What’s Wrong with the World

Much ink and many pixels have been spilled in disputations over the nature and significance of neoconservatism, particularly as this tendency appears to be the dominant political motif of the present administration. Much of the discussion has been, well, not so much a discussion as an exchange of incandescent invective, and, when it has not been so intemperate, it has tended towards the obfuscatory, as in the attempt to deny that there actually exists a definable tendency corresponding to the term "neoconservatism". Fortunately, prominent neoconservative Michael Novak has obliged those pining for a succinct exposition of neoconservatism. That interview, however, requires some interpretation; for, like a scriptural text, the story of neoconservatism is not a fit one for private interpretation, particularly the self-interpretations of those who authored it. Unlike a scriptural text, which is best interpreted from within the tradition out of which it arose, neoconservatism is best interpreted by outsiders. After all, is it not the case that we are often understood best by those who are, well, not us?

To this end, I propose to provide an interpretation of select passages from the linked Novak interview, refraining from emotionally-freighted language; imagine the deadpan delivery of Bob Dole, and you will have in mind the intended tone.

The "right of privacy" isn't.

That is, it isn't a right to do what you choose to do in private without undue busybody meddling by others.

"It", to be clear, is the legal right of privacy found by the Warren/Douglas court to be emanating, as a postmodern penumbra, from the U.S. Constitution in the contraception case Griswold vs. Connecticut.

"Rights" are all well and good, but I expect that the natural and positive law could be expressed without ever using the term, and we might well be better off avoiding the term as much as possible. At the very least I expect that whenever we use the term "right" to express something true about the moral order or desirable about the legal order, that that expression supervenes on saying the same thing in terms of obligations. A "right" as far as I can tell is just a rule whereby we discriminate between one set of claims and another, and decide what moral (or legal) obligations obtain to the parties involved.

I'll set aside what that imples about the term "equal rights", which on its face would seem to be a self-contradictory requirement to discriminate without discriminating. Suffice to say that although it isn't necessary for the use of the term to result in the banishment of substantive meaning from our politics, in practice it most often does have the effect of banishing meaning from our politics. If everyone always has to be treated equally then distinctions have to be made not to matter: meaning must be banished. Yet the assertion of any "right" is an assertion that some distinction matters: that one claim or set of claims must trump a conflicting claim or set of claims: that the meaning of the specific conflict must be resolved.

As Mr. Martin mentioned in passing below, the philosophy of the ancient world, (and the philosophy of Christendom, once the former was, as has been said many times, baptized by Christian thinkers, culminating in the great Aristotelian synthesis of the Dumb Ox, Saint Thomas Aquinas) hinged upon the parallel between order in the soul and order in the commonwealth. This was an insight into the political character of man that was not lost on our more immediate ancestors, here in America. Their literature abounds with quotations emphasizing the folly of trying to erect a tolerable commonwealth upon the sifting sand of human vice or appetite

Modern people like to think politically almost exclusively in terms of rights as opposed to obligations. Framing politics in terms of "rights" makes it seem as though there is a progression toward greater human freedom as more rights are recognized. More rights (the unreflective modern presumption goes) means more freedom.

But this is only illusory, precisely because one man's right is necessarily another man's obligation. One man's right discriminates between his substantive claim and some other man's substantive claim. One man's property right is another man's trespass. Every political right carries with it an authoritative discrimination, backed by the full force and credibility of the government, between some set of substantive claims and some other set of substantive claims. A "right" by its very nature asserts authoritative discrimination.

Neoconservatism is a topic that has received a fair amount of commentary during the course of the past six years, and seems likely to receive still more, as a lame-duck administration continues to wallow in lameness, the war continues to drag, and the host organism of the neoconservative movement, the Republican Party, hurtles toward the abyss of 2008. Neoconservatism is a topic warranting serious reflection, for while the media and the average American might well content themselves with the knowledge that some neoconservatives promoted a foreign policy that resulted in a Mesopotamian quagmire, the tendency is not one that will be slinking off to die on one of history's ash-heaps anytime soon.

In light of these considerations, it seemed preferable - instead of offering a quick response to a thoughtful comment - to elaborate upon the nature and origins of neoconservatism.

Having been issued a sort of philosophical summons to render an account of my opposition to the political economy of the neoconservatives, and indeed, of the American consensus of the past several generations, I propose to provide an answer to the question, "Why such stridency against cooperation for mutual betterment, AS DETERMINED BY THE PARTICIPANTS"? Ultimately, this is a question that implicates what I take to be the fundamental questions of political thought, namely, what is justice? and how is justice to be sought and approximated in the ordering of our earthly affairs?

Sometimes, conservatives exasperated by such skepticism concerning freedom and markets will frame the question as one of hypocrisy: Why would an executive who has arrived at a decision to outsource his manufacturing in order to save x dollars per hour on wages and benefits be regarded as greedy, while the American employees who wish to retain those wages and benefits are not so regarded, and are often considered to be struggling to retain something to which they are entitled? And what has this to do with public policy? Any one of several different, though interrelated conservative answers to such a query could be articulated, though I only wish to focus on one for the present. For the purposes of political economy, the executive has a higher set of hurdles to clear.

Cardinal Newman wrote very astutely, if a bit acidly, that it is a misfortune to be self-educated. It may be a misfortune; often it is a joy and a calling. But even where joyous it must always be an exception, unless barbarism is ascendant. In that sense we might almost say of a society which, by lassitude, heresy or avarice, forces many men to become autodidacts: “there is a society oppressed by barbarism.” Upon reading a devastating essay by Larry P. Arnn in the Fall 2006 issue of The Claremont Review of Books, one is left with that distinct impression. Ours is a society oppressed by barbarism. Misfortune will be the lot of Americans for some time to come — at least for those Americans who believe that “education” contains a notion of diligent immersion in, and exploration and veneration of one’s own civilization.

What Arnn — President of Hillsdale College — lays out in some detail is an arraignment of education in America so shattering as to induce the reader to a kind of despondency, followed by, it is to be hoped, a very solid kind of defiance. As Arnn tells it, with subtlety and incision, the agents of barbarism are in the driver’s seat; and the would-be defenders of civilization are reduced by bafflement, misconception, and disarray. Deriving from work by a committee of the President’s Advisory Council, the verdict is grim: “our kindergarten students rank with the best in the world in their knowledge of science and math. For each year that they are subjected to the capable attentions of our public education system, they fall a step behind. By the time they graduate from high school, they rank at the 10th percentile in math internationally, struggling to keep ahead of the unschooled goatherds of the Third World.” It might be added, of course, that a goatherd at age eighteen is probably the master of quite a variety of useful skills, such that his education is, in its own way, quite adequate.

The modern liberal order is premised on the political primacy of freedom and equality over traditional, natural, or otherwise unchosen constraints. Tradition and nature are allowed to play a political role, but only inasmuch as the roles they play are freely chosen. It is not the job of politics, in the modern liberal order, to carry out directly any natural or traditional imperative; but only those imperatives mediated by the actual choices of a free and equal body of supermen-citizens.

One way to think about equality is that it asserts identity with respect to an attribute. Therefore, there is no such thing as equality-qua-equality when applied to anything actual: equality is always preceded by a modifier which tells us the attribute that is identical from one instance to another. So we can have numeric equality, racial equality, gender equality, etc. "Equality" with no modifier at all would mean literal identity: a thing is always equal in this most general sense only to itself, not to anything else.

Still, though, this remains ambiguous. Racial equality for example raises (without answering) the question of circumstances: specifically, in what circumstances are we to treat the attribute in question - race - as identical. And in a political or moral context, what this seems to be prescribing is that there are certain true facts which must be ignored or made-as-if-not-true in the context of certain decisions. So specifying what equality means involves the creation of a master list of true facts which must be ignored and circumstances in which we are to ignore them.

Many a careful and penetrating student of politics — Burke, Oakeshott and Weaver come immediately to mind — has made a distinction between freedom as enjoyment and freedom as power. The former is tethered firmly to the historical and the particular, and even to the personal. This freedom, as Weaver put it, “is something that gathers around the hearth, inheres in local associations, and endears to a man his place of habitation.” It is not about action or force, but rather appreciation. Its spring is gratitude and its provocation the threat of change or deprivation. The man aware of this liberty will be more aware of his obligations than his rights; and he will feel, deep in his bones, the honor and joy it is to fulfill obligations honorably. He will not hesitate to embrace sacrifice.

Freedom as power is ahistorical and idealized. Not enjoyment of the things that exist, but the potential of those that one day might, is what gives it life. Its mark is that it almost has no tether, but rather a balloon that carries it to and fro according to the wind. Its spring is concepts spun out of the minds of men. It is adventurous and dissatisfied with the present; it needs no external provocation, but often demonstrates a complicated lineage of influence. Though this freedom is dismissive or even contemptuous of history, it is perfectly unintelligible without it. That is to say, the observer must consent to enter the history or world of this theory of freedom in order to understand it. Its historical roots are deep, tangled and long, but we may take the French Revolution as its great exemplar and solidifier. Its parlance is “rights”; its aspiration is to rule or possess; its currency is force. It operates on human desires, downplays obligation in favor of privilege, which its construes as right, and is oriented toward the future. Men possessed by this version of freedom tend toward grandeur of theory, stridency of debate, bafflement at reluctance, and exasperation at dissent.

As I suspect most readers of these pages will be aware, the son of Boston University professor of history and international relations Andrew Bacevich was killed while serving in Iraq. I'll not linger on the loss, which, like all such losses, is unutterably tragic, tinged in this case by the irony of the fallen hero's father's reputation as a critic of Bush's Mesopotamian misadventure. Our prayers must be with the Bacevich family as they mourn their loss.

The loss of a young officer, however, while an occasion for private grieving, is veritably pregnant with portents for the future of this nation, well beyond the polarization of our political discourse that would have the vilest of war enthusiasts penning letters to Prof. Bacevich to lay the blame for the loss of his son at the elder man's writings. For here it is not merely the nature of the loss - though even this alters its aspect when contemplated in light of the political setting - that arrests the mind, but the also nature of the political establishment itself. Though the sort of people who were rankled by the celebrated First Things End of Democracy symposium will likely bridle at the suggestion, it is all but incontrovertible that the response of the establishment to public opinion on the war (and on other matters, as we will see) indicates that the integrity of our ostensible republic of self-governing citizens has been compromised, perhaps mortally.

Red State editor and blogger Pejman Yousefzadeh is currently on board at Right Reason as a guest-blogger, contributing a series of pieces sketching the lineaments of a rapproachment between conservatism and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's philosophy, long tarred by association with the horrors of German National Socialism, and rejected by most conservatives on account of its advocacy of militant irreligion and its status as a resource for postmodernists and nihilists, such as this fool, may, he argues, contain rich potentialities for conservative thought.

