I would remain stalwartly, intractably opposed thereto. First, because I cannot but regard such a replacement of the American people, on account of their injustices, as the very nadir of dishonour; to conflate the American people with a legal regime, a regime repudiated by sizable pluralities, at a minimum, and to countenance their abolition on account of that regime, would be treacherous enough; to countenance the replacement of the American people, merely because one has come to regard them as flaccid, or decadent, or requiring of "fresh blood", in the telling but fulsome phrase even some conservatives employ, not much less so. I dare say that it is a form of faithlessness and despair, a rejection of Providence, and a form of hatred no less malignant than that of the usual, leftist humanitarians and altruists. Second, I would reject this hypothetical Faustian bargain because I cannot, and will not, accept the reduction of an entire culture, an entire mode of existence, to a few controverted moral questions - even ones on which, I dare asseverate, I am further to the right than the average conservative (I would readily countenance the proscription of abortion, even were this a position favoured by but 5% of the population, for example).
Other conservatives are welcome to articulate that argument, if they so desire; for my part, the notion that I might countenance the consignment of my own children to a squalid, stratified, caste-ridden, race-conscious society, fulminant with resentment of everything my country has ever been, only to resolve a grave injustice that does not touch them personally, is too monstrous for me to contemplate. Were I to accept such a pact, I know, with certitude, that I would suffer the insomniac torments of the damned. There are licit and illicit means to redress injustices; I cannot but think that the abolition of one's own people falls into the latter category. The propositionalist, as evidenced by his policy prescriptions, is sanguine about the prospect of my children dwelling in an America far nastier and more brutish than the present America, if only his ego and ideology receive the requisite stroking.
Apropos of Zippy's sagacious remarks, I should state that I have failed to practice charity if I subscribe to the Nicene Creed, yet detest the members of my parish, even to the point of wishing to replace the lot of them; so also do the propositionalists and immigration enthusiasts fail to exhibit charity in their obsessive confessions of an American creed, a dessicated epiphenomenon of a way of life their own managerialism has effectively abolished, or corrupted beyond recognition, combined with a cultivated indifference to actually-existing Americans and their circumstances.
Or, if I might state the matter succinctly, I want it all in conservatism: opposition to abortion and the culture of death, and opposition to the abolition of the American people and their culture.
Posted by Maximos | September 19, 2007 5:06 PM
Very briefly for the mo--I wasn't proposing any such bargain, Maximos. And my own posts on incommensurable evils between Islam (which is ostensibly anti-abortion) and liberalism make it clear that I regard all such proposed deals or bargains with great suspicion. My point, rather, concerned merely a sense of alliance or political shoulder-to-shoulder-ness with individuals. I can imagine hypothetical propositionalist, pro-immigration individuals with whom I would disagree on that point but with whom I would overall find myself to have more political agreements and commonalities than with some hypothetical anti-propositionalist, immigration restrictionist individuals. Of course, to flesh out such hypothetical individuals and make it clearer how and why I would feel that way I'd probably have to say a lot more than I already have said about them. Those were very sketchy sketches that I gave.
Posted by Lydia | September 19, 2007 5:27 PM
It is a fair point, but I'm dubious that it demonstrates the harmlessness, neutrality, or indifference of propositionalist convictions; that I might have more in common, in terms of a political checklist of sorts, with Joseph Bottum than with Donald Collins (a VDare contributing editor of population-control sympathies, which extend, apparently, to a certain issue already mentioned) does not prove that the former's propositionalism is virtuous, or, at least, not vicious.
Posted by Maximos | September 19, 2007 5:40 PM
May I say, Paul, what a fine essay I thought it was. Perhaps a little more emphasis on a Christian understanding of the hearth and home (the culture) you treasure, as that is the thing any edict of government ought to be concerned to protect, the latter owing its very life to the former.
Posted by William Luse | September 19, 2007 7:30 PM
Maximos, what can I say? As I understand the position you're attributing to Donald Collins, in my view such a position is abhorrent and evil. I can't believe that I'd say anything similar about any of J. Bottum's views that spring from or are in any way related to his "propositionalism," no matter how soft he is on immigration. Does that mean that his views on that subject are definitely neutral, quite unimportant? No. But between saying that someone's incorrect political views are evil and abhorrent and saying that they are no biggie at all there's a lot of space.
