The tyranny of pluralism

A good article by John Rao, or at least one that's helpful to me: "Why Catholics Cannot Defend Themselves: The Religious and Cultural Suicide of a Conquered People". Before I was a Catholic I wrote a couple of things on liberalism and pluralism that are in line with Dr. Rao's views, but he develops the issues with reference to the situation in the contemporary Church.

The article does an excellent job of describing the hole we've fallen into through the acceptance of pluralism as the standard for all actions that are not strictly private. It's especially good in showing how pluralism becomes an unquestionable absolute beyond all discussion. To doubt it, in the view of post-Vatican II thinkers, is to lack faith in God and his Church, not to mention the Pope, the human person, and what not else.

Pluralism, it turns out, isn't plural. Instead, it's monolithic and -- as Rao says -- fideist. It's also patently anti-Christian. The Incarnation made God a public reality in this world rather than a matter of private interpretation. That's why Christ spoke with manifest authority, and that's why he was crucified. It's also why the apostles went out to convert the world and the martyrs died rather than sacrifice to Caesar. How can any of that make sense if "free to be you and me" is the ultimate truth of things?

Rao seems to overstate the importance of America in the triumph of pluralism. The pluralist position has a compelling logic that didn't need America to win out: once "God is dead" -- once transcendent standards are rejected -- then "good" can only mean "desired." Since desires conflict, one must nonetheless have a way to choose among them, and since there are no goods beyond desire the criterion cannot appeal to the notion that some desires are better than others. That leaves two choices: (1) simply giving preference to the desires of certain people, or (2) establishing some procedure for aggregating, reconciling and arbitrating among desires that in principle gives the preference to none and so is strictly formal. The latter approach seems more rational -- since all desires are equally desires, and the good is simply the desired, it seems that all desires should have equal power to define "good." That's pluralism, though.

I also like Rao's proposed solution, return to the "Whole Christ" -- reappropriation of the life of the Church through the ages. That, I think, is what traditionalism should be. To view it as a matter of "going back to the 50s" is to trivialize it beyond recognition.

Why such a crisis?

If the West is Catholic Christendom, and Catholic Christianity is the truth to which all roads lead, how come the West has evidently abandoned Catholicism and Christianity?

In a way, that's like asking "why the Fall"? Men are inconstant. They aren't satisfied with real goods that make demands and are always the same. They want something imaginary that fits itself to their moods and vices. Today they also like to do things in an organized and comprehensive way. Why shouldn't that apply to apostasy?

G. K. Chesterton says it's all happened before, repeatedly. The Faith, like Christ, is of as well as beyond this world. In its worldly presence it can grow corrupt, die of old age, get murdered or crushed beyond recognition. But then like Christ it is suddenly alive again.

There's something to that. It's notable that you can't get rid of Christ. He keeps coming back one way or another, and eventually people get tired of deferral and avoidance and want the whole Christ.

It's hard to avoid the belief that the present situation is special, that the crisis goes deeper, is more comprehensive, and has penetrated ways of thinking and the institutional church more thoroughly than in the past. That may or may not be true. There's no metric for such things, and historical comparisons are impossible for lack of evidence.

It nonetheless seems a corner has been turned. The Pope has held firm, although (from my right-wing point of view) he's stretched things to the limit. In its triumph liberal modernity has refuted itself. It grows visibly more antihuman and irrational because it doesn't have the resources to be a supreme governing philosophy. And all the bombshells that were going to explode historical Christianity seem to have fizzled.

Fr. Richard Neuhaus comments (toward the end of one of his immensely long rambles):

It was at a conference in the mid-eighties that I listened to Hans Kueng hold forth in triumphalist tones on the victory of the progressives. "We" control, he announced, the seminaries, the academic departments of theology, the catechetical and liturgical institutions, the publishing houses, the magazines that matter, and the chanceries. Most of the bishops, he said, are now on "our" side, and those who aren't have been neutralized. Anyone who wants a future in the hierarchy or the Catholic academy has no choice but to cooperate, he observed. It was a clean sweep; all that was left were a few details; the disgruntled band of risibly reactionary dissidents from the new order didn't understand what had happened and couldn't do much about it.

As Neuhaus points out, no-one on the Catholic Left is talking that way now. They're still in control in most places, but they're aging in place and haa ve no successors. The initiative is on the Right.

What will happen and how we have no way of knowing. All we can do is pursue what's right and true as best we can. And that is enough: "we know that all things work together for good to them that love God." (Romans 8:28.)

Is liberalism the natural conclusion of Christianity?

I've argued that contemporary liberalism is the flowering and not the corruption of classical liberalism. Once people accept the primacy of freedom, the basic principle of classical liberalism, what we have now naturally follows.

How far can that line of thought be taken? Liberalism, with its emphasis on the freedom and dignity of the individual, is evidently an outgrowth of Christianity, and many have argued that the same is true of modern natural science and therefore of modern rationalistic secularism. So are those things the natural consequence of Christianity? The European New Right, after all, claims that Christian monotheism leads naturally to imperialistic and intolerant liberal universalism and no doubt other bad things.

It seems to me the ENR position is wrong. The result of rejecting a fundamental principle of a way of life and thought is not its flowering but its transformation into something different. At all times liberalism has viewed liberty as its highest principle and been unwilling to give any substantive good priority. The consequences of taking human will as the measure of all good, and rational equal satisfaction of desire as the highest law, may therefore be attributed to liberalism. Those consequences include the managerial liberal state.

Christianity, in contrast, is explicitly based on both monotheism and the Trinity, on God-made-man (which by itself might lead to radical individualism and secularism) and God's ineffability and transcendence, on universality and on the particularity required by the notion of incarnation. It can't be converted into anything like liberalism or scientism without ripping out the greater part of the doctrines that have always explicitly and emphatically been treated as fundamental. To all appearances, the reduction of Christianity to this-worldly rationalizing hedonism wasn't required by anything basic in Christianity, but by rebellion against Christianity -- the desire to reduce it to something that could be managed and controlled -- and by the pragmatic success of scientific rationalism.

Will liberalism continue to be successful?

Why does liberal society function as well as it does? Ordinary people and theoreticians complain about it, its proponents have trouble defending it coherently, and its imminent demise has been announced since long before any of us were born. Nonetheless, it is more widespread and firmly rooted than ever and its development goes from victory to victory. Most people aren't willing to say so explicitly, but it is generally viewed as the final form of human society, a permanent achievement that has definitively triumphed and can never be superseded.

What is going on? Is liberalism strong in spite of seeming weakness or weak in spite of seeming strength? It is difficult to view something so pervasive and dominant from a perspective that is independent enough to allow assessment of its true strength. Several lines of thought seem relevant, however:

• Liberalism is associated with other things that counteract its effects and make possible non-traditional ways of doing things. For example modern natural science and technology multiply both wealth and power over nature and society, and thus make up for weaker social connections.
• It is farthest advanced in the societies that can afford it, those with steady and lawful habits, and it finds methods--public education, bureaucratic careerism, development and centralization of the media of communication, weakening of independent forms of social organization--to keep the habits of the people in line with its requirements.
• It is a tendency rather than a system, and on the whole has moved slowly and cautiously. It has generally avoided pushing its principles to the limit and destroying completely the things it opposes but depends upon, such as traditional family and similar relationships. Also, it develops partial substitutes for what it destroys. Even though liberalism can't base family relations on anything but contract or arbitrary sentimental attachment, and therefore has no way to understand sexual differences, it took hundreds of years for it to draw the obvious conclusions with regard to sex roles and homosexuality, and then only when it seemed possible to fill the gap created by family disorder with bureaucratized social services and daycare, including a greatly expanded system of public "education," and to some extent to substitute immigration for childbearing.

As time has passed and antiliberal institutions and views fallen into disarray liberal restraint has weakened greatly. The '60s were decisive in that process. It seems therefore that post-60s liberationist liberalism can't appeal to the long historical success of preceding forms of liberalism as reason to think it will be similarly successful doing what comes naturally for it. Its survival requires conscious self-restraint. That is the element of truth in neoconservatism.

So what now? The liberal democracies continue to prosper economically and grow in power relative to the rest of the world. No real alternative to liberalism has appeared. Nonetheless failures are appearing that seem likely to be decisive in the coming decades because in principle they make it impossible for liberal society to continue and it's quite unclear what resources there are in liberal society that will make it possible to deal with them. The most notable of these is the inability of liberal society to reproduce itself, culturally--the corruption of education, intellectual life and even science is a serious matter--or even physically. Another is the increasing inability of liberal elites to think or engage in self-limitation or self-criticism. Still another is growing corruption and self-seeking in public life. Again, the problem is not so much that these things are problems as that it appears that as liberalism develops it becomes less and less able to deal with them.

Still, a system that is dead in principle can stumble on a surprisingly long time if nothing is available to replace it. So the key question for the next few decades is likely to be whether ways of life at odds with liberalism--radical Islam or traditionalist Christianity, for example--will be attractive enough to gain and hold enough adherents to give liberalism genuine competition. Things liberalism now emphasizes, like multicultural "tolerance" and the reduction of family to formal legal relations, can be understood as ways of depriving alternatives of any social setting in which they can develop.

September 11 as a “wakeup call”

Conservatives are always expecting a wakeup call that will rouse the American people so they will rise up, recapture the citadel, and restore sanity and good government. None ever comes. The most recent failed wakeup call was September 11. For a while it seemed significant that people were putting up "God Bless America" stickers, and it was even reported that someone on TV had referred to "firemen" instead of "firefighters." Today "God Bless America" has become "United We Stand," and we hear more about female soldiers than about "firemen."

It appears, in fact, that the effect of 9/11 has been to reinforce rather than reverse existing tendencies. That's not surprising. The normal response to attack is to reaffirm basic principle. The basic principle of the public understandings that now dominate America is the supremacy of bureaucracy and market as the only social institutions neutral and rational enough to respect human dignity, as understood by liberals, and reliably promote social well-being. Other institutions -- legislative assemblies, businesses, private associations, religion, particular culture, various household forms -- can organize and perform their functions to some extent, but they must accept the supremacy of bureaucracy and market and enthusiastically accept whatever degree of supervision is needed to ensure rationality and neutrality.

Maintaining principles of a public order, especially principles as odd as those that now rule America, is always difficult. A particular challenge for the current order, one important enough to determine its whole orientation, is that the people are often inclined to prefer inherited practices and substantive moral standards and loyalties to liberal neutrality, rationality, and institutional arrangements. What that means, from the standpoint of the guardians of public order, is that they are "bigots" who can't be trusted with anything serious and stand in permanent need of supervision and re-education.

September 11 plainly violated neutrality, liberal rationality, and bureaucratic and market ordering. The response to the event has therefore been to reaffirm those standards and pursue all the more vigorously the campaign to make them supreme universally. In particular it has meant a more vigorous and comprehensive war on "bigotry" -- on all attachment to institutions other than bureaucracy and markets and standards other than neutrality and efficiency.

So we have seen:

• An emphasis, in response to presumed Christian and majority bigotry, on criminalizing "hate," reaching out to Muslims, and promoting Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance, superior to Christianity and certainly no less welcome and at home in Western society. To say Christianity is better than Islam is thought likely to precipitate a war of civilizations. In contrast, to say both Christians and Muslims should become liberals (and thus that liberalism is better than either) is thought the best way to work for peace on earth.
• Redefinition of the problem posed by radical Islam as a problem posed by "fundamentalism," which includes any view that makes religion anything but a poetic rephrasing of liberalism, and by "theocracy," which includes any tendency to be guided by specifically religious principle or authority in public life. "Religious tolerance" thus means that all religion has to redefine itself as poetry and strictly private sentiment -- that is, as something other than religion. If you don't like what Mohammed Atta did, then you should go after the Taliban wing of the Republican Party, Christian fundies, people who like school prayer, people with doubts about feminism, opponents of "gay marriage," and so on.
• A stepped-up attack on any public allusion to Christianity, and often on religion as such. After all, permissible religion must understand itself as poetic myth, otherwise the Muslims the West is welcoming in such numbers won't be able to live happily with Christians, and how could availability of a few additional poetic myths compensate for the danger that an authority at odds with liberalism might assert itself? The suppression of Christianity is especially noticable around Christmastime, the general attack on religion in England, our main ally in the "War on Terror."
• An accelerated attempt to do away with America as a specific people living in a specific place, and redefine it as the universal dominance of liberal principles and institutions through the instrumentality of the United States government. Aspects of that attempt include ever-more-open borders, imperialism, and blurring of the specificity of American law through treaties and judicial merger with international human rights law.
• Radicalization of the attack on the family as a specific social institution not reducible to contract or individual sentiment. "Gay marriage" is the latest battlefront in a battle that the guardians of public order view as already settled.

All in all, from the standpoint of almost two and a half years' experience, it appears that to the extent 9/11 was a wakeup call it was a wakeup call for liberals and a prelude to ever-more-comprehensive liberal Gleichschaltung. In an ideological war there are opposing temptations: to become like your enemy, and to become what your enemy thinks of you. In America our rulers are managing both: they want to impose their own comprehensive Shari'ah on all social relations everywhere in the world, by force if necessary, and the specific provisions of that Shari'ah are as inhuman as any reasonable enemy could desire.

Some notes on traditionalist futurology and the internet

Can the internet and traditionalism get along? On the face of it, the net sums up the most extreme features of the modern world. It destroys particular connections by making everything equally present to everything else. With all things in the same setting and position, the meaning and significance of things has nowhere to establish itself. Personal relationships become casual. Identities change at will and disappear. Everything becomes either an object of undifferentiated appetite or aversion or else a resource for some further purpose. Money, government decree, and technical rationality become the sole principles of order that can be relied on in the face of adversity.

So the internet is hardly tradition-friendly. Still, the basic issue for social order is less what elements are present than what principles are decisive. Life always goes on, and what doesn't work dies out. To the extent coherent traditions are necessary to social order they will exist regardless of technology. The infinite choice the internet and modern life generally offer is still consistent with a tradition capable of anchoring a loyalty that transcends self-interest, and thus with a tolerable way of life. For that to come about, however, the choices have to be restrained and channeled by a sufficient principle of identity and authority. History suggests parallels. The Jews lived by trade and had no country of their own, but for centuries maintained their religious and ethnic identity through attachment to their history and their God, and through self-imposed restrictions on conduct and attachments. Modern conditions require something similar of us all.

What are now called tolerance and inclusiveness may be inescapable requirements of the modern political outlook, but they have no future in anything like their present form. They provide nothing by which men can live and order their lives, or that can sustain them when times are bad. If modern thought requires them then modern thought will disappear. The serious political issue today is what does have a future. It's difficult to deal with that issue in general public discussion, because the outlook that has become compulsory in public, an individualistic universalism that can't accept sex, class, ethnic culture, or religious authority as functional elements of social life, forbids discussion of essential points. The future isn't likely to be anything like a continuation of present trends, but since it's accepted that the true morality and rationality have now unquestionably been found to propose fundamental change sounds crazy and evil. Hence the emptiness of present-day political discussion. All significant issues have been irreversibly decided, no one can propose going back, but the result is a form of society that as a matter of basic principle tries to suppress fundamental aspects of human life. It can't manage or even recognize the resulting problems, which are as basic as failure to reproduce and maintain identity.

The difficulty of public discussion is not surprising. A public exists though common assumptions, so the broader the public and the more public the discussion the less it can deal with basic points. A multicultural society that lives by electronic mass media can only discuss trivia, and advanced liberalism accommodates the situation by deciding all issues before discussion even begins, leaving only minor points open for debate. Still, the American notion of freedom, and electronic media like the internet, make possible even today at least semipublic discussion of basic issues. Tradition itself requires a much denser and more enduring network of connections and a more definite principle of authority than the internet can provide. Nonetheless, the articulation, defense and re-establishment of tradition in a technocratic world require dealings in that world and a way of going around the bureaucracies of thought and knowledge. Hence this weblog and similar efforts by others.

What's needed?

What kind of conservatism is needed today? Whatever it is will have to be different from that of the past. Conservatism as such is simply the desire to keep what's good in an existing way of life. Conservatives today, however, have seen liberalism transform the world they once loved beyond recognition. What can there be to conserve in a world that makes inclusiveness the highest ideal, and enforces the requirements of inclusiveness--the abolition of all distinctions other than those of interest to the market, bureaucracy, and purely individual sentiment--ever more single-mindedly? Can Martin Luther King day ever truly be a conservative holiday?

Certainly we still have a great deal to be grateful for: prosperity, physical comfort, and (in a purely private sense) freedom. But those things hardly seem sufficient at a time in which Leftist indoctrination is compulsory in school, workplace and all public life. In America a man may be able to read and say what he wants at home and among friends. However, if he says publicly anything seriously at odds with "inclusiveness"--that immigration or homosexuality is a problem, that racial differences do have consequences--he'll discover how many ways there are of shutting someone up in a society as interdependent as our own. What he says will become much less public as opportunities for making his views known shut down. He's likely to have career problems if he holds any but the most technical and low-level of positions. And in Europe he may find himself in jail.

Further, how long will current freedoms last now that we've adopted a social ideal that reforms attitudes and personal relationships, requires thought control, and abolishes the open public discussion and personal independence that hold rulers to account? Right-wingers sometimes worry that the future will bring a horrible Leftist utopia, like Brave New World only more perverse sexually. It's likely though that the future will mostly be just stupid and brutal. Utopia is impossible, and forbidding people to think doesn't make it otherwise. Social order requires particular loyalties, concrete ideals of conduct, and willingness to sacrifice one's own interests. Abolish those things in the name of the universal right of self-realization, and the result may be very bad but it won't be the horrifying perfection of a Leftist utopia.

So things seem bad, but there is always something to work with and for. What do we do though? Here are some approaches people have suggested:

1. Mainstream conservatism takes the existing life of society as a standard, resolving conflicts when possible in favor of traditional ways. It's not an approach that can work once the Left has won decisively, and standards that in principle reject tradition (like inclusiveness and self-realization) are treated as ultimate by all respectable authority. That's where we are now.
2. Libertarianism at its best (that is, most traditionalist) observes that tyranny requires government to enforce it. In the absence of government, people rely not only on the market but on traditional arrangements like family, ethnicity and religion to order life and provide security. Therefore, libertarians say, the best way to let human life develop in accordance with its own principles rather than those imposed by the Left is to do away with the state as much as possible. The problem, though, is that the ultimate standard for libertarians is freedom--which as an ultimate standard can only mean the untrammelled self-defining human will--and that standard is likely to determine the strategy, alliances, and practical effect of the movement.
3. Withdrawal. Public life in the West is intolerable today. On the other hand people can do what they want in private. So instead of watching the Viagra ads on the evening news and sending your kids to be indoctrinated at school why not drop out and live as you choose? This approach has much to recommend it. It's not equally possible for everyone, however, because of personal complications or because it requires the support of a community--most likely a religious one--and not everyone belongs to such a community or could join in good faith. A further difficulty is that withdrawal from public life can mean loss of influence, and that could be dangerous in a world in which giving children a traditional upbringing might at some point be declared a form of child abuse justifying state intervention.
4. Restoration of the traditions of America and Christendom. That's the obvious goal for conservatives if neither "what is" nor "as you wish" are taken as standards. The way forward to restoration is, however, unclear. At present it must exist largely as a movement of personal or at most marginal local reform, and as an intellectual movement that aims to clarify what a rebirth of Christendom and of America would be.