The suggestion that conservatives, and even religious conservatives, might find something of value in the writings of that prophet of the death of God, Nietzsche, seems to have been poorly received. It may not be possible to help this, but it might be of some value to explain why one conservative, even reactionary, soul found some berries amidst the briers of Nietzsche.

If I had to offer a one-sentence explanation of why I ever bothered to read Nietzsche, it would be the following: I read Nietzsche because I was raised as a low-church evangelical Protestant.

Andrei Navrozov, European editor of Chronicles, and a literary stylist of occasionally daunting, yet always exquisitely aesthetic prose, has a new essay up at Taki's entitled The Right to Shirk. I would commit a grave injustice were I to attempt a summarization of one of Navrozov's pieces, so perhaps the following excerpt should suffice as an appetizer:

In a combox at Mark Shea's blog, one commenter says:

No good can come from deconstruction, playful or not. "Good post-modernists" is an oxymoron.

Lawrence Auster, the prolific blogger over at View From the Right, has posted an enlightening letter from a reader, who has summarized the atheism-inspired philosophical declension of John Derbyshire, National Reviews' resident curmudgeon.

I should state, for the record, that neither "peak oil" nor "global warming" impress me as being inherently "liberal", though certain policy responses to either would assuredly be "liberal". And while I'm more in the "how you take your Darwin" camp than the "whether you take your Darwin" camp, the role of untethered Darwinian speculation in the Derb's evolution merits reflection. Were we a people given to myth and legend, Darwinian thought would surely figure in myth as one of those benefactions that can destroy, or as a basis of civilization that also alienates us from ourselves. But enough of my thoughts. Read the letter.

Via Rod Dreher:

Islamic extremists embedded in the United States — posing as Hispanic nationals — are partnering with violent Mexican drug gangs to finance terror networks in the Middle East, according to a Drug Enforcement Administration report.

"Since drug traffickers and terrorists operate in a clandestine environment, both groups utilize similar methodologies to function ... all lend themselves to facilitation and are among the essential elements that may contribute to the successful conclusion of a catastrophic event by terrorists," said the confidential report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.

The 2005 report outlines an ongoing scheme in which multiple Middle Eastern drug-trafficking and terrorist cells operating in the U.S. fund terror networks overseas, aided by established Mexican cartels with highly sophisticated trafficking routes.

These terrorist groups, or sleeper cells, include people who speak Arabic, Spanish and Hebrew and, for the most part, arouse no suspicion in their communities. (Sara Carter, Washington Times for August 8, 2007)

Now, some of us who have taken the measure of the jihad, perceiving in it the nature of an existential threat to the very substance of our civilization, albeit one which will require time to ripen, have contemplated this very possibility for some time. In fact, we might even asseverate that this possibility suggests itself upon consideration of the entities involved: it is in the nature of clandestine organizations, even those that, like some Islamic groups, observe a decentralized, "leaderless resistance" style of organization, that they not concern themselves overmuch with the objectives of partners. Provided that there is sufficient overlap at the point of meeting, and provided, further, that there exist no immediate and overt conflicts of aim, collaboration can occur. That some nationals of Islamic nations may easily pass themselves off as Latin Americans only adds to the synergy.

James Poulos, who blogs at Postmodern Conservative and The American Scene, has, in his own words, taken part-time employment as a critic of "our general cultural retreat into the therapeutic meta-ethics of feeling, emotion, and sense - and away from the ethics of fact, act, and responsibility". Critiquing a NYT article on US-Saudi relations which stated that the American officials had consented to interviews in advance of a diplomatic junket in order to "send a pointed signal of deep frustration", Poulos wrote:

No, ladies and gentlemen. The officials were clearly intent on actually expressing deep frustration that more private American appeals to the Saudis had failed to produce a change in course. (snip) We must cease this constant retreat into meta-narrative. We must insist upon discussing the world where actual actions take place. We must resist the half-conscious urge to make feelings and feints, interpretations and intimations, more important than the behaviors that call them into 'being.' We must stop reading entrails and issuing oracles.

In other words, the US did not send a signal of frustration; they simply expressed it, period. The metanarrative of signals and signs adds nothing but a layer of opaque, baroque ritual, obfuscating what actually transpired.

I want you to consider what it would mean to you, if you learned that a Jim Crow Party were potent and fashionable, and perhaps even ready to shake the political science of our country. Consider that before us stood the menace of a political movement organized upon a principle of subjugation and humiliation of an inferior or benighted class. How would you greet this? How would it strike your sensibility? Or consider what might be your reaction to the appearance of renewed apparatus of subversion, in certain ways analogous to the Communist infiltration of the early 20th century.

I want you to consider them amalgamated: an organized apparatus of subversion ordered toward the subjugation of a class of men.

This, friends, is the Jihad; and it is we who shall be subjugated. For the great honor of Islam is to extend equality to all men; and the great disgrace of the Jihad is to remove it utterly from those who reject the faith.

It is vital to understand the gravity of the situation. Now of course I know that all my friends here understand it perfectly well — else they would not have signed onto a statement of purpose so emphatic as ours. I feel confident, moreover, that even some of our dear right-Liberals, as Zippy long ago described them, are pretty well on-broad with our purpose. I have even discovered, in personal conversation, that indeed a number of flat-out Liberals are in the end sympathetic; in short that though they might bristle at the strictures I would apply to Liberalism, they could still be made to perceive the true threat of the Jihad. In these facts I find great reassurance and even pride. My countrymen, in considerable number and even despite other differences of real depth, are with me in opposition to the Jihad.

There is, in a manner of speaking, a board constituency for a formidable Anti-Jihad Coalition.

And so my question to readers is this: what sort of rhetorical, political, philosophical, even theological principles ought to comprise our strategy against this enemy?

Via Rod Dreher, quoting Caleb Stegall's review of Bill McKibben's book, Deep Economy:

In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in Röpke’s home of Geneva, Switzerland. During the war, the Genevan fathers coped with shortages by providing citizens with small garden allotments outside the city for growing vegtables. These citizen gardens became so popular with the people of Geneva that the practice was continued even after the war and the return to abundance. Röpke was particularly proud of these citizen farmers, and so he took Mises on a tour of the gardens. “A very inefficient way of producing foodstuffs!” Mises noted disapprovingly. “Perhaps so, but a very efficient way of producing human happiness” was Röpke’s rejoinder.

For the present, I'll restrict myself to observing that the efficient, centralized agricultural production so admired by Mises will be rendered obsolete by the gradual increase of the costs of the petroleum required for fertilization, pesticides, and transportation, and that smaller farms tend to produce greater yields per acre, while larger farms tend to produce greater yields per dollar. Oh, yes, one more thing - I've never yet known a child who thrills to the sight of heavy industry and suburban sprawl; virtually all of them, to the contrary, thrill to the sight of such ordinary features of the natural world as hills, fields, forests, ponds, cows, turtles, and so on. From the mouths of children, thou hast ordained wisdom, O God - or so I am inclined to say.

Perhaps some readers will be conversant with a controversy, simmering beneath the surface of our mundane political discourse, concerning a hypothetical/proposed/aborning/fantastical North American Union, modeled after the European Economic Community and entailing similar economic, regulatory, administrative, and legal "harmonizations". The ostensible centerpiece of this union, a 'NAFTA superhighway' bisecting the continent, running from Mexican ports on the Pacific Ocean right through the American heartland to Canada, is said to exist in embryonic form in the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor, a colossal white-elephant boondoggle of the age of globalism. Left-wing and progressive political movements in Canada and Mexico perceive the high-level, international conferences, in which representatives of both government and business participate, as a nascent continental corporatocracy; right-wing populists in America, stinging from the obsession of the American establishment with mass immigration and a New Economy which benefits Wall Street, but not Main Street, perceive in these consultations a plutocratic subversion of national sovereignty. Of course, the principals of these proceedings, who often seem to adopt a "whatever it is, which we're not quite going to say, it isn't what you think it is" posture towards their critics, must exist under the clouds of left and right-populist suspicion arising from growing awareness of the profoundly unrepresentative character of the European Union.

Regardless of one's position on this discrete controversy, it would seem logical - yes? - given the manifest logic of globalization, to contemplate the prospects for deepening integration among the three North American nations. If globalization is what its proponents claim for it, then something akin to what the critics allege either is occurring, or will occur, or is likely to occur, with or without those international junkets for bureaucrats, executive branch appointees, and CEOs from richistan.

The autumn of 1994 I spent at Messiah College, in Grantham, PA. My family were moving at the time, both the business and the residence, and it seemed better for me to be near to home at such a time. One of my three roommates that semester was a Korean who had been adopted by a Texas family, spoke with a bit of an accent, wore cowboy boots, and chewed tobacco. He was also greatly enamored of the foreign policy writings of George Kennan, considered one of the architects of the policy of containment. This fondness provided fodder for the occasional conversation, and my expression of reservations concerning the judgment of a man who came to perceive in the specific character of American opposition to communism and the Soviet Union a greater threat to the commonweal than the often dissembling anti-anticommunism. Kennan feared the release of the simplifying, reductive passions of a nationalism that would, far from grasping the profounder, historical, geopolitical, and yes, spiritual dimensions of the standoff, construe it as a confrontation of rival ideologies. The Cold War was not merely a matter of geopolitical wrangling and foreign policy; it was a test of national character.

This, in my youth - I was but twenty years old at the time - I did not perceive. I had not yet learned to discriminate between the various tendencies and strands of the American character, to winnow the noble from the base, the prescient from the purblind, the prudent from the foolhardy. And so I thought that anticommunism was anticommunism, and that the imperative thing was that one have opposed communism, that specter of a godless, totalitarian collectivism, stamping on a human face in the name of the future.

The opposition of yours truly to a phenomenon variously described as 'economic centralization', 'globalization', 'managerial capitalism', and 'concentration' is perhaps a curiousity, a seemingly bizarre and incongruous outlier relative to the mainstream of conservative thought. At a minimum, this is the impression I often receive.

However, suppose I were to reformulate the questions posed by our own Steve Burton in a comment in an earlier thread.

Scholars and theorists thrashing about in the waters of postmodernism sooner or later encounter a bizarre and stupefying fact: Michel Foucault had a thing for the Islamic revolution, had, in fact, a rather unnatural affection for it. To what can we attribute this shattering aporia?

David Frum, in a brief blog review of a recent scholarly interrogation of this theme, Foucaut and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, writes:

...of all the absurd infatuations ever to sweep literary Paris, none has ever matched the absolute incongruity of Michel Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979. Foucault, a man utterly devoid of religious feeling, a homosexual who reveled in the brutalities of San Francisco’s sado-masochistic bar scene, decided in 1978 that the Khomeini revolution offered mankind’s best hope for personal liberation.

How could Foucault – for all his absurdities, obviously no idiot – have talked himself into believing anything so manifestly absurd?