Posted by Lydia | September 19, 2007 8:08 PM
In the spirit of potentially annoying everyone in the discussion, isn't one core issue though taking the propositions (doctrines) as erasing blood and soil, as opposed to being a modal aspect of them? Isn't what is at issue the attempt to saw abstract truths off from history and incarnation, to treat them as a complete and free-standing system disconnected from its roots in reality? IOW, isn't the real problem not propositions or adherence to universal truths per se but positivism?
After all, the world would be a better place in at least some senses as a universal Christendom rooted in Western Christendom. But one of our principles or traditions (it is difficult to say which really) is modesty in our encounter with the incarnate world: that something may be abstractly desirable by no means licenses us to usurp its actual realization in particular times and places among particular peoples from Providence. It is this latter principle or tradition which I think began to wear at the edges during the Civil War and which was decisively pushed to the background in the twentieth century. And whether we call it principle or tradition by name, it is essential that it be recovered.
Posted by Zippy | September 19, 2007 8:40 PM
Thanks, Bill. That is a very good criticism, which I will keep in mind in future excursion into this subject.
Lydia, as it happens Bottum is the author of some really vicious hyperbole on the subject of immigration. If I recall correctly he said that specific restrictions on Muslim immigration, i.e., discrimination against them in immigration policy, would make us as evil as the terrorists. Perhaps Jeff knows the quotation exactly.
Now undoubtedly endorsing population control is worse, but this is a really lunatic statement: sufficiently lunatic, in my view, to call into question his judgment and wisdom.
Posted by Paul J Cella | September 19, 2007 8:44 PM
Zippy: Yes; and that is very well put.
(Although you might have to elaborate on the term positivism in this context. I'm having trouble relating it properly.)
Posted by Paul J Cella | September 19, 2007 8:48 PM
(Although you might have to elaborate on the term positivism in this context. I'm having trouble relating it properly.)
From a certain perspective the positivist-postmodern dichotomy represents an encounter between the abstract/universal and the particular/local/actual, where one attempts to dominate the other to its exclusion.
Clearly there are universal truths, and clearly there are local particulars. Positivism on this understanding attempts to take some set of local particulars and make an abstraction out of it: to make us omniscient in our knowledge of at least the domain in question; to in a sense reduce the domain in question to our abstract knowledge of it (the abstract/universal utterly dominating some sphere of the particular/actual: in this case, America becoming nothing but some comprehensive set of abstract propositions defining what it is to be American). Postmodernism realizes (correctly) that this is impossible, and concludes (incorrectly, in what amounts to a tantrum directed at the impossibility of even a localized omniscience) that this falsifies the possibility of universal truth: the postmodern is in this sense the particular/actual dominating the abstract/universal.
Both are wrongheaded, and indeed are in my understanding two sides of the same erroneous coin.
But also I wanted to tweak Lydia even while agreeing with her. :-D
Posted by Zippy | September 19, 2007 9:09 PM
You might be reading far, far too much into my stated views in this instance. It is certainly true to state that, in the abstract, Collins' views on population control and that hell-spawned euphemism, "reproductive freedom", are more abhorrent and evil than Bottom's views on immigration and identity. However, in the concrete, for an individual actor such as this father of two, the calculus changes, and the weighing of normative statuses becomes, if not altogether irrelevant, than at least beside the point - this latter being that we can know, apodictically, that Bottom's doctrines - which are the doctrines of the political establishment, as well as of the economic establishment, the plutocracy - will result in an America nastier and more brutish than the present America, an America less good, in many substantive ways, than any America a conscientious father should desire to bequeath to his children. The significance of this is that I believe it incumbent upon me to oppose Bottom's immigration fanaticism with the same vigour with which I oppose Collins' "just enough of me, waaayyyy too many of you" nostrums. It is not sufficient to state that one has opposed the culture of death, if one has connived at policies which will worsen the circumstances in which one's own children must dwell. With Collins, some of the positions in question are just plain evil; with Bottom, and those like him, it's personal.
Posted by Maximos | September 19, 2007 9:25 PM
Paul, you're right, that's a lunatic statement of Bottum's. Probably the reason I missed it is that the blogosophere took care of the part of my mind that First Things used to appeal to, so I let my subscription lapse.
And I agree that it calls into question his wisdom and judgement. But I'm a sufficiently curmudgeonly sort of person and have a sufficient number of very strong opinions that I think a lot of things call into question a lot of people's wisdom and judgement. Maybe even call them seriously into question on this or that type of issue. Don't get me started listing particulars. What I try to do is to say, "I don't trust so-and-so's judgement on such-and-such. He's off his rocker in that area." So what this means is that I absolutely don't trust Bottum's judgement on any immigration issue, not even just Mexican immigration (which I'd hoped perhaps was the worst it got with him).
