Author: Lee M.

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke or St. Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or M. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.

Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books. If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why—the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed at some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance. The only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity (“mere Christianity” as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books. It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

–from “Introduction to St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation“

I’m not qualified to comment on the constitutional issues (since when did lack of qualification ever deter a blogger??), but otherwise I agree with The Weekly Standard‘s Jonathan Last:

I’m sympathetic to those who argue in favor of capital punishment. I understand and appreciate its theoretical benefits. But at the end of the day I don’t know that whatever deterrent or cathartic effects it has are worth the harm it does to our culture. Life, all life, is precious. When there is a workable, practical alternative, the government–meaning we the people–should not be in the business of destroying life.

Every time the government executes a prisoner, it hardens us that much more to the act of abortion, or embryonic stem-cell research, or to the every-day moments where mercy is needed.

In general, courts shouldn’t make law. But this case, since it applies only to juveniles, is a smaller form of overreach. Hopefully popular opinion will one day swell so that legislatures, and not the judiciary, will make the death penalty a thing of the past.

That is not a snarky rhetorical question, but an honest inquiry when I see things like this (via Kim-Loi Mergenthaler). When people say “Stop the genocide!” I can only assume they mean actual armed intervention, since I somehow doubt strongly worded petitions are going to deter the Janjaweed from carrying out their bloody work.

Indeed, the site linked above explicitly calls for “humanitarian intervention” along the lines of what was done in Kosovo – should we take that to mean airstrikes, or are we actually supposed to put troops on the ground this time? Either way we face the unappealing choice of civilian casualties (airstrikes) or American boys (and girls) engaged in ground warfare against the Sudanese militias (and government?). And how long are we supposed to stay on afterwards to “keep the peace”?

I’m not necessarily opposed to an intervention, but let’s be clear on what we’re talking about.

http://purposedrivendrinking.blogspot.com

Also see this. Genius.

Stuff on the ethics of war, mostly. I recently finished Robert L. Holmes’ On War and Morality.

Also, various articles:

• “War, Peace, & the State” by Murray Rothbard
• “Killing, Letting Die and the Alleged Necessity of Military Intervention” and “Violence and Hypocrisy” by Laurie Calhoun
• “Strategies of Annihilation: Total War in US History” by Joseph Stromberg

Reading Holmes and Calhoun in particular has convinced me that the “principle of double effect” is more problematic than I had thought. I am no longer sure it can be used to justify the unintentional but forseeable killing of civilians during war.

More on this later, probably.

Interesting interview with disability-rights activist Mary Johnson on Million Dollar Baby, Hunter S. Thompson and the “right” to die.

Well, what I think Ralph Luker means is to defend the concept of heresy – i.e. that there are some opinions that are beyond the pale. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mean “In Defense of Arianism” or “In Defense of Monophysitism” or what have you.

Anyway, good stuff here:

I’m not defending heresy here. I’m defending the idea that there are some claims that are just so wrong that they ought not be tolerated in the community of faith. I long ago gave up on my own particular sect, the United Methodists, who have grown so mushy in matters of doctrine that we have no principle of exclusion. You believe in re-incarnation? Welcome to the fellowship of the United Methodist Church. You think Jesus was one of many little pixies who periodically come from outer space to sprinkle fairy dust on human history? Fine. Welcome to our fellowship.

But there are some things that are just so wrong that they ought not be uttered or tolerated in the community of faith. The latest blasphemy heard in my community came from Representative Sam Johnson (R, Texas) who spoke at a veterans’ celebration at Suncreek United Methodist Church in Allen, Texas. According to the Carpetbagger, Brother Johnson was bragging about a recent conversation he’d had with George Bush on the porch at the White House.

Johnson said he told the president that night, “Syria is the problem. Syria is where those weapons of mass destruction are, in my view. You know, I can fly an F-15, put two nukes on ’em and I’ll make one pass. We won’t have to worry about Syria anymore.”The crowd roared with applause. Brother Carpetbagger asks:

Which of these is the most outrageous part of this story?
* That a sitting member of Congress is bragging about his desire to drop nuclear weapons?
* That Johnson has shared this idea with the president?
* That Johnson’s favored approach to non-proliferation is an unprovoked nuclear attack?
* That this speech was delivered in a church?
* That Johnson’s audience “roared with applause”?