So what is the conclusion? As usual, a little eclecticism seems in order. If the principles that are publicly all-but-compulsory are radically wrong, alternative principles are needed, and Christendom and the traditional American regime can provide them. The alternative must be based on something actual, however, which requires disassociation from the existing way of life. Some degree of withdrawal is therefore necessary. That will require limitation of state power, so libertarianism is also needed. And it will require sensitivity to the seeds and remnants of a better way of life in what we have now, so mainstream conservatism, perhaps in a more self-aware form, has a necessary role as well. Each can contribute. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

What's the hope for the future?

The movement of modern life is still evidently toward the "left": toward hedonism, rationalism, egalitarianism, technocracy, making man the measure, eradication of any sense of the transcendent, and all the other things we have come to know so well. Seems bad, if you happen to be an antimodernist and right-winger.

Still, overall formulations leave things out. Big words don't tell you everything. That's true of one's own theories, but also of the way things are formulated in public discussion. You can't trust what you read in the papers. Life includes everything, even the things that aren't what we talk about.

So what else is there? Some possibilities:

1. Everyday life. People are still born and die, and must deal with whatever is part of of that. They can not in fact live or believe like the people on TV. That came out in the response to 9/11--people were much more religious and patriotic than advertised. And even people who don't realize it may be "anonymous Christians" or something of the sort. The official formulation of their attitudes, beliefs and habits may be quite misleading; a more traditional formulation might be less so. Time may dissipate the confusion, and bring traditional formulations back into fashion.
2. Still, TV and the rest of it have their effects. An international survey of religious beliefs shows the consequences of indoctrination in the controlled societies of Europe. The figures for the formerly communist countries, where indoctination was heaviest, are of particular interest. While the indoctrination was mostly effective, Poland is an anomaly. The apparent reason is that there was something unusual in the relation between society and regime there. After all, Poland is where the collapse of communism began. The similarity to Ireland and to some extent Italy, and to the comparatively libertarian United States, suggests that trust in God is an alternative to trust in the regime. For a government to put "In God We Trust" on its currency is truly an act of self-limitation. So one possibility is that with the failure of the state as God--the failure of the self-sufficient rational organization of human capacity and desire as the ultimate ethical reality--men will regain the sense that they depend on things that transcend them. The examples of Russia and East Germany suggest that may not happen immediately, however
3. Darwin's revenge: what works survives, what doesn't disappears. It is Europe that has moved farthest to the Left, and Europe can't come close to reproducing itself. After all, what does comfortable individual hedonism have to do with raising children? The Europeans expect their continent to become a comfortable retirement village dutifully supported by Muslim immigrants. How likely is that? A system of unreality can't last, whatever prestige it may have for a while, and it's no wonder they're so easily frightened.

None of these grand possibilities tells us what to do now, apart from live well and try to be as clear and truthful about things as possible. The Left is doomed by its nature and will be replaced; what will replace it, when and how can't be predicted. Still, there's plenty to say and plenty to work for, and for that we should be grateful!

Where to go?

It may be true--I believe it is--that American society is mostly good, if only because no society could last a day that wasn't mostly good. Still, if that's true then it must be possible for a society that's mostly good to be pointed in a radically wrong direction and to adopt a fundamentally evil system as its public orthodoxy.

So what to do? The mainstream conservative approach is to participate in ordinary life but stick to the conservative side of things. That becomes increasingly difficult as time goes by. What, after all, counts as ordinary life today? Sending your children to public or mainstream private schools? Having a TV and letting them watch it? Attending a mainline church? Accepting a responsible position in a large organization that requires you to express personal enthusiasm for "diversity" and act accordingly? Reject those things and you're an extremist; accept them and most likely you're no longer living as a conservative.

Independence and integrity have become far more difficult than in the past due to improvements in communications and the growth of comprehensive bureaucratic organization. "Ordinary life" now includes acceptance of the mass media and the socially interventionist liberal state, and tolerance of the things they stand for. Most of us are employees now, and must sign on to an institutional program. It's hard to escape individually except by becoming an eccentric or hermit, and not everyone--especially, not everyone with children--can live like Thoreau.

In order to avoid mere personal eccentricity one needs a place to stand--some understanding of things that's fundamental enough, comprehensive enough, and recognizable enough to justify, in a manner that can be publicly understood and shared with others, a way of life at odds with that other people carry on. Possibilities include:

• The Confucian approach--culture and retirement from public affairs. When the right way does not prevail, you withdraw from public life, study the rites and the ancients, discharge your normal human obligations to family, friends and neighbors, write (if prudent) the occasional memorial protesting injustice, and wait for Heaven to send better days. The approach is a natural one for conservative intellectuals with no very concrete religious commitment. The problem with it is that it assumes a morally coherent and publicly recognized cultural heritage, as well as family and local community life that is not much affected by public corruption.
• The St. Benedict approach--withdraw and join a community devoted to disciplined pursuit of some otherworldly goal. That's splendid for those with the calling, but not everyone has the calling and you can't bring your wife and kids along.
• The Pilgrim Fathers approach--determination among a network of families to live in accordance with a definite religious principle, combined with willingness to embrace whatever degree of separateness is needed for the integrity of that way of life.

The last approach seems the most workable today, at least for those with family responsibilities. A decent life requires dropping out of the established culture, but you can't live by purely private standards, especially if you're responsible for family members. So you have to establish community with other dropouts, and the way a community establishes and justifies its distinctiveness is through an authoritative concrete understanding of how things are and what people owe each other. Such an understanding is, at least in effect, religious and dogmatic. How dogmatic it has to be no doubt depends on the degree of separation needed from the surrounding world.

Joining the Pilgrims is not an altogether pleasing prospect for those of us who would temperamentally prefer something less ambitious, the Confucian approach for example. The problem is that in the absence of the necessary social setting an attempt to live like an out-of-office Chinese literatus becomes an attempt to live like Thoreau, but in surroundings that are much less favorable than Walden Pond and mid-19th century Concord. There is no easy out for those who want to avoid participation in modern corruption--it has spread much too far. Modernity is intrinsically extreme, and in the long run leaves no choice but capitulation or active radicalism.

Doubtful prophecies of a paleo peritus

Paul Gottfried says the paleo movement is dead, and calls for youth to take over in the form of a post-paleo movement based on true American conservatism, which is the constitutional liberalism once represented by Taft Republicanism. He sees signs of such a development in the Ron Paul campaign, and in the writings of some youngish right-wingers.

If such a thing happens I'm all for it, especially compared to anything else that seems likely in the near future. Still, there are some bothersome points. Gottfried's piece seems to suggest a sort of Brownian motion theory of historical development that leads to an overemphasis on strategy and tactics at the expense of basic principle:

• Stuff happens, and that leads to other stuff.
• Figure out the configuration of forces, and you can guide how they play out through intelligent intervention.
• The reason the paleos failed was that they didn't have enough money, and the media were against them, so they couldn't push things their way.
• That practical problem was due to an odd combination of circumstances that can't last forever. Maybe next time we can get more money and get things to go more our way.

If that's the analysis, it leaves out a lot. I'd say that the paleos failed, at the pragmatic level, because they were on the weaker side of a battle between the imperialism of bureaucratic and market institutions, and the resistance of the informal, local and traditional institutions they correctly believe necessary to a tolerable way of life. Money, media, managers and other mainstream authorities support the former side for excellent and enduring reasons. They are the ruling class, so why not squash all competitors? And if their side is stronger, for basic reasons, why shouldn't it just keep on winning?

What follows to my mind is that staring at the existing configuration of power might suggest some tactics or strategies of secondary importance but isn't going to get us out of the hole we're in. To do more than try to stave off catastrophe we need to be able to say what we want, why we want it, and why we should get it: at a minimum, to be able to explain to other people why we're right. And right-wingers aren't able to do that just now. How else could left-wingers win in court on claims that traditionally-minded legislation has "no rational basis"? The failure of conservatism has not been just institutional. It has also been--as all agree--intellectual.

More specifically, we need to offer an explanation why markets and expert regulation aren't uniquely rational principles of social organization. To do that, though, we have to be able to say why neutral scientific expertise is not the whole of knowledge, why maximum equal satisfaction of preferences is not the human good, and if those things lack something just what it is, as a practical matter, that can supply what they lack.

In other words, we have to go rather deep--so far as I can tell, to something rather like the Catholicism of which Gottfried complains. America may be basically Protestant, and originally Calvinist, but both those tendencies have their origins within Catholicism. They are Catholic factions that believed--falsely, it now appears--that they could go it alone. That being so, why wouldn't it be smart for them to return to their origins when they've evidently ended up in such a hole?

Dealing with the most basic issues is not of course a sure-fire recipe for victory. At present, though, it seems necessary for getting anywhere at all.

alt.revolution.counter FAQ

For several years the following text was distributed monthly on the usenet newsgroup alt.revolution.counter. Distribution was abandoned at some point in 2001, when it seemed that discussions had altogether petered out. So here it is, for old time's sake:

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

1. What is the purpose of alt.revolution.counter?

   The discussion of counterrevolutionary perspectives on society, politics, culture and religion. The newsgroup was originally started by Catholic integrists and others of similar persuasions attached to Christianity as the basis for culture and politics and opposed to the ideals of the French Revolution and its progeny. It has developed into a forum for the discussion of all aspects of counterrevolutionary and related thought, including American paleoconservatism, the European New Right, Southern Agrarianism, Integrism, Distributism, monarchism and ethnic nationalism.

2. What is a counterrevolutionary?

   One who believes that the leftward trend of recent times (which some extend back to the Middle Ages) is irredeemably destructive and recognizes that it has triumphed. Egalitarian hedonism has become the guiding principle of almost all present-day political institutions and discussion. As a result, conservatism as it has been conceived in the past is no longer tenable because there is not enough left to conserve; fundamental changes in the direction of society are required.

3. What do counterrevolutionaries oppose?

   In general, they oppose the tendency of modern society to take nothing seriously other than the impulses and desires particular men happen to have and the establishment and maintenance of a universal rational order designed to organize all available resources for their maximum equal satisfaction. The modern order is universalistic, materialistic, egalitarian, and hedonistic, and counterrevolutionaries don't like any part of it.

4. What do counterrevolutionaries favor?

   The things that don't fit into the foregoing scheme of things: the Good, the Beautiful, the True, God, love, loyalty, family, local and ethnic particularity, and so on.

5. Are all counterrevolutionaries the same?

   No. Schools of thought include:

   • American Paleoconservatism. Bring back the pre-1861 (or at least pre-FDR) republic. Down with the neoconservative revisionists and other left-wing deviationalists. Keep government small, limited and local. Bring back the Protestant ethic. Build communities of individualists. (Typical query from other counterrevolutionaries: isn't the present situation a necessary outcome of the thought of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson?)
   • European New Right. Down with all universalisms. Long live the Europe of 100 flags, the Fourth World, and polytheism. What we need is a fundamental shift in our collective consciousness and philosophical and epistemological foundations. (Typical query: exactly what does this all mean? Is this the wish list from outer space, or is there something here that can be taken seriously?)
   • Neo-Confederates and Southern nationalists. Paleocons with a drawl. Down with the Yankee neo-puritans; long live the Montgomery Constitution of 1861!
   • Integrism. Long live Christ the King!
   • Distributism. Decentralize economically. Promote small business. Build a nation of independent property owners.
   • Monarchism. Long live the king!
   • American Populist Right. Down with the feds. Support the RKBA (Right to Keep and Bear Arms) and your local militia. Become a sovereign citizen. Barter instead of using those FRNs (Federal Reserve Notes). Fight the ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government).
   • Ethnic nationalism. Let's have a politically independent state as the vehicle for the collective life of each people. (Typical query: isn't partitioning a state on ethnic lines messy when transfers of populations are required? Also, once there are separate ethnic states, what then? Is Sweden really the ideal? If we're looking for a fundamental political attitude, can ethnic nationalism really fit the bill?)
6. Since counterrevolutionaries are so different from each other, how can they all fit into a single newsgroup?

   Their views on the ills of modern society are often broadly compatible, as are some characteristics of the societies each would promote. The discussions in a.r.c. can be useful in developing the counterrevolutionary diagnosis of modern ills and bringing out the strengths and weaknesses of proposed remedies.

7. Are counterrevolutionaries racist sexist homophobes?

   As a general thing, yes. They tend to think that socially-defined sex roles and ethnic loyalties are OK, and so qualify on all three counts.

8. My ex-wife in Ulan Bator wants to join a.r.c. so she can discuss her plans for bringing back the Mongol Empire but with more of a theocratic emphasis. She has Internet email but not Usenet access. What can she do?

   Your ex qualifies for our outreach program to third-world women of color who reject the traditional patriarchal family. Accordingly, she should send us email asking for a connection to the a.r.c. mail gateway. (Others may also request the connection.)

9. Are there any special a.r.c. no-no's?

   Crossposting. At its best alt.revolution.counter has been a haven for discussions of a sort not found elsewhere on the net. Crossposting makes it impossible for it to serve that function.

10. How can I find out more?

    Listen to the discussions, join in if you wish, and take a look at our companion postings, the a.r.c. Resource Lists.

How will the counterrevolution come?

A Finnish correspondent sent me some questions about the current overall situation, where it's likely to go, and what to do about it. I thought others might find them of interest, so here they are with my responses:

Q: How do we know that faith in the omnicompetence of technique will give way to anything else? What it means to live rightly is exactly what there is (at best) disagreement about. The ethical, philosophical and spiritual disarray of our time makes it a forlorn hope for the masses to live rightly and the liberal will grope about in the dark when he has finally seen that technique will save his society no more than it will save his soul.

A: People have tried to treat technique and expertise as omnicompetent and it hasn't worked. They don't keep beating themselves over the head forever. So eventually they'll get fed up and stop believing in it. The collapse of socialism was a lesson for a lot of people. Not enough of a lesson, but it was a beginning. It raised some issues, and laid the groundwork for raising more issues.

Also, expertise to some extent is debunking itself. A few examples:

• Scientific studies of various types are suggesting severe limits on the usefulness of expertise and on various projects of social rationization. I recently discussed a couple of aspects of the situation (Sim City social science).
• Architecture and urban planning is another field in which recognition of the uselessness of modernism is making headway even among some experts. Nikos Salingaros is doing good work on those issues and has posted a lot of his work to the web.
• Telos, originally a New Left publication, has been a useful focal point for efforts to deal seriously with the failure of the modern project in a way that puts the necessary critiques and proposals for new departures in a form in which they can affect the discussions of the experts themselves.

So the counterrattack is gathering force, both at the level of popular disillusionment and at the level of organized thought that takes the form of legitimate expertise and so can't easily be shrugged off. As an organizational matter liberalism continues to sweep all before it. Its hollowness though is increasingly evident even to its own proponents. That is one of the lessons of postmodernism.

Your big question is what comes afterward. Once people stop worshipping technique and their own desires they have a choice: they can drink themselve to death, fall back on various superstitions, or ask broader questions about how to live and try to recover what they've lost. Not everyone will take the first two choices.

I think the key is that expertise can never suppress informal knowledge altogether because action can't be coherent without informal knowledge. Tradition can't die because its death would mean utter idiocy. It would be like the final pages of a late Samuel Beckett novel. The human tendencies that give rise to tradition don't die either. Feminism and other forms of radical egalitarianism require constant propaganda and policing.

Ilya Ehrenberg said that if the whole world were paved with asphalt a green shoot would break through somewhere. Eventually the propagandists get tired, the police get inefficient and corrupt, the experts stop believing in their own expertise, people stop taking in what the authorities tell them, and natural tendencies start reasserting themselves, guided by memories of a time when they were given freer rein and by the inherited habits that had been making a more-or-less-ordered social existence possible all along. Green shoots spring up and spread, and when people see something better than what they have they imitate it. The future belongs to the ways of life that work. Those ways learn to be what they are by looking at what's worked in the past and drawing on what goods have survived.

So I see a restoration less as something to be planned by sorting out the good and bad in some organized way, and then propagandizing and instituting the good, than something that grows up as people abandon what they have come to hate, pick up on what they begin to love, and stick with what gives them solid rewards. Each of us can further the process by rejecting the bad and furthering the good himself as best he can. We can't control the timing or details or even be completely aware of what's happening. That's an old point though -- "the Kingdom of God cometh not by observation." ( Luke 17:20 )

An additional point: something is needed that isn't quite captured by the simple notion of traditional ways. Tradition can't be understood as simply the self-organization of human life based on memories, natural impulses, and the experience of what works. It has to point to something beyond itself that validates it. Otherwise it's just a bunch of rules that turn out to make things good for "society" -- that is, for other people -- but have no personal hold on someone who's thoughtful and has come to see them as the merely conventional arrangements they are. That's been a problem, e.g., for Roger Scruton.

The problem of liberalism -- of the ontological, epistemological and ethical primacy of the naked ego -- will be with us until people understand themselves more definitively as part of a moral order greater than themselves. It's the primacy of the naked ego that makes the goal of liberalism -- abstract equal freedom -- seem so compelling. I am convinced though that some day people will once again understand themselves as part of a moral and spiritual cosmos. It's the natural way for people to view things, and the alternative doesn't work in the long run, philosophically, socially or personally.

A practical consequence is that the process of rebirth, rejuvenation, return, restoration or whatever has an essential religious component. The things tradition reveals can't be understood as simply rules that happen to work, but as a revelation of realities that transcend us and make us and the world what they are. That's another reason to think that a worthwhile future can't be altogether planned. It's not simply a matter of developing the right ideas and putting them into effect. The things at issue touch us too closely and are too comprehensive to be handled that way.

Q: Isn't this to say that conservatives have no answers to current political problems? When a parliamentarian asks if you have any wishes, it does not do to say that he should be pious and reverent.

A: In a sense principled and coherent conservatives have no answer to current political problems because they think current political discussions, which identify problems and the sorts of things that would constitute solutions, is misconceived. Current discussions assume the world can be run by plan to bring about whatever purposes are chosen to a greater extent than it can.

Conservatives do have political goals though, primarily restricting the scope of government attempts to displace traditional institutions like the family with bureaucratic arrangements and to reconstruct social and moral reality. I think though that what's needed most is an attempt to live better here and now without special reference to what government is doing. Political action would then be treated as mainly ancillary to that attempt.

Q: Perhaps groups like Amish and strictly orthodox communities are the hope for the future.

A: It's hard to know. Such groups are in fact thriving. The strict orthodox have lots of kids and they get converts. The Amish don't get converts, but they have lots of kids and maybe 80% of them stick with it.

It seems to me that at worst such groups will survive, find imitators, and eventually replace a liberal civilization that can't reproduce itself socially or even physically. Then we would end up with a sort of neo-Levantine society of inward turning ethno-religious communities, probably in an overall setting weakly ordered by corrupt dynastic despotisms.