Would I still consider writing for a journal he edited? Yes, I would. But I can't imagine that I'd want to be associated with a population control person in any pundit-ish way whatsoever.
Zippy, one reason why we really can't say, I think, that particular beliefs or commitments are a modal aspect of blood and soil is because of the phenomenon of successful immigration. I don't think any of us wants to say that it is impossible, or shouldn't ever be allowed, or is always bad, or something like that for (say) a Vietnamese person to come to America and thoroughly to make it his adopted country, really become an American. But in that case whatever it is he adopts can't really be a modal aspect of blood and kinship, because he doesn't have the blood and kinship.
Posted by Lydia | September 19, 2007 9:34 PM
It is not merely - as I perceive the controversy - that neoconservatives and other propositionalists reduce the actuality of America by conceptualizing America as a set of relations among abstractions, though they do this. It is also that the abstractions in terms of which they define America are the worst elements of our tradition, or, at a minimum, that they are the most easily distorted and perverted of all the elements of our tradition: individual rights, democracy, capitalism as the temporal summum bonum? Translate that back into the particular, and you're left with the braying fool, the mob, and Gordon Gekko as the essence of America. Apply this to foreign affairs, and you're left with the Ugly American, only with guns and bombs, and an unshakable conviction that he is entitled to make the world a "better place" by killing people.
Posted by Maximos | September 19, 2007 9:54 PM
But in that case whatever it is he adopts can't really be a modal aspect of blood and kinship, because he doesn't have the blood and kinship.
No, but he can certainly embrace the American culture, perhaps a hybrid version of it, and he can transfer his patriotic loyalty to place to America, and the little corner of it in which he dwells. This is possible for a hundred-thousand Vietnamese in the greater Philadephia area in a way in which it is not possible for tens of millions of Mexicans spread throughout the country. Any propositions he affirms could certainly be modal aspects of that.
Posted by Maximos | September 19, 2007 10:03 PM
But in that case whatever it is he adopts can't really be a modal aspect of blood and kinship, because he doesn't have the blood and kinship.
Immigration though is somewhat like adoption. Adoption doesn't reduce a family to nothing but a set of abstract propositions. The actual filial love in the case of adoption isn't merely an abstraction, I don't think, and I would have a hard time considering an arbitrary commune of people who are not and never have been blood related who nevertheless pledge filial love to each other a family in the same sense that a family who (say) adopts a Vietnamese child is a family. At bottom the proposition nation is anti-essentialism with respect to nations riding on the back of propositions: thus meriting the label "positivist".
Posted by Zippy | September 19, 2007 10:04 PM
Can he be loyal to Americans over against foreigners, to the extent of being perfectly loyal to the net taxpayers of our citizenry, and to the exclusion of loyalty to the fellow nationals of his source country, who increase the level of aggression on some of our citizens by coming here? This is a hard challenge, can the nation mean less than that we owe loyalty to fellow nationals when foreigners arrive here in a manner which increases the level of aggression on our citizens, some or all of them? I don't think anyone will feel strong enough to answer it directly and properly, but then, I'm not going to go through all the controversial statements above and try to spell out what's wrong with them, or almost right.
Posted by John S Bolton | September 19, 2007 10:05 PM
That's an excellent point, Jeff: it's not just that the propositionalists overrate the importance of abstractions, but that they emphasize so many inferior ones. That's why I like Chesterton's real American/ideal American line.
For example, they always go for "democracy" instead of much better, nobler concepts like "self-government" or even "republicanism." They prefer capitalism to free enterprise. They underrate American localism, regionalism, state-based-loyalties. They distrust the rugged individualism of the West, which is not about self-assertion but self-possession. They sneer at the long agony of the South, and are tone-deaf to the aching tragedy of her just defeat. They're alienated from Christendom. They are altogether too polite and friendly with creeps like Christopher Hitchens. They don't understand, and misuse, old Ronald Reagan. They emphatically prefer the Executive to the Legislature. The vast wonder of American variety bores them. They preach rootlessness and are shocked by ugly proletarianism.
So there. Got that off my chest.
Posted by Paul J Cella | September 19, 2007 10:20 PM
If I may make a mildly-worded comment here about which abstractions are being embraced, it does seem to me that the willingness to work hard and not demand handouts is one of them. Now, I'm afraid I'm going to anger Jeff here, but it does not seem to me that people who use the exaggeration "so-and-so is a bette