Since at least the Enlightenment and perhaps before there has been this notion that our current state of affairs requires the justification of history; or else lacking that the present order is nothing and can be discarded. If injustices were perpetrated against the American Indians, the narrative goes, then the entire present order of private property in America is called into question. If the Hiroshima bombing was immoral, the narrative goes, then entering the war in the first place was unjustified, and indeed the American military and American efforts to defend herself from foreign aggressors is morally suspect generally. If the conditions for a just war were not met in Iraq at the outset, then no obligation to use military power in the present context is metaphysically possible.

Most on the political left and many on the political right buy into this narrative, taking it as true and drawing a conclusion about the major premise from a self-serving reverse-engineering of the proposition. The left likes the idea of invalidating the present regime of private property and of castrating American defense, so therefore the major historical premeses above are true. The right (correctly) resists those conclusions, and therefore (incorrectly) concludes that the major premeses are false. Many on the right conclude that simply agreeing to the major premeses above constitutes "liberalism", as if liberalism is inter alia implied by a particular assessment of the justice of specific historical acts.

Referencing a contribution by Ezra Klein to an ongoing conversation about Wal-Mart, its business model and the social, political, and economic consequences of that model, Reihan Salam states, or, perhaps, sketches, the case for wage subsidies:

Hence the case for wage subsidies. Wal-Mart shouldn't be held responsible for solving all our social ills. On the center-left, there really are (at least) two distinct approaches to Wal-Mart: in cities like Chicago, politicians target big-box stores per se, as though Wal-Mart were a black-hatted corporate villain that exists in a vacuum. (McDonald's also plays this role.) Then there are those who very sensibly advocate comprehensive national policies that would impact all of us. My bias is clear. The right policies are those that use revenues raised by broad-based taxes to fund a basic minimum: a decent wage and health care.

Apropos of two recent posts here at WWWtW, and in response to this characteristically unilluminating Will Wilkinson post, Daniel Larison highlights the non-discursive nature of Wilkinson's remarks:

My concluding points in these two cases (Two previous instances, linked in Daniel's piece, in which D.L. observes that Wilkinson is not really arguing anything - Maximos.) were to draw attention to the fact that the points of contention between Mr. Wilkinson and his interlocutors are not disagreements over anything like measurable practical benefits for the world’s poorest or anyone else. They are disagreements between libertarians such as Mr. Wilkinson and conservatives, because the two are sharply, seemingly irreconcilably at odds about basic values. He berates conservatives for privileging the interests of fellow citizens and countrymen (which he finds “morally abhorrent”), but beyond asserting that this act of privileging is wrong he does not give any persuasive reason why this should be so, except to fall back on his assumption that distinguishing between citizen and non-citizen is arbitrary and wrong.

Relatedly, Mr. Lee, incognizant of the follies of his previous post, has more or less done precisely what I said libertarians would do in my comments on Wilkinson, throwing in the hoary old libertarian shibboleth of 'denying social services to the masses of third-world utility-maximizers we are obligated to admit'. It is incumbent upon us to acknowledge that the willed imposition of such Dickensian conditions would be gravely immoral; albeit that denial would be the squaring of the circle - of the rights of Americans to maximize their utility and the rights of the third world migrants to maximize their utility - for the libertarian, for whom citizenship matters, except when it doesn't.

Libertarianism: applied autism.

I should hope that the following won't have me designated a stalwart poseur, but I consider it necessary to make a sort of meta-point concerning our relationship to the natural realm, a subject on which - as I believe some of the subtexts of the infamous crunchy-con debates disclosed - some conservatives are woefully confused.

Nature, then, may be considered as an end in itself, an end prior to all human purposes, its value not contingent upon those purposes - this, by virtue of its Creator's original donation of being, and subsequent declaration that this natural reality, having been given being, is good. Good, that is, in itself, and independent of the existence, and therefore, purposes, of man. The natural environment is good because it participates in being, in the Great Chain of Being, if you will; that is, nature is good because it is.

The free man practices and values the virtues of honesty, courage, reverence, justice, and self-restraint not so much because they are good in the abstract as because he shares a general taste for them. It is only within such an ethical and civic context that it makes any sense to speak of pursuing or loving truth. Philosophy, as Aristotle points out, is a dangerous pursuit for people have not been properly brought up by family and friends, because they will only learn how to justify their vices. Even the paltry bits of philosophy studied by Ayn Rand and her chief apostles hardened them in their selfishness, arrogance, and lewdness. Even if Rand or the Brandens had read a few good books, they would probably have turned them to evil purposes. We need only look at the example of Straussians who spend entire careers twisting and distorting every great political thinker from Plato to Jefferson. What is the result of all their lying? The kind of mad arrogance that overtook Bloom and Jaffa. (Thomas Fleming, from the September issue of Chronicles

Which reminds me of one of my favourite minor texts of conservatism, Whittaker Chambers' magisterial review of Ayn Rand's turgid and indigestible tract for a dictatorship of the meritocratic, technocratic-capitalist superman, Atlas Shrugged.

I hate property taxes. In fact, I probably, upon reflection, detest them even more than mere income taxes, for there is something more perverse about them. The income tax, however intrusive, presupposes only that a certain percentage of one's income is owed to the government, for the maintenance of public goods. The property tax, however, presupposes something more, and in this lies its monumental perversity, from which many particular evils flow.

Property taxation, it seems to me, presupposes one of two things. Either, first, that the properties upon which tax is levied generate income, of themselves, such that a portion of this is owed to the government for public goods and so forth. Except that, for the overwhelming majority of us, our property is simply real estate, which does not of itself generate income. To be sure, there is an expectation, now fading, that real estate can only appreciate, yielding income at the time of sale; but there is another term for this: capital gains. All of this is to say, then, that the property tax seems to presuppose something like feudalism: one held a piece of land in fief, and owed a certain percentage of its produce to one's lord. The fief generated wealth, and some of that wealth was due for the provision of public goods and services.

We, obviously, do not live under a feudal regime, though property taxation seems to presuppose such a regime. A feudal regime would also be a more distributive state, but we obviously do not live in one of those, which renders this tax doubly absurd to my mind: the properties which are taxed are neither income-generating, as they would be under feudalism, nor distributed as they would be under feudalism. So, despite the rhetorical appeal some have occasionally found in likening this tax to feudalism, it seems a safe conjecture that it is not a relic of feudalism.

Or, second, the property tax could be a sign of something else altogether - not a vestige of a long-discarded social order, but a sort of implicit rent payment: we are all renting, in this sense, from our local governments, with the tax representing the fee paid for the privilege of having shelter. After all, contrary to the feudal system, in modern rental arrangements, the only presupposition is that of use, as opposed to income generation. And it strikes me as perverse in the extreme to proclaim, even tacitly, that governments are universal landlords.

In closing, I note only that I have pointedly ignored the pragmatic rationales for property taxation: the ease of financing local governments and schools, and so forth. These rationales elide the many inequities of such systems of finance, and in any event, the use of a thing does not exhaust its significance. And it is the significance of property taxation, its symbolism, apart from the numerous pragmatic purposes and injustices (elderly folks losing homes because, on fixed incomes, they cannot pay the tax and, well, eat as well), that renders it manifestly perverse.

Hegemonism, the attempt (it should be acknowledged at the outset that the ambitions of the hegemonist can never be fully achieved, save upon mountains of skulls) to provide for the security of one's own nation, not by defending her by means of a military deterrent, alliances, and geopolitical balancing, but by reducing, degrading, subverting, and subordinating other nations to one's own, reducing them to a state of vassalage, is not an expression of patriotism, but its negation. The contemporary conflation of hegemonist policies with a patriotic love of place and people is but one reflection of a profound moral disorder, an ideological deformation of loyalties and obligation that, by nature, are concrete and circumscribed, ethically and geographically.

Patriotism is an almost tangible thing, a love of a man for the very soil (I dare say that he will not call it dirt.) of his homeland; it is an instinctual attachment to the very specificities of his place in the world: its rivers, hills, plains, towns, villages, and irreducibly, the customs, traditions, mores, legends, histories, memories, heroes, villains, and articulated order that make of those natural features a human environment, and not mere physical things. Patriotism, then, is above all a virtue, a mode of piety: a veneration for a certain community of memory and history, a community, moreover, which is not to be confused with those presently living, but receives its very substance from those who now rest from their labours, and hopes to transmit that substance to posterity. Patriotism is a love of neighbour expressed as a democracy of the dead and the as-yet unborn. It is thus particularistic; the nature of the thing excludes the possibility of a universalist patriotism. To combine such terms, and to attempt thereby to conjure a complex meaning from their conjunction, is a fully absurd as to posit square circles.

Georgetown Professor Patrick Deneen, objecting to the term "environment", on the grounds that it establishes an untenable dualism of man and the stuff of the physical world, which is then conceptualized as existing as the raw material of utilitarian pursuits, thereby begetting the political dualism according to which one is either for people or for the planet (or some part of it), writes:

It's worth reflecting on why we have so readily embraced the term "environment" but utterly eschew the word "nature." Nature, of course, is the "normative" term of Aristotelianism: it is a standard and represents a limitation. Humans are creatures of and in nature. We are subject to its laws and to its strictures. Nature is not separate from us; we are natural creatures (special ones - political animals - but animals nonetheless). To employ the word "nature" would mean a fundamental reconceptualization of the relationship of humans to the world with which we live. Rather than either extending human mastery over our "environment" or attempting to stamp out the contagion of humanity, to re-claim the language of nature would require us to change our fundamental conception of a proper way of living well. Living as conscious natural creatures in nature requires the careful negotiation between use and respect, alteration and recognition of limits to manipulation, and thus calls for the virtues of prudence and self-governance. Neither of these virtues are particularly valued in the "environmental" movement, whether that advanced by corporate America in the effort to continue our growth economy of itinerant vandals or the violent anti-humanism of radical environmentalists. Until we reacquaint ourselves with the language, and more importantly, the reality of nature, we will continue in our current condition of human-environmental dualism.

All theological language aside, the dichotomy between the virulent misanthropy of some environmentalists and the pave-and-industrialize everything (or at least regard-the-prospect-with-sanguinity) mentality of some conservatives is not merely philosophically dubious, but politically unfeasible, quite apart from the possible (probable) wrongheadedness of certain contemporary environmental policy nostrums. Conservatives could attempt to orient these sensibilities in virtuous directions, or they could yield to inertia, allowing the corporatists and haters of mankind to define the debate.

I'll not be making any wagers. It is not without reason that the conservative persuasion has been deemed the stupid one.

With respect to the Zero Group Differences mythology discussed in Maximos' post below, a commenter observes:

Essentially, a "noble lie" (Zero Group Differences) has been constructed to counter an ignoble one (ateleological reductionism), in order to prevent the horrific consequences that would follow from people accepting the latter on its own en masse.

