Spelt from Homais’ leaves: Bobo edition

Many wonderful days in New York with friends and family concluded the old and began the new year with happiness.  A happy new year to you!

If any cloud darkened the horizon in my days here, it has been the realization that at least among educated professionals, the culture wars have not died with the election of a Democratic President and Congress, or even abated. In truth, I avoid the most sensitive topics with most of my secular friends. I know we agree that the Bush presidency has been a disaster, but I generally steer away from theological questions, life issues, and other other controversial matters of moment to enjoy their company, talking about books and movies and children and life in general.

That said, a few of my friends– decent and good people, faithful to their spouses and devoted to their children– simply assume and feel free to orate to sundry company that, as “enlightened” people, we “know” that religious people are ignorant, authoritarian, and bent on control and crude, pathetic evangelism that even in its benign forms, is something like being accosted by an Amway representative with a quota to fill, but with less authentic care for the well-being of the person being sold a (more or less fraudulent) bill of goods.

The fact that these “enlightened” opinions (and accusations) are delivered in a state of ignorance about Christianity that is to deep theological knowledge what zero degrees kelvin is to tropical temperature, that the tone is apodictic and in somewhat menacing fashion, brooks no dissent, and that even mild expressions of skepticism are either ignored or are occasions for manifest incredulity, resentment or condescension– none of these ironies register with the “enlightened” speaker. They speak in the fashion of a tribe that knows it has transcended the mere tribalism of religion. They need provide no evidence, nor inquire after what they dismiss, to know it is arrant nonsense. The same goes for pro-life arguments, or really anything that does not comport with various platitudinous, postmodern bourgeois secularisms.

How does one engage in conversation with people who deliberately and on their own volition raise deep and difficult questions, only to express complete certainty about their stock answers, and become peevish, aggrieved or passive-aggressively condescending when unanimous assent and applause is not immediately forthcoming? It’s not a rhetorical question; I really struggle with it. I will say this: the question I am posing is precisely the one that would come to them, good and decent people as they are, if they found themselves in a social setting where a Christian began to loudly declaim his or her convictions to them, in which a kind of a brittle, just-short-of bilious certainty is supposed to make up for the absence of dialogue.

Secularism advertises itself as a neutral space where ideas can be debated with  civility and rationality; revealed religious “comprehensive views” are said to substitute vehement emotions for productive inquiry. In my experience, secularism is itself a “comprehensive view,” often quite aggressive and oddly fideistic. I am close to many very secular people that I truly admire for a host of reasons; but I do wish that a few among them had, if nothing else, a more generous sense of irony about their own highly-developed and visceral antagonisms.

A Wonderful Life, pleasure, and freedom

In preparation for Christmas, the New York Times has offered two different interpretations of It’s a Wonderful Life in the last week. Both rightly give emphasis to the disturbing, much darker hues of what is only an intermittently sentimental movie. Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey spends most of his adult life being” frustrated and warped” (as Potter acidly observes in his hour of need) by bad luck, at times ugly and destructive resentment, and the tendency of others to rely too quickly and easily upon his real capacity for self-sacrifice.

It goes too far, however, to claim that the movie shows Bedford Falls to be a staid, economically doomed place, that would have been far better off aspiring to be a flashy, fairly sleazy resort town like Pottersville. It may well be true that there is far more easy indulgence to be had in Pottersville, and that gambling towns are the only towns that are now thriving in largely rural corners of once- industrial areas of the country like upstate New York. In the long term, of course, turning over rural areas to become gambling centers is self-defeating (if every other town has a casino, the corruption will spread abundantly but the profits will spread thin– the Freakonomics argument, as always, proves itself to be shallow even in economic terms by neglecting the moral assumptions that make a- or immorality profitable as an exception to more general moral rules). If theology is off limits for sophisticates of this kind, they should at least have to read Daniel Bell, or in certain moments, Kant.

The movie shows how an exalted and almost oppressively material enjoyment is purchased with human dignity, and how turning over a whole community to material prosperity and pleasure not just as a good, but the good, is never worth doing, because it takes the energies and imperfections of citizens and debases them to the point where they lose their dignity and their freedom. Once Bedford Falls becomes Pottersville, the most prominent man in town ceases to be an assertive businessman and becomes something close to a despot; the no-nonsense bartender becomes a violent cynic; the flirt becomes a prostitute; the problem drinker becomes the homeless town drunk.  It’s the kind of place where people like to “get drunk fast” as the bartender puts it. In Bedford Falls, these same predilections are either morally neutral or only mildly pernicious. Yes, George Bailey is understandably eager to leave such a limited place; but the movie tells us that its limitations have a certain purpose that gives them beauty. That is, they keep people connected to one another in a way that allows for genuine citizenship, rather than the immediate material pleasures of living in a plutocratic pleasure dome, where self-governance, in every sense of the term, has vanished. George’s heroism– what makes him “the richest man in town”– is that he has, at great cost, governed his own desires, and thus kept Bedford Falls a free town. (With, granted, the real consolation of being married to a beautiful and supportive Donna Reed.) That this argument may appear paradoxical or illiberal to some is a reflection upon the ambient utiltarian ethos abroad in our culture (and in Freakonomics), not upon the argument itself.

Truth, Torture, and America’s Responsibility

Given the release of the torture report by the Senate Armed Services Committee this week,as well as the recent comments by Ross Douthat, and today’s New York Times’ editorial, the following is worth some thought:

In his unflinching Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Bartolomé de las Casas described how the Spanish punished the indigenous peoples of the New World. He recounts ghastly inversions of Gospel images and imperatives amidst a general run of tyrannical violence. One commander ordered his soldiers to mutilate the faces of the conquered as mock “testimony” to missionary activity for “the Holy Catholic Faith.” Another burned his victims alive thirteen at a time, “in honor of the Saviour and the twelve Apostles.”