I say "at worst" because I'd much rather have a society of the Western type with more of a substantive public life. Science, philosophy, free government etc. are all good things and it's upsetting to think they might all go. I don't think though that liberal civilization will survive long-term. Right now it's all-victorious, and other possibilities seem extremely speculative and even flaky because liberal civilization has basically defined itself as equivalent to reason itself. That self-definition though leads to a tendency to derive more and more compulsory social practices and even compulsory thought from universal abstract requirements. That makes self-criticism and dealing with fundamental problems impossible. It's not really a strength in the long run.

Q: Conservatism traditionally calls for an elite. Obviously, a distinction between aristocracy and elite is crucial, otherwise the notion becomes void and we end up defending the liberal new class. But how do we distinguish these phenomena?

A: An aristocracy I suppose would be a legitimate elite, one that is constituted by its role in a social, moral and spiritual order that is superior to it in the same way the order is superior to the people generally. That order determines what the function of the aristocracy is, and both grants and limits its authority. It also imposes obligations that match privileges. An aristocracy is therefore not simply self-interested. If need be it's capable of self-sacrifice.

A problem with the liberal new class is that everyone's supposed to be equal so there really isn't supposed to be an elite. That means everybody has to lie about the situation, and since there are no legitimate privileges and no legitimate personal authority no special personal obligations can be recognized either.

Q. Traditionalists, especially Catholic traditionalists, speak of the importance of liturgy. Even the journal Telos has picked up the theme. It seems unclear to me though how the liturgy conveys transcendent truth except in a vague and general sense.

A: It's not liturgy in general, something put together by liturgists, that conveys transcendent truth. That's more likely to be used to misrepresent or obfuscate transcendent truth. It's particular liturgies -- the inherited liturgies of Catholic and Orthodox Christendom -- that convey it. A liturgist is almost by definition stupid or evil -- stupid, because he has no idea what he's doing, or evil, because he wants to manipulate the sacred in the interests of what he wants.

What is to be done II

What to do? There's plenty for right-wingers to complain about but solutions are notoriously scarce. A couple of days ago I put up a piece with some suggestions. Here are some others that friends have put forward:

• Live well yourself. Traditionalist conservatives claim they know about a way of life that's better than what liberalism has to offer. So live it and the world will follow you. Reject the lie and the truth will triumph. Direct action lives!

• Still, in politics it's hard to act simply as an individual. One thing needed is an intellectual culture decisively separate from the one defined by liberalism and at odds with it. The triumph of liberalism means minority views such as traditionalist conservatism must become more self-conscious and comprehensively analytical. A problem with conservatism has been narrowness of focus--each has a particular issue, but how the issues relate to each other, the world and ultimate principles is not always kept in mind. The consequence has been piecemeal defeat. View from the Right tries to contribute to the development of a traditionalist counterculture by publishing general theoretical discussions, applying generalities to current events, and creating opportunities for discussion. Much more needs to be done, and any number can take part. Why, for example, shouldn't there be print magazines that do the same thing?
• Question the questioners. Liberalism puts traditional ways in question. It then declares that since they can be questioned they shouldn't be forced on anyone and other ways should be protected and equally respected. Why shouldn't liberalism be subjected to the same scrutiny as everything else? One could imagine for example an academic "Institute for the Study of Liberal Society" that doesn't present proposals for how liberal society can become more consistently liberal but instead studies it in the manner of Paul Gottfried's After Liberalism.

What is to be done?

So what does a traditionalist conservative do when he becomes convinced that public life is proceeding on fundamentally bad principles? The usual resources of the extremist are unavailable to him, because traditionalism is adverse to dogmatism, conspiracy theories and cure-alls. On the other hand, he can no longer participate in what passes for the mainstream. The following, extracted from a longer piece I wrote, outlines one possiblity:

So what is to be done? Basic matters like following traditional morality in daily life are clear enough. More and more the world enforces other demands as the price of integrity. The situation of traditionalists is becoming that of religious minorities in Europe before 19th century emancipation. Technocracy makes traditional beliefs on matters such as relations between the sexes and the place of the transcendent in social life hopelessly opposed to the understandings now demanded. Official insistence on commitment to antitraditional views has begun to make it difficult for a traditionalist to accept a responsible job in a mainstream institution, or permit his children to be educated by the public system. In the coming years such difficulties are likely to affect more and more of life.

A radical traditionalist movement has thus become necessary. The immediate function of such a movement would be to make life as a traditionalist easier for those so inclined; the ultimate function to restore tradition to public life. The first goal can be pursued piecemeal and as occasion offers; the second is mostly a matter of maintaining principle. Pragmatic success on any large scale is likely to be slow, because the traditionalist outlook is so deeply at odds with modern public understandings. Nonetheless, the views of even a tiny minority can be influential, especially if they express durable aspects of human life that established views ignore, because they change the setting in which men act.

That effect can be cumulative; if the public outlook has gone radically astray steady maintenance of an alternative can eventually transform what views seem plausible. The traditionalist outlook has great long-term advantages. To say values are human creations, as technocrats do, is to reduce morality to a statement of what others want and make it utterly ineffectual. Rational hedonism can motivate only what is self-serving, and formal liberal principles like utility or the categorical imperative are insufficient for the concrete demands of life. Effective common action requires faith in something that encompasses and transcends us, so lasting success goes to those who care about something more substantive than winning. Traditionalism connects morality to the nature and tendencies of things, and so grounds the trust in the world needed to motivate a comprehensive system of action.

In any event, grand public success is ultimately not the point. Honesty and maintenance of principle is itself victory. Traditionalism means that politics depends on things more important than itself, that our purpose in life is not pragmatic success but living in accordance with spiritual and moral order. We must give our lives a footing in what is real; from that all else follows. At a time when good and evil are proclaimed the offspring of desire, and all the means of publicity and tricks of rhetoric are used to foreclose discussion, it requires thought, effort and independence of mind to do so.

Independence does not mean denial of our surroundings and connections; the world would have ended long ago if good were not more pervasive and enduring than evil. The point of tradition is not to fabricate anything but to secure and foster the good everywhere implicit. The means are at hand, since we learn to live well in attempting to do so. Natural feelings lead us toward right patterns and understandings. Living memory and recent history tell us of a way of life, much of it still available to us, that is far more explicitly at odds with technocracy than the one that now prevails. Formal study also helps: the history of modernism shows how we got where we are, and the classics put us in touch with what preceded. Discussions with others, those sympathetic and those opposed, help clarify and broaden our thoughts and provoke thought in others.

The current situation demands something different from each of us. The traditionalist movement is an alliance of traditions, each with its own doctrines and authorities, working together against a pervasive common enemy that would destroy humanity as such. Such a movement has its strains and paradoxes, since traditions oppose each other, but its necessity is clear. As it evolves it will come to have its own standards, although each tradition will see what is needed somewhat differently.

On some points unified action is called for. We are social beings, and as such must confront the new order together and publicly. Its nature tells us what weapons to use against it. The power of technocracy comes from an unquestioned acceptance that is not well-founded and in some ways is difficult to maintain. Nonetheless, the language and habitual assumptions of public discussion make it hard for those sympathetic to traditionalism even to articulate a position different from the one dominant. Objections stutter and fall silent before the confidence and seeming coherence of the technocrats.

The political battle today is therefore in men's minds rather than the legislative chamber, the polls, or the streets. Men naturally revert to tradition unless it is continually disrupted and suppressed. What is necessary is less to enforce particular traditions than to weaken antitraditionalism. Those who are not against us are for us; our job is not to overcome our fellow citizens but to bring them to realize where their fundamental sympathies lie.

The overwhelming public success of the technocratic outlook makes it an easy target. The ability to break its spell by forceful and repeated questioning and by providing an articulate alternative is an enormous power, one possessed by traditionalists right now if they would only use it. In spite of New Class dominance, Western polities allow anyone to participate in public discussion. There are ways of suppressing discussion , but also a thousand forums -- dinner table conversations, local meetings, letters to editors and public officials, Internet discussions, little magazines, campaigns of minor political parties -- that permit any of us to present almost any view he thinks right. A few intelligent and forthright voices in each forum arguing against the new order and for traditional ways would have a powerful effect on the balance of intellectual forces and eventually the social order itself.

The language of public discussion must therefore be contested. Technocratic rhetoric must be deflated, modernism deprived of the appearance of moderation and its brutal implications displayed. The possibility of social technology must be disputed, the failures of the new order driven home, and traditional understandings justified. Man must be shown to be a creature that lives by blood loyalties and transcendent goods, human life a compound not only of impulse and appetite but of essences -- man and woman, Confucian and Christian, Turk and Jew.

Confronting technocracy, of course, is only preparatory. As men our main goal must be to put our own lives in order, and for that something more definite is necessary than clearing obstacles and indicating general directions. Truth exists for us in concrete forms, one of which each of us must accept as authoritative. To establish a life better than the one offered by individualistic liberal choice -- in practice, by experts, advertisers and popular entertainers -- it is necessary to accept and submit to a specific community and its traditions. That is not easy when social practice is too diffuse to make the authority of any tradition a given, but in times of dissolution each of us has no choice but to find his way to something to which he can give himself wholly.

At bottom, the answer to today's confusions lies in faith, the realization that we do not make the world, that we recognize rather than create the Good, Beautiful, and True, and that to do so adequately we must draw on a wisdom greater than our own. Our acts can be fruitful only as part of an order for good founded in the nature of things. In spite of its apparent strength technocracy is based on fear of anything greater than ourselves and refusal to face obvious human limitations. It must fail because it has no way to deal with realities. Success is far more likely than appears. The world is ours: we need only throw off the chains of illusion.

The Amish, David Koresh, and a Newer World Order

A slightly edited version of the following essay appeared in issue 19 of The Scorpion.

Shortly before dawn on April 19, 1993, FBI tanks equipped to dispense tear gas crashed through the walls of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Over the course of the next six hours the tanks repeatedly rammed the ramshackle frame building inside the compound occupied by members of the sect, pumping in tear gas and causing structural damage that blocked stairways and exits. At about noon, fire broke out and spread in the high winds, quickly swallowing the half-wrecked building in flames. Most of those inside, including dozens of women and children, were trapped in inner rooms on the second floor and died in the fire.

The catastrophe ended a nationally-televised 51-day siege that had begun after a raid by over a hundred Federal agents to search for illegal firearms and explosives led to a firefight that left four agents and six Branch Davidians dead. Neither the agency that staged the raid nor the one that carried out the final assault with tanks had reason to think that such forcible methods were required to protect the public. They did not like the sect, though, and wanted to handle matters in a way that demonstrated their power and resolve. According to polls, most Americans approved of their methods. Those whose investigations went beyond absorbing what was presented on TV news felt differently, and even other law enforcement officials found it hard to defend the conduct of the agencies involved.

Government malfeasance and murderous abuse of power in Waco can only be understood as a display of official attitudes toward separatist groups like the Branch Davidians; when even sympathetic observers have difficulty explaining actions the publicly acknowledged motives and purposes are not likely to be the real ones. Nor are government attitudes a mystery. Simply by existing, separatist groups endanger the ability of the New World Order to integrate all human life into a single political and economic structure and so are natural enemies of that order and its supporters. The emnity will grow with the pretensions of the New World Order and its declining ability to provide a tolerable way of life. More and more people will reject it and try to set up on their own. The state will oppose the successionists, and as their activities threaten to become more widespread persecution will become routine, whether in the form of petty administrative harassment or, as in Waco, something grander.

Ultimate pessimism is nonetheless misplaced. One need not accept what the mainstream media have said about David Koresh and his sect to realize that their fate does not typify that of the millions of Americans involved with unconventional religious groups or living in separatist communities. While the destruction of the Branch Davidians shows something important about the modern state, the growth of sects like theirs suggests far more about where the world is ultimately headed.

The end of the Cold War has given us the New World Order but also made manifest the tendency of the modern world toward tribalism. That tendency runs deep. Man forms tribes because he knows what he is by contrast with what he is not, and because a single worldwide society is far too vast for feelings of participation and loyalty. When he finds himself in a society that lacks the cohesion to be a community man remains a political animal and finds means to create some form of polis.

In a society that claims to be universal those means will include separatism. Groups that find their own identity through separation will face repression, but in the end they will prevail because they will outlast the bureaucratic ordering of society for the sake of economics and power that constitutes the modern state. Throughout the West the past several decades has seen an unprecedented rise in crime, family breakup, illegitimacy, and other indicia of social disorder. That rise reflects a developing crisis in the fundamental organization of society. Life based on ties to particular individuals and communities has been giving way to life based on subordination to abstract overall schemata. The new form of society has proven itself unable to achieve moral legitimacy; no one feels love and loyalty for financial markets or daycare centers. The modern state therefore maintains itself by a mixture of threats, bribery, and intentional weakening of competitive centers of power. Like all tyrannies it will thrive for a time on the social and cultural chaos it creates, but when chaos infects the state itself, rendering it it unable to maintain its own power, it will give way to other organizing principles.

What principles will those be? What forms of human organization will flourish, how will they be constituted, and what kind of world will they build? Depending on circumstances a disintegrating empire can be replaced by almost anything. In the Roman Empire persecution could not stop the slow growth of the illegal Christian community, that "new race", which by the reign of Constantine had become necessary to the Roman state itself as a source of order and after the fall of that state gave rise to European Christendom. In contrast, in the Soviet Union and its successor states it has largely been criminal mafias that survived draconian penalties on economic crimes during the Soviet period to rise to power afterward.

Every tribe has a fundamental principle of identity and unity. Such a principle can have several sources; until very recently territorial propinquity could serve the purpose. If conditions were favorable, people who lived in a place eventually built up a common consciousness and way of life through intermarriage and other dealings with their neighbors. Political unification promoted the process and under particular conditions has given rise to the system of national states. The English race and nation grew up under the English monarchy from a mixture of Angles, Saxons, Danes, Normans and a scattering of Celts and others, and similarly in France. Farther afield, the Chinese refer to themselves as "Han people" after the Han dynasty that first gave durable imperial unity to China, but in the South as "T'ang people" after the dynasty that extended the empire to those regions.

The principles of propinquity and common citizenship have become steadily less important as a result of modern communications and continuing reductions in material obstacles to world trade. As the practical advantages of dealing with neighbors instead of people on the other side of the world continue to decline, physical proximity loses its importance in human relations. Liberals hope that as a result all nations will merge to form a single worldwide culture. In cherishing that hope they forget that tribalism is necessary and takes many forms, and if geography is no longer a sufficient basis for it another will arise.

The relation between tribalism and the territorial state is a contingent one. Most states throughout history have not given rise to tribes, most tribes have never had a state, and many tribes, such as the castes of India, have never had a particular geographic homeland of their own. Tribes will merge within a state into a national community if conditions are favorable to communities based on geography and citizenship. Where conditions are not favorable, as has commonly been the case in Asiatic despotisms and is now more and more the case everywhere, states can come and go while tribes develop or decline in accordance with other principles.

Rather than a universal and homogeneous society, the weakening of ties based on residence and citizenship will bring renewed emphasis on family, clan and ethnicity. Since tribes define themselves through customs and world-view, the future will also see the multiplication of the cultural and religious distinctions among neighbors that motivate and define separateness. The strictly political components of separatism will decline in importance as territorial sovereignty loses the clarity and importance it has come to have in modern Europe. Rather than create a separate state tribes will strive to loosen their ties to existing states and carry on more and more of their life through institutions that from the viewpoint of the state might be classified as customary or contractual rather than political. Tribes identified with a homeland will still try to secure autonomy or independence for their homeland; the trend, though, will be to a weakened connection among tribalism, geography, and political independence.

If the future belongs to tribes with no necessary connection to any particular homeland or state, the manner in which such tribes exist and thrive under modern circumstances hints at the shape of things to come. Several nonterritorial tribes, notably the Gypsies and the Jews of the Diaspora, have lived in Europe and elsewhere for many centuries without losing their distinctiveness. Although their histories are instructive, they are too long and complex to deal with here in detail. The Old Order Amish, as a remarkably successful group formed in modern times, is a more manageable example.

The Amish are a community of perhaps 145,000 scattered through almost half the states of the United States and one Canadian province, but found mostly in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. Their forebears were Swiss Anabaptists who emigrated to Alsace and adopted some of the practices of the Dutch Mennonites, most importantly the exclusion of disobedient members from normal social relations with members of the church community. The failure of the Swiss leadership to accept the new practices led to a permanent break in 1693 and the emergence of the Amish as a separate community.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries groups of Amish moved to America to escape hard times in Europe and established communities that with time and changes in the surrounding society have become more and more distinctive. Growth has been rapid due to natural increase; few outsiders join, but families are very large (seven children is average) and four-fifths of the children choose to be baptized into the community after reaching adulthood. Many Amish settled in Pennsylvania, where they established their largest settlement close to Philadelphia, in Lancaster County. There, with their distinctive dress, horses and buggies and roadside produce and handicraft stands, they have become a major tourist attraction. In spite of the crowded setting they maintain their nonconforming ways and separation from the world.

The Amish view the church as a community of those who have dedicated themselves to radical obedience to the teachings and example of Christ. Their religious outlook emphasizes separation from the world and Gelassenheit, a term that imports humility, simplicity, peacefulness, and submission to authority, whether it be the authority of God, of earthly magistrates, or of the community and its traditions. The way of life they have created realizes that outlook, subject to human imperfections, and satisfies most of those who lead it.

Religious services are held by rotation in homes rather than special church buildings. As a result, simplicity is maintained and congregations remain small and cohesive. Each congregation chooses several ministers and a deacon by lot from among men who receive a sufficient number of votes from members, and every two congregations choose a bishop the same way. These offices are unpaid and for life. Decisions by the leaders are by consensus that grows out of discussion and the deference paid to age and tradition, and normally must be accepted by the community before they are put into effect. Twice a year bishops confer on common concerns. After these semiannual meetings there are local district meetings to discuss the bishops' decisions, to engage in self-examination, and to reaffirm the way of life and unity of the community.

The Amish guard their separateness through a number of consciously- chosen restrictions. They do not marry outside their community or join organizations that include non-Amish. They speak their own language, a German dialect, and dress distinctively, with wide-brimmed hats, suspenders, beards, and shaggy hair for the men and long skirts, aprons, and white organdy head coverings for the women. They live mostly by farming, although with rising land prices more than half do something else at least as a sideline. Whether they are farmers or not, Amish men generally work either for themselves at home or for other Amish close to home; married women take care of home and family and never work outside the home.

The Amish have rejected many technological innovations, most notably those that would tie them into today's all-pervasive communications network. They refuse to drive motor vehicles or use high-wire electricity, and do not allow radio, television, movies, audio equipment, in-home telephones, computers, photography, or electric lighting. They also reject innovations that would make life too easy or reduce the need for close and constant cooperation among family members. Thus, they accept horse-drawn hay balers but not automatic bale throwers to load the hay.