So my understanding of the strength of the "zero group differences" mythology in the face of what has always been massive evidence against is this: that implicitly everyone understands that it is the only thing standing between the advanced liberal superman and the nazi.

I'll apologize in advance for the length of the quotation, which is drawn from a favourite essay within a favourite book, Kolakowski's Modernity on Endless Trial, an anthology of selected essays written between 1973 and 1986. The essay, entitled, Politics and the Devil, commences with a brief discussion of the Christian doctrine of existence as a positive good, with evil, therefore, being wholly negative or privative in nature. The devil, then, cannot create either ex nihilo or de novo his own world-order, but must instead corrupt, debauch, deflect, or commandeer institutions or tendencies which have already legitimate purposes, moral and otherwise. Kolakowski's essay traces the moves and countermoves in the grand chess-match between God and the devil, wrought in the sphere of human freedom, as this impinges upon political affairs. We pick up his 'general history of their struggle' on the cusp of the transition to modernity:

One major task of the Enlightenment, among others, was to free politics from the fetters of religion. Since religion itself, by assuming so many political responsibilities and so much power, had become more and more contaminated with secular interests, more and more involved in military adventures, in diplomatic intrigues, and in amassing wealth for wealth's sake, the other part of the assignment was to purify Christianity itself and to reduce it to what was its proper business. This part was to be given to the Reform movement within the Church. Again, two sides of the same Roman coin.

The devil, as one should have expected, was operating relentlessly on both sides of the process, and quite successfully. Within in the Enlightenment proper, his idea was to convince people that it was not enough to liberate politics from religious control and to sever the State from the Church but that the progress of humanity consisted in forgetting its religious tradition altogether and, if necessary, doing it by violence. He gave the Enlightenment its anti-Christian shape and worked out, with the help of many fine and virtuous minds, the idea of humanism, which defined itself primarily by godlessness. Thereby it opened the door to the concept of politics as a sheer vying for power, power being a supreme good in itself; this went far beyond the Aristotelian tradition.

This was the easier and not very complicated half of the devil's job. Properly to wreck and to exploit the ideal of Christianity, which would have gotten rid of the secular pollution and returned it to its original purity, was a much harder task, but the devil proved to be up to the challenge.

Via my good friend Colin Miller, the following anti-Kant attack advertisement.

I'll note, for the time being, that Kant gets sublimity precisely backwards; the sublime does not awe us by awakening us to our rational mastery of contingent being, or some such thing, but overawes us, stupefying our faculties and pointing to what lies beyond phenomenal experience. And "rational mastery" is still a part of phenomenal experience. And no, I've no interest in re-reading the Third Critique, either.

So, put me down for the Other Guy, or, better yet, None of the Above. But the Other Guy, at least, is a much more enthralling read.

I cannot hope to approach the aptness of Srdja Trifkovic's own title, Kosovo as a Symbol of Anti-Postmodernism, and so I have not tried. Nevertheless, the essay is a masterful summation of the significance this little piece of Balkan territory holds in the not-so-playful scheme of signifiers regnant in the West. Selected excerpts follow.

Blissfully unaware of the cultural tectonic shift that has taken place in “the West,” many Serbian political leaders, analysts and institutions in their contacts with the Western elite class keep invoking four sets of arguments in support of their position that Kosovo ought to remain part of Serbia:
1. Historical: Kosovo was the heartland of the Serbian medieval state;
2. Cultural: in Kosovo there are many priceless monuments of Serbian art and architecture that define Serbia’s contribution to the common European heritage;
3. Spiritual: Kosovo is “Serbia’s Jerusalem”;
4. Civilizational: Kosovo should not fall to the insurgent jihad.

If one spends any amount of time, even a few torturous, agonizing, ascetical-works-of-purgation moments reveling in the 'insights' delivered by conservative talk radio, one will encounter a certain meme which, roughly, reduces to the idea that any policy at variance with the policy preferences of the economic wing of the Republican party - the supply-siders, the free-traders, and Wall-Street bagmen - is tantamount to socialism. Nay, may be socialism itself, cloaked as obscurantist populism, and will assuredly set us off on the Broad Way of the Road to Serfdom. For example, some possibly well-intended pol may proffer, as a means of encouraging the nation to lessen its increasingly-ruinous path-dependence upon foreign sources of energy, some tax, or tax-credit, intended to subsidize research in potential alternatives, and the talk-radio personalities and members of the conservative punditocracy will often deride the proposal as utterly illiterate, Big Government on the march, running roughshod over 'consumer preferences', and portending a buckboard ride down the road to serfdom. Such proposals, however, may or may not be wise, depending upon the details, the expected implementation, and the economic rationales and ramifications; nevertheless, where such proposals are of dubious merit, the reasons are particular and empirical, and do not reduce to the assertion that they are truck stops on Hayek's road.

Wither the Republican party in the aftermath of the Iowa caucuses? The party mandarins are aghast at the success of Huckabee, and talk radio personalities are excoriating their own listeners, on the grounds that, by supporting Huckabee, they have ceased to actually vote conservatively. While I am not predisposed to political prognostication, I believe that it would be instructive to spend a few moments analyzing the background to this apoplectic reaction to moderate doses of quite possibly toothless - as I have argued previously - populism. The issues implicated in the controversy, though superficially insubstantial (Huckabee appears to be a compassionate conservative in the mould of Bush, his deviations from GOP orthodoxy are marginal matters of emphasis in most instances, and those rhetorical tropes which have drawn criticism are too slight to merit the weight of the opprobrium they have elicited.), have precipitated a tipping of hands on the part of the custodians of Republican orthodoxy.

Consider the following contributions to National Review's Symposium on the Iowa Caucuses:

According to the Club for Growth, Huckabee takes “profoundly anti-growth positions on taxes, spending, and government regulation.” For Huckabee to succeed where Robertson and Buchanan failed, one of two things must happen. Either he must mislead GOP voters into thinking that he is an economic conservative, or those voters must stop caring. Either way, a Huckabee victory would be very bad news for conservatism as we know it. (John J. Pitney, Jr.)

Huckabee is a fringe Republican, and does not represent the conservative movement on economic policy, domestic programs, law and order, and foreign policy. It is hard to imagine a candidate so out of step with most in the conservative movement assuming the stage in Minnesota in eight months as its leader. (Pat Toomey, of the Club for Growth)

Presented without commentary or emendation:

I assure the reader that I use words in quite a definite sense, but it is possible that he may use them in a different sense; and a muddle and misunderstanding of that sort does not even rise to the dignity of a difference of opinion.

My purpose in posting the following is not to endorse what many might be tempted to surmise, namely, the forcible recreation of some hypothetical ideal peasant society, for such an objective, in any case, would be wholly infeasible. Rather, my purpose is twofold: first, to encourage a re-evaluation of a particular myth of inevitability, a notion which owes more to a forgetting of the historical contingency of a tradition of political economy, now assumed as the unalterable backdrop of our world-order, than to any actual necessity; and second, to observe that the threat, so often urged against even the faintest suggestions of distributism, of an augmentation of state power over society, is omnipresent and has many causes. In point of historical fact, such a growth of governmental power has occurred in tandem with the expansion of corporate power, both as a facilitator and a competitor. The matter is not so much one of eschewing certain objectives for reason of the fear of state power, for this threat is coextensive with political society itself, but of the prudent and judicious means by which the ownership of productive property can be made more widespread. It is a question, in other words, of what one might call an 'ownership society'.
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About fifteen years ago a few of us began to preach, in the old New Age and New Witness, a policy of small distributed property (which has since assumed the awkward but accurate name of Distributism), as we should have said then, against the two extremes of Capitalism and Communism. The first criticism we received was from the most brilliant Fabians, especially Mr. Bernard Shaw. And the form which that first criticism took was simply to tell us that our ideal was impossible. It was only a case of Catholic credulity about fairy-tales. The Law of Rent, and other economic laws, made it inevitable that the little rivulets of property should run down into the pool of plutocracy. In truth, it was the Fabian wit, and not merely the Tory fool, who confronted our vision with that venerable verbal opening, "If it were all divided up to-morrow —"

Nevertheless, we had an answer even in those days, and though we have since found many others, it will clarify the question if I repeat this point of principle. It is true that I believe in fairy-tales — in the sense that I marvel so much at what does exist that I am the readier to admit what might. I understand the man who believes in the Sea Serpent on the ground that there are more fish in the sea than ever came out of it. But I do it the more because the other man, in his ardour for disproving the Sea Serpent, always argues that there are not only no snakes in Iceland, but none in the world. Suppose Mr. Bernard Shaw, commenting on this credulity, were to blame me for believing (on the word of some lying priest) that stones could be thrown up into the air and hang there suspended like a rainbow. Suppose he told me tenderly that I should not believe this Popish fable of the magic stones, if I had ever had the Law of Gravity scientifically explained to me. And suppose, after all this, I found he was only talking about the impossibility of building an arch. I think most of us would form two main conclusions about him and his school. First, we should think them very ill-informed about what is really meant by recognizing a law of nature. A law of nature can be recognized by resisting it, or out-manoeuvring it, or even using it against itself, as in the case of the arch. And second, and much more strongly, we should think them astonishingly ill-informed about what has already been done upon this earth.

Reihan Salam, of the American Scene, a blog I consider essential reading, on account of the eclecticism and erudition of the contributors, is interested in what might be termed 'applied neoconservatism'. Someone else, though I cannot recall who, has employed that term, and though Salam would understandably wish to distance himself from much of contemporary neoconservatism, it is probably not too far wide of the mark. Salam, after all, does count David Brooks as a mentor. In any event, Salam and Ross Douthat have been collaborating on the development of a policy programme, initially termed Sam's Club Republicanism, and since elaborated into a forthcoming book, Grand New Party, the burden of which is to articulate a vision by which the Republican party can recapture the allegiances of the working middle class. I look forward to reading the book, though I've no inclination towards neoconservatism, inasmuch as it behooves one to ponder how the present 'adminstrative state' - which, alas, will be with us for a while - could be made more hospitable to ordinary folks.

Nevertheless, in the comments section of Salam's discussion of the divergence of Republican and Democratic populisms, with the optimism/pessimism divide being a critical psychological factor, there is enacted a confusion of categories with great bearing on some of the pressing political and economic issues of the moment.

One of the interesting dialectical pivot points in recent discussions we've had about employment discrimination is charity. At some point our Christian culture degenerated to the point where "charity" started to mean "acts which are nice to do but always optional". Another thing which seems to have come along for the ride is that charity has become more abstract: the notion seems to be that charity is a marketplace selection of opportunities from which we can arbitrarily choose what we want.

In the discussion on natural obligations employers have toward the men providing for families who work for them, this has manifested in two ways.

The first way has been to treat the contingent obligation an employer has to provide for the basic dignity and needs of employees, and in turn the loyalty and diligence that an employee owes to his employer, as optional: as things not required as a matter of reciprocal justice, but rather as gratuitous and completely optional gifts.

