Author: Lee M.

That wacky atheist Michael Newdow is at it again, this time getting a federal judge to declare the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional again, possibly setting the stage for another go round at the Supreme Court. (The court, you’ll recall, dodged a bullet last time around by ruling that Newdow didn’t have standing to bring the suit since he doesn’t have custody of his daughter. This time, though, he’s brought the suit on behalf of other parents (Newdow is a lawyer and an M.D.).)

I predict much voluble outrage from bloggers, cable news pundits, radio talk-show hosts, etc. etc. at this godless attack on our great country. Despite this, the Supreme Court has pretty consistently ruled that the reference to God is nothing more than “ceremonial deism” intended to recall our history and/or shore up respect for the state.

It’s funny that those same conservatives who so strenuously object to removing “God” from the Pledge hardly ever point out that the Pledge itself was written by socialist Baptist minister Francis Bellamy, in part to express the ideas of his brother Edward, author of the (in)famous socialist utopian novel Looking Backward, whose bright, shining future is an authoritarian collectivist nightmare that ought to make any true conservative’s skin crawl.

Philosopher C. Stephen Evans reviews a biography of Wodehouse for Books & Culture (via Thunderstruck), offering some reflections on why Wodehouse is so beloved and seems to be more than a “mere” humorist:

According to Kierkegaard, the fundamental contradiction that is human existence can be experienced as either tragic or humorous, depending on our perspective. To smile at life (or anything), we must be able to occupy a “higher perspective,” which makes the “contradiction” painless. This is surely why so many situations that are painful at the time can be funny in retrospect; the person remembering the incident is beyond or above the contradiction, and this distance is a necessary condition for humor. Thus, to view life itself as humorous, to vary the metaphor, we must have a way of escape, “know the way out.”

But which do we do? The Christian, for example, knows the tragedy of the fall, but also knows the good news of God’s grace and forgiveness. According to Kierkegaard, the character he calls the “humorist” lies on the boundary of the religious life because the humorist has somehow acquired a “knowledge” of these religious insights. The humorist fails to be genuinely religious because this knowledge is a kind of merely intellectual appropriation of those insights; the humorist does not really take these religious convictions into the core of his or her own existence. If we shift focus from religion in general to Christianity in particular, perhaps humorists can be viewed as people who help themselves to the solution Christianity offers to the problem of human life without fully plumbing the depth of the problem itself.

I think that Kierkegaard’s description of the humorist fits the case of Wodehouse precisely. We love the world of Wodehouse because it is paradise, a world without sin. Of course Wodehouse has villains and intimidating aunts, but they are amusing rather than genuinely evil. We love the world of Wodehouse because it is the world we were born to live in, and it is a world in which we would love to dwell. Yet, as [Evelyn] Waugh himself clearly said, Wodehouse’s world is a world to escape to, not a world we aspire to find or create. It is not paradise regained but paradise never lost. Sin has here not been defeated; it has never really appeared.

(Via A Conservative Blog for Peace.)

Post to the host for May 2001:

Mr. Keillor,I’ve been wondering if you picture the Lake Wobegon Lutherans as ELCA Lutherans. If so what do you think of the new communion between the Lutheran and Episcopal churches, and thus what would the good reserved Scandinavian folks there in Minnesota think of their more liberal Anglican brethren?

Aidan

Dear Aidan, The ELCA Lutherans of Lake Wobegon were dead set against the new communion, although some of them (I name no names) have, while visiting their fallen-away children in distant cities, attended Episcopal churches (with the children) and partaken of communion. But they don’t want there to be an official link that might, over the years, grow tighter and, before you know it, you’ll find Pastor Ingqvist processing in a dress and a rhinestone-encrusted cape preceded by two guys twirling incense pots on chains like they were yo-yos and go through a lot of bowing and turning and genuflecting. And suddenly the Bible-based sermon of 25 minutes turns into a 6-minute homily about the beauty of flowers. And the Sunday School takes up the infrastructure needs of the inner cities. And soon you realize that your young people are a little shaky on their Bible stories and parables and can’t find Jeremiah or Deuteronomy or even Ephesians without looking up the page number in the index. No, the Lutherans of Lake Wobegon don’t care to go in that direction. Anglicanism is for when you take a vacation to England. It’s like nightclubbing that way. It’s for special occasions. You don’t want to make a practice of it.