The specific restrictions applicable to each Amish community make up its Ordnung ("order"), a set of understandings, generally unwritten, that is defined or modified when necessary by the consensus of the community's leaders and approval of its members. The Ordnung is often very specific regarding points of symbolic importance, such as details of dress, and regarding concessions to modernity, such as permitted ways of using electricity. Modifications are based on a balance among adaptation to changed circumstances, acceptance of changes that benefit the community, and maintenance of the coherence and distinctive qualities of the Amish way of life. Occasionally agreement cannot be reached on the Ordnung and groups of families adopt rejected innovations, resulting in schism. After breaking with the community the schismatics often adopt more and more innovations, eventually merging into worldly society and thus providing an object lesson of the consequences of rejecting the consensus of the community.

The Amish tend to regard the restrictions contained in the Ordnung as human institutions that in themselves are morally neutral rather than divine commandments. Accordingly, the restrictions become binding only after baptism, which is a serious matter and for adults only. Before that time a certain amount of rebellion is common and if possible ignored, especially among the young men, but baptized members who violate group norms are first cautioned, then required to make public confession, and finally are subject to Meidung ("shunning"), which requires all members of the group, including their immediate families, severely to restrict social relations with the offender. Those who do not choose baptism are not shunned, but cannot marry within the community and eventually move away because there is no place for them in it.

While the Ordnung has been strikingly effective in maintaining the Amish way of life, difficulties arise when it conflicts with the law of the land. The government has so far been willing to make concessions, very likely because the Amish are productive and law- abiding people who make no trouble if a few accommodations are made. For example, the Amish reject schooling beyond the eighth grade or otherwise out of keeping with their way of life. Beginning in the 1930s that position came into conflict with stiffer compulsory attendance laws and an increasingly centralized educational system, and many Amish fathers were jailed. A resolution to the conflict came through the Amish decision to establish their own schools and a Supreme Court ruling recognizing their right to limit their children's schooling. The Amish have also secured a statutory right to opt out of the Social Security system in recognition of their view that participation in such a program would undermine their own system of mutual obligation. The military draft, once a point of contention, can now (when in effect) be avoided through alternative service.

The Amish experience displays one way for a modern tribe to maintain its coherence and distinctiveness. Their way emphasizes inoffensiveness and customs that require separation from the larger society while allowing necessary accommodations. A striking feature is the emphasis on consensus, kept stable and coherent through fixed fundamental beliefs based on a rather literal reading of the Bible and respect for tradition and community leadership. Their methods enable them to combine cohesiveness and adaptability remarkably well.

Other tribes have other means of achieving similar goals, and the lessons of the Amish experience can be filled out by considering other nonterritorial societies such as the Jews, Gypsies, and various communal groups (for example, Israeli kibbutzim and the Hutterites, communal- living cousins of the Amish).

To exist at all, a separatist group must have a way of life capable of staving off competing forms of association. Such a way of life rests on a well-defined system of belief and conduct defended by clear boundaries between life within the group and life outside. The Amish satisfy that requirement through their radical evangelical faith, their Ordnung, and the institution of shunning. Other successful groups have a variety of institutions that serve similar functions; among Orthodox Jews, Gypsies, and Indian castes, for example, rules of ritual purity that create difficulties for social interaction with outsiders play an important role. No separatist group makes itself easy to join and all make serious demands on their members and require some degree of social exclusivity. The success of a modern tribe thus requires rejection of the "tolerance, diversity and inclusiveness" on which liberal universalists insist so strongly.

Nonterritorial tribes exist by giving public importance to ethnicity and religion. There are few successful separatist groups that are either secular or multi-ethnic, and apparently none that is both. The Amish are religiously and ethnically distinct, as are Jews and Indian castes. A separatist community that at first is non-ethnic will, if sufficiently successful, take on ethnic characteristics as it becomes a tribe; the Amish are a case in point. Successful separatist groups whose identity is not explicitly based on religion, such as the Gypsies, nonetheless have a distinctive religious outlook. Even the secular utopianism of the early kibbutzniks, who were ethnic Jews, was functionally a religion that Martin Buber saw as "the religion of communal living, a religion where God reveals himself in the society of man".

Nor have successful separatist groups been sexually egalitarian or liberated. The Amish, Orthodox Jews and the castes of India agree in emphasizing strict patriarchal sexual standards. Even the Gypsies, in spite of popular fantasy, are very strict in such matters. Many observers have commented on the retreat by kibbutzim from radical sexual freedom and equality and on the tendency of modern American communes, often against original intentions, toward role-typing by sex. The sexual rationalism often found in literary utopias has not been realized in any enduring separatist group, nor is it likely to be. Sexual freedom and equality undermine personal ties and responsibilities and prevent establishment of a definite and stable family setting in which a distinctive way of life can be maintained and passed on to children. Alleged exceptions to the rule of sexual traditionalism include a few celibate religious communities such as the Shakers and certain double monasteries in early medieval times, which are said to have approached sexual egalitarianism, and several communes in modern times that apparently have succeeded in maintaining systems of group marriage for several decades. Such ventures have never succeeded in reproducing themselves, however, so their manner of dealing with sexual matters must be judged a failure.

After internal cohesion, the most pressing necessity for a successionist group is survival in the face of hostile or disruptive external forces. Like necessity, survival knows no single law. In some settings it is the strong who survive and the bold who prevail, while in others only the meek last long enough to inherit the earth. The Sikhs were able to establish themselves as a new martial race in Mughal India, but in the Roman Empire armed resistance meant death -- the Jews had to become nonmartial and cosmopolitan to survive, and it was a group that idealized nonresistence to evil that eventually triumphed.

Our rulers are more similar to the Romans than to the Mughals in organizational capacity. Guerilla warfare has not been successful in modern times without the support of local populations and existing territorial states, while random violence has been successful only when it could be turned to the advantage of the state, as rioting by blacks has been used in America to justify an ever-greater degree of state control over society in the supposed interest of the rioters. Accordingly, a minor people today whose ways are seriously at odds with the existing order of things and has no geographical homeland is unlikely to survive an armed struggle. The Branch Davidians ended as they did because they seemed to threaten the established order with force. The threat of force was unreal, and they committed no violations of the law that remotely excused the initial raid and subsequent events, but those events would not have come about if the group had no history of violence and had not been receiving large shipments of firearms and explosives.

In contrast, the Amish and other evidently pacific groups have often thrived in the modern West in spite of sporadic harassment or persecution. Their peaceful strategy has no guarantee of success, but it is more likely ultimately to be successful than armed resistance. Some groups will find it very difficult to accept pacifism and maintain their integrity, but those that can find ways of doing so will be at an advantage in the years to come.

The present order will never be able to organize itself well enough for its opposition to successionists to be monolithic. It will be destroyed by destroying itself, so its rulers can view pacific groups as a serious threat only by recognizing the limits of their own capacity to rule. Circumstances will eventually force that recognition on them, but by then the difficulties of governing will give them (like Roman emperors who turned to Christianity or Soviet leaders who relied on Russian patriotism and the black market) little choice but to accept whatever sources of order are available.

Physical destruction is not the only external threat to the survival of a separatist group. The seeming benevolence of public authorities can destroy a tribe no less than state violence. The modern state feels responsible for what it views as the well-being of each of its citizens, and believes its responsibility overrides the beliefs and standards of particular communities. It is not clear that Amish control over their children's education will survive the increasing tendency for public authority to define and enforce rights of children against their parents, or that the Gypsy way of life will survive the determination of modern governments to ensure that everyone has an education, an apartment and a job that meet a particular standard. Anti- discrimination laws, which are explicitly intended to eliminate separatism in all matters the state cares about, are another troubling government initiative. Limiting the intrusions of the social welfare state into their affairs will be a political necessity for separatist groups in the years ahead; the rising expense of government social programs, economic competition between high-tax and low-tax jurisdictions, dissatisfaction with racial integration, and the growing popularity of neo-Darwinist social views should provide them with oddly- assorted allies in that struggle.

More generally, all separatist groups find survival easiest when competing forms of community are weak. They found it difficult to maintain their integrity in Europe during the long period in which nation-states were becoming more unified and local particularities giving way to national community. By the 1500s the Jews had been expelled from the countries on the Atlantic coast, where national states first appeared. After making their way East to more backward lands, and ultimately suffering catastrophic reverses there as well, the majority have now moved to America and Israel, where Jews who reject assimilation thrive as separate societies. The Hutterites followed a similar route. From the 16th to the 18th centuries they were repeatedly driven East, from their place of origin in what is now Austria ultimately to the Ukraine, and are now found only in the New World, to which they moved in the 19th century. The Amish themselves no longer exist as a separate community in Europe even though most of them stayed there, while in America, where there has been less stress on national unity, they have thrived. Conflicts between the Amish and the government were most severe from the First World War through the 1950s, when wars abroad and increasing centralization at home resulted in greater emphasis on national unity than any other time, but have since declined with the decay of American national feeling.

The current situation as to competing forms of community is ambiguous. The New World Order, as a form of association that is growing in pretensions and power, is by nature a threat to separatist groups. Nonetheless, it cannot help but benefit them to the extent it weakens other competing forms of association such as the national state. If (as seems certain) it lacks the capacity to foster social arrangements that inspire loyalty it is likely in the end to promote the triumph of forms of community that can do so, such as tribalism.

The effect on separatism of general conditions of life in the modern West are also ambiguous. Science has undermined myths that gave strength to separatist movements, but myth is recovering its good conscience with the aid of an increasing recognition that science itself can not get along without it. The economic prosperity that makes self- indulgence and defection easier also makes it easier for tribes that retain the devotion of their members to realize their goals. The Amish have displayed a notable ability to pick and choose among the material goods of modernity, accepting those that strengthen and rejecting those that weaken their community, while among Orthodox Jews modern prosperity has made possible an unprecedented level of participation in Torah and Talmud study. Electronic mass media penetrate everywhere and dissolve singleness of spirit, but the Amish and others have demonstrated that such things can be turned off and shut out. Other groups have turned electronics to communal benefit; Orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians have become particularly enthusiastic users of modern communications, and more generally faxes and computer networks have made it far easier for likeminded people to find each other and keep in touch.

A problem for separatist movements in recent times has been that many prospective members are people who like to go their own way and want more autonomy as well as more community. The conflict between community and autonomy destroyed the communes of the '60s and is now putting the future of the kibbutzim in doubt. Community and autonomy can be fully combined in special situations, for example in a small community one could not practically leave in which individual ends can be attained only through cooperation. Primitive hunting and gathering bands, the original setting for human life, no doubt were like that, and such groups seem still to be the setting in which men find it easiest to be happy. The Gypsies tend to live that way because their ways of making a living require loyal cooperation in small groups and their habits and outlook do not fit them for life in non-Gypsy society. However, in the modern world it is hard to create small semi-involuntary groups at will. Until social disintegration reduces us to roving bands living hand-to- mouth we are stuck with choice, and we can create a durable voluntary community only by choosing to submit to some definite authority. Those who hope for a way of life better than that provided by a disintegrating liberal consumer society will have to begin by deciding which authority to recognize.

Separatist communities deal with the problem of authority variously. The Amish emphasize submission to the consensus and customs of the community as part of their fundamental ideal of Gelassenheit, but few outsiders join and it appears that such an approach can not easily spread where it does not exist already. Other communities represent their rules as specific commands of God, whether embodied in a traditional code of law as for strictly Orthodox Jews, in the commands of a leader as for the Branch Davidians, or in some mixture of the two as for the early Christians or the Mormons. The ability to make a persuasive claim for the authority of a particular divine revelation is likely to be important for the success of many separatist groups in the coming years.

Perhaps it is the need to accept authority that has often made intellectualism mix uneasily with successful separatism. Intellectuals have trouble with authority because they want to be able to entertain whatever ideas they please. Socrates would do no better in most separatist societies than he did in the freest of Greek city-states. The Amish and Hutterites do not pursue education beyond elementary school, and the Gypsies are traditionally an illiterate society. The Jews have a tradition of learning, but in the modern world the strictly Orthodox disfavor secular studies that lack a directly practical purpose, and the kibbutzim, in spite of the often avid cultural interests of their members, are wary of intellectuals. From Brooks Farm in 19th century Massachusetts forward, communes established by intellectuals have tended to do notably badly. The scarcity in recent times of intellectuals fully committed to separatism has limited the development of separatist groups. New forms of life can not supplant the current order of things if they are of decisively lower intellectual stature. It is crippling to a movement if people can give themselves to it only by giving up the pursuit of truth and beauty.

Anti-intellectualism need not always be the rule among separatists, however. Among Jews, Early Christians, and monks there have been distinguished intellectuals who were wholly committed to the practices that maintained the distinctness of their groups. Intellectuals respond to the needs of intellect in their own time, and times change. When intellectual life can thrive in the larger society, they find it difficult to be loyal separatists, but when civilization is in decline, and there is no prospect of intellectual advance within the existing order, they do what they have to do to find a setting in which the life of the mind can go on. In recent times that life has been carried on in a liberal society committed to the progressive rejection of particular faiths and loyalties in the hope of attaining absolute universality. That hope is now dissipating, and its disappearance will make a fundamental difference. "Nisi credideritis non intelligetis" ("you will not know until you believe"), said Augustine at a time when secular thought had long stopped progressing. The conditions that require adherence to a particular community of faith as a condition of productive thought appear to be returning. If so, intellectuals will submit to the authority of faith because they will have no choice, and separatist communities will become the tribes that constitute a new civilization.

That new civilization will grow up piecemeal as new communities develop outside the mainstream of the existing order. It is likely to be some time before they incorporate any very substantial part of society, but as they grow they will act as a leaven. Many sympathetizers will hold back from joining because of habit, love of comfort, personal ties or a conception of civic responsibility that favors practical activity within existing institutions over more visionary pursuits. The influence of such sympathizers will nonetheless aid the development of the new civilization by mitigating persecution and enabling the new communities to have an effect on the larger society that goes far beyond the numbers of their members and the resources under their control. Eventually, if the new communities are indeed able to offer a better life than one based on markets and bureaucracies, the larger society will be transformed in their image. As the new communities multiply and the influence of the tribal outlook grows those who fail to join will find that the section of the larger society to which they belong has insensibly transformed itself into another tribe.

What will be the nature of the new society? The era of territorial tribes and nation-states has been favorable to universalizing views. In such an era the history of the community and its standards is one of geographical expansion and internal unification. People deal equally with all whom they meet, because within the national borders all are presumed members of a single tribe. The notion of a common order to which all are subject is natural in such a setting because people rarely come in contact with members of other communities, and when they do the outsider is at a disadvantage as one who is not on his home ground. The standards of the community thus come to seem something to which outsiders would do well to conform, and the outcome is an imperialism that seeks to spread the blessings of the civilization of the community, understood as something of universal import, to those unfortunate enough to lack them. Even successionist groups that grow up within such a civilization are affected by their surroundings and view themselves as bearers of truth for the benefit of all mankind.

The situation alters when tribes become nonterritorial. When we constantly deal with people who define themselves through laws and standards other than our own, the ideal of a concrete and knowable common truth in which all participate recedes. Different truths grow up, a separate one for each tribe, that intersect if at all only in some transcendent realm that is not readily accessible.

What relationships will form among these tribes that are so foreign to each other is hard to predict, but there is little reason to expect more war and less peace than in the past. International affairs has long been dominated by divisions of interest, culture, and belief, and it is not evident why conflict should become more predominant if universalizing notions become less common, or if the number of participants in the international system rises and the size and power of each is correspondingly reduced.

Nor is some sort of universal political order out of the question in a tribal world. The unified national state is an historical exception; a more common system has featured both general authorities for the maintenance of public peace and communal authorities for other concerns of life. The Turkish millet system of self-governing religious and ethnic communities guarded and kept in order by a military class survived on the fringes of the European state system into quite recent times, and something similar may shape the future. Grounds of cooperation that could support overall public order are not lacking. Trade has always been possible among peoples who differ radically in their beliefs and way of life, and the language of science and technology may now be sufficiently abstract and formal for those pursuits to be carried on collectively by peoples that otherwise have very little in common.

It seems likely that modern technology will survive in a tribal world. Even the Amish, selective though they are, accept technology provided by experts outside their community, and strictly Orthodox Jews have been willing and able to develop their own expertise in such things. The degree to which scientific theory will continue to develop is a more difficult question. The philosophical implications of modern science are unsettled; its successes have led many people to take it as a model for all knowledge, but there is no rational compulsion to do so and in time the glamour of success is likely to wear off and allow other considerations to reassert themselves. If so, there is hope that modern natural science will be put in its place as a component of man's understanding of the world but not the final standard for all truth, technology will become a means rather than a master, and it will become possible to integrate tribalism and science.

If our future is one of a diversity of tribes, each with its own rationality, overall planning becomes impossible. No one can dominate the world that is taking shape, a condition that in itself gives grounds for hope. If each tribe is granted only a partial vision of the good, the beautiful, and the true, a world of many tribes with no set hierarchy may be unabiguously better in its multiplicity than a world subject to an imperial order. In any event, the ultimate shape of things is out of our hands; it remains for each of us to work out his salvation in community with others who share his faith and to hope for the best.

More on faith and reason

A blogger offers comments on my talk on Reason and the Future of Conservatism, concluding that the talk opposes faith to reason and comes out on the side of faith.

I don't think that's quite right. Faith and reason are like substance and form: they're different but they can't get on without each other. You won't be able to make use of reason unless you take a lot on faith, while a belief that you can't understand in an orderly way isn't much of a belief.

With that in mind, the current idea of reason, which tries to make everything altogether rigorous, just doesn't work. Among other things, it says that everything is whatever it happens to be--which means whatever it can be observed and measured to be--and that's that.

But that can't be so. Things can also be about other things. If they couldn't we couldn't talk about anything. Our thoughts and words are things too, and they can evidently be about something! Meaning and reference cannot be observed and measured, but knowledge rests on faith that our words and thoughts do somehow connect to reality.

And then there's the old subjectivism issue: things and actions can be objectively good or bad, and that's not observable or measurable. If they couldn't then "irrational," which is an evaluative term, would be an empty term of abuse.

Another problem with current understandings of reason is that they are overly analytical. They look for elementary properties of elementary particles, while human life mostly involves dealing with enduring functional patterns in complex systems. Our knowledge of the latter is more like recognizing essences than noting measurements, and current views of reason can't make much of essences. (Hence "gay marriage" as an issue, which the blogger seems to view as one in which reason and traditional views oppose each other.)

In all this the point is not that reason should be rejected, but that current views of it need to be expanded. As to God, it seems to me we can't make sense of our situation without Him. The world must be reasonable for us to know it rationally, and it must have an intrinsic connection to purpose for some purposes to be intrinsically good and others bad. How do we talk about such features of the world without religious categories?

Same rant, continued ...