The second way this notion has manifested itself is in the idea that charity (and therefore justice) is fungible: that there is no particular charitable obligation of employer to employee in justice but rather that the employer's obligation is just to some abstract charity-in-general, an obligation (to the extent it is one at all: see the previous point) which can be discharged by giving to one of any number of charitable opportunities in a marketplace of opportunities.

Each society, having attained an indeterminate, though critical degree of sophistication, develops and elaborates characteristic modes of aesthetic expression. In healthy, integral societies, these modes are disseminated throughout; though there may be higher and lower expressions of these forms - as with the relationship of classical music to various folk traditions. Seen under another aspect, these aesthetic forms are not separate from life; they do not confront members of a healthy civilization as an otherness to which one repairs in order to escape from a discontinuous and ostensibly hideous and impoverished reality. Art may express the sense of the transcendent - indeed, it cannot but do this on some level - but it is not regarded as salvific.

Hence, each society develops an implicit iconography, a series of images, tropes, and forms which constitute a sort of natural sacred, which disclose in sensory forms the religious ethos of that society. Without words, these may direct even the unlettered as to what, and to whom, reverence is owed. Communist societies, such as the Soviet Union of my wife's youth, for example, merely substituted for icons of Christ, the Mother of God, and the saints images of communist personages; and one might even suggest that socialist realism developed a sort of cycle of images, an obvious analogue and replacement for cycles of sacred images. Constructivism added further grotesqueries to the iconography of communist society, and socialist realism itself easily descended from the heights of hagiographic excess to the bathos of simple propaganda. And this is not to slight the monumental sculpture of communism, which, in its brutal modernism, perfectly embodied the essential inhumanity and violence of communism, theory and practice.

Reader Deuce has posted an interesting comment in the earlier Liberal Fascism thread, one which, in my judgment, merits a more substantial response.

I begin by noting that, in the original entry, I wrote the following:

That things possess a distinct essence or nature, and that these things can be situated in radically different social and theoretical contexts, depending upon the narrative framework within which they acquire collective meaning, are considerations altogether too nuanced for Goldberg's labours.

I wanted to blog this, despite not having much to add by way of commentary:

Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we will know everything the eighteenth century didn’t know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.

—Randall Jarrell (HT: Nicholas Desai, at The American Scene.)

Emancipation from the moral and religious heritage of Christendom + Technological emancipation from natural limitations (and from nature understood as intrinsically, as opposed to instrumentally, teleological) = The abattoir (inclusive of everything from the Holocaust to the Gulag to the privatized holocausts of the American superman (and superwoman). Fine; I've expanded upon the original, but I'd proffer this as the elementary equation of political modernism.

Patrick Deneen has posted an intriguing analysis of the walk-away culture emerging in the wreckage of the collapse of the mortgage debt pyramid. Referencing this article on the new business of 'walking away', which discusses the rising trend and summarizes the animating ethos thusly:

If banks can make "business decisions" to ignore risks, to lend money with no down payment, and fire people at at the first sign of trouble without any remorse, why shouldn't consumers be able to do the same?

By way of explaining what is undoubtedly perceived as my peculiar antipathy for globalization and the economic doctrines taken to undergird it, allow me to present economist Dani Rodrik's trilemma of the global economy (there is even a chart at the link):

I have an "impossibility theorem" for the global economy that is like that. It says that democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full. (Snip)

To see why this makes sense, note that deep economic integration requires that we eliminate all transaction costs traders and financiers face in their cross-border dealings. Nation-states are a fundamental source of such transaction costs. They generate sovereign risk, create regulatory discontinuities at the border, prevent global regulation and supervision of financial intermediaries, and render a global lender of last resort a hopeless dream. (Snip)

One option is to go for global federalism, where we align the scope of (democratic) politics with the scope of global markets. Realistically, though, this is something that cannot be done at a global scale. It is pretty difficult to achieve even among a relatively like-minded and similar countries, as the experience of the EU demonstrates.

Another option is maintain the nation state, but to make it responsive only to the needs of the international economy. This would be a state that would pursue global economic integration at the expense of other domestic objectives. The nineteenth century gold standard provides a historical example of this kind of a state. The collapse of the Argentine convertibility experiment of the 1990s provides a contemporary illustration of its inherent incompatibility with democracy.

Finally, we can downgrade our ambitions with respect to how much international economic integration we can (or should) achieve. So we go for a limited version of globalization, which is what the post-war Bretton Woods regime was about (with its capital controls and limited trade liberalization). It has unfortunately become a victim of its own success. We have forgotten the compromise embedded in that system, and which was the source of its success.

American policy seems to instantiate the worst of both words, with incremental integration structured so as to benefit a comparatively narrow socio-economic stratum, and an establishment political consensus that constrains viable domestic political responses.

Whatever the case may be, globalization is subverting both the integrity of the nation-state and the quality of the representative politics within the nation-state - and the nation-state is the only contemporarily viable vehicle for any sort of conservative politics. If we lose that, we lose the whole game.

Tyler Cowen poses the question, "Which 20th century classic of American conservative political thought has held up best?" Cowen's inquiry is circumscribed so as to exclude works of economic theory, the treatises of foreign conservatives (albeit not those who emigrated to the United States), and, of course, works which preceded the Twentieth Century. Additionally, Ross Douthat provides his selections and observations. These conditions seem eminently reasonable, though I would, as a reactionary, quibble with the qualifying "has held up best", inasmuch as this condition places the accent on factual, as opposed to normative, criteria. It is at least conceivable that, owing to the vicissitudes of history, those works which will exert an enduring influence on American conservatism ought not exert that influence. Would we want to reflect back upon our epoch fifty years hence, only to realize that some screed penned by Ann Coulter proved more consequential for actually-existing-conservatism than some magisterial disquisition? I think not.

What follows, therefore, is my non-exhaustive list of ten twelve authors, and those works from their respective oeuvres that ought to shape conservatism going forward, which is not to argue that the contents of these books, in their respective totalities, would receive my approbation. In no particular, programmatic order:

Evil is a privation, a want or lack of some good or multiplicity of goods. This principle also finds applicability in the sphere of knowledge. There are books that, by virtue of their publication and continued existence, so corrupt, distort, and occlude the perception of reality that they decrease the sum total of knowledge in the cosmos; these are books that function as intellectual black holes, actively negating knowledge, wisdom, and understanding, leaving the void of ignorance and depravity in place of these. It would have been better for all the world had they never been written, or, having once been written, that they had been consigned to the flames, so that we could discuss the temperature at which ignorance burns.

I'll not impose upon this the artificial and unworkable constraint of an arbitrary number; the number of such desolators of the mind is as the sand upon the shore. We shall content ourselves with whatever number of such works we happen to submit.

My initial submissions: The collected works of the Marquis de Sade - Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, 120 Days of Sodom, Juliette, etc. It matters not that some philosopher or critic somewhere has written of his transgressive problematizing of this or that, nor that some poet or philosopher may have written something clever under the influence of de Sade. To the flames, go.

Submissions welcome.

Commenter Blackadder, in the thread following my earlier post on Bill Gates, analogizes technology and labour arbitrage, arguing that both can be regarded as placing downward pressure on wages, but that both actually increase efficiency and outweigh such pressures. In the first instance, though the available figures are all over the map, it would seem that, at best, real wages have risen only marginally since 1970. Some analyses show a gradual decline from the early Seventies, with perhaps a brief upward blip in the late Nineties, followed by a decline throughout the Bush era. Whatever the case may be, the meager result, at best, for so much destructive creation, is disappointing and suggestive of futility.

Second, regardless of these seemingly contestable figures, present conditions are ultimately unsustainable. The inexorable logic of globalization, of the economic path the establishment has chosen for us, cannot be thwarted. And, in this connection, it is worth observing the asymmetries of technological development and labour arbitrage, as well as the ways in which they converge under the conditions of globalization. The dynamics of technological change and labour arbitrage are sufficiently different, and the effort to associate or even equate them under the rubrics of efficiency only illustrates the reductionism of most economic analysis.

Labour arbitrage, for one thing, results in a direct competition for employment, among persons of roughly comparable skill sets, across national boundaries, boundaries which also divide nations of markedly differing levels of economic development, cultural norms concerning a 'good life', and so forth. For the prospective employee from the hitherto more advanced nation, there really isn't much to be done, once the decision has been made to hire the lower-wage competitor. He can reconcile himself to a lower standard of living, to downward mobility, or he can undertake some combination of retraining or skills augmentation. The former, however, is not always feasible, for a variety of reasons, and not even the latter offers grounds for confidence; new skill-sets or innovations, once they have been diffused throughout the market, are readily transferable, meaning that the process will begin afresh. Routinization, whether of technique or knowledge, is endlessly duplicable, and only affords the basis of further rounds of arbitrage. The fundamental dynamic of this process is downward wage pressure, simply, since the initial condition involves comparable skill-sets, with the decisive difference being the wage each of their bearers is willing to accept.

Quinn Hillyer, writing over at the American Spectator, has a brilliant idea, one which will, all at once, revive a flagging American economy, increase the profitability of American corporations, reward pensioners and investors, lower consumer prices, and eliminate the distorting effects of tax policy from decision-making. Interest rates will fall (how could they be lower, given the loose monetary policy of the Fed?) and outsourcing will end, meaning that this ultimate in supply-side cosseting is also the ultimate pro-labour policy. Everything will operate more efficiently, and we will all ostensibly be better off. Perhaps even cancer will be cured.

What is this miracle cure for what ails the American economy?

Eliminate the federal corporate income tax.

Yes, kill it entirely.

Commenter thebyronicman has already stolen some of my thunder on this question, though I'll press on, undeterred. I'm not quite so negative about popular artistic forms/media/genres as about the culture considered as a totality. The culture as a totality is irredeemable, beyond even a glimmer of a hope of transformation. Partially, this is a reflection of the inexorable degradations of mass culture, particularly in an age of religious declension; partially, it is a reflection of the inevitably coarsening and anti-aesthetic impulses of commodification for mass markets; and finally, this is a function of the (contingent) nature of the industry itself, which not only facilitates commodification (the nemesis of all artistic sensitivity), but is, quite plainly, as thebyronicman indicates, a form of legalized racketeering. Even the so-called 'Christian' labels often engage in this racketeering, imposing extortionate contracts upon artists, who are often thereby compelled to produce schlock in order to continue in the industry.

In a blog entry at Turnabout Jim Kalb comments:

The author's conclusion is that we need some tribalism, fanaticism and law of the jungle of our own, just enough to maintain our ability to put individual self-interest first. It's the classic neoconservative version of the culture war: liberalism does itself in, so let's stick some traditional discipline into it and justify the discipline by pointing out that it'll put the system of everybody doing what he feels like doing on a more reliable footing.