All those questions bother me. Why am I not re-assured that he was speaking to another United Methodist when Johnson delivered this wisdom to President Bush? If we Methodists had a principle of rejection, neither Brother Bush nor Brother Johnson would be among us. The cross would have fallen on poor Brother Johnson right there on the spot at Suncreek United Methodist Church in Allen, Texas, and delivered him unto his eternal reward.

So, is advocating mass murder heresy? Should it at least call forth a stern pastoral rebuke?

Continuing the trend of blogging about books I haven’t read (and probably won’t read), I’ve recently read two interesting reviews of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? For those not in the know, Frank’s thesis is that culturally conservative red-state voters have been duped by the GOP’s ostensible (and, according to Frank, largely fake) concern for things like abortion and gay marriage into voting for economic policies that are directly counter to their class interests.

In First Things, James Nuechterlein accuses Frank of a “vulgar leftism” that attributes mass false-conscious to the middle-American proletariat taken in by those crafty conservatives:

The concept of sincere error is largely foreign to [Frank]. Contemporary conservatives and liberals alike are not just mistaken in their understanding of politics; they are for the most part venal sellouts for whom hypocrisy and mendacity are second nature.

Not so, to be sure, with the deluded folk. Their problem is not venality but, well, a certain form of stupidity. They are apparently just too dumb not to be taken in by the “hallucinatory appeal” of backlash cultural issues. Frank, one assumes, would quarrel with this way of putting his argument, but he offers no alternative explanation for how millions of middle Americans are so blind to their real interests and so self-destructive in their political behavior. The backlash, in his own words, “is a working-class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working-class people.” Or consider the typically ripe rhetorical flourish with which he concludes his book: “Kansas is ready to lead us singing into the apocalypse. It invites us all to join in, to lay down our lives so that others might cash out at the top; to renounce forever our middle-American prosperity in pursuit of a crimson fantasy of middle-American righteousness.”

Nuechterlein goes on to point out (rightly, in my view) that it is entirely possible and right to vote on issues other than economic ones:

Frank is led to this bizarre binary view of contemporary American politics—people are either knaves or fools—by his insistent (if entirely unexamined) assumption that the only rational politics is a material politics. Voters who place cultural or moral concerns above economic self-interest are obviously beset by a form of false consciousness (Frank never uses the term, but his analysis presupposes it). […]

It is fair enough to question the true significance to the lives of ordinary Americans of some items in Frank’s litany of backlash issues. But consider the three that regularly come to the fore: the role of religion in public life, gay marriage, and abortion. It is not irrational or irrelevant to consider the elimination of public acknowledgment of religion a likely contribution to the loss of moral seriousness in our civic life. It is not irrational or irrelevant to view with grave concern a redefinition of marriage that would overturn the practice of millennia. And it is certainly not irrational or irrelevant to insist on that most basic of civilizational requirements: the protection of innocent human life.

Meanwhile, at Reason Jesse Walker questions Frank’s insistence that what middle America really wants is big-government liberalism (a.k.a. social democracy). He suggests that working-class middle Americans may well have good reasons for distrusting bossy liberal elites as much as bossy conservative elites. For better or for worse, many working class people stopped seeing the government as acting in their interests. This, combined with know-it-all social engineering, may have contributed to the “backlash” Frank laments as much as conservative “wedge issues”:

If liberalism, in Frank’s words, “ceased to be relevant” to this “traditional constituency,” it was at least partly because the leading liberals were acting against that constituency’s interests. The hardhats of Charlestown didn’t face a laissez-faire Democratic Party that ignored their economic interests and a Republican Party that appealed to their values. They faced a big-government Democratic Party that was actively working against them and in favor of a wealthier group. […]

In short, perhaps the Great Backlash regards liberals as an elite because sometimes, just like conservatives, liberals really do act like an elite. You can do that when you have a powerful government at your command. Back in the Progressive Era, Eastern reformers offered a platform of “scientific” management, of giant enterprises and giant government working for the collective good. This set the template for the most destructive species of 20th-century liberalism: the liberalism that bulldozed neighborhoods to build freeways, that flooded farmers’ land to erect the Tennessee Valley Authority, that drafted kids to fight in what Bob Dole so accurately called “Democrat wars.”

Relatedly, over at The American Scene, Reihan Salam ponders what a fusion of blue-collar social conservatism and economic liberalism might look like:

I start with the premise that the government is