What we see around us, and my last entry points to, is a perfect storm of compulsory unreason:

• The identification of reason with a scientism that rejects tradition, faith and the ability to recognize what things are--which involves belief in essential natures--as irrational, and therefore oppressive. As I note in the last entry, the result is that reason can no longer deal with the most basic and obvious features of our situation. When meaning becomes personal choice or assertion, and social thought is no longer able to deal with marriage and family, you know you've got a problem with how people are thinking about things.
• The identification of justice with social justice, and social justice with abolishing the effect of non-rationalized human distinctions and connections such as sex, marriage, family, culture, religion, and historical community. To the contrary: life according to reason depends on the ability to classify situations, things and people in accordance with their relation to a scheme of life worth living. That ability exists through tradition and culture, and tradition and culture discriminate. The point of multicultural justice, then, is making tradition and culture nonfunctional. If they were allowed to do their work then some systems of life would be more respected, and those who were part of them would benefit more. That wouldn't be multicultural.
• The conversion of our educational system, in accordance with the preceding two points, into a system for training people out of the ability to live reasonably. Thought depends on unjust particularities like tradition, culture and discrimination. It comes to unjust conclusions as to what's good and bad. Wouldn't it better if people were deprived of the ability to deal with life in accordance with their own principles but just watched TV, did their jobs, went shopping, and accepted what they're told while believing that they're making up their own minds about everything? If they don't like it--if as a practical matter they reject freedom and equality--why let them get away with it?

Through the looking glass

Commenter Alice, with whom I've had a couple of exchanges at her husband's weblog, carries her battle into the opposition's territory. The pile of arguments is getting unmanageably high, so I'll set up my response as a new entry:

Dear Alice,

I agree that not all ways of viewing the world are equal. Some are more rational than others. Some are more adequate than others. The problem is to combine rationality and adequacy.

The requirements don't really conflict, since an irrational understanding is inadequate and an inadequate understanding is irrational. They are nonetheless in tension. That's the human condition. We didn't make the world and it's very hard for us to comprehend it. The problem with rationalism is that it ignores the tension. It takes principles that are clear, useful and rational, like empirical evidence and logic, and insists on treating them as sufficient when they are not. That has bad results, but the principles are nonetheless OK in themselves.

With that in mind, I don't see the problem with Christianity using arguments a rationalist could use to debunk what it thinks is false, and then saying that rationalism is not enough. It's true it has to be able to respond to rationalist objections itself, but that's an old story. Christianity doesn't "situate itself above rational examination." If it did there would be no such thing as apologetics.

You don't seem to take seriously the existence of apologetics, or of Christianity as a principled structure rather than the agglomeration of everything any Christian has ever said or done. You seem to think that there's an obviously rational and rationally sufficient way to look at things, the liberal humanist way, but for some reason people sometimes arbitrarily announce "there was a virgin birth and therefore fornication is bad and if you don't believe God has three persons you'll roast in hell forever."

No. The way it works is that we are involved in the world and have to understand it to act in it. How we act displays how we understand it. So we try to figure out what kind of world it is, we always have some sort of view of the matter already, various other possibilities come up, we exclude some as inadequate, we are drawn to others as illuminating, we consider assorted lines of thought, we make various demands for coherence, fruitfulness, truth to experience and so on. Eventually something comes in focus as how the world is and that's what we take to be the truth of things. We then act by reference to that truth. That is what human thought and therefore human rationality is actually like. The way we come to conclusions as to the most general issues can't be systematized.

For all that, once adopted a position can normally be articulated, put in order, and defended. Since it presents a full-blown view of the world, the articulation will involve a great many propositions, some of which will make no more sense from outside than quantum mechanics would make to someone who knows only common-sense physics or American constitutional law would make to Assurbanipal. For that reason, snarky remarks about Schroedinger's cat or the incorporation doctrine do not constitute a refutation of those systems. A bit more discussion is needed.

Moving along to particular comments: I don't suggest that "there is no qualitative difference between the claims made by religion and those made by [secularist] government." I compare the two with respect to politics and the freedom and rationality of social life, and claim that doing away with religion doesn't help and in fact hurts on that score. If you do away with religion you still need something that serves the same political function because you have to be able to make sense of things collectively and in particular justify coercion and sacrifice in the interests of an overall scheme of life. The result will be a secular political quasi-religion.

I agree that such quasi-religions have their own specific features. The big difference is that they are unusually stupid because of their grossly insufficient understanding of human life. In particular, they have no way to make sense of interior experience, which you will agree is of fundamental importance. Since they have no way to make sense of it, and since it inevitably connects to all aspects of human society because man is social, they deal with it in an incredibly ham-handed way, for example by treating maximum equal preference satisfaction as the highest human good. In the absence of any standard beyond that, and with the aid of the rationalist need to bring everything in line with a few clear simple principles, the result is that the things people actually care about and live by--which touch on interior experience--get crushed.

You don't say which of my statements about Medieval Christendom is inaccurate. You do say some things I agree with. I agree that the Church was the single most influential institution at the time. I also agree that like all governing institutions everywhere and always it was often corrupt.

I deny that it was characteristically manipulative. If it were simply or mostly a system of manipulation there would have been no saints. Anselm, Aquinas, Bernard, Bonaventura, Catherine, Clare (go through the alphabet) weren't stupid, irrational, uninformed, or lacking in other options. Nonetheless, they thought the best thing they possibly could do in life was give themselves wholly to the Church. You can't manipulate that degree of devotion into existence. Ditto for chant, Romanesque architecture, the cathedrals of Europe, etc.

Rationalist and individualist skepticism about concepts like "the public good," together with an inability to deal with inner experience, mean that the liberal state can't offer good motives for obedience and necessarily comes to rely on manipulative rhetoric. I'm told that there are theoreticians today who treat manipulative rhetoric as the universal basis of public life. Perhaps some such view has crept into the way people understand other times and places, when a richer and more adequate understanding of human life had some influence so that the concept of a non-manipulative public order could affect how people acted.

I'm not sure why it's hideous to treat marital sexual relations as morally serious, so that some attitudes toward them are wrong. I suppose a liberal individualist who considered public standards regarding human relations inherently manipulative, because human relations involve nondiscussable issues of inner experience, might be outraged by public assertion of a definite standard on such an issue. That's just speculation on my part though.

Be that as it may, forcible repression of privately-held heresy seems to be your biggest objection to Medieval Christendom. If it matters, I don't think they should have done that either. Similarly, I am confident that you reject execution on suspicion of disaffection and many other things liberal French revolutionaries and various progressive secularists have done over the past 200+ years.

It would be hard to find a civilization in which there has been no official oppression. The question is whether the religion or quasi-religion at the base of the civilization systematically leads to it. Here I think the objection against Catholicism is that it concerns itself with the spiritual well-being of each of us, and that leads to a perpetual temptation to use aggressive methods to investigate and promote our souls' good.

On the other hand, modern scientism concerns itself with mental health, so the same temptation seems present. Soviet psychiatry shows what can happen. And contemporary liberalism very much concerns itself with human relations and therefore attitudes toward others--racism, sexism, homophobia and all the rest of it. Officially-mandated sensitivity training uses proactive inquisitorial methods to flush out bad thoughts in that regard. So I don't see that there's such a difference in principle. If anything, Christianity has the advantage: it has a built-in fundamental reason for considering voluntary adhesion essential, which the medical and community relations outlooks do not.

Ferocity of procedure and punishment seems irrelevant to the issue. On those points the Church was simply following the best legal system around, secular Roman law. Burning was the late Roman punishment for treason, and heresy seemed a kind of treason. Torture was just the way the Romans investigated the truth of a matter in dispute. I'd assume that if despite Dignitatis Humanae the Church once again fell prey to the temptation to use overly-imaginative methods of persuasion they'd also follow what the best authorities were doing in secular matters. So instead of diversity coordinators we'd have orthodoxy coordinators telling us what to think about everything.

Zen and the art of antiliberalism

Liberalism can be understood as a view that evolved and triumphed in a contentious political environment through a sort of philosophical jiu-jitsu. It wins all arguments by not arguing but rather using its opponents' own force against them. Liberalism claims it has no points of its own to make, it accepts all your points just as they are, and all it wants is to be able to do so, which requires you to agree to the general principle that all points everyone makes get accepted just as they are. Thereafter, of course, it turns out that for all points to be accepted equally everything has to be run by experts who claim to be neutral facilitators but nonetheless end up deciding everything important -- in other words, by intrusive liberals. By then it's too late. You've already in effect agreed than none of your points can have practical consequences, because that would deny equality to other inconsistent points and oppress their proponents.

Liberals, naturally, believe in their own strategy. It's worked wonderfully well for them, so why not? One consequence of that is that it's generally impossible for them to believe that fundamental principled objections to their views are possible. If you disagree with them and they're genteel they'll say you don't understand John Rawls or whatever. If they're not genteel they'll just say you're ignorant, malicious or psychologically disordered. After all, what kind of person would complain when everything he says gets accepted to the extent possible? Nonetheless, liberals do in fact have a comprehensive vision of what human relations should be like, together with the will to back their vision by force and insist it be followed in all aspects of human life. To say they're not pushing views of their own is patently absurd.

What's needed is something to break the spell that makes the absurd seem real. No doubt the best counter to liberal jiu-jitsu would be a collection of illiberal koans to break up frozen schemes of thought and bring one face to face with reality. I'm not the master who can put something like that together. Here's the best I can do: a collection of pointed questions designed to dramatize the gap between what liberalism claims to be and what of necessity it is. Comments, additional questions, and other ideas are welcome.

1. Government is needed when discussion and voluntary arrangements don't work. So how can liberalism claim it's based on discussion and voluntary arrangements when it's a system of government?
2. If liberalism is based on the deliberate consent of the people how come it tries to put as much as possible beyond popular influence, as shown by constitutional law and "international human rights"?
3. Liberalism says it doesn't force values on people. Why isn't telling people they have to treat all values as equally valuable, but suppress values that claim to be better than other values, forcing values on people?
4. What's the difference between saying everyone has to treat other beliefs about God, morality and whatever as equally worthy, and saying everyone has to treat his own beliefs about God, morality and whatever as personal tastes and so not beliefs about those things at all?
5. How can liberalism be tolerant when it's always insisting on reforming things? If someone is tolerant doesn't he leave things alone? Why all the rules, bureaucracies and re-education programs?
6. How can "diversity" (recognizing and respecting real differences) be the same as "inclusiveness" (making things comprehensively the same for everybody)?
7. Liberalism claims to free the human spirit and allow 100 flowers to bloom and flourish. If so, how come everything is becoming the same everywhere? Why do all educational and cultural institutions in advanced liberal societies adhere to the same orthodoxy? Where are the great monuments of the human spirit advanced liberal society has produced?
8. Liberalism says the restrictions it imposes are OK because they only apply to public life, and you're still entirely free in your private life. What can "private life" possibly mean when reform of attitudes and practices regarding sex and gender, and the re-education of children, are basic to the contemporary liberal project?
9. To summarize: isn't it obvious liberalism is very different from what's advertised?

Isn't something odd about this picture?

During the Middle Ages Europe was loosely organized politically -- there was no conception of state sovereignty -- and it recognized a universal Church that in principle was superior to political authorities and in practice could sometimes influence and so limit them. In early modern times Europe moved from that state of affairs to one in which the state was supreme. Each state had its own church, a Protestant church with the prince as governor or a branch of the Catholic church the prince could dominate under the terms of a concordat.

A lot of blood was shed during the transition in wars among states and through state enforcement of the prince's choices in religion. Academics and experts dependent on the state blame the bloodshed on religion. They call the Thirty Years War, which pitted Catholic France and various Protestant powers against Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, and which ended with a decisive proclamation of the principle of state sovereignty, a war of religion. The consensus of certified authority today is that the history of such conflicts proves that religion must be driven completely out of public life, and the state or more likely some transnational governmental arrangement made absolute as the ultimate social authority. Liberalism must be the supreme political principle. Otherwise there will be unending violence.

For some reason it's not thought relevant that by their nature all states and transnational authorities coerce and kill. Since they need a reason for doing so, they are based of necessity on particular beliefs about man and the world that are thought sufficient to justify coercion and bloodshed. Not everyone shares such beliefs any more than everyone shares religious beliefs. State sovereignty means that each state has to choose and define such beliefs for itself rather than accepting the traditional beliefs of its people and civilization. World government would require the decision to be made for the world as a whole.

From the French Revolution onward the beliefs chosen by the state, in their secular form, have been enforced by persecutions and tyrannies far bloodier and more thoroughgoing than any blamed on religion. In Europe today, where laws on the whole are extraordinarily mild, men are prosecuted in the name of tolerance for what amounts to blasphemy or heresy -- for denying the moral principles of the current public order or the historicity and significance of its founding events. Here in America the Supreme Court's about to rule on whether it's legal to pay public honor to the Ten Commandments. The view against is considered enlightened.

The question nonetheless remains: why is Martin Luther King so much better than the Ten Commandments? A political society needs to honor something as a point of public reference. What's so bad about the things the people are actually attached to and the country and the civilization of which it is part have actually been built upon? Why do freedom, justice, equality and public peace require such things to be taken from us and something else forced on us instead?

Were the Wars of Religion really that?

The claim that the history of Europe from 1517 to 1648 shows that mixing politics and religion leads to endless violence, so that peace requires the secular state, always seemed odd to me. After all, states kill by nature, and they can be defended only if someone is willing to put his life on the line. It follows that any state whatever is based on some principle thought worth killing and dying for. Political principles have to do with the use of force to achieve practical objectives, while religious principles relate more essentially to other things. The latter put all practical goals in a larger perspective and so tend to make them seem less absolute. So it seems that the usual effect of excluding all religious principle from public life, leaving only warring political principles, would be to make political conflicts more absolute and therefore bloody. The history of the last century seems to bear that out.

Here's an interesting account of the "Wars of Religion" and the rise of the modern state that goes into some of the historical issues. The basic claim is that the "Wars of Religion," which liberals claim led to the modern state as an escape from religious violence, were in fact the Wars of the Rise of the Modern State, which likes and makes use of religious conflict because such conflict advances its project of doing away with independent religious authority and making itself absolute. I think the argument needs clarification, but the piece touches on a lot of material and what's there is very useful already.

The Fall of France, ch. xxxvii

In France, criticism of a private fund-raising effort now seems to constitute a violation of the separation of Church and state: Catholic Clergy Attack French Telethon Over Stem Cell Aid.

The country’s Muscular Dystrophy Association runs an annual telethon to raise money for medical research, part of which is spent on research on embryonic stem cells. Some clerics said the telethon shouldn't be supported for that reason. It seems that the most extreme statement was made by a member of the commission for bioethics and human life in one diocese, who posted a statement on the diocesan web site that said “It is no longer possible to participate in the telethon ... Christians cannot cooperate with evil.” The statement has been removed, and the consensus among bishops is that the effort should still be supported,

The result? "For the secular French state, the attack by the country’s Roman Catholic hierarchy comes close to a declaration of war.... the separation of church and state is an unshakable pillar of the French Republic, and these attacks have been met with sharp resistance. Government officials and the leaders of the French medical establishment have made clear that the church has no business interfering in matters of state, especially when they involve a practice that is legal.... the current verbal assault by church leaders is exceptional in republican France. An analysis on Thursday in Le Monde called it 'a polemic without precedent.'"

So what's going on? Why is reluctance to support a voluntary charitable effort interference in matters of state? One possibility is that the article is simply incompetent, and the real story is quite different. The journalist, Elaine Sciolino, writes for the New York Times, so she's not likely to be intelligent about anything involving religion, and she's both American and female, so she may be unable to think about France as an actual functioning country rather than a fashion statement and symbol of something-or-other. In general, though, it's likely there's something to the story. It appears that

• Public life in the EU and particularly in France is based on ideals of social justice and solidarity.
• Social justice and solidarity mean that government is responsible for all aspects of human life that matter. It follows that it must decide everything, so that "separation of church and state" can only mean the abolition of religion in all settings that make a difference to anyone.
• The French bishops, on the whole, have accepted that situation. On the whole they have contented themselves with modernizing the Mass, praising social justice and solidarity, and otherwise doing what their social betters want them to do.
• They are nonetheless bishops, and at some point in the devolution of liberal modernity that will require them to act in ways now officially understood as grossly antisocial. Since the point is obvious, liberal moderns are extremely sensitive on the issue and quick to stomp on any signs of independence.

The laws of the city

(An outline of a talk given at Montfort Academy, Katonah, New York, on April 2, 2005)

WHAT ARE THE FEATURES THAT MAKE A CITY?

Closeness and permanence.

Complexity.

Common background and future.

Public life.

Complete society.

Aristotle: man is a zoon politikon.

WHAT IS LAW?

How are things set up from the standpoint of what people owe each other and what they can expect from each other? When are those things enforceable? How do you enforce them?

Thomas Aquinas: "Law is an ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by him who has care of the community."

Laws are rules governing a city. They correspond to the features that make a city. Close and permanent relationships that extend to the whole of life means law has to be firm, reliable, stable, knowable, comprehensive, flexible, just.

Those things can conflict. "Firm" and "flexible" and "just" don't always go together.

JUSTICE IS IMPORTANT

Order can't just be based on force. Things have to be settled and people have to accept the way they're settled as right. If they think the law's right and makes sense then they'll be willing to obey it and they'll know how to obey it.

Augustine: "Take away justice, and what are governments but great confederacies of robbers?" Confederacies of robbers don't last. Thieves fall out.

Sir Francis Bacon: "If we do not maintain Justice, Justice will not maintain us."

So a legal system should be a system of justice. That's what's right, and it's also necessary for the system to work. The point of a system of justice is to establish justice, to determine what it is and to see that it's applied. It's a human thing, though, so the justice will be limited.

WHAT IS JUSTICE?

Giving each his own.

What is "his own"? How do you decide?

Consensus and custom. Precedent. Generally accepted principles.

Contract.

Positive law. What the legislature says. Majority rule.

But what should guide the legislature? And why should anybody pay attention?

What works best. But what does "best" mean? Assassinating troublemakers?

Sense of justice. But is that just a feeling?

Natural law. It seems that law has to refer to some standard beyond itself and beyond what we believe and want. Benjamin Disraeli: "Justice is truth in action." But how do you find truth?

We find natural law by experience and reason. Observing things, thinking about them, discussing them, seeing how they work out. Tradition and common consent, both local and of all peoples.

What are some examples of natural law? Self-defense. Perform contracts. Reap what you sow. Marriage and basic family obligations.

How about revelation, as in Jewish law, which is based on the law of Moses? Christianity distinguishes the things of Caesar from those of God., and Christian morality is basically a matter of natural law Justice is a natural virtue. Our laws reflect our own habits and reason.

Catechism: "Society ensures social justice when it provides the conditions that allow associations or individuals to obtain what is their due, according to their nature and their vocation. Social justice is linked to the common good and the exercise of authority."

The Catechism describes the common good as "the sum total of the conditions of social life which allow people, either as groups or individuals, to reach their own perfection more fully and more easily."

So the idea seems to be that social justice prevails when government acts and legislates in accordance with what people are and what they should be able to do, so we can all reach our perfection.

Note: a lot of people disagree. They say the purpose of law is to keep people from infringing each other's rights and not to promote the common good. Your idea of human nature and the common good may be oppressive to me. But the law always presents some understanding of those things.

HOW IS JUSTICE MADE A SYSTEM?

Substantive rules.