In many of my posts touching on foreign policy and the analysis thereof, I have referred to America's strategy of openness, a trope for the orthodoxies of the American establishment, according to which America, a society from which a cohesive cultural identity has been scoured by the deracinating forces of mobility, the fetishization of economic growth, vapid consumerism, mass immigration, and the failures of statist social engineering, requires a policy of globalization, underwritten by an interventionist foreign policy, in order to avoid disintegrating into a squabbling Babel of classes, ethnicities, interests, and ideologies.

As Prof. Andrew Bacevich was quoted in the original post -

In a society in which citizens were joined to one another by little except a fetish for shopping, professional sports, and celebrities along with a ravenous appetite for pop culture, prosperity became a precondition for preserving domestic harmony. Arguing on behalf of a populist vision of an engaged, independent, self-reliant citizenry, an acerbic critic like Lasch might rail against luxury as morally repugnant, insisting that "a democratic society cannot allow unlimited accumulation." But in reality the prospect of unlimited accumulation had long since become the lubricant that kept the system functioning. A booming economy alleviated, or at least kept at bay, social and political dysfunction. Any interruption in economic growth could induce friction, stoke discontent, and bring to the surface old resentments, confronting elected officials with problems for which they possessed no readily available solutions. Lasch may well have been correct in charging that "the reduction of the citizen to the consumer" produces a hollowed-out American democracy. But by the 1990s no one knew now to undo the damage without risking a massive conflagration.

English departments, hotbeds of fashionable schools of literary criticism, are slowly emptying out, and William Deresiewicz, examining some of the proximate causes, suggests that the discipline lacks a survival instinct. Conservatives conversant with the bitter struggles over the literary canon and the various theoretical fads that have buffeted the discipline might indulge in a few reveries tinged with schadenfreude, consoling themselves with the thought that perhaps the relativists and radicals are finally receiving their just due; perhaps, however, the causes are more mundane. Perhaps no one really cares anymore:

...the number of students studying English literature appears to be in a steep, prolonged and apparently irreversible decline. In the past ten years, my department has gone from about 120 majors a year to about ninety a year. Fewer students mean fewer professors; during the same time, we've gone from about fifty-five full-time faculty positions to about forty-five. Student priorities are shifting to more "practical" majors like economics; university priorities are shifting to the sciences, which bring in a lot more money. In our new consumer-oriented model of higher education, schools compete for students, but so do departments within schools. The bleaker it looks for English departments, the more desperate they become to attract attention.

Somewhat astonishingly (though why I continue to find this astonishing, at my age, remains a mystery), recent discussions of health care as a type of social provision have precipitated impassioned declarations of (what certainly sounds like) libertarian ethical norms: the (allegedly - this is the locus of a begged question) mere fact that someone is suffering from a malady, the treatment for which he cannot afford out of his personal resources, does not imply, create, or impose, let alone entail, an obligation on the part of any other individual to remedy that want. So strong is this libertarian principle that it is not merely 'socialized medicine' that traduces it, but the very vaunted private health care system itself, which, through the mechanisms of mandated insurance coverages, risk-pooling, and the proscription of genetic screening, ensures the extension of coverage to many who would be excluded were risks to be individualized. The sick do not have a right to our money, in order to procure treatment, not even the comparative pittance factored into an insurance premium so that such higher risks might be adequately underwritten. Presumably, a starving man would not have a right to our bread, either.

Moreover, in accordance with such principles, those risks should be socialized on a purely voluntary basis, in and through families, churches, and other voluntary institutions established for charitable purposes; there obtain no enforceable claims upon such benefactions, which should alight upon the sick and infirm only insofar as those possessed of health and wealth will it, and only to that degree made possible by the gratuitous movements of their sovereign wills.

Much could be said of this, especially that a species of economistic dogmatism now impels some ranged along the right spectrum of our political culture to war against an inevitably flawed, but fundamentally decent, system, and this in the name of an ideological figment which cannot be translated into reality, and that this intransigence will eventually beget something far worse. The endeavour to fully marketize the domain of health provision, leaving the individual naked, with all of his weaknesses and frailties, before the utterly impersonal and unforgiving mechanisms of the market, petitioning those who clutch their wealth to their breasts like the misers of many a parable for relief, as a pious man might petition the Almighty, will shipwreck on the very structural foundations of modern society. Indeed, the argument has already been sketched:

...since the origin of any thing is, at a minimum, a clue to its nature or essence, we ought to attend to the fact that widespread health provision was originally a ministry of the Church, and founded as a charitable endeavour. Nevertheless, the Church or, more broadly, charitable institutions, can only assume such a tremendous burden - particularly in a more complex modern society - if they can command vastly more social authority than they do presently, exercise more overt social power on the basis of that authority, and command a greater percentage of adherents' resources than those adherents presently provide under our purely voluntaristic models of giving. One cannot recreate a social form without first recreating its conditions of existence.

In reality, total expenditures on health care exceed the wealth commanded by all churches combined; moreover, a perusal of the budgetary statements of the average church - say, a parish like my own - will confirm that there exists no fiscal fat that could be trimmed to pay for 'routine' cancer treatment, let alone every medical necessity that would portend the bankruptcy of a family. The counsel that 'we cannot know unless it has been tried' is not merely an exercise in ideological anachronism, but a declaration that folly is not folly until it has been performed.

Barack Obama, speaking on the stump in Oregon over the weekend, and arguing that America must "lead by example" on environmental questions, stated that "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK." To do so would represent a failure of leadership.

The response of the conservative commentariat was as predictable as the rising of the sun, death, and taxation. Jim Geraghty, writing at NRO's Campaign Spot, delivered himself of the following:

Would an Obama Administration really mean an end to "eating as much as we want?"

I want to jokingly ask if that includes airstrikes on buffet tables, or John Kerry's "global test" being followed up by Barack Obama's "global diet," but I'm semi-serious — Obama apparently feels Americans eating as much as they want is something that cannot continue, or at least with other countries' approval. What will his administration do to change that? If he isn't going to act as president on this matter, why bring it up?

Frankly speaking, were any government, let alone our own, to establish a Quantitative Dietary Commission, for the purpose of promulgating and enforcing dietary moderation, it would be an abomination, not to mention utterly unfeasible. Nonetheless, I'm dubious that any such thing lies in prospect, and find this characteristic combination of mockery and fearmongering to be hyperbolic and overwrought. It seems manifest that, in context, Obama was not so much isolating three discrete instances of American crapulence, each of which he proposes to moderate by coercive regulation, as associating the three under a general rubric of excess and indifference, desire and entitlement, and were conservatives interested in reckoning with reality instead of scoring political points and stoking fears, they might relate Obama's utterance to recent news. For example, interpreted in connection with ongoing price inflation in foodstuffs, driven in part by the American insistence on converting food into fuel for the Happy Motoring Paradise, which has occasioned shortages and hunger abroad, Obama is essentially stating that Americans cannot a) consume all of the motor fuels they want by driving as much as they want, even transforming food into fuel in order to do so, b) eat as much food as they want, further pressuring world supplies, and c) consume yet more energy pretending that our homes can all possess, at all times, the internal climate of San Diego on a fine Spring day, and then, d) expect the remainder of the world to accept our actions as legitimate. In what alternative universe would the rest of the world, particularly the poorer parts thereof, deliver the verdict that, in a globalized economy, American profligacy is legitimate, even when it adversely impacts them? No one reasons in such a fashion: what that other party does demonstrably harms me, but it's all OK, because they possess the right to do the things that indirectly, though logically, cause those harms.

I reiterate that I oppose the creation of a Quantitative Dietary Commission, the legal regulation of thermostat settings, and the proscription of the SUV. Not that my opposition is of any consequence, as none of these things is really in view. It appears to me that 'market incentives' are addressing these questions, at least to some extent. Nonetheless, there is something more at work here.

Rod Dreher has been posting a veritable cornucopia of resigned commentaries, tinged perhaps with a measure of despair, on the apparently inexorable societal death march towards the dissolution of marriage since the California Supreme Court's issuance of its egalitarian diktat. In the most recent of these commentaries, each of which has broached numerous substantive issues meriting further comment, and relied upon the MacIntyrean judgment that moral disagreements in late modernity are incommensurable (late modern 'ethics' being essentially emotivist, its valorized ideals of selfhood, autonomy, and desire regarded by classical and Christian ethics as the collective fons et origo of those problems moral theory is supposed to solve), Dreher references Margaret Liu McConnell's recent essay on marriage in the American Conservative, en route to a citation of Scalia's typically prescient dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, averring that he found her argument wanting:

But we must recognize that insisting that traditional marriage is best for raising children is not effective. A better approach is to emphasize that traditional marriage promotes the ideal that no parent should abandon his child. Who would argue against that? It’s consistent with other governmental policies in the area of child welfare. It’s in accord with human nature. But making the argument requires the courage, honesty, and humility to say that some ways of procreating are not as good for the general welfare as others, whether the parents are of the same sex or are married heterosexuals.

Adoptive parents do God’s work when they provide homes to children, and those homes can be as loving and stable as the home of any natural mother and father. But adoption is a humane response to what is already a tragedy in a child’s life, the loss of a parent. Those adorable adoptees from China, for example, are the byproduct of a cruel policy of child restriction that has lead to the deaths of thousands of children.

Reproductive technology, like adoption, without doubt can produce children who are loved by their new parents in homes as stable as those of any biological parents. But the various techniques, when employed by same-sex couples, always require that at least one of the child’s natural parents give up the child. This tempting world of sperm banks and egg brokers is the domain of the affluent and easily verges toward eugenics.

Adoption and reproductive technology as methods of forming our next generation are no foundation for a stable society. Social order doesn’t depend on parents being forced to give up their children for adoption because of poverty, illness, supposed unfitness, or the brutal policies of a foreign country—nor on parents giving up their children in advance of birth in sterile, scientific transactions. Those historical Supreme Court cases declaring marriage a fundamental right lauded the stability-promoting aspects of marriage, emphasizing the good that radiates throughout the broader society from the promise the man and woman make on their wedding day: “Marriage … creat[es] the most important relation in life … having more to do with the morals and civilization of a people than any other institution.” “Upon it society may be said to be built, and out of its fruits spring social relations and social obligations and duties.” The promise of the married couple to keep and care for one another and for their children engenders a respect for unconditional responsibility that serves us all.

Extending marriage to same-sex couples would leave no other institution to promote the ideal that every parent promises to care for his child. It’s easier for fathers to walk away from their responsibilities when society no longer promotes the simple norm that a child belongs to both parents equally, and each has a duty to care for the child—the norm encompassed in traditional marriage. As the NAACP, La Raza Centro Legal, and the National Association of Social Workers know, the pain and deprivation caused by the erosion of this norm fall hardest on the poor.