This one’s from Anglican theologian Oliver O’donovan, from an interview he did with the Calvin Collge Chimes a few years ago:

I think [Stanley Hauerwas’] criticisms of the Christendom idea are partly wrong, first because he dismisses the church as always being a minority. I don’t know on what theological authority one could make that assertion. The church has very often been a minority. But whether the church is a majority or a minority at any time or place, the church is not given yet to be wholly visible to itself. There is a real temptation in wanting to be a visible minority, a gathered church in which you can say, “We are few, but we know exactly who we are, and we know who is on our side. The line is drawn clearly and unambiguously between us and the world.” That kind of visibility and definition is not granted to the church in our age. We know where the church is because we know where the sacraments are and where the word is preached. We see people gathering to the sacraments, we see the church taking form. I’m with Augustine and again a gathered church Protestantism. The edges are always indistinct. Is this person moving into the church, giving light to those who dwell within the house, or is he just standing on the edge and about to turn his back? We don’t know. … Even if it’s true that the church is going to be a minority, the church is going to be embattled and contested to a certain extent, but it can be so as a majority sometimes. Evil has its ways of challenging the church when it’s in an apparently confident position just as much. Even if the church is a minority, it can’t be a self-conscious minority which says to itself, “We’re perfectly safe because we’re a minority.” That I have to say I find troubling in the kind of catacomb consciousness I find in Stan and John Howard Yoder. I don’t think it was at all typical of the Christians that actually inhabited the catacombs. They didn’t huddle down there and say, “How nice. We at least know who we are while we’re down here.”

An oldie but a goodie from the Bruderhof site:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil. It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Brandon has a good post on the now-common argument that the disaster in New Orleans has somehow discredited libertarianism. I’ve actually read people who say that this shows the bankruptcy of the concept of “limited government.” Should we assume such people are for unlimited government?

The problem with the handling of this situation, in my view, has a lot more to do with venality and incompetence than with excessive devotion to the principles of Locke and Jefferson.

Andrew Bacevich* reviews Robert Kaplan’s Imperial Grunts, which Bacevich says is a paean to American soliders who, in Kaplan’s view, are the elite vanguard of a new American empire which is the only hope for pulling the rest of the world out of chaos:

Reactionary populists idealize the past because they loathe the present. Kaplan proves no exception. Fawning over soldiers as a virtuous remnant of a lost, better age, he misses no opportunity to express his contempt for his contemporaries who do not share in the austere existence of the classic man-at-arms. The targets of his wrath include, but are by no means limited to, narcissistic intellectuals, risk-averse politicians, micromanaging generals, bean-counting bureaucrats, wimpy journalists who have never visited Djibouti or Mongolia, the entire “policy nomenklatura in Washington and New York–in its cocoon of fine restaurants and theoretical discussions,” and all manner of effete civilians, especially those residing in New England, which Kaplan, who makes his home in Massachusetts, describes as awash with pacifists.

Why are such people worth defending? How is it that a warped and decadent society manages to produce such sturdy warriors? Hovering in the background of his snapshot, these questions do not interest Kaplan. He prefers to focus on the American soldier in the field, where the order of the day has less to do with defending the country per se than with managing a global empire.

On that empire Kaplan is bullish. He views the global war on terror as an opportunity to push out its boundaries–if the policy-making twits in Washington will simply give dirty-boots soldiers the latitude to do so. “To be an American in the first decade of the twenty-first century,” he writes, “was to be present at a grand and fleeting moment.”

The events of September 11, 2001, inaugurated what Kaplan calls America’s “Second Expeditionary Era”–the first had begun with the expansionist surge of 1898–in which US forces once again sally forth to take up “the white man’s burden,” a phrase that he employs without irony or apology.

Kaplan laces his narrative with ostentatious references to emperors and adventurers, proconsuls and viceroys, ranging from T.E. Lawrence to “Ligustinus, the Roman centurion.” The cumulative effect is to suggest that the United States today is simply doing what empires throughout history have done: shouldering “the righteous responsibility to advance the boundaries of free society and good government into zones of sheer chaos.” To imply that other, less exalted considerations just might enter into the equation–power? profit?–becomes unseemly. For Kaplan, the essence of empire is helping those unable to help themselves, creating order out of anarchy and uplifting the downtrodden.