Define source of what counts as justice:

Common law (custom and precedent)

Legislation

Super legislation (constitutions, treaties)

Natural law, principles of justice. Most used as ideals or interpretive principles.

Procedural rules. Step back from conflict and try to be fair and just. Also develop facts and rules in an orderly way.

Very important. What are the facts? What principles apply?

Court, judge, notice, hearing, confrontation, counsel, burden of proof, appeal.

Arguments over both facts and law.

Terri Schaivo case.

LIMITS OF LAW

Law and a system of justice are necessary. But are there limits?

Distinction of Christ and Caesar suggests that there are. Augustine: City of God and City of Man. Can't completely separate law, justice and religion but they aren't the same. Contrast Islam.

It's a general Catholic principle that sometimes you permit bad things because worse things will happen if you try to do away with them.

Thomas Aquinas says that the law should not require more of a people than they are able to do, as they will lose respect for the law.

Also, there can be evil laws. It's difficult to know what to do about them. Should we treat them as laws at all? On the whole, we should obey the laws even when they don't make a lot of sense because lawfulness is necessary for living together. Saint Paul's "be subject" to Nero. Still, law must at least not require us to do something against morality. A law that required killing innocent people wouldn't be binding and wouldn't really be law.

Order and justice in the end have to do with human beings and not just laws and institutions. People's acts have an effect and it's injustice to deprive them of it. It doesn't work -- communism, socialism, even welfare state.

The life and order of the city is a matter of participation and not just compulsion. So it's not enough to talk about rights, you also have to talk about responsibilities, duties and virtues. Social justice is an ideal rather than something that's normally part of the system of justice. Working toward it is a political and moral matter. It takes discussion and participation to understand and bring about.

Kant didn't believe that: "The problem of the institution of a State, however hard it may appear, would not be insoluble even for a race of devils, assuming only that they have intelligence." Not so. The law can't be a universal machine that does everything.

Justice as a virtue means steady will to give others their due. Legal justice won't work without that. Pius XI in the 1937 encyclical, Divini Redemptoris: "It is of the very essence of social justice to demand from each individual all that is necessary for the common good."

To some extent grand principles become part of US constitutional law and international human rights law enforced directly by courts. That hasn't necessarily been successful. Abortion cases. When courts take on general issues of social justice they view them from their own perspective. Courts are part of the government and they function by giving orders.

A couple of sayings on the limits of the law:

Benjamin Disraeli: "When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken. "

Grant Gilmore: "The better the society, the less law there will be. In Heaven there will be no law, and the lion will lie down with the lamb . . . . In Hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed."

LAWSUIT, n.: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out as a sausage.

ALTERNATIVES TO SYSTEM OF JUSTICE

A system of justice is good, but you can't expect too much of it. Lots of injustice can't be rectified without worse injustice. The system itself causes injustices. You also need other things, for example justice as a virtue among the people.

Is our legal system too big?

A million lawyers. Over 30,000 state court judges. About a thousand federal judges. Libraries full of laws, regulations, court opinions, administrative rulings, treatises and whatnot. Maybe 20 million court cases a year.

Too much reliance on justice as a system of compulsion and too little on justice as a virtue.

Not everything should be a federal case. People take care of stuff on their own. Informal systems and social pressures. Arbitration.

Plato's Laws -- death penalty for lawyers.

Confucian view.

Subsidiarity. Pius XI: "Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do."

Freedom and making free

When "freedom" means fluid standards and relationships, it puts everything up for grabs. When everything is up for grabs the grabby get everything. Tastes differ, but that doesn't seem so great to me.

For some reason grabbiness is thought a specifically capitalistic vice. In fact, the point of private property is that it limits grabbiness by requiring consent to attempted grabs by existing property owners. If you don't think that's so, think about eminent domain abuse in this country and kleptocracy abroad.

In fact, there are lots of ways to be grabby. In addition to greed in the marketplace, there is greed among those with ties to the government, and manipulation, abuse and suspicion in other aspects of life. In financial matters it's at least possible to apply clear numerical standards, which limit what people can get away with. Elsewhere, there's more room for bullying and sheer assertion. Things are likely at their worst in intimate relationships and in bureaucracies concerned with lofty topics like knowledge and religion, because of the difficulty of outside scrutiny, the complexity of the considerations that might be relevant, and the increasing separation of both from the life of community and tradition. That should be no surprise: corruptio optimi pessima is an old story.

Hence the value of "traditional values." Community and tradition are considered oppressive, especially by the grabby, because they limit new ventures and require conduct to be brought in line with the standards people have come to expect over the years. In fact, such standards and limitations are the most effective protection for ordinary people against abuse. People notice that freeing of religion from traditional strictures has led to religious sociopaths--that was certainly my experience during my unfortunate connection to the Episcopal Church--and that sexual freedom has turned out to mean that every woman is constantly in play and every man called to be a player. That's no doubt freedom, especially for some people, but is it so wonderful?

What rights for the Right?

It's a mistake for conservatives to stake their case on the appeal to freedom and equality as ultimate principles that is the stuff of political rhetoric today. The appeal is self-defeating, both for conservatives and for anyone intelligently attached to those goals. Their logic is innately unlimited, and the attempt to put them into effect ever more comprehensively leads first to left-wing radicalism and then to tyranny and degradation.

Still, we have to live in the world around us to some extent and try to make our pitch in a way that can be understood. So if people want to talk about rights traditionalist conservatives should, among other things, put forward their own ideas on the subject. It seems to me that one very important right they should push is the right to live with integrity in accordance with views they share with others, at least if those views have longstanding local backing and so aren't eccentric, antisocial or aggressive and are plainly capable of ordering a productive and satisfying way of life. Such a right is obviously basic to any political order that can legitimately claim to be free or popular. It would include:

• The right to resist reprogramming. If government, employer or school want to turn you or your children into a different kind of person for a different kind of society than has existed in the past, in which settled ways of living count for nothing, the effort is tyrannical and everyone has the right and duty to resist it.
• The right to withhold support from a cause, especially one at odds with longstanding habits and understandings. That's been recognized to some degree, in connection with school activities fees and right-to-work laws, but needs to be greatly expanded. Why should a printer, for example, be required to print invitations for a "gay wedding"?
• The right to abstain from and refuse to support or countenance behavior considered outrageous for enduring and widely-accepted reasons. Why should Catholic doctors, hospitals and employers be required to provide or pay for abortions, euthenasia, birth control or what not? Why should a Catholic high school be forced to allow homosexual couples at its prom?
• The right to choose your associates, particularly on grounds that have long been thought relevant to the choice. That right is obviously inconsistent with "equal opportunity" laws. It's mostly been asserted in connection with private clubs but has generally lost because some sort of public connection can always be made out, and in any public setting inclusiveness is thought to have infinite importance. Forthright assertion of the right might at least call into question the infinitely good and wholly drawback-free quality of inclusiveness -- an extremely important goal, since what "inclusiveness" means is the forcible abolition of the distinctions on which non-market and non-bureaucratic institutions operate.
• The right, when participating in public life, to make the arguments and act (within the law) on the principles that seem right to you based on your best understanding of how the world really is. There can be no obligation, in a social order claiming to be based on popular participation and free discussion, for telling those whose participation has long been fundamental to the polity that in public life they may no longer make arguments or act on motives that a hedonist and materialist might not share.

The right can be viewed as an extremely moderate and restricted form of J. S. Mills' principle that experiments in living should be allowed: if the experiment has been going on for a very long time, it doesn't impose on others or require the use of force against them, and it's enabled whole societies to live in a way they have enduringly found good, then it's not the job of a government claiming to be liberal to eradicate it. What liberal could, in good faith, object to that?

Taking liberties with freedom

In the absence of an explicit common understanding of what a good life is, and in the face of a government that has taken on responsibility for the whole of human life, from the rearing of children to the relations between the sexes to the validity of communal loyalties, the people responsible for persuading us that everything makes sense have decided to base public authority on freedom, choice, individual autonomy and the like. That's what liberal political philosophy is all about. We should do what we're told because it's all in the service of a system that maximizes freedom.

A problem with that line of argument is that people don't agree on the content of freedom any more than they agree on the content of the good life. In fact, the two issues are largely the same. Freedom might mean

• Freedom to do whatever you happen to feel like doing. So if you feel like watching TV all day, then freedom means access to a TV, the availability of a lot of channels, and the absence of other demands on your time.
• Freedom to do what you really want to do. If you often feel like watching TV, but don't like the habit, then freedom means the ability to turn the TV off so you can spend your time doing something you're happier with overall.
• Freedom to realize your true good.

The first idea of freedom seems perfectly straightforward, and it's what people generally think freedom means. The problem, though, is that on reflection the second makes even more sense to most people. If you're addicted to something then freedom from the addiction seems better and more free than freedom to follow the addiction. The freedom of a drunk to drink himself to death doesn't seem like anything to base a social order on.

The third does not at first sound like freedom to most of us. Nonetheless, I think it's closest to what people end up meaning by freedom if they really want to make it the basis of social life. After all, if following actual desires isn't really freedom when they get in the way of desires that would make us happier--which seems to be the lesson of the "addiction" example--then why can't the superior desires, the ones that would help us be all that we can be or whatever, have to do with things we don't presently see the value of? Isn't education supposed to be liberating? False consciousness oppressive? Psychological manipulation a bad thing? Consciousness-raising correspondingly good? And shouldn't the government and social order generally support education, enlightenment, and liberation?

People believe that in the long run freedom has to do with their version of the good life. Otherwise they wouldn't care so much about it. If other people aren't living the good life, or at least aspiring to it, it's hard for most people who aren't cynics to avoid concluding that they've been misled, miseducated, deprived, defrauded, or manipulated, so that their freedom has been violated. We're oppressed by whatever keeps us from thriving, and "thriving" means realizing our true good. That being so, it's probably more illuminating to discuss political, social and moral questions with reference to conceptions of the good life rather than conceptions of freedom. It hides fewer issues. For all I know that's why they're discussed by reference to freedom: it's easier to keep the lid on the jar if the nature of the discussion means that issues won't be raised.

Life, law and the world

While I was preparing to give a talk about law, I did a little reading on the philosophy of law. One thing that struck me was what might be called the "external" point of view taken in current thought on the subject.

Here's a quote from Blackstone:

This law of nature, being co-eval with mankind and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force, and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original.

Blackstone here is looking at the law not as an outsider but but from within, as a participant in a world the order of which depended on law. In other words, he is looking at the law as a human being. For him, law was a particular type of obligation, one that's enforced by a political society and derives at least some of its binding quality from that feature. "What is the law" meant something like "what enforceable norms bind us as members of a particular political society." As such, the law was part of the general system of binding norms, and there was no place outside that system from which it could be viewed and analyzed. That's what it meant to say it was based on the law of God.

Today the philosopher doesn't look at law from a standpoint within the human world. He studies it the way a natural scientist might study a pattern of behavior displayed by some species of insect. Hence legal positivism. That way of approaching the matter is of course consistent with the liberal and modernist view of man as basically an ego with no essential qualities or connections to anything outside itself.

I also note in the linked article the bizarre treatment of what the article refers to as "legal moralism," defined as

the view that the law can legitimately be used to prohibit behaviors that conflict with society's collective moral judgments even when those behaviors do not result in physical or psychological harm to others.

The thought seems to be that a society's "collective moral judgments" have nothing to do with the society's functioning. Any relevance they might have can be reduced to possible direct physical or psychological harm to others resulting from violating them. The article observes that some people have claimed (apparently without sufficient ground) that they might be necessary for the society's existence, but apart from that there seems to be no basis for treating such things as relevant to the law.

Does the author of the piece think that collective moral judgments are simply odd psychological phenomena? How does he suppose they arise and get credit? Why does he think people find them so important? Is everybody except the author and his friends simply irrational? Sometimes I think that professionalized thought is necessarily professionalized ignorance. In order to be defined and organized clearly enough for professional standards to apply so much has to be left out that what's left over isn't worth bothering with.

A dialogue continues

My liberal lawyer correspondent continues the discussion (previous exchanges here, here and here). Here's an edited version of the most recent part of the exchange:

Liberal Lawyer: I strongly believe that the comprehensive liberals about which Hitchcock complains are pursuing things that fundamentally conflict with basic political liberalism as proposed by John Stuart Mill: The state is to remove itself from declaring certain answers to ultimate questions established.

Jim Kalb: I just don't see how a comprehensive system that orders all social life from the cradle to the grave gets by without having a view about what life, man and the world are about. The state educates children, spends much of the national income, establishes things like "family policy," makes decisions that extend to matters of life and death, and of necessity, simply because it is a state, claims the right to demand loyalty and the most serious sacrifices from its citizens. So I don't see how Mill's view makes sense. His kind of liberalism is dead except rhetorically. It's never going to be an operational system of government.

LL: Hitchcock's article is useful in describing a real tension among liberal principles. If the Amish have decided that limiting their children's education is necessary for their way of life, I would favor the Amish. I think the principle of limiting state power over its citizens to what is necessary to achieve an orderly society that protects citizens' lives and property and their ability to define for themselves who they are (the language from the Casey decision) is more fundamental to liberalism than equality.

JK: The question, as Hitchcock suggests, is whether the Amish decision points toward the future or whether it's a hangover from the past. The decision is obviously inconsistent with any sort of children's rights perspective. It takes the authority of the family as a sort of natural given that precedes the state. From a liberal standpoint it reduces the child's ability to make up his own view of the universe. How can such an attitude toward family authority survive the current tendency (demonstrated by the Massachusetts "gay marriage" decision) to reduce the family to a legal arrangement defined by the state in accordance with the state's standards and purposes?

LL: You say that there are two separate issues: the assumptions about human nature, the world, the good etc, upon which a state operates, and what the state does to those who don't share those assumptions. I believe these are not wholly separate. For example, if you have a liberal state that operates on the assumption that human beings are fallible and have not been able to devise answers to ultimate questions the truth of which are so self-evident that no reasonable man could dispute them, and all prior attempts by states to establish certain answers have resulted in tyranny because force, not reason, was the only way for these states to keep their answers established, then it follows that it must tolerate those who disagree. It is legally possible for the Catholic Church to become established in the USA and then to enact Catholic social teachings into secular law. All you need are enough like-minded citizens sufficient to expend the political force to amend our constitution or to call a constitutional convention to write a new one and it is done.

JK: A liberal state is not based on comprehensive skepticism. No state ever is. The claim that liberal states are based on reason expresses the view that they are based on answers to the ultimate questions of politics that are so self-evident that no reasonable man could dispute them. "We hold these truths to be self-evident" etc.

You're right though that the questions of what the world is like in general and the role of government aren't wholly separable. If it's your view that man and the world have no given nature preceeding social convention, so that it's human decision or social attitudes or whatever that defines the moral nature of things, then it's not clear where any limits on government come from. Government could remake human nature -- abolish the sexes, for example. In fact, that's one of the projects of contemporary liberal government. But if government redefine human nature it can do anything. It could change the nature of right and wrong.

Any state can change its form and basic principles. All that's needed is to persuade enough influential people it would be a good idea. Liberalism has a tendency to make that more and more difficult because of its attachment to increasingly-demanding universal principles that are understood to trump any possible political decision. The development of international "human rights" standards, which to the extent effective trump local constitutional arrangements, are an example.

LL: Would a Catholic-controlled state be so accomodating? History says no. It took decades of bloody warfare for Protestants to get the ability to worship freely. What was common to Catholic and Protestant states was their support of illiberal states that didn't give individuals the right to follow their conscience.

JK: The officially Godless state, the state that in principle recognizes no moral authority that transcends human purposes, is a rather new invention. So far their record overall has been far worse than that of officially religious states. In America we've had one only since the early '60s and it takes a long time in a prosperous and comfortable society to realize the logical implications of basic decisions so we don't have a lot of historical experience on the point.

As to Catholicism: universities, the modern sciences, representative government with distributed powers, and charters of rights are all inventions of Catholic Christendom. The basic point is that the legitimate goals of liberalism, like limited government, relative autonomy of individuals and social institutions etc., require a general understanding of man and the world so they can be understood, interpreted and applied. I can see how they fit into the Catholic Christian understanding of things within which as a historical matter they developed. After all, that understanding of things has a basis for saying that no human authority is absolute and an institutional basis for opposing some independent but non-political higher authority to the power of the state. I can't see how they can survive or even make sense in the absence of any authoritative general understanding of man and the world, which is the setting you seem to associate with liberalism.

LL: If the state should operate on the assumption that men are unable to devise answers to ultimate questions on their own because they are sinful by nature but God has given these answers to the one true church which alone has THE right answers, and therefore the state should do all in its power to protect and support that true church and enforce its social doctrines as the law of the land, then those who disagree with this assumption aren't just wrong but sinful, Satanic even, for they are putting the salvation of mens's souls at risk and therefore they must be suppressed.

JK: You seem to be saying that non-liberal assumptions as to government lead to absolutely horrible things. You are also saying that if someone believes that the wrong principles lead to absolutely horrible things then he becomes a persecutor. It's not clear to me how those two views fit together.

Look, people always base what they do, including running governments, on some understanding of what's good and bad. Since government involves telling people they can't do things they want to do and imposing whatever sanctions are needed to make the command good, and it also involves the possibility of war and so the need for loyalty that extends to matters of life and death, government always tends to be intolerant on matters of basic principle. You claim that liberal governments are exempt from that rule. I don't see it. In most liberal countries other than the US you can get sent to jail for saying illiberal things having no immediate connection with action. That doesn't bother human rights organizations. It seems to me the US situation is a hangover from an earlier stage of liberalism that is unlikely to last. After all, that earlier stage involved among other things an informal establishment of religion that made it possible to view government and human society generally as subordinate to a definite higher authority. It also seems to me that if government overreaching worries you then what you should be looking for, and support if found, is a general understanding of things that relativizes government authority by opposing to it a higher authority that is not political but does have definite institutional embodiment. Something like Catholicism in fact.

All states answer ultimate questions in some way. They have to, because they deal with ultimate situations like birth, marriage, life, sickness and death in a practical way. It seems to me that the basic distinction the current situation presents is between the view that the answers to such questions are set in the nature of things and the view that they are constructed by human choice. The pre-60s American regime was based on the former view, our current regime on the latter. It seems to me that the current regime better effectuates the most basic liberal principle, removal of obstacles to human will, but it has a very different and much worse relation to the possibility of tyranny. That's why I look at the current regime as a sort of self-refutation of that basic principle.

Is liberalism totalitarian?

My Liberal Lawyer correspondent has provoked me to the following reflections on the relationship between liberalism and totalitarianism:

How you use political words depends on the features of political life you think deserve to be played up. People view these things differently so maybe the best I can do is explain what I have in mind and see where we agree and where we differ.