Nonetheless, aside from the hackneyed conceits of late modernity and its increasingly strident nominalism, such an argument ought to be persuasive, though the matter is considerably more grave than McConnell expresses. It is not merely that emotivist-nominalist marriage, extended to homosexuals, will enshrine in law the principle that some parents must abandon their children for the sake of the rights-regime, but that such a marital regime entails the commodification of children. Children, in Christian thought, are a supervenient grace; upon the intrinsic good of the conjugal, self-giving love of husband and wife, the gift of new life supervenes, both ratifying and expanding the good of marital love. More than this, a marriage open to children instantiates the great cosmo-theological principle that through self-giving, self-sacrifice, and abnegation (marriage is regarded as both loving and martyric), the world is reborn; by dying to ourselves, we instead receive life more abundantly. Such an order also renders our origins concrete and particular; we are rooted in particular histories and places and lineages. The deformation of marriage to accommodate homosexuals* will definitively ratify and cement in place a contrary principle, once children are factored into the 'marital' equation: children, desired by many such couples, will become objects of felt entitlement, and claim-rights upon their 'inclusion' in such marital units will be asserted; but because such unions are intrinsically infecund, the claim will thus be that adoption and reproductive technologies be enshrined as rights, so that all can claim their 'rights' to produce or possess a child. The child will no longer be a gift, a living symbol of a love which precedes him and envelopes him, but something something acquired or created, to the end that someone might 'fulfill himself' or realize his private conception of the meaning of the universe; this will entail the apotheosis of the consumerist mentality of us moderns: as we consume - according to the logic of advertising & etc. - in order to create our very selves, the things we acquire being instrumentalized towards the satisfaction of transient desire, so even children, sundered from natural biological origins, will be instruments of lifestyle preference-satisfaction. This is the gateway to the final frontier of commodification. When once we admit into law and culture the idea that some persons exist, or may be brought under the discipline of existing, so as to complete the world-images of others, conjured from the nothingness of their desires, a fathomless abyss of evils will lie before us.

From Slavoj Zizek's most recent tome, In Defense of Lost Causes, the concluding passage, in fact:

It is easy, from today's perspective, to mock the "pessimists", from the Right to the Left, from Solzhenitsyn to Castoriadis, who deplored the blindness and compromises of the democratic West, its lack of an ethico-political strength and courage in dealing with the Communist threat, and who predicted that the Cold War had already been lost by the West, that the Communist bloc had already won, that the collapse of the West was imminent - but it is precisely their attitude which was most effective in bringing about the collapse of Communism. In Dupuy's terms, their very "pessimistic" prediction at the level of possibilities, of linear historical evolution, mobilized them to counteract it. We should thus ruthlessly abandon the prejudice that the linear time of evolution is "on our side", that History is "working for us" in the guise of the famous mole digging under the earth, doing the work of the Cunning of Reason. But how, then, are we to counter the threat of ecological catastrophe? It is here that we should return to the four moments of what Badiou calls the "eternal Idea" of revolutionary-egalitarian Justice. What is demanded is:

In times such as these, I am honoured to trace my ancestry to two European signs of contradiction, Poland and Ireland; though my pride is these heritages cannot be delimited by purely political considerations, in an age dominated by malign political ideologies and their votaries, political considerations are bound to factor more highly than they would in healthier times. Poland catalyzed the resistance to Communist domination in Eastern Europe, and Ireland, in rejecting the Treaty of Lisbon, itself merely a treaty intended to bypass the popular opposition that felled the Euro-Constitution, have shown themselves unwilling to go into that long night without resistance. While I harbour a suspicion that Lawrence Auster is correct in predicting that the Eurocrats will decree that EU treaties cannot be subjected to referenda, this defiance must not go unrecognized. If those of us who purpose to defend the heritage of the West, and the separate heritages of her constituent nations, must walk toward defeat, let us at least do so with eyes open, commemorating each victory wrenched from between the teeth of defeat as a noble triumph. There is nobility in such defiance; there is but shame in submission.

Nonetheless, in an intemperate outburst worthy of a commissar whose prerogatives have been denied, Morning's Minion denounces the opposition to the European Union, insinuating in the process that such opposition is contrary to the Christian religion:

So what went wrong in Ireland? As I said , people didn’t understand it. As they have in the past, people used it to protest against the government in an environment of increasing economic uncertainty. And the “no” campaign was particularly effective with its scaremongering tactics. The Irish were told that the treaty would force them to raise their tax rates. They were told military neutrality would be jeopardized. They were told abortion would be introduced in Ireland. All lies. In the end, every single mainstream political party and social partner supported the treaty. Its opponents were a rag-tag group of Marxists, ex-terrorists, hard-care nationalists, the extreme Catholic right, and a shady unknown businessman with ties to the US defense industry. (Snip)

Ah, but they have already spoken. Completely oblivious to the voice of the Irish church, some US Catholics (the usual suspects) laud the no vote, the the grounds that Ireland has given the finger to “Brussels elitists”. As always, they are reflecting their own political and ideological biases onto Europe. They see the debate through the eyes of the kind of Enlightenment-era liberalism that prizes the liberty of the individual over the common good and solidarity (notice the whole comment is about economics- when the Irish bishops say that is exactly the wrong way to look at it). They are also wedded to a form of nationalism that elevates the role of the nation state above any supranational cooperation. Clearly, the dream of Erasmus and Thomas More for a united, peaceful, Europe was misplaced then…

Morning's Minion offers a spirited defense of the European Union project, characterizing it, essentially, as an attempt to rectify the historical mistake of the nation-state:

But let me raise a rather basic issue here: what attracts me most about the European project is what many Christian Democrats (such as the Bavarian CSU's Edmund Stoiber) dub the "Europe of the regions" -- a loose supranational federation with much power devolved to the regions. What gets taken out is the nation state, which I consider an ugly step-child of the Enlightenment. For the modern nation state usurps powers that rightly belong to subsidiary mediating institutions and wipes out a traditional network of overlapping loyalties in favor of a direct relationship between the individual and the state (how delightfully Protestant!). Now, there are tendencies in Europe that go against this conception of Europe, but these tendencies are highly influenced by nationalism. And here is the rub: so many American critics of the EU are themselves deeply wedded to a nationalist conception of the USA. After all, the idea of a pan-European army would repulse me, and yet we think of the existence of a US army as beyond question (even glorifying it)-- why?

In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

In a June 28, 2006 keynote address to a group called "Call to Renewal," Senator Barack Obama offered his thoughts on the relationship between politics and religion. This speech has been getting a lot of air play within the past 24 hours because of the critique of it by Dr. James Dobson on his June 24 radio broadcast of Focus on the Family. Although Dobson makes some important points on Senator Obama's reading of Scripture and his equating of Dobson with Al Sharpton, I find these comments far more troubling:

The saying goes that the just powers of a government derive from the consent of the governed.

That, not to put too fine a point on it, is complete poppycock.

A just power is an exercise of government authority which one is morally required to obey. "Give unto Caesar" is an archtypical example for Christians. One is morally required to give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. One cannot excuse onesself from this moral requirement by claiming that Caesar's powers do not as an historical matter derive from the consent of the governed.

Under the hood the 'consent of the governed' narrative is designed to replace the natural law with consent: to equate what is good with what is willed. It is of a piece with the modern revolt against God and nature.

Peter Wehner writes in his Commentary Magazine blog:

Senator Barack Obama has announced his opposition to a California ballot measure that would ban same-sex marriages–a decision that was forced on the citizens of California by the state’s Supreme Court. In a letter expressing his support for extending “fully equal rights and benefits to same-sex couples under both state and federal law,” Obama wrote that he opposes “the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California Constitution, and similar efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution or those of other states.”

Via Glenn Greenwald, Tom Friedman ruminates on the strategic rationale for the Great Mesopotamian Quagmire Near Eastern War of Democratic Liberation:

Friedman's astonishingly puerile and uncouth exposition features a choice piece of verbal legerdemain, which begins with a mention of the Open Society and our willingness to defend it, and concludes with a vulgar peroration, which has American servicemen (and women, of course, for one mark of our civilizational superiority is that we send our women to bleed and die in our wars) going door to door between "Basra and Baghdad", telling anyone who might oppose the Open Society to "Suck on this." I mentioned a piece of legerdemain, by which I mean an unthinking attempt at esotericism. Friedman, of course, commences by discussing the Open Society, and then avers that no border controls, no clever INS officials - in summation, no declensions from the (utopian) conceit of the Open Society - could possibly suffice to protect us from further terrorist assaults, leaving as the inevitable conclusion the imperative of converting the recalcitrant of the world to our visions of global order. But, of course, this standard line is a farrago of nonsense. The firm proscription of certain Islamic doctrines, the cessation of Muslim immigration, beginning with the abolition of the Visa Express programme and student visas for nationals of countries which contribute disproportionately to the jihad, and rising to the encouragement of Muslim emigration from the West, would, over time, mitigate the threat of jihad, and all without the perceived imperative of wars of (democratic capitalist) imperial conquest. What, therefore, Friedman really means is that we cannot maintain simultaneously the Open Society and measures inhibiting the social and economic intercourse of the Western and Muslim worlds; we can undertake either, but not both, and, inasmuch as the latter is simply unthinkable - a form of apostasy, in reality - we must opt for the former by means of war. The exoteric rationale is that we cannot defeat "terror" save by waging wars of "liberation"; the esoteric reality is that our elites cannot preserve the politico-economic articulation of their class interests save by waging wars of "liberation".

Glenn Greenwald takes Friedman's utter self-delusion, his incomprehension at negative global perceptions of the U.S., and nails it to the wall:

My copy of the Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann seems to have vanished into the ether as a result of my move last November, so I am unable to consult it to determine the context of the observations quoted by Rod Dreher, to the effect that Solzhenitsyn was a Russian romantic, a maximalist who minimized the faults of his nation, loved it above all earthly - and perhaps heavenly - things, confabulated a romantic ideology of Russian messianism, and was consumed by a passionate detestation of all things Western. Honestly, the entire line of critique rings false. That Schmemann, ordinarily possessed of a penetrating discernment, could so egregiously misunderstand Solzhenitsyn, both as an artist and intellectual, only demonstrates the fallibility and partiality that besets each of us. If I had to venture a critical interpretation of Schmemann's incomprehension of Solzhenitsyn, it would center on the disjunction between the former's conviction that modernity posed a serious challenge to the credibility of the inherited forms of Orthodoxy, and that the latter regarded the philosophical underpinnings of modernity as a load of twaddle, the proper response to which was asceticism, self-limitation. Schmemann, I think, regarded the challenges of modernity perhaps too seriously, as something with which we would have to wrestle indefinitely; Solzhenitsyn, having endured Applied High Modernity, perceived it - more profoundly - as a serious challenge proceeding from all the wrong questions. Dismiss the questions, and challenges lose much of their salience; they are no longer properly existential, but more manageably practical.