In this sense, as Kaplan sees it, 9/11 returned the US military to its nineteenth-century roots when advancing the boundaries of free society meant removing any obstacles impeding the westward march of the young Republic. Today’s war on terror is “really about taming the frontier,” with the frontier now literally without limits. According to Kaplan, the vast swath of Islam, stretching from Africa across the Middle East to Southeast Asia, now qualifies as “Injun Country.” The “entire planet” has now become “battle space for the American military.”

Read the rest here.
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*Yes, I realize I never finished my review of his book. Long story short: Bacevich thinks that we’ve reached a point where the entire political class as well as large swaths of the American public have come to believe in American military power as a nigh-omnipotent force for “spreading our values.” This, combined with an addiction to cheap oil, has embroiled us in the messy and dysfunctional politics of the Middle East with little appreciation of the dangers, Iraq being a case in point. The solution, in his view, is a strategic pullback, allowing other countries to pick up the slack of their own defense, a return to the policy of using force only as a last resort, and a genuine commitment to energy independence. I think he’s substantially right about all of this.

Okay, not really (made ya look though, didn’t I?), but Jonathan Rauch has a column comparing the philosophy behind Sen. Santorum’s It Takes a Family and “classic” Goldwater-Reagan conservatism. In Rauch’s view, Santorum represents a principled turn away from the individualist/limited government paradigm (allegedly) represented by Reagan.

In Santorum’s view, freedom is not the same as liberty. Or, to put it differently, there are two kinds of freedom. One is “no-fault freedom,” individual autonomy uncoupled from any larger purpose: “freedom to choose, irrespective of the choice.” This, he says, is “the liberal definition of freedom,” and it is the one that has taken over in the culture and been imposed on the country by the courts.

Quite different is “the conservative view of freedom,” “the liberty our Founders understood.” This is “freedom coupled with the responsibility to something bigger or higher than the self.” True liberty is freedom in the service of virtue—not “the freedom to be as selfish as I want to be,” or “the freedom to be left alone,” but “the freedom to attend to one’s duties—duties to God, to family, and to neighbors.”

This kind of freedom depends upon and serves virtue, and virtue’s indispensable incubator and transmitter is the family. Thus “selflessness in the family is the basis for the political liberty we cherish as Americans.” If government is to defend liberty and promote the common welfare, then it must promote and defend the integrity of the traditional family. In doing so, it will foster virtue and rebuild the country’s declining social and moral capital, thus fostering liberty and strengthening family. The liberal cycle of decline—families weaken, disorder spreads, government steps in, families weaken still further—will be reversed.

As a libertarian-conservative Rauch naturally thinks this is a turn for the worse.

Goldwater and Reagan, and Madison and Jefferson, were saying that if you restrain government, you will strengthen society and foster virtue. Santorum is saying something more like the reverse: If you shore up the family, you will strengthen the social fabric and ultimately reduce dependence on government.

Where Goldwater denounced collectivism as the enemy of the individual, Santorum denounces individualism as the enemy of family. On page 426, Santorum says this: “In the conservative vision, people are first connected to and part of families: The family, not the individual, is the fundamental unit of society.” Those words are not merely uncomfortable with the individual-rights tradition of modern conservatism. They are incompatible with it.

Santorum seems to sense as much. In an interview with National Public Radio last month, he acknowledged his quarrel with “what I refer to as more of a libertarianish Right” and “this whole idea of personal autonomy.” In his book he comments, seemingly with a shrug, “Some will reject what I have to say as a kind of ‘Big Government’ conservatism.”

They sure will. A list of the government interventions that Santorum endorses includes national service, promotion of prison ministries, “individual development accounts,” publicly financed trust funds for children, community-investment incentives, strengthened obscenity enforcement, covenant marriage, assorted tax breaks, economic literacy programs in “every school in America” (his italics), and more. Lots more.

What I think we have here is one more crack in the post-World War II conservative movement, which has been coming apart at the seams at least since the end of the Cold War. Part of the glue that held libertarians and “traditionalists” together in the conservative coalition was the belief that Big Government was the chief enemy of intact, flourishing families. While libertarians were opposed to Big Government in principle as a violation of individual rights, traditionalists were concerned that it suffocated the initiative and self-reliance of families (and local communities). Thus the two factions could join forces in a campaign to roll back the encroachments of the state.