We can probably agree that totalitarianism has two aspects, substantive and procedural:

1. It involves a doctrine of man, society and the world that claims to be complete, final and plainly correct. People who reject the doctrine are thought stupid, evil or crazy, and have nothing worthwhile to say. It is able to make that claim persuasive to its followers -- totalitarianism couldn't exist if it didn't have lots of followers -- because the doctrine radically simplifies human existence and makes some one thing that is capable of clear definition and concrete realization the standard by which all issues are to be judged. That ultimate standard is normally the triumph of someone's will or a bogus claim of special expertise possessed by some small group (e.g., "scientific socialism").
2. That isn't a normal way to look at things. The only pre-modern examples I can think of are from the Warring States period in China. So somehow normal human thought and reactions are disrupted and suppressed. That's likely to involve various devices that keep the doctrine from being effectively questioned and opposed. In the most obvious cases of totalitarianism the mechanism is also obvious -- mass terror. Since you agree that Brave New World was totalitarian though you agree that much less brutal devices are also possible.

To my mind the first is the fundamental point. For me the basic question regarding anything social or political is what kind of surroundings and what kind of life people end up with. As to any one of us the social world always involves lots and lots of compulsion. So I view totalitarianism as basically the imposition on the whole of human life of a simple easily-graspable total explanation of everything that provides a clear enforceable rule for deciding all issues. Its essence isn't mass terror, it's suffocating and inhuman totality. A front-line soldier experiences mass terror but not normally totalitarianism. I read somewhere that in Russia durring WW II men actually felt relief when they arrived at the front because they felt they could breath easier.

But what's needed under the second point? A totalitarian system can't exist unless lots of people buy into it, and any system of government can be peacefully and legally changed if those who hold power agree to the changes. We saw in Russia that a totalitarian system can fall apart without much violence if everyone just stops believing in it. I suppose there could be a situation in which tyranny of the majority becomes totalitarianism of the majority because people voluntarily agree on something I would view as totalitarian. I'd imagine most people in Brave New World would have voted for the established order. Cults might be another example. Can a voluntary community like Jonestown be totalitarian? I don't see why not.

So to my mind what's basic on the second point is some radical distortion in how people form their beliefs and attitudes. A problem of course is that we judge distortions in how people form beliefs and attitudes partly by looking at the ones they actually form. Still, life is difficult and not all problems can be avoided.

All of which is very vague so here's how I apply it:

1. My primary claim is that liberal ideology is totalitarian. It reduces politics to the utter simplicity of human will and equality (Rawls' two standards), and then expands politics to supervise all significant human relations everywhere so they can be brought in line with that standard (international human rights pronouncements and documents are an example). The ultimate standard is thus a combination of the triumph of the will, with each will counting equally, and claims of expertise -- philosophers, judges, bureaucrats, therapists and whatnot are needed to identify what people really want and then go through the technical process of arranging things so all desires get satisfied as much and as equally as possible. Those who don't buy into the ideology are ignorant, stupid or sick -- to be specific, they're bigots. The only relevance their views have to government is that government should do what it can to cure people of such views.
2. My secondary claim is that liberalism arises from distortions in how beliefs and attitudes form. That has a theoretical and a practical aspect. The theoretical aspect is the view that modern natural science is the model for all knowledge and belief, so that knowledge and belief should be (1) determined by trained experts operating by professional standards that leave out qualitative considerations to the extent possible, and (2) oriented toward practical prediction and control. The practical aspect is then the growth of professionalism and the centralization and rationalization of social, cultural and intellectual life.
3. Most of what people see and hear today passes through the mass media which are staffed by professionals conscious of their position and responsibilities who therefore develop professional standards of what goes and what doesn't go. To the extent they want to know what their standards should be, or a concerned citizen wants to go beyond what's available on TV, they consult the experts -- academics and other professional functionaries in the bureaucracy of knowledge. People think that's an enlightened and appropriate way of forming opinions. I say it's a catastrophe. It turns intellectual life and even the formation of popular opinion into a rationalized industrial process that produces products that look perfect but in fact reflect the needs of the process much more than actual human life.
4. A tertiary claim is that the degree of popular self-rule we have in America and the West generally is much less than you suppose. Fundamental decisions are simply not left up to the people. Evidence for that claim would be the contrast between popular views on affirmative action, mass immigration, and abortion on demand (lopsidedly and durably against) and the results the political and legal process gives us. Do you suppose the American regime was radically secularized -- the school prayer decisions were the decisive event -- because the people wanted it that way?
5. I don't say that what we have today in America and the West is a totalitarian system. I say we have a system that has totalitarian aspects and tendencies, and that the governing ideology to which its elites are committed is totalitarian. The fact that people can talk and organize does matter, and it matters a great deal. It doesn't sanitize everything though since we don't in fact have government by the people. Right to lifers can elect -- and have elected -- Republican president after Republican president who fight, more or less, to get their guys on the courts. It's a very long and complex process though with lots of steps, and all elite opinion is totally committed to abortion, so it's very hard to make headway uphill and keep whatever ground you gain. The same is likely to be true of "gay marriage." (Incidentally, how will all this play out as international human rights standards become accepted as authoritative?)
6. The basic problem with liberalism is that it pretends to avoid ultimate questions but it can't help answering them because it's a comprehensive theory of government. Since man is social and modern government has pervasive effects the modern state is necessarily intertwined with the whole of human life. If the authoritative social view on which all law is based is that all ultimate answers are of equal value and each should be treated equally then that in itself is an ultimate answer: it says that each man makes his own good by choosing it, and since each equally makes choices the goods of each man are equally good. That's a complete theory of the good, so it's an ultimate answer like any other ultimate answer.

Liberalism and how to decide

My liberal lawyer correspondent (previous exchanges here and here) has asked how to compare and decide between a liberal and a more traditionalist and Catholic approach to politics and society. Here's an edited version of the exchange:

Liberal Lawyer: Is it possible to come up with an objective standard by which one could compare liberal and traditional Catholic understandings of how a state and a society should be organized?

Jim Kalb: It's hard to find a set standard, but here are some things to ask: Do the views seem true to experience? Do they work on their own terms? Are they practically self-defeating? Are they consistent with what else we know? Do they help us understand things and know what to do about them? Does the life they offer seem worthwhile?

I've written several pieces setting forth what I see as the internal contradictions of liberalism, for example PC and the Crisis of Liberalism and The Tyranny of Liberalism. One problem I see is that if the highest social goals are freedom and equality, with no substantive goods that can come before them and so limit their demands, the government will go to extremes because the goals are too abstract and demanding. For the sake of perfect freedom and equality the government will end up insisting on controlling everything absolutely so it can keep us from oppressing or getting some sort of advantage over each other. It will be a sort of PC socialism. In order to avoid that you have to recognize other goods that come before freedom and equality, but if you do you aren't liberal any more.

Another problem internal to liberalism is that people's goals conflict and no government can resolve the conflicts without taking sides. A liberal government will have to pretend it isn't doing that because its claim of neutrality is its claim to special legitimacy. What it will have to do, for the sake of attempted neutrality, is give the preference to goals that are totally personal and don't involve any participation from other people. Otherwise it's too complicated to treat goals equally and there are too many possibilities for various sorts of oppressive and manipulative behavior. So the people in a liberal society will be trained to be dissolute asocial consumers.

I should add that Alasdair MacIntyre is well-known for his treatment of the question in a sort of trilogy, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. A couple of weeks ago I asked for comments on my own long piece that goes through the internal problems of liberalism, asks how it's possible to do better, and eventually ends up with Catholicism. So the piece is intended to answer the question you ask without begging the question by simply presuming the answer. It's just a draft but I think most of the argument is there.

LL: I think you misunderstand liberalism if you think equality is as much a central goal of liberalism as freedom. Equality, in classical liberalism, is only legal and political, NOT economic. Look at the platforms of mainstream liberal Democrats; there is no call for equality of result, only further attempts to level the field.

JK: You speak of "classical liberalism," but classical liberalism changed into what we have now. For the past 100 years or so liberalism has had a strong egalitarian streak. I think the change was natural. If you take content-free abstractions like freedom and equality as final standards that trump everything else their demands escalate without limit.

I agree that for liberals freedom is primary, but equality is also essential. The goal is equal freedom, and if I have less money and position than you do my freedom isn't equal. As to me, the situation is oppressive. I think Rawls has the liberal view right -- he says that while freedom comes first of all equality is also a fundamental principle of justice, and the government should intervene in favor of equality as much as it can without actually reducing the well-being of those at the bottom. So inequality is allowed only as a grudging concession to minimal efficiency.

Liberals who criticize Rawls on this point, by the way, complain that depending on circumstances his theory might allow very great inequalities. They're uneasy about that. Liberals aren't really happy about the collapse of socialism, or the cutbacks in European welfare states. I speak of various intellectual and academic liberals here, who presumably have the best grip on the implications of the liberal view of things.

I agree that in mainstream politics people talk about equal opportunity more than equal results. As a practical matter though the two are the same. Equality of opportunity can't be directly observed, there's too much that might make opportunities unequal, and it's not nice to say people are less successful because they're lazy, stupid, or vicious. The result is that unequal results are presumed -- pretty much irrebuttably -- to reflect unequal opportunity. "Poor" and "underprivileged" are taken to be synonymous.

Getting rid of artificial barriers like the Jim Crow laws has never been the basic concern in the modern "civil rights" movement. The '64 CRA was interpreted almost immediately to require affirmative action of various sorts. Also, since the '70s talk about "equal opportunity" has mostly been replaced by talk about "diversity," which really does mean "equal results." Equality of results is the way you get a workforce that "looks like America," "reflects the communities in which we do business" and so on. I agree that when the question is raised people say "affirmative action" is temporary. We've had it for more than 30 years, though, and no-one's cutting back on it. Justice O'Connor says another 25 years ought to do the trick. Why take that seriously?

LL: I don't understand your point about liberalism being unable to handle conflicts. On the contrary, liberalism is specially qualified to handle conflicts in that fair, open, processes are in place to ensure that these conflicts are handled peaceably and as reasonably as possible.

JK: A philosophy that claims that neutrality as to values gives it a right to rule that trumps all other rights will naturally claim that it doesn't impose anything, it just establishes fair open processes that facilitate coming to reasonable results that reflect various opinions in a balanced way. It's obvious though that such an approach can only apply to issues that don't matter all that much to people, for example matters of marginal economic advantage. If an issue is really important then the liberal tendency is to handle it prepolitically, for example through constitutional adjudication and now increasingly through international standards of "human rights". What that amounts to is defining basic conflicts out of existence by defining one side of the conflict as illegitimate and politically impermissible. Taking sides in fundamental conflicts and denying you're doing so by defining one side as something that can't legitimately exist is what I call inability to handle conflicts.

I think the liberal tendency to expand the role of "expertise," "professional standards" and the like also shows the dislike and fear of conflict, and the desire to somehow define it out of existence, that you'd expect in a philosophy that exalts neutrality above all. A basic problem with that tendency is that expertise and professional standards can't in fact remain neutral when they tell us what to do about actual issues. They claim to be neutral but aren't because neutrality doesn't say enough to resolve actual problems. The attempt to present them as ways of to avoid facing divisive issues squarely always involves fraud.

LL: Even on social issues, any Supreme Court decision can be overruled by a later Supreme Court. State and federal constitutions can be amended.

JK: An absolute monarch can be overruled by his successor, and various sorts of influences can be brought to bear on him. He's only one man, after all, and needs to get the cooperation of others to do anything. So he's never as absolute as he seems.

More to the point, the stronghold of liberalism is the class of those who claim the right to rule because they claim to possess disinterested expertise of one sort or another that means that their views should trump the views of other people. That is a class like any other class and it has interests just as doctors or automakers or munitions manufacturers have interests. That class includes the top people in law, academia, and journalism and it is overwhelmingly liberal -- which is not surprising, given its interests. Because of the centralization of public discussion in America today and the prestige associated with expertise in mass hi-tech society it's very hard to push through constitutional change if the top people in law, academia, and journalism are outraged by what you're doing. And if you do push the change through it will be difficult to get it to stick because after all laws must be interpreted and it's the members of that same class who do the interpreting. I agree that the fact it's at least theoretically possible to push through constitutional change is a moderating influence compared with the situation is say the old Soviet Union. Still, the possibility shouldn't be overestimated.

LL: Liberalism's strength is its legitimacy. If it works as it should, every side to an issue gets aired freely. Then the people's representatives decide the issue. Since everyone is equal politically and legally and everyone's voice is heard, then everyone can accept an adverse decision. Plus there's always the ability to work on changing minds to review the issue and perhaps get a different result.

JK: You're talking about an idealized version of representative democracy and not about liberalism. The two aren't at all the same. Do you believe that the present role of courts, regulatory bureaucracies and experts of various sorts in American public life is anti-liberal? Do you believe that international human rights law is anti-liberal?

LL: The fact that many Americans act as dissolute consumers is not due to liberalism. People choose to be that way. What would you have the government do? Force people to be "better"?

JK: It seems to me that it matters what ideas of good and evil a social order is based on. If that weren't so why would the question of a religious establishment be considered so important? If it doesn't much matter that liberalism is the established view why would it matter to you if the government recognized Catholicism as true?

What people become depends on what they choose, but they choose within a setting and by reference to what is publicly considered good, bad, honorable, disgraceful, and so on. I think it matters that in America the education of children is mainly a matter for the government and for certified experts. I think it matters that children are trained by public authority to view making money, rising in the world, pursuing their own personal goals, and accepting what experts tell them as genuinely worthy things, and to view religion, culture and sexual conduct as matters of purely personal choice and thus as matters of taste, so much so that it's considered a vice to think there's a real difference between good and bad in such matters. I think it matters that public authority tells people it's illegal to refuse to rent an apartment to an umarried couple or for a municipality to put a Nativity scene on public property, and that courts are beginning to say that defining marriage as a union of a man and a woman is impermissible bigotry. Man is social, and what authoritative social institutions say is good and admirable gets reflected in the lives of those around us and eventually our own lives.

LL: It's easy to take pot shots at liberalism's weaknesses, but you don't have a real-life alternative to liberalism, do you?

JK: We certainly have to start where we are, so in that sense I don't have a real-life alternative to the general outlines of how things are now. Here are some of the reforms I'd propose, though:

• Abandon judicial doctrines that forbid the recognition of religion and moral standards that are arguably religion-based in public life.
• Reduce the role of the courts in public life generally. The resolution of social issues should not normally depend on supposed interpretations of the law by judges.
• Radically reduce immigration, so that a more settled people with more settled mutual relationships and common understandings becomes able to participate in running its own affairs in a more genuine way.
• Radically cut back on equal opportunity laws, so people can form the connections they find rewarding based on their actual habits, understandings, and affinities. (That means, among other things, that private institutions can have all the affirmative action they want but government can't pressure them into it.)
• Decentralize government. Why are the Feds always trying to force the states to comply with policies that don't have to be decided at the national level? An extreme example of over-centralization would be the Convention on the Rights of the Child. What's the justification for an attempt to make parent/child relations a matter of international law? Hasn't something gone very wrong when that seems normal to people?
• Find ways to reduce the role of expertise in our public life. Some ideas: decentralize public education and increase local responsibility for funding it. Reduce formal requirements for teacher certification and for that matter formal requirements for all sorts of positions and occupations.
• Something has to be done about the welfare state -- the well-being of particular individuals should not be the responsibility of national government.

There are lots of other right-wing reforms I'd approve of. Collectively these things would change the direction of things away from the further working-out of liberalism. Not all of them can be put into effect by a simple act of government. There's plenty for everyone to do, a great deal of intellectual work, persuasion and personal conversion of life for example. There'd also have to be reforms within religion and higher education, and new or reformed cultural institutions.

LL: History has proven the success of liberalism. Can you point to a society, in existence right now, that is not liberal but has achieved a better way of life, however you define that term, than liberalism has?

JK: At various times in the past the same question could have been asked about established Christianity or hereditary monarchy or societies with established nobilities. We live in a civilization that's been very successful in many ways. What's made it successful has been a mixture of things, some of which have been liberal in tendency and some of which have been distinctly non-liberal. (I go into the issues a bit in my Traditionalism and the American Order.)

The West has tended to become increasingly liberal over time. No civilization lasts forever, and no simple principle of action can be extended more rigorously into more aspects of life indefinitely without running into problems. At present we're more successful in some ways than in the past but not in other ways. The question to my mind is whether whatever benefits have been associated with the increasing dominance of liberal principles in the West have played themselves out, so that the continuing development of those principles is now destructive and a different orientation is needed.

Tolerance and Southern Baptists

One example among many of how tolerance works: Baptist Pastor Attacks Islam, Inciting Cries of Intolerance. A past president of the Southern Baptist Convention called Muhammad a "demon-possessed pedophile" (he apparently consummated his 12th and final marriage when the lady was 9 years old), and declared that Muslims worshiped a different God than Christians. He also "attacked American pluralism" by saying that pluralism wrongly equates all religions.

The article cites with evident approval claims that the talk illustrates how hate speech against Muslims has become a staple of conservative Christian political discourse, bemoans intolerance and "open scorn" of Islam, mentions protests over Southern Baptist condemnation of homosexuality and "open proselytizing" of members of other religions, and comments on the political involvement of the denomination and other developments that threaten Muslims in America. The article in substance constitutes an attack on the Southern Baptists.

How does one interpret this? It appears that for a Christian leader to say that Christianity is better, or there is something seriously wrong with another religion, is hate speech and an attack on the adherents of that religion. The reverse does not hold, although the article does not quite make that clear. (The point can be proven by considering other attacks on Christianity, in particular Catholicism.) What the article does make clear is that it is OK to attack religion that is "fundamentalist," that asserts anything different from what liberal modernity asserts. It's OK, for example, for Trinity Church Wall Street to take advantage of 9/11 by presenting a conference on "fundamentalism and violence". Don't like what the fundamentalist hijackers did? Go after the Southern Baptists, they're fundamentalists too.

There is no mystery to any of this, nor is it particularly inconsistent when viewed properly. It follows from the basic principle that authoritative truth is found only within scientific liberal modernity. Legitimate religion is therefore a personal spiritual expression of no public authority, although one often pursued in voluntary community with others. All historical religions must be treated as legitimate since they must be interpreted--by main force if need be--as personal expressions. Since every legitimate religion is strictly personal, to attack it is simply to attack its adherents. And since adherents of historical religions are free to view their faith as a personal expression of no public authority and practice it as such, their religious freedom is safeguarded.

In contrast, religion that asserts anything of its own--that is fundamentalist--is not legitimate religion. It can be attacked as intrinsically murderous because it rejects liberalism, the basis of peace and public order. It is to be treated as an ignorant distortion of the true nature of religion, which is always consistent with the truth of liberal modernity.

But why the special animus against Christianity, and why does Islam seem to get a free ride as a "religion of peace"? The reason is that the goal is to abolish the authority of religion, and to induce all religions as far as possible to give up their objective claims. Christianity is the inherited religion of the dominant civilization, so it is especially important to abolish its authority. Hence open season on the Bible, the Catholic Church, the Crusades, fundies, what have you, and hence the favor shown Islam, which is to be treated as an ally in the abolition of what remains of Christendom. In addition, it is necessary for the ultimate success of liberalism to promote a new legitimate Islam that accepts demotion to the status liberalism accords religion generally. Hence the emphasis on Islam as the religion of peace and tolerance with an assured equal place in Western countries. In essence it's a bribe to Muslims, especially those who live in the West, to accept the substantive abolition of their faith in exchange for material benefits and the opportunity to contribute to the abolition of Christianity.