The accusations of Russian romanticism and utopianism are so preposterous, so utterly at variance with the tenor of Solzhenitsyn's work, that I will pass over them - I trust that anyone who has so much as lightly skimmed one of his works will grasp how he associates the horrors of Soviet communism with the failings of his people, albeit not in the essentialist manner common in the West - and proceed directly to the question of Solzhenitsyn's apprehension of the West. The fundamentals of that critique are found in the celebrated Harvard commencement address: the West is no model for the world, sunken as it is in a vulgar materialism born of Enlightenment rationalism, a despiritualized world-image in which we strive to satisfy our desires to the uttermost, brooking no limitation upon our appetites, which profane every humane, moral, and spiritual good. This theme is revisited in the September 14, 1993 address to the International Academy of Philosophy:

(Update: My response to the review can be found here)

Northeastern University political and legal theorist Eileen McDonagh, author of Breaking the Abortion Deadlock: From Choice to Consent (Oxford University Press, 1996), recently reviewed my book Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice (Cambridge University Press, 2007). The review was published online by the Law & Politics section of the American Political Science Association. You can find it here.

I will be working on a reply over the next couple of days. In the meantime, I'd like to get your take on Professor McDonagh's review.

Lawrence Auster has initiated a lively thread for discussion of the Russian-Georgian question, and its relation to American foreign policy, posting numerous substantive comments from many of his regular correspondents. For the moment, I'd like to highlight what is, in my estimation, the most perspicacious of the lot, written by Sage McLaughlin:

One of the more profound insights I've found in the writing of Pope John Paul II, though of course the idea does not originate with him, is that the things that we choose to do always end up changing who we are. This is a profound truth about the human person. Sin brings us closer to Hell because it makes us more the kind of person who will ultimately be at home in Hell. Good works, done out of our own free will with the help of grace, bring us closer to the Beatific Vision because they make us more the kind of person who is close to God. What we choose to do changes us.

A lot of argumentation in the blogosphere, though - particularly political argumentation - tacitly assumes that this is not the case. The notion seems to be that if I vote for a medical cannibal like John McCain or Barack Obama, having decided to do so as a choice of the lesser of two evils, that making that choice does not mean that I will do anything else differently: I will be the same person and do all the same things subsequently whether I vote for a cannibal or not.

But this is obviously not the case. It is not the case for an individual, whose effect on the election is literally negligible. And it is not the case when we aggregate individuals. Five million people who are unwilling to vote for a cannibal are a different kind of group from five million who are willing to vote for a cannibal. Refusing to pull the lever for the least bad viable option is in the end far more powerful on an individual basis than pulling the lever for the least bad viable option, because pulling the lever or refusing to pull the lever changes what kind of person you are. And what is true on an individual basis is true in the aggregate.

"If everyone did it the pro-life cause would lose" is simply false, because it rests on the unspoken assumption that all else remains the same. But all else never remains the same; and most especially we don't remain the same.

(Cross-posted)

When I say that I think it is wrong to vote for a Presidential candidate who supports the murder of innocents, including John McCain, people often respond as if they haven't heard what I said. A fairly typical response is that if I expect "perfection" in a candidate there will never be a candidate I can support, as if I had said that a candidate who would answer "no" to the question "does this dress make me look fat?" would be disqualified by taking that position. Lying is, after all, intrinsically immoral. But somehow "doesn't support the murder of innocents" has come to be equated with perfection in our politics.

There is a message in there for those who can hear, it seems to me.

As Evangelium Vitae tells us, there is a very basic contradiction at work when government officials support the killing of the innocent. Protection of the innocent from murder is fundamental to what a legitimate government is. A government which actively pursues the murder of the innocent is not merely doing something wicked: it is negating its own essence, destroying its very reason for being, indeed destroying its own being.

When we vote in national politics, what we are primarily doing - irrespective of what we think we are doing - is expressing our civic loyalty, our affirmation of the legitimacy of the governance which emerges from the election. My individual vote or deliberate abstention, as I have observed to much wailing and gnashing of teeth, is simply not going to affect the outcome of this election. Basing a moral choice on the idea that my vote can change the outcome is lunacy.

What my vote or abstention will affect is me: as a concrete act of civic duty it will express and even change the kind of citizen I am, and the nature of my commitment to the common good. When I am voting for a good politician - not a perfect politician, but one who at least minimally does not support the murder of the innocent - that is a good thing. When I vote for a politician who supports the murder of the innocent, I have contradicted every legitimate proportionate reason there might be to vote in the first place.

(Cross-posted)

Nobody seems to agree with me that an individual act of voting is negligible to the outcome of a national election, and that therefore any double-effect evaluation of a particular choice to vote or not vote for president must hinge on other considerations. I guess I must just be crazy not to see the profound impact it has, which acts as the proportionate reason justifying remote material cooperation with grave evil.

But perhaps there is at least a middle ground position that we can agree on, even if we don't agree on the margins.

Suppose I were to suggest that people who do not live in swing states do not have a proportionate reason to vote for McCain/Palin. Can't we all at least agree to that? Does anyone who does not live in a swing state have an objectively proportionate reason to vote for a cannibal for President?

(Cross-posted)

A difficulty in recent discussions is that many folks are treating human acts as if they were an analog radio signal of effects and only effects which can be gradually attenuated down to nothing. They aren't. An act either categorically is deliberate remote material cooperation with grave evil, or it is not. It takes a certain minimum movement of the will to act at all.

If an act is deliberate remote material cooperation with grave evil at all, it can only be justified in the presence of a proportionate reason. And if the act is causally negligible with respect to the very outcomes which the person is analyzing under double effect in order to justify it, then a proportionate reason does not exist.

The contemplated act might be justifiable under some other understanding, of course. But it cannot be justified by appealing to double-effect with respect to outcomes upon which it has causally negligible effect.

(Cross-posted)

A guy walks into a bar.

He slaps a $100 bill on the table and says "I'm auctioning off this $100 bill. Bidding starts at a dollar. The only rule is that the next highest losing bidder has to pay me too."

Bill and Ted can't help themselves. Bill would love to have some extra money to donate to Catholic Answers, and Ted is planning on using the proceeds to renew his subscription to Commonweal. A hundred smackers with bidding starting at a buck? What's not to like about that?

So Bill bids a dollar. Ted tops him by bidding $2. (Heck, who wouldn't put $2 on the line for a hundred?)

When the bidding gets up to $99, something interesting happens. Bill realizes that he is out $98 if he doesn't bid $100, but if he bids $100 he can still break even. Being Catholic, he consults the USCCB document on game theory. It says something to the effect that if he has a proportionate reason it is fine to make a decision to limit his losses. It doesn't mention Martin Shubik.

So he bids $100. Then Ted realizes that if he bids $101, he will only be out a buck instead of $99.

And so it goes. At some point the knife fight starts.

(Cross-posted)

Folks may not agree with my particular conclusions about voting in the upcoming Presidential election, but maybe we can make some progress in mutual understanding of what constitutes a proportionate reason for engaging in remote material cooperation with evil. Inspired by an inquiring commenter, I give you the following:

Suppose we are contemplating doing act X in order to block a big evil E, where X is not intrinsically evil but doing it involves remote material cooperation with evil.

A proportionate reason to do X obtains when (1) X is reasonably effective in stopping E without being excessive, and (2) stopping E does not produce evils and disorders graver than E.

Folks tend to make a reasonable case for (2): that is, they make a reasonable case (lets stipulate, in case you disagree) that McCain winning does not produce evils and disorders graver than those which would follow from Obama winning.

In the comments of a post on my personal blog, Steve G writes:

Zippy DOES have a position that is compelling to me, but I haven’t seen him argue it as forcefully as the negligible vote position. His more compelling argument is that the whole electoral process is a myth, or a sham, that we take part in. That it’s not to choose a leader, but to validate the ‘system.’

That the election itself is primarily about choosing the kind of leader we want is a myth; a myth connected to the fact that our votes do not exert a significant influence over how we are governed, but exert a large influence over our acceptance of things done in our name. The election itself isn't necessarily a sham, any more than a coronation pageant for the king is a sham. Under the mythology of what elections are about it is a sham, but it is the mythology itself which is a sham not the election itself.

More generally, a lot of the damage which occurs to us under the rubric of voting for mass murderers has to do with reinforcing the lie of what elections are really about.

Professor Michael Bauman comments in Lydia's post:

[The political Left] own[s] the schools and colleges; they own the Senate, the House, and soon the White House and Courts; they own entertainment; they own the news media; they own the laboratories; they own everything -- even lots of the churches. They ran the board on us, and it's not an accident.

So looking beyond the election of this very moment, the way to beat the Left politically, and (among other things) effectively save the children being massacred by the acolytes of Moloch -- the only way to beat the Left politically, as an eminently practical concern -- is to stop becoming the Left, through a quasi-Hegelian process which seems to take about two generations. As Lydia observes, the hard Left has a whole core worldview which anchors it and which it will not give up for anything. The Right has nothing of the kind: the political Right is basically a classical liberalism / neoconservatism which is nominally against abortion and a few other enumerated issues. Think for a moment of the laughable dissonance of the term "hard right" in our culture: in general it brings up images of failed projects of modernity, not images of a viable political movement drawing members from respectable parts of society.

As long as that remains the case, 'conservatism' will be the tail on the dog. And as long as 'conservatives' are willing to support liberals like McCain just because he tepidly throws them a few policy bones, conservatism will be not merely neutralized, but will remain complicit in the inexorable march of liberal modernity/postmodernity.

Things are every bit as bad as Professor Bauman has stated rather eloquently here. Christians of good will have had their clocks cleaned politically for a long time now. That is because there are core parts of modernity which are set firmly against not merely Christianity specifically but nature generally, and we - that is, political 'conservatives' - are adrift in them. Unless and until we find our anchor political conservatism will continue to be nothing but a foil for the hard Left, a way station where men of good will can be held while being spoon fed acceptance of the latest hard-Left atrocity.

The reason we always lose even when we win is because we are frogs in a pot, being slowly brought to a boil.

It has been several years since I have given a talk at Biola University in La Mirada, California. It is an institution that has a number of my friends on the faculty including Craig Hazen, John Mark Reynolds, J. P. Moreland, and Scott B. Rae. So I am very much looking forward to this Thursday, when I return to Biola as a speaker in its Distinguished Speaker Lecture Series for Christianity and Culture.

Scheduled for October 30 at 6 pm in Biola's Calvary Chapel, I will be delivering a lecture on the topic of abortion and American politics. After the lecture I'll be meeting for an informal Q & A at the Philosophy House of Talbot School of Theology (Biola's seminary) with some students in the school's M.A. program in philosophy of religion and ethics.

If you are in southern California, feel free to attend. The lecture is open to the public.

(cross-posted)