The use of Christian imagery to mark the triumph of Spain over its captive population was (and is) revealing. In The True History of the Conquest of New Mexico, Bernal Díaz testified to the unthinking contempt with which the conquistadors encountered the religion of the indigenous peoples. When Montezuma took Hernando Cortés to the temple in which the Aztec gods were said to dwell, Cortés seemed tempted to laugh, telling his host “Lord Montezuma, I do not understand how such a great prince and wise man as yourself can have failed to come to the conclusion that these idols of yours are not gods, but evil things— devils is the term for them.”

The idols of the Aztecs were not gods, but this did not prompt Cortés and his men to live the Gospel and invite others to join them. The superiority of Christianity was taken by the conquistadors to mean that the Spanish, as members of the visible Church, were obviously superior beings, and thus were entitled to brand the bodies of the captives with grotesque parodies of Christian history and faith.

In the gamut of violence inflicted by a victor’s officialdom upon the recalcitrant defeated, horror is often accompanied by monotony: there are the inevitable assaults, deprivation of food and sleep to captives, threats to spouses and children. But there are moments of distinction that ooze out amongst the rote grind of punishment. De las Casas notices one peculiar to Spain in its conquest of the New World, but it reveals a more general pattern of distinguishing marks in violence and torture practiced upon a defeated people. The victims and captives of a dominant power are very often branded with what their captors perceive as their distinctive mark of cultural superiority.

In France, for example, scientific technocratic rationality in service of centralizing power has long been a source of national pride, bringing the world the metric system and dirigisme in education and health care. Yet from the profligate use of the guillotine to the “science” of coercive interrogation in colonial Algeria, it is precisely this sense of superiority that has manifested itself in French cruelty. The bodies of those who opposed the French government in revolution or, in an imperial context, the mission civilisatrice were marked with the power of the technocratic rationality they had “irrationally” sought to thwart.

In the Bush years, the United States came— at the very least— perilously close to becoming a de jure torture state. It should not surprise us that like its political predecessors, America has also given its forays into torture its own distinctive mark. There are occasional pseudo-religious and pseudo-scientific moments in America’s misadventures at Guatanamo and Abu Ghraib, but here the source of cultural superiority appears to manifest itself differently: America’s distinctively prominent form of coercion and torture is sexual humiliation.

Sexual humiliation appears in perverse and disturbing profusion in the photos from Abu Ghraib, now recognized as evidence of something much more systematic than the excesses of a few low-ranking officials. As Jane Mayer writes in her recent book The Dark Side, the imperative to coerce prisoners into assuming sexual positions or to simulate sexual acts (where they would be repeatedly photographed), to force prisoners to remain without clothes for days or weeks, to humiliate male prisoners by forcing them to stand naked in front of female interrogators, or the gratuitous use of anal suppositories was by no means confined to Abu Ghraib, but was part of a deliberate program of degradation. It was implemented by the CIA for “interrogations” around the world.

This sexual humiliation is uniquely prominent (and painstakingly recorded) by America’s torture regime. Yet what is the triumphant cultural imperative with which this regime marks its victims? In postmodern American culture, it is the assumption that ever-increasing exposure, above all sexual exposure, is a supremely valuable category of information about human beings that both discloses selves for what they really are and is itself an emancipatory act. It is as close as our ironic, unbuttoned postmodernist culture can come to a liberating truth. In relation to the regime of eroticized exposure, citizens of the Islamic world, guilty or guiltless, are found to be risibly repressed and retrograde, much as the Spanish found Montezuma in his room of idols— and are subsequently marked with the visible signs of our evident superiority.

Naturally, this is not say that rejections of sexual reticence and concealment are simply evil, any more than being a member of the visible Church, or respect for the human sciences are evil. Nor is it say the varied cultural propensities of a defeated people— human sacrifice, or denying women their rights— are good.

That said, a look at the past tells us that a distinctive torture regime against other peoples often manifests itself when a dominant culture has already begun to corrupt what is good and creative in itself, and to make a distinctive aspect of its own culture an instrument of domination and pride within its own boundaries. The Iberian peninsula was awash with religious coercion at home— in which faith was sometimes bizarrely defined by bloodlines rather than, well, faith— long before a violently superficial (no oxymoron) religious triumphalism found expression abroad through the conquistadors. Various noxious forms of “enlightened” radical materialism and positivism had long provided an ugly and sometimes profoundly intolerant metaphysical underpinning to the human sciences in France long before, say, the torture chambers of Algeria, or even the cruelties of the Great Terror. And it may very well be that our culture too, has begun to apply the promise of revealing what was hidden or repressed in a kind of compulsive and destructive way, redolent more of arrogance than therapeutic solicitude, let alone human dignity and freedom.

What is to be done? Of course American torture must come to an end, and the new administration must make it an urgent priority. But America’s responsibility does not end there, and will not end in a year or ten. Well beyond the range of government policy, Americans must begin to think carefully about our own expansive cultural regime of eroticized exposure. The past gives us some assurance— if also a sobering demand— that this is our particular responsibility. Often it is precisely the nation responsible for a cultural imperative turned toward coercion that also produces its most powerful and original antagonists and ultimately, its healers.

In response to Spain’s atrocious exploitation of the New World and its peoples, de las Casas and Spanish scholastics like Vitoria created a language of human justice transcending religious and political boundaries, a language that would ultimately become the language of human rights. France, the pays natal of many “human sciences” would repeatedly produce exceptional minds acutely aware of the ways in which these “sciences” often discounted and diminished the full humanity of their subjects, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Henri de Lubac to the late writings of Michel Foucault.

In Spain and France alike, to criticize what appeared to be a special providential gift or unique genius of the culture initially required resolute independence from prevailing opinion. Our situation will require the same independence. For fear of sounding less than ecstatically American (on the Right) or less than ecstatically progressive (on the Left), foot-shuffling evasions can easily take the place of honesty when faced with the limits and shadows of a powerful source of personal and collective affirmation in American culture. America has yet to produce a candid intellectual reckoning with what are our sometimes questionable notions of eroticized exposure as a kind of fundamental knowledge and liberating truth. The distinguishing mark of our recent torture regime is a vivid sign that the time to begin that reckoning has come.

The Party of Life

The following argues, in as non-partisan a fashion as I can, for Christians to leave behind the designations of Christian ‘Right” and Christian “Left.” Why? Read on…

As we approach the next national election, Christians will encounter throngs of pundits on page and screen urging them to support a political party. With those appeals, we will hear diverse voices within the Christian commentariat on public life unite to denounce the apparently precious, rather jejune notion of “pox on both your houses politics” or “beyondism.” There will be regular reminders that those who have emerged from political immaturity know that being a reliable member of a major party is the way to get things done in a representative democracy like our own.

A ritualistic political dance will follow. The Christian “Left” will waste no time claiming that Democrats care about and for the poor, in whose service Scripture tells us we participate in nothing less than the life of God, and that the Democrats are relatively likely to oppose torture and wars of choice— while claiming Republicans largely do not. Thus Christians should vote for Democrats. The Christian “Right” will bluntly remind them that the Republican party platform and many of its candidates affirm the right to life, and that there is no issue more fundamental than affirming and protecting life and the dignity of life. To deny this fact is at best to act upon a grievously flawed moral calculus, or to offer demonstrable support for intrinsically immoral acts.

In a presidential election, these warnings have real value: on this occasion one must choose a representative of one party or another or abstain altogether. With some additional Supreme Court appointments, for example, the election of a Presidential candidate might mean that the legality of abortion could be returned to legislators. Even then, however, the task of persuading those legislators and the electorate as a whole to support pro-life legislation would only have just begun. One hopes that on the other side, torture and preëmptive war might come to an end or at least be put on the defensive with a new administration, and that needs to be seriously considered. Is it then true that such persuasion and political action, on abortion or torture or other life issues, can best be accomplished through the labors of a single political party, and that only political adolescents will hope for something “beyond” those labors?

In historical and political terms, and answer is a resounding no. To make for effective pro-life politics at every level of American politics over the long-term, the denunciation of beyondism or cross-party politics and alliances is utterly wrong, even disastrous. In historical terms, it concedes a distinctly modern political taxonomy a pride of place it should never have in Christian thinking about politics. It also ignores the fact that nearly every major moral reform movement that has peacefully created a new consensus on a fundamental issue must draw significant support from different major political parties, and above all from a truly diverse coalition drawn from the nation itself. Furthermore, for any Christian movement, on behalf of any Christian cause, to tell a single political party in advance that it will have one’s support, no matter what, is to tell that party that it need not concern itself with that movement’s cause except in token, symbolic ways. To be content with that situation is a serious error.

It will not escape any attentive observer that— with a record now stretching over several decades—the two party-bound Christian political strategies have accumulated only modest political achievements on their own terms. On the Christian “Right” the pro-life movement has an unimpressive judicial and legislative record (the partial ban on embryonic stem-cell research is one admirable exception). Over thirty-five years after Roe v. Wade, several of the pro-abortion justices on the Supreme Court in the last several decades were appointed by putatively pro-life Republican presidents, and the more recent appointments’ commitment to pro-life positions is uncertain. Furthermore, there is no particular incentive for the Republican party to give much more than intermittent rhetorical support to pro-life causes. Republican Presidents quite literally phone in their support to the annual pro-life rally in Washington D.C., and offers a few applause lines for sympathetic audiences. If the Republican party had failed so singularly to enact or simply to work for and publicize the agenda of financial conservatives or foreign-policy conservatives, they would have mutinied decades ago, taking their support for Republican campaigns with them.

In dishearteningly similar ways, the Christian “Left” has watched as the Democratic Party gives decidedly feeble support or even stands in outright opposition to campaigns to end our newfound embrace of torture, or further preëmptive war, or to help the poor in America and abroad. As the Christian “Left” continues to support the Democratic party, poverty has increased, income inequality have exploded, America now has the largest prison population of any country in the world, and torture has entered the respectable mainstream of political debate, with few meaningful objections by Democrats. The Democratic party has too often straightened its spine to offer unwavering support for abortion and to offer a quasi-positivist account of how largely unregulated scientific research on human embryos will change our lives, but not to help the poor or the vulnerable— not coincidentally, standing tall on the issues that often matter most to its wealthy campaign donors.

Given this history, the failures of the “Christians need to choose a party and be tough enough to pay the price of party politics” strategy are now clear. While individual Christians continue to work in innumerable pro-life and anti-poverty ministries throughout the country and help others in countless ways, as political movements both the Christian “Left” and the Christian “Right” have conspicuously remained among the less successful reform movements in modern American history.

To start, it should be said right away that there is something very odd about the strange contemporary fealty to secular political demarcations among Christians. The very notions of “Right” and “Left” were created in the most violent phase of the French Revolution, where those terms designated factions within the National Convention. Left and Right as political labels were thus born at the precise moment where politics became the supposed source and apex of transcendent desire, expressly replacing God with obsessive attachment to political ideology and the idolatry of the nation-state. It was also the moment where modern secularism first violently attacked Christians and Christianity. It was the Convention that initiated the infamous Dechristianization campaign, which included a “Left” that counted among its accomplishments the desecration of countless Churches and the collective execution of cloistered nuns. The “White” (i.e., antirevolutionary) Terror that followed was hardly a testament to the moral rectitude of the modern “Right.” Christians should at least be aware of the provenance of these labels before identifying themselves so intensely with them.

Even if one is tempted to write off a discussion of this ominous history as an instance of the genetic fallacy— the blood of Christians being merely an accidental effect attending the emergence of the central descriptive division in modern secular politics— there remains the nettlesome truth about successful moral reform movements in modern democracies. The pro-life movement and Christians most concerned about poverty compare their causes to the causes of ending slavery and segregation. Yet those examples should be studied with care.

The British slave trade was ended in large part through the heroic efforts of William Wilberforce, a member of Parliament strongly allied with the Tory Party, but who relied for a very large portion of support for abolition from his Whig opponents. Above all, Wilberforce appealed constantly and with great success to the British nation as a whole, regardless of party, to end the slave trade, with millions signing petitions and attending meetings to learn about the organized mass kidnapping, murder and debasement at its core.

In the same way, into the twentieth century, civil rights for African-Americans was for sometime an ancillary policy priority for a minority, safely contained within the Republican party, before slowly becoming an important Democratic cause. Beyond party designation, however, led by Martin Luther King the civil rights movement appealed to Americans as such to end the horrors of segregation, and Americans as such began to respond. The Civil Rights Act ended segregation in large part through the extraordinary legislative energy of the Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, who famously realized that large numbers of whites would abandon the New Deal coalition as a result. But this accomplishment was only possible because—as Johnson well understood— large majorities of Republicans in both the House and Senate supported civil rights, compensating for numerous Southern Democratic defections, and these Republicans were in turn  supported by their constituents.

Yet what does this history mean? It would be easy to respond that the pro-life movement in the Democratic Party is small– where then, should pro-lifers turn for cross-party support? And if ending torture and attention to the poor is a priority, isn’t electing Democrats the most likely and direct route to that goal? In a country with only two major political parties, doesn’t one have to choose?

It is, of course, easy to counsel continuing with the present course. Amorphous, sometimes sentimental calls to “solidarity” often appear among pundits of the Christian “Left” in this context, just as gestural, not always rigorous appeals to “Aristotelian phronesis” usually find their way into similar arguments among pundits of the Christian “Right.” In more substantive terms, some may argue that pro-life voters are Republicans for many reasons of which abortion is only one, and those who are most serious about poverty or torture are Democrats for many reasons of which these questions of justice are only one, and thus the current configuration is a “natural” one.

One wonders, however, if a “natural” political division among Christians that produces such meager results for what are said to be the most urgent issues on each side should not be subject to more vigorous criticism and opened to something new. And even if our current divisions seem natural to us, does several decades of political marginality for advocates of life— with no end in sight— justify perpetuating the status quo?

It must be said that this emphasis on choosing a party, accepting its priorities, and sticking with it no matter what ignores the fact that in the last several decades of American politics, both parties have for far too long paid vague and ineffective lip service to different basic Christian principles about human life and dignity, while each has very often devoted their real and politically effective energies to various kinds of violence placed conveniently out of view of most American voters: violence against the unborn, against prisoners, against the sick and the weak and the vulnerable. Ramesh Pomuru has inspired a number of recent reflections about a “Party of Death” that while not a literal party, has worked its way through American politics and culture with pernicious consequences. To make their agenda effective, Christians must begin to think less of contemporary America’s secular versions of Left and Right and begin to build a corresponding Party of Life within and across party lines. By distributing their money, votes and time more carefully, and above all by being much more assertive about the profound and consistent reasons for their unpredictability in secular political terms, Christians can change the stalemate that afflicts pro-life politics.

A glance at practical realities shows that campaign funds are a prerequisite for electoral success. Pro-life organizations are consistently outspent by their pro-abortion counterparts in elections by wide margins, and groups opposing torture are not especially well-funded either. It would change America’s electoral math a great deal if Christians committed themselves to much more consistent and generous support for pro-life organizations that dedicated their efforts to supporting active and committed pro-life candidates. There are of course a good number of Republicans who support pro-life policies above all on abortion, and on issues like torture as well, and they deserve respect and often support, even from those who might not otherwise agree with their positions on other issues. In this way, as the Reagan Coalition has begun to fray, the internal debate within the GOP about the core principles of the party offers several opportunities for Christians within the party to emphasize the preeminence of life in Republican politics.

Other Republican candidates content themselves with passing, lifeless rhetoric on all life issues, or simply actively oppose pro-life causes. Those who simply do not support the pro-life movement at all should no longer be supported on the grounds of “responsible” party loyalty, any more than pro-abortion, pro-torture Democrats should be.

It’s also most important to remember that, depending on the survey, no less than a quarter and in some polls, around forty percent of registered Democrats are sympathetic to pro-life politics. Even accepting the most conservative estimates, there are literally millions of Democratic pro-life votes— but it is no exaggeration to say that they have been deliberately deprived of a voice. In recent years, however, an organization has been created to give them one (its name is Democrats For Life– and it is worth noting that it does not work for, fund or endorse Democratic candidates at any level who are not pro-life). This circumstantial constellation, featuring a mixed and often tepid commitment to pro-life policies among Republicans, and a Democratic group that will give financial support only to pro-life candidates, offers real possibilities on both sides of our political divide.

If pro-life groups in both parties received substantial support for committed pro-life candidates, GOP candidates would be required, out of electoral self-interest if nothing else, to offer more visible and active support for pro-life politics to win that money and those votes. On the other side of the aisle, if the small numbers of pro-life democratic congressman and senators could grow in some clearly perceptible way— say up to 50 or 60 pro-life Democratic congressman from a little over 30 today, and up to 10 or 15 pro-life Democratic senators from 3 or 4 today— that would make it simply impossible to use lazy, dishonest but effective attacks to marginalize pro-lifers as “right wing ideologues.” In the same way, opposition to America’s becoming a torture state de jure would benefit enormously from the support of a significant bloc of Republican pro-life legislators who hardly lend themselves to being described as “soft” or bleeding hearts. Economic conservatives are often given to praise the salutary effects of competition and emphasize the need for groups of stakeholders to insist upon direct and measurable results for an enterprise. Pro-life politics can learn something from them on these questions. Furthermore, by more widely and consistently building pro-life support, there would be a motivated base of support for pro-life positions across the nation with significant support at different points along the political spectrum, just as there was for the abolition of the slave trade and for civil rights.

Yet these tactical questions are only a small part of the answer to building a Party of Life. The supreme question is one of principle.

It is worth returning for a moment to think about earlier moral reform movements in modern democracies. Wilberforce and King, for all their virtues, had obvious flaws. But they accomplished so much in large part because they it was overwhelmingly clear to their contemporaries that they did not trim and spin their ultimate convictions for the transitory imperatives of party advantage. It is certainly not the case that they never compromised, or never took a gradual path to their goals: but the goals themselves were clear, and they were in no way submitted to the approval of party interests. They and many others allied with them insisted on supporting the good wherever it was found, and their moral authority was exponentially stronger for it.

In this way, Wilberforce urged his nation to takes its Christianity far more seriously and rigorously than it had been doing, strongly supported more humanitarian policies in Britain’s colonies, favored peace whenever it could be had, and in various ways embraced causes that regularly confounded the conventional political categories of his time on Christian grounds, because he was a Christian. He was willing to vote against his party on a many important issues when principle was at stake (repeatedly infuriating his Tory friend and ally Pitt the Younger).

Martin Luther King’s work was premised on non-violence, a non-violence that expressed itself at home and abroad beyond civil rights and led him to criticize with great vigor the same President that had worked so hard to pass civil rights legislation and also to denounce and distance himself from the turn to violent protest in the sixties— so much so that in those radical years, he was increasingly written off as a tool of established power. Yet throughout, King’s political action was founded upon Christian convictions that transcended the immediate demands of a political party.

Christian truths about human life and dignity today are in need of people who do the same. For too long, the Christian “Left” has spoken clearly about the poor when it has been unfashionable to do so, as well as about the iniquities of capital punishment and the unjustly imprisoned with reference to a seamless garment— yet they have conveniently downplayed or even ignored the garment’s protection of the unborn, and too often only uttered lame, shoe-shuffling rhetoric along the lines of “having a conversation about difficult choices” before moving back to proposing programs to support the disadvantaged. The Christian “Right” has spoken with far greater moral clarity and honesty about abortion, but (given Church teaching, remarkably including Catholics) have been largely silent or indifferent to poverty and at times bizarrely sanguine about legalized torture, while devoting considerable space in Christian journals and websites to issues with nowhere near the same moral urgency, like urging their readers to assume a still more thoroughgoing skepticism about global warming.

Christians can and naturally will have very different views on various political proposals on all sorts of issues, from global warming to economic policy to education; and while Christians are bound to concern themselves with the plight of the poor, the relative role of the free market and government action in ameliorating their situation can of course be understood in diverse ways.

Yet on fundamental issues of life— including and above all abortion, torture, capital punishment, and for all the various debates about methods that may legitimately be raised, concentrated attention to the situation of the desperately poor here and abroad— there can and should be far more unity among Christians than there has been for decades. For being divided against themselves, it is now obvious from decades of political experience that Christians have gotten neither the life agenda of the Christian “Left” nor of the Christian “Right.” The consequences of Christians’ party-driven silences and non-sequiturs are now clear: they make it simplicity itself to accuse Christians working for Christian causes of being predictable partisans— at once inconsistent, expediently selective, and completely indistinguishable from their secular political allies. These accusations are of course most frequently and vehemently made by fellow Christians allied with the opposing political party, and many Christians have for several decades worked very effectively to mutually diminish one another’s persuasive power and moral credibility.

It must also be said that the political choices that America has made over the last few decades simply give no credence to the notion that by working primarily within party coalitions, Christians have helped educate Americans as a whole about the moral imperatives attending their preeminent issues: the fight against poverty or abortion, or the importance of ending legalized torture or ending nascent eugenics. Rather, as Christians continue to accuse one another of being partisan apologists, America has gotten abortion and increasing poverty alike, legalized torture and nascent eugenics alike. In political terms, the effective convergence of anti-life policies from the Left and the Right continues, and as long as this convergence prospers with little effective protest from deeply divided Christians, Christians will continue to be considered— as more than one prominent political operative has been known to describe them in different ways— as the useful idiots and chumps of American politics.

The evils we face are no less real than those of the past. To earn the respect and thus above all to win the victories that the movements of Wilberforce and King earned, the Party of Life must work both within and across secular parties, in surprising yet strikingly consistent ways. The Party of Life must vigorously oppose abortion and torture alike, denounce their respective supporters’ uncannily congruent deployment of pseudo-scientific and gratuitously technical euphemisms, a compulsion that betrays the fact that even their defenders know implicitly that these acts are evil. The Party of Life must peacefully but vigorously call to account a culture that teeters on the edge of outright eugenics while the ranks of its poor increase and its prisons overflow.

If it is “beyondism” to support a fight against these evils— and to state clearly how they are related to one another, even if it makes down-the-line partisans of both political parties uncomfortable— than this is a condition that many, many Christians should happily and vocally acknowledge as their own. When Christians stop waiting behind party lines and step forward to speak and act boldly according to the logic of their faith and not to the shifting exigencies of transient political parties, then they will be heard anew. With God’s help, they will end a long and fruitless impasse and win victories for life.

Changing Terms

Since I’ve been talking about language, I thought I would add a few other changes I’ve noticed in our public speech. Here goes:

In the last 10 years, Americans have started to use the British “gone missing” or “went missing” to describe lost people or other vanished presences. We used to say “is missing” or just “missing.”

In the same period, three nouns have definitely become fairly common verbs: “impact,” “partner” and “reference” (I still use “refer to” but this is becoming rare; I avoid the other two like the plague).

The words “actively” and “proactive” are now everywhere in American officialese. I’m hoping to see some weary souls insert “passively” and neologisms like “preactive” into reports, press releases and memos just to keep people awake, and maybe play Borat-style with some of our other favored words as well. E.g., “We are passively searching for a company with which to liaise in order to couple and, in resourcing our out-sourcing of people-based contacts (our most precious resource),  reference our common preactive stance within both our active and passive client lists.”

I’m sure there are more changes of note– let me know and I’ll post them.

Branding Life

Much has been made recently of the “GOP brand” in the 2008 election– and the American “brand” in international public opinion, and the Red Sox “brand” in Boston, and the Chicago Symphony “brand” and its attendant difficulties, and the Sundance Film Festival “brand,” and no doubt the Eastern Pequot High School croquet club “brand” in Upper-Lower Palatinate County (I made the last one up, but I exaggerate only slightly). I am also being a bit of a stickler simply by putting scare quotes around “brand”– for while those scare quotes used to appear fairly regularly when the word was used beyond the immediate ambit of cattle fairs or supermarkets, the quotation marks have almost entirely disappeared over the last 2-3 years.

There is no reason to get in high dudgeon about every trendy metaphor for human activity. There is a pointed and persistent human desire to explain one’s life activities by recourse to metaphors involving some other experience– and thus corporate people, who have the most legitimate claim to use the language of branding in the modern sense, often compare their work to sports and war.

But there is something significant in the fact that “brand” is quite suddenly the ubiquitous word for identity, for recognition and for the gestalt of good or bad connotations connected to an entity in politics and culture alike. That is, those activities that have long and often quite specifically claimed to give citizens and patrons an experience that at least partially transcends the market have now made the vocabulary of the market their own without shame or hesitation (or scare-quotes). It is one more sign that citizenship and a kind of aesthetically enriched self (and the conflict between these two possibilities that so fascinated a cascade of modern thinkers from Rousseau to Henry James to Lionel Trilling) are both increasingly under the shadow of the market as the supreme arbiter of modern experience.

I confess that I am not inclined to say that this is just fine, that our new gonzo-capitalism is simply the way things will and in some sense ought to be, to quote Tyler Cowen and Freakonomics and pretend that all or virtually all human experience can be reduced to a kind of hidden market logic based on rather low human interests and motives, and that it takes a clear-sighted no-nonsense truth-teller like the author himself to tell us that. What is quite specifically missing from this kind of account are ideas of form, of essence, and of relationality. The language of “brand” denotes a kind of superficial and infinitely fungible externality, and it does say something about our culture (not everything about our culture, but something) that this and other externalizing, shape-shifting market metaphors have spread like kudzu in several domains of human experience where they had for so long been greeted with intense ambivalence or even disdain.

Centro-Centrism

Many people have recently commented on the apparent paradox that while technology makes it possible to follow events and work from almost any spot in the world without delays in communication, rural areas and even small- to medium-size cities are in rapid decline all over the developed (and often the developing) world. At times it seems the world wants to work in or very near a metropolis (in the U.S., these would be found in the Boston-Washington corridor, in or around Chicago, L.A., Miami, Seattle, SF, etc.). Why would the urge to migrate to the center become stronger when technology makes moves of this kind unnecessary– all the more so when the cost of living in these centers has skyrocketed in the last decade?

The paradox is not terribly difficult. While technology makes it possible to follow and at least in theory to participate in the economic-cultural-political whirl of contemporary culture, the industries (of both structure and content) that drive this whirl are located in and around a very few cities, and there is less and less of a need for intermediaries or independent sources providing various kinds of goods and services in the provinces. There used to a need for serious newspapers (including ones that would have a few of their own foreign corespondents) in, say, Pittsburgh, just as its steel companies were major players in international trade. Now its industries are increasingly marginal, even as newspapers in cities like Pittsburgh reprint stories from AP or the NYT. Similarly, regional theater companies and local symphonies used to be major cultural outlets in second-tier cities, and even rural areas needed something of this kind every 30 miles or so; now products from the center (cable television, DVD’s, MP3’s, miscellaneous downloads etc.) can move easily from the center to the furthest corners of the earth in minutes, obviating the need for many people to support the regional theater company or the local symphony.

In short, as technology magnifies the power of the most talented, the best-connected, the most advanced, or simply the best-funded, life in the provinces becomes economically, culturally and politically lifeless; people in those places are more than ever spectators to events happening the center. One might say they have better seats than ever before; but spectators they are. The possibility of having a less than glorious but still thriving career outside the major cities in various professions (esp. in technology, some sort of internationally desirable product manufacture, academia, the arts, and the media) is now near the vanishing point.

Is this centro-centrism (neologisms unbound!) a good thing for human flourishing? That is a question worth further thought.

Robert Kagan and the Myth of a Neo-Con Nation

Robert Kagan’s article in World Affairs is instructive here and there, but ultimately it is an extremely misleading, even irresponsible account of American history and the history of American foreign policy in particular.

Kagan argues that a bold, interventionist, often messianic tradition in American politics has manifested itself in our foreign policy from the founding generation forward. In this way, the Iraq War is a manifestation of the same impulse that led America into everything from the Mexican War to the Civil War, to the Spanish-American, Korean and Vietnam Wars, as well as into the First and Second World Wars. He argues that there has been a steady rumble of dissent against all these wars– and this dissent has been prone to ugly conspiracy theories about how America got into these wars whenever they become difficult. Nonetheless, this antiwar, anti-interventionist America has always been the position of a minority, and a generally ineffectual one at that. We are a bold, interventionist (in contemporary terms, a neo-con) nation, says Kagan, and always have been– whatever the fringes around Chomsky or Ron Paul want you to believe.

If Kagan’s primary purpose is to refute the notion that a neoconservative cabal was singlehandedly responsible for bringing us into Iraq and thus betraying a heretofore unblemished unfurling of republican virtue in American foreign policy, he has done his work. I don’t believe many thoughtful people have ever believed such a thing, but fair enough. America indeed has a long history of interventionism abroad, often justified in vigorous, at times grandiose rhetoric about America’s special purpose in the world. He is also right that after the end of the Cold War, a kind of smug, relatively lazy manifestation of this triumphalist position became part of both Democratic and Republican political rhetoric after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and that the current election is filled with rhetoric in both parties about America’s need for an idealistic foreign policy accompanied by an overwhelming preponderance of military power.

Kagan goes well beyond these relatively safe targets, however. He wants to argue that he and other vociferous supporters of the Iraq War represent America’s mainstream foreign policy tradition. To this end, he makes some lazy, at times absurd arguments.

First, Kagan needs to attend to some basic distinctions. The Mexican and Spanish-American Wars offer some meaningful affinities to the motivations and gestation of the war in Iraq, i.e., as wars of choice against weak powers to expand our influence and implant our ideals abroad by force. But it is simply ridiculous to try to pass off both the First and Second World Wars as wars of similarly assertive, even preëmptive interventionism.

Neutral until 1917 (i.e., most of the war), the sinking of the Lusitania and the German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare was a pretty clear indication that the First World War was coming to us unless we wanted to watch our ships sink, or become passively allied with Germany against our major trading partners and allies. We maintained our neutrality up to that point, on the grounds of avoiding foreign entanglements. Suffice it to say that Imperial Germany was, in relative terms, an infinitely stronger economic and military power in the early twentieth century than Iraq was at the outset of the twenty-first; yet even so, America did not attack until it was clear that we had been and would continue to be subject to attack by Germany itself.

The notion that WWII was an example of assertive or even preëmptive interventionism is risible. The phrase “Pearl Harbor” should ring some bells for Kagan, but apparently does not. The war was over two years old by the time of Pearl Harbor, and yet we had limited ourselves to giving material help to Britain until we were directly attacked (and Hitler gratuitously declared war upon us afterwards). It should also be said that one of the most powerful criticisms of Japan was the fact that it had attacked us prëemptively. Kagan should also spare a moment to reflect upon the possibility that a “messianic” tone in American political rhetoric was a more forgivable excess in the midst of a struggle against the combined forces of Hitler’s Third Reich and Imperial Japan than it was against the horrible but squalid and enfeebled tyranny of Saddam in Iraq.

Though lost on Kagan, Robert Kennedy remembered these kinds of historical distinctions when the Kennedy Administration was considering preëmptive war against Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, telling the advocates of preëmption bluntly that “my brother is not about to become the Tojo of the 1960’s.” As a result, America enforced a naval blockade around Cuba and began backdoor negotiations that ended the crisis peacefully, despite the fact that nuclear weapons (real ones, not potential ones) were 90 miles from American soil. Yet in Kagan’s mind, FDR and Kennedy were interventionist imperialists in exactly the same way as George W. Bush, responding to similar situations in similar ways.

Our wars in Korea and Vietnam were somewhat closer to the Iraq model of assertive interventionism– but even there, there was at least a partially independent country that invited us in (we were happy to accept, but nonetheless we were there with the approval of a government in the country). The War in Iraq would be much more similar to Korea and Vietnam if, say, our allies in Kurdistan had found themselves the object of a renewed military offensive by Baghdad, and we had been invited to defend them. Of course, nothing of the kind occurred in Iraq. This is why the invasion of Iraq cannot possibly be described as part of a policy of “containment,” whereas our entries into Korea and Vietnam can both be described as applications of Cold War containment.

Kagan thus works very hard to ignore the fact that the Bush Administration has revived a very ugly and far less mainstream tradition in American foreign policy than the ones that led us into two World Wars and several other struggles. By a wide margin, the assumptions that led to the Iraq War are most similar to America’s early twentieth-century imperialist misadventures, which is why his article’s quotes from Theodore Roosevelt and his allies are the ones that sound most like the rhetoric of contemporary neo-conservatives.

Finally, Kagan fails to address or even acknowledge the ways in which the current Administration has introduced innovations within the already very dubious tradition of American imperialism– innovations that will have enduring and terrible consequences. First and foremost, America under George W. Bush is now a torture state de jure, something that the Founders, Lincoln, FDR and others never countenanced, despite facing infinitely more serious threats than Saddam’s Iraq. The Bush Administration has also taken an all-volunteer army to the absolute limit, while telling the rest of America to shop. For the first time in American history, a significant war has not been accompanied by increased taxes to pay for it.

This looks a lot like imperial panem and circenses, something American governments have rightly and consistently avoided in times of war. Speak to any elderly American about the Second World War, and ask them if they remember being asked to sacrifice from their savings, even as children, to support the war effort; or even ask any older person about Vietnam, and ask them if they remember how tax increases and the draft made it very clear that America as a whole was being asked to fight. The Bush Administration’s purposeful exhortations to public apathy may explain why unlike in other wars, Congressional investigations of war profiteering and corruption have been almost non-existent during the Iraq War, which has inspired many instances of flagrant corruption over the last five years (and counting).

In sum, Kagan supported a preëmptive war of choice against a weak foe that posed no imminent threat whatsoever. The war was disastrous not just in strategic and tactical terms, but because it introduced some horrible precedents into an already unsavory (and minority) tradition in American foreign policy that upheld American imperialism, adding officially approved torture and a near-complete lack of civilian engagement and oversight to preëmptive war and moralistic bluster. Kagan then tries to convince us that outside of isolationist weirdos, conspiracy nuts, and republican virtue types who wax lyrical about Sparta under Lycurgus, he and his allies represent centuries of mainstream American foreign policy, for better or worse. This is not just wrong; it is lazy and demonstrably false nonsense.

Prosperity and Optimism

Two headlines are worth a look for readers of this blog. First, one article reports that income inequality in America is accelerating: average incomes for people in the bottom fifth of the American income distribution have dropped 2.5% in the last eight years, whereas incomes in the top fifth have risen over 9%. Middle class incomes are stagnant.

In a second piece, we learn that according to a venerable survey, middle-class Americans are less pleased with their relative economic position over the last five years than they have been since the poll was first taken in 1964.

Of course, some Americans’ economic expectations have grown considerably (in some ways irrationally) since 1964. Yet along with health care and housing costs, the data points to increasingly severe volatility and strees on working Americans’ economic well-being, and uncertainty about their ability to realize their hopes for a simple, moderately prosperous future.

One can only look forward to the Wall Street Journal’s inevitable op-ed piece denouncing these findings that, if precedent is any guide, will be amusingly amenable to being read in Marxist terms. There will be wild assertions that today’s poor and middle-class people simply don’t understand how wonderful their relative position actually is (i.e., false consciousness), and arguments that government bureaucrats and left-leaning think tanks are conspiring to exaggerate income inequality for their own purposes. That is to say that, in a Gramscian sense, traditional intellectuals and the lackeys of a dominant elite are producing pedestrian knowledge that serves their interests, in contrast to the organic intellectuals who live and move within the new economy and truly understand how unprecedent household debt, both parents holding down multiple jobs in a single household, and ebay sales have are transforming the lives of, say, the working poor into veritable fountains of contented prosperity.

The question of how best to address the Gilded-age style inequalities of our time, given an increasingly volatile global economy, is a genuinely complicated one. But the attempt to deny these inequalities and their attendant anxieties altogether is just no longer credible.

Update: Larry Summers makes a similar point about how the boom coming to an end now actually did nothing to raise, in real terms, the American median income.

Fish on French Theory

Stanley’s Fish’s New York Times post on the history of French theory is well worth reading, and in very nearly equal parts right and wrong. He’s perfectly right that by forsaking all foundations or teleological destinations for language in relation to truth or to “the world as it really is,” French postmodernism neither offered nor commended any political program in itself. He is also right that in the Eighties and Nineties, French theory’s American acolytes and detractors did consistently impute political content to it, often presenting it as inexorably corrosive and relativistic in relation to premodern and modern truth-claims– except those of the progressive, inclusive cultural Left, which were assumed to remain or emerge after the deconstruction of all onto-theological claims, etc.

As Foucault’s late, ironic references to a common “Vulgate” reading of his work acknowledges, however, many leading practitioners of theory were perfectly aware that this kind of culturally Left-progressive appropriation of theory was responsible in very large part for postmodernism’s prominence and influence in the closing decades of the twentieth century. The cultural Left’s transmission of Theory may have freely and not very rigorously mixed Foucault, Lacan and Derrida with themes drawn from Emerson, Marx, Nietzsche, and twentieth-century Left anthropology, but there it was. The protests against these not necessarily philosophically rigorous appropriations of French theory by its progenitors were, in all truth, fitful at best (Foucault’s late candor was an exception).

It’s also not clear that postmodernism’s appropriation by the cultural Left was– in cultural and political rather than philosophical terms– an illogical move. Most people are not going to float in unending indeterminacy or encourage others to do so, and the prospect of dismantling truth claims is going to exercise a particular fascination upon those who want to attack longstanding, general assumptions about who human beings are and what possibilities or limitations inhere to human beings as such, in order to make way for new ones. Those who assent to these longstanding accounts are unlikely to play with dismantling or uprooting what appears natural or at least desirable (either to them or for others). In this way, while it is true that French theory did not present a philosophical justification or ground for any political program (like, say, Marxism), as a way of thinking and writing it was bound to be much more attractive to some political and cultural sensibilities rather than others.

French theory’s salad days are now long gone (it peaked intellectually in the Seventies and Eighties, and institutionally in the late Eighties and Nineties). But its legacy remains powerful and complicated. Its attack on a self-grounding, putatively triumphant secular rationality has opened the way both for a return to theological questions and a counter-reaction by an aggrieved and increasingly defensive secularism. The cultural flare-ups of the early twenty-first century owe a great deal to the fact that nearly every Western liberal-arts graduate now between the ages of 25 and 50 was asked in one way or another to “interrogate” the self-sufficiency of “enlightened reason” in their youth.

Of course, the Boomer professors who encouraged this “interrogation,” had not the slightest notion that their ideas would move in the directions they have. This in turn should give pause to those who fear the indoctrination of their children on college campuses. The long-term effects of even the most ideologically motivated pedagogy tend to be at once maddeningly and delightfully unforeseeable.