Catholicism and public order

Another part of the appeal of Catholicism today (apart from its truth) is a sort of this-wordly extra ecclesiam nulla salus: outside the Church there's no satisfaction now and no hope for the future.

The problem can be stated briefly: the West now stands publicly for secular liberalism. The latter has reached a philosophical, moral and social dead end that manifests itself in things as diverse as the state of popular and high culture, the collapse of the birth rate, and the devolution of Europe into the EU. Our official teachers, the writers, scholars, statesmen, educators and mainstream religious leaders of the West, can tell us only to respect "diversity" and "tolerance": do what you want, but stay away from each other's throats. Young people have nothing to look forward to but insecurity or the treadmill of career and consumption, mitigated by the sentimental hope for love and the more solid availability of various dissipations. Meanwhile, Western civilization has become world civilization, and emptied of humanly sustaining goods propagates itself everywhere through global markets, electronic communications, and the whole apparatus of international politics and law. The secular totalitarian ideologies that once resisted it have effectively disappeared, leaving local tyranny, corrupt nationalism, and totalitarian Islam as the remaining principles of opposition.

Such a broad-brush gloom-and-doom picture can be questioned in various ways, but I think there's something to it. After all, one aspect of man is that he is a broad-brush thinker. He needs to see himself as part of a world with an overall nature that he can grasp to a degree and so orient himself. Notwithstanding claims as to the power of the "invisible hand" and such-like, it seems that some sense of objectively valid purpose is needed for the longterm well-being and even survival of social order. After all, if the public order has no purpose other than making it possible for me and others to do what we feel like doing, why support it when times get tough? And no matter how scientifically things are managed, times do get tough on occasion.

The problem, then, is that the current Western way of life is radically unsatisfying, unless we suppress fundamental human qualities in ourselves, and unlikely to last indefinitely. Since it can't offer us what we need, it is natural to look for something else. But what?

The non-Western alternatives are decadent, fanatical or otherwise unappealing, and so can't offer anything better. Within the West there's New Age thought and liberal Protestantism, but those are useless. The problem with secular liberalism is that it rejects the notion of objectively valid purposes, but New Age and liberal Protestantism do the same, at least in effect. Judaism claims objective validity, but only for a particular people, and therefore can't satisfy a non-Jew who is troubled by the world and his place in it. While relatively orthodox Protestantism does claim public validity, it can't do so persuasively because it lacks a publicly authoritative way to decide doctrinal issues. The same is true to a much greater extent of every non-ecclesiastical philosophy that proposes objective goods. All of which leaves Catholicism as the sole practical basis available to us now for the substantive public moral world that we need.

Christianity and politics

Random thoughts on politics and Christian orthodoxy:

Political modernism is the attempt to establish a wholly rational and this-worldly social order. The world is to be re-created and redeemed through man's will. Political modernism thus substitutes faith in man for faith in God. As such, it is a denial of the nature of God, man, and the world. Its natural consequences are anarchy, tyranny, or both.

Political conservatism is the rejection of political modernism, of the possibility of a self-contained and wholly rational social order. It therefore means acceptance of the complexity and necessary imperfection of all social arrangements. In opposition to the mechanizing tendencies of modernism it makes it possible to recognize the irreducible freedom and responsibility of the human soul, and therefore not only the unavoidable reality of evil but also the possibilities of hope and action.

Collective man cannot control the world because individual men make choices. Moral evil exists because every man is free to err and so do serious injury to himself and others. Without that freedom men would lose their dignity, and since it's a real freedom it is sometimes acted on. Christian orthodoxy is concerned with the consequences of that situation. The point of the Crucifixion--God abandoned, humiliated and tortured to death--is that evil cannot be managed and made innocuous, as it could if it were a matter of social structure. Basic Christian doctrine thus implies severe limits to the possibilities of social reform.

Such limits are needed to protect the integrity of individuals and institutions. Christian orthodoxy accepts that the individuals and (to some extent) institutions that make up society, by reason of their relationship to an order of things transcending human purposes, have an integrity that cannot be violated for the sake of this-worldly goals. As a result, it rejects the collectivism that abolishes the distinctiveness of the individual and of the particular institutions and relationships that help define and support him.

Christian orthodoxy therefore makes room for seeming contradictories: universal principles, the irreducibly individual soul, and ordered diversity--hierarchy, distinct roles for men and women, ethnic and cultural particularity, and civic and occupational groupings. What allows all these things to combine is the principle of "subsidiarity"--genuine particularity within unity--which is fundamental to orthodox Christian social thought.

That thought begins with individual morality. Individual man transcends any worldly order and so must be considered first. Nonetheless, individual man is always this particular man in this setting with these connections. Orthodoxy therefore takes personal morality, especially the morals relating to our closest connections to others, quite seriously. Its concern with family and sexual life has nothing narrow or obsessive about it but is a direct consequence of the primacy of the particular person, and therefore of the habits and attachments that make him what he is and connect him to others. Chastity, for example, is a statement of the sacredness of the human body and intimate human ties, monogamy of the value of the particular person. A morality that slights such things, that does not interpret them to us and tell us they are valuable, would be inadequate and inhumane.

What we are depends not only on family connections but also on our connections to broader groups with whom we share the habits and attitudes that form culture. Culture is learned from the family and the family is molded by culture, so the two cannot be separated altogether. Nonetheless, there is a difference in emphasis: family is more a matter of nature, culture of history. The significance of culture, and of the ethnic, class and regional groupings to which it is tied, is therefore more conditional than that of family. Nonetheless, culture and ethnicity are also part of what we are and so should be respected, as should civic, occupational, avocational and other groupings. The attempt to abolish the significance of such things is an attack on the world in which human life is at home.

Man realizes his social and moral nature through the participation of each man in governance as ruler and ruled. Man would lack dignity if he could not affect others as well as himself, and he would become self-centered if he did not take direction from others. The effect of subsidiarity is that each man rules and is ruled in turn, through his personal moral life and through participation in the groupings of which he is a member. Even the most prominent man must often submit to moral rules and the will of his fellows, and even the most subordinate is responsible for himself and must sometimes be responsible for others.

Christian orthodoxy thus rejects the comprehensive and abstractly perfect systems of compulsion demanded by modern systems of reform in favor of a complex mixed system that cannot be wholly controlled by anyone. That is in accordance with its nature: Christ does not influence politics through administrative schemes but by making his followers the salt of the earth.

A note on discrimination:

The social complexity native to Christianity means differentiation and thus inequality. Christian orthodoxy therefore accepts forms of discrimination that political modernism condemns. Women priests are an obvious current example. The modern mind believes that discrimination is always wrong because to categorize and so limit the individual violates the right to absolute self-determination that is the essence of his dignity. Political modernism demands that man define and so control the significance of all things. That demand is basic, for example, to the current understanding of sex and gender, which treats customary stereotypes and even hature as unjust and oppressive and demands their abolition.

From the orthodox Christian point of view, however, what is most important is not the equal application of universal rules to individuals, but the participation of particular individuals in things that transcend them. Since the type and degree of participation differs from individual to individual, we differ in important ways, and simple-minded opposition to discrimination makes no sense. That opposition rests in the end on the right of self-definition, which Christian orthodoxy rejects because it deprives the world of intrinsic meaning. Christianity tells us that God made the world and called it good, and that he means something by his actions in it. It follows that man cannot rightfully impose his own interpretation on the world, but must accept things and their significance as God made them.

In the Incarnation God has revealed himself as a specific historical person whom we follow not by abolishing our nature and particularity but by transfiguring them. The things that touch us most deeply--our humanity, but also sex, family relationships, culture, and the other connections that define who we are--are to be transformed and not abolished. The hierarchical family remains in Christian life the hierarchical family, for example, but it takes on a new meaning. The social world thus remains related to us, since it continues to be ordered by the qualities that make us what we are, but it also becomes more related to God. The consequence is a truly human world totally different from the featureless desert modernity imposes in the name of equality.

A note on the poor:

It is a good thing remember the poor. However, respect for them requires rejection of the view that sin is basically social and that poverty and oppression can be abolished in some comprehensive way. The temptation of Christ is enough to demonstrate that the point of Christianity is not the solution of political and economic problems.

To emphasize sinful social arrangements at the expense of individual sin is to say that at bottom it is others who make man what he is, and so to make each of us the creature of those in power. The result is to diminish the poor themselves. How does it help them to be told that the truly human life is one of secure comfort? What they most need is God's presence; by comparison social reform is a promise of pie in the sky to be delivered by their social betters.

The liturgy and American constitutionalism

I was discussing America, the Constitution, the liturgy and the Roman Catholicism with an Anglican and Americanist friend. It occurred to me that the issues were all related, so I decided I'd put them somewhat together. On the liturgy I said (in an edited way):

My vote for the Novus Ordo for now would be to improve the way it's done -- improve the translations, have the priest once again face the same direction everyone else faces, and put more and more of it back in Latin. That would be very much in line with what Vatican II said should be done, and it could be carried out without any formal changes in liturgical rules if bishops and priests liked the idea and decided to take it piece by piece. If you don't have support in the clergy for this kind of stuff you're not likely to get anywhere anyway.

The preference for Latin isn't mindless adherence to tradition. Latin displays the identity and universality of the Church through time and across borders. Total vernacularization of the liturgy makes it national simply by what it most obviously is, a text wholly in the national language. If it's a good liturgy the language will take on a sacred quality. The Book of Common Prayer (and King James Bible) made Tudor English the liturgical language for the English-speaking world. But when that happens the sacred and the national start to look the same. There's nothing in the linguistic form of the liturgical text that makes the point that something higher and different from the national society is in play.

I don't think either America or Catholicism needs that. It's been a problem that the Anglican Church has been a national church. It's made critical distance with regard to national trends and authorities very difficult to maintain. It's worth a lot to head that off, because it's important to have a hierarchy of societies. I'd rather America weren't understood altogether as a novus ordo seclorum, and the Latin liturgy corresponds to Western civilization and to the whole of the Western past. It's important to see America as part of that and subordinate to it. (I also think, by the way, that it's important to have other liturgies that correspond to other civilizational groupings within the universal Church. Such liturgies exist and are in use, for example the Greek and Slavonic liturgies).

On the U.S. federal constitution and religion:

My general point is that the federal government has final authority over survival issues like war and final decision-making power in case of conflicts, for example over federal/state jurisdiction. That makes it the ultimate focus of social loyalty. Unfortunately, it was also created for purely secular purposes, commercial prosperity and physical safety. It doesn't point at all to anything higher, and religion is explicitly made irrelevant to participation through the "no religious test" clause.

It seems to follow from all that that in America our ultimate worldly loyalties and most serious social connections have nothing to do with anything higher than physical security and making money. I don't think the same conclusion would follow if the federal government had been set up ad maiorem gloriam Dei for the salute populi in the name of the Sanctissimam Trinitatem even if its actual assigned functions for one reason or another happened to be pretty much the same (I suppose they'd have to be different enough to make the broader orientation recognizable but I don't think that would take much as a practical matter).

The basic point is that the limitation of function has to be a practical decision rather than a matter of ultimate principle. In order for it to be the former the federal government has to be seen as subordinate to some higher principle so its own principles can be seen as only relative and pragmatic. To that end it helps to have the highest principle be something transcendent that is embodied in a concrete universal institution that nonetheless lacks direct political power. Then both in theory and in organizational reality no level of political authority will represent ultimate standards in a privileged way. You escape this-worldly totalitarianism by making the ultimate principle of unity a transcendent one that can never be more than very partially realized anyway and putting it in an other-worldly institution.

That line of thought has some historical backing. The division of the Empire under Diocletian was followed shortly by the effective establishment of Christianity under Constantine. Conversely, the Reformation led to divine-right monarchy and the principle of national sovereignty, and the 20th c. decline and then collapse of Christianity in Europe led to various attempts at a totalitrarian unity, including the current EU variety.

I'm inclined to think that if you don't have recognition at the federal level of a specific church, which would then also have to apply at lower levels, federal authority is not institutionally relativized to something higher and there's more danger of a slide into absolutism. Possible you could fix the institutional problem with a clear right of secession. Then the ultimate this-worldly loyalty would be to the states, each of which could recognize some concrete representative of higher authority. How stable that would be I don't know.

What the two discussions have in common, of course, is the recognition that Western freedom and self-government grew out of Western Christendom, and if you want to keep valuable things that have been specific to the West in general and America in particular, like notions of freedom, constitutionalism, government under law and whatnot, you need to keep the basis of the civilization of the West out of which those things grew, and that basis is in fact the Catholic Church. Without Catholicism and its true expression in liturgy government in the West tends to become absolute, and in the modern age that absolutism can go very far indeed.

America, the world, science, the Tridentine Mass, etc.

In my recent entry on being American I quoted John McCain and Thornton Wilder as authorities. McCain evidently views America as a sort of overriding moral cause that we should all buy into, Thornton Wilder as an inescapable reality and predicament we must accept and deal with on its own terms. That is to say, their understanding of America is their religion. It defines what they believe is ultimately real and unavoidable and obligatory, at least for us (as with Wilder) and possibly for everyone (as with McCain).

That's just their angle, though. It's true that various neoconservatives and other politicians continue to profess Americanism as a religion, and Richard Rorty apparently proposed it as a Leftist strategy, but it has receded since the '60s, partly because of the Vietnam war and other displeasing features of American life but more basically because of the general convergence of America with Europe and much of the rest of the world. In its place there has been a trend, at least among the well-placed and influential and their hangers-on, toward History and Scientific Rationality as religions.

History, like Americanism, takes the social system of which one is part and its internal tendencies as the ultimate standard, but looks more to an incipient global system than to local peculiarities. Scientific Rationality treats procedures likes those of the modern natural sciences, together with various supposedly rational default positions, as sufficient for all realities that need concern us. Usually the two are combined: the emerging global system claims to embody scientific rationality, and scientific rationality is thought an all-conquering force that will soon bring everything under its sway. (People say postmodernism or some such has superseded scientific rationality, but the latter is still the functional view and postmodernism etc. mostly a way of making meaningful criticism impossible.)

It seems there's a basic problem with all these views, one Thornton Wilder noted and emphasized: "Americans are still engaged in inventing what it is to be an American." None of these grand principles -- America, Science, Global Society -- tell us what's worth doing, and on the whole they deny that we can stably be anything whatever. Our purpose and identity becomes self-invention, which obviously goes nowhere, so we get bored and disgusted and turn to stupid diversions: the consumer society and pop culture. Emerson, of course, put it best: "Whilst we are waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with crimes."

Religions that don't illuminate and don't satisfy don't last. Man is a social animal, but the society around us is no longer one that can socialize us. It moves too much on the level of what it understands as the public sphere -- free contract and legal regulation -- and defines everything else too forcefully as private taste and so excludes it from any scheme of objective value. "I believe in America" is rather in decline. "I believe in Science and Reason," or "Tolerance and Progress," or "the EU" will I think follow suit. Most of those faiths have become somewhat ashamed to speak their names in demanding intellectual circles, and when demanding intellectuals notice that something's amiss social institutions and the people are likely eventually to follow.

So what will happen? The New Age seems a bit of a stopgap, the consumer society and pop culture gone spiritual. To my mind a radical turn is likely at some point. That is why I think the recent motu proprio liberalizing the availability of the old Tridentine Mass is so important. The New Mass accepted and subordinated itself to the modern world, which seems likely to disappear because of its own incapacities. The Old Mass didn't bother accepting anything, except what is permanent in our situation, and responded to what it accepted by pointing to and presenting something radically other than any social order. As such it was able to ground what has since become known as Western Civilization. On the face of things, it could once again became the infinitesimal but infinitely consequential point about which something necessary and new crystallizes. We shall see.

Nominalism etc. for dummies

John Milbank has a nice clear article for popular consumption on the Church as an organic union of divine and human aspects. The piece goes into nominalism, voluntarism, William of Ockham and what not else, and explicitly says that the mixed and organic nature of the Church should serve as a guide to secular as well as church polities. If he wants to call such views "socialism" and take a swipe at Margaret Thatcher it's OK with me, we all have our quirks.

He presents his view in opposition to one proposed by the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, Marilyn McCord Adams, to the effect that "the best model for the human institutional side of the Church is not the organic body, but the [liberal] secular state." He's quite genteel in his treatment of the lady, they're part of the same church and guild and she's extremely well-placed, so he attributes her views on such matters to her "scholarly interests." Inside dope from an Old Yalie [search about 3/5th the way down] suggests that those interests may have an extra-scholarly point, at least if black leather bondage-wear as clerical attire counts as extra-scholarly. In today's academy, though, who knows?

The Kingdom cometh not by observation

So how can Christendom be restored? Liberals view the question as one of force -- will people be forced to accept some particular religious dogma, or will they be free to follow their own consciences? In fact, of course, it's not fundamentally a question of force, but of how the world is understood. Is equal satisfaction of preferences the highest law, or something else? If something else, what? Such questions precede law and indeed rational action, and so can't be decided by political instrumentalities.

Christendom begins to exist when there are Christians who understand their faith as the reality in which they live and act. A political society becomes part of Christendom when its center of gravity comes to be among such men. To restore Christendom is to restore recognition of Christianity as an authoritative reality that transcends human habits and desires. It is most fundamentally a spiritual and intellectual quest, although the pervasiveness of government at present gives it a necessary political aspect as well.

Awakening from reason's sleep

Here is the text (plus or minus a few ad libs) of a lecture delivered at the Roman Forum conference in Gardone, Italy, on July 3, 2008.

I have a dream

Every movement needs high-flown rhetoric, and trad rightwingery can't be any different. Inspired by what seems voguish I've put together a few phrases for my own "I have a dream" speech. Additions are welcome.

I dream of an America that is a normal country.

I dream of an America that is not an all-purpose fantasy, or a team, business, political movement or religion, but a country and people and their habits and ways to love, support and complete.

I dream of an America with normal human relations and aspirations.

I dream of an America in which every child is born into a family with a father, mother, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins, and into a way of life that makes sense and reaches out to the infinite.

I dream of an America whose principles make sense.

I dream of an America in which idealism is not sordid, tolerance not bigoted, freedom not forced, equality not snobbish, diversity not oppressive, and expertise not mindless.

I dream of an America that makes the normal and human and not the commercial, bureaucratic or technological the standard. I dream of an America in which education cultivates ordinary habits and feelings and opens the way to higher things, and does not try to suppress or replace them with inhuman artifice.

Incidentally, does anyone know when "dream" rhetoric first caught on? "I have a dream" became famous in 1963, and the phrase "the American Dream" first appeared in 1931, but there may be other landmarks. The whole way of speaking seems anti-republican and even somewhat irrationalist to me. It's not at all sober. Still, you go with the flow, so while I'm at it I might as well put forward an initial snippet for a heartfelt I dream of a church speech:

I dream of a church without programs, middle management, professionals or experts, just traditions, teachings, sacraments and the faithful.

I'll probably add to both these as time goes by.