However, I think a lot of traditionalists and social conservatives have come to realize that the state is not the only enemy of the family. Many have turned their attention to the market as a force that corrodes traditional values, undermines cohesive families, and disrupts communities. Thus they are less skittish about using government power to protect families from those forces, and don’t see reducing government as an end in itself.

Of course, some traditionalists always realized this. Russell Kirk was just as opposed to a society dominated by the values of the market as he was by the spirit of collectivism manifested in socialism and communism. He championed the “humane economy” of Wilhelm Roepke who favored a market hemmed in by strong social, cultural and legal institutions. Such conservatives believed that families and humane values couldn’t flourish in a society of dog-eat-dog capitalism and expressive individualism. It’s also worth noting that the Catholic Church, not exactly a bastion of liberalism, has long insisted on a “just wage” so that one working parent (preferably the father) could support a family.

The Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that we are “dependent rational animals” – that is, that we all go through periods of dependence on others (infancy, sickness, disability) and that cultivating the virtues of mutual aid and solidarity is a precondition for the flourishing of any human community. This is not to say that government can or should be the one inculcating these virtues, but it can restrain some of the forces that make it difficult to practice them.

Conservatives have also joined with anti-corporate liberals in opposing the conflation of entertainment and information and marketing to children, and questioning the value of unchecked technological progress and eschewing the values of consumerism.

Needless to say, none of this shows the merit of the particular programs suggested by Santorum, or that the problems families face are always best addressed by government. The Catholic principle of “subsidiarity” suggests that many problems are best handled at the most local level feasible. Plus some of his “pro-family” statements consist of little more than scapegoating gay people. But I think it is an authentically conservative impulse to be concerned about how the social and economic environment affects the health of families beyond simply getting government off their backs.

O.C. premier tonight! Yeah! Forget all your highbrow HBO dramas and PBS documentaries. For sheer entertainment value you just can’t beat beautiful and rich (yet angsty!) teenagers and their equally beautiful and rich parents all set to the background of today’s hippest rock ‘n’ roll tunes!

(Incidentally, the O.C. is often called this generation’s 90210. I don’t think that’s quite accurate since the O.C. is chock-full of pop culture references that only someone over 25 would get. Maybe it’s 90210 for people who actually watched 90210 when it was on?)

Matthew Yglesias makes the important and often-overlooked distinction between intervening militarily to stop ongoing crimes like genocide and intervening for the sake of regime-change toward democracy:

Operations of that sort are clearly different from operations aimed at halting an ongoing genocide or preventing an imminent one. There is a huge amount of space, both practical and conceptual, between a genocidal government and a democratic one. The liberal hawks who’ve been trying to assimilate the Iraq case to Kosovo and Bosnia [are] being willfully obtuse about this. “Morally,” wrote Leon Wieseltier in his article “Against Innocence: A Liberal’s War, Too” (TNR 3/3/03) “there is no significant difference between Halabja and Srebrenica.” And there isn’t. There was, however, a huge difference between them chronologically. The United States did not have the option in March, 2003 of sending a couple hundred thousand troops back in time to prevent Saddam’s genocide of the Kurds.

[…]

At any rate, this is all just to say that I think the way out of this thicket is pretty clear. If you have a good reason to invade and occupy an area, then, sure, you should try to build a good government there (that beats trying to build a bad one). Stopping an actual genocide is a good reason for war, as are genuine national security threats. Beyond that, promoting democracy is good. But there are way more democracies today than there were in 1945, or even 1975, and virtually none of that was achieved through forcible regime-change.

This is good stuff. And, despite my quasi-isolationist leanings, I’m not opposed in principle to the U.S. acting (preferably with allies) to put a stop to genocide or similar crimes. But, as Yglesias rightly points out, this is a far cry from “regime change” as an end in itself. (Though I’m not convinced the U.S. needed to intervene in Kosovo. Moreover, if intervention was called for it should’ve been handled by the Europeans. That, however, is part of the broader argument I’d want to make for the U.S. to pull back from its security commitments to countries that are perfectly capable of defending themselves and/or dealing with regional conflicts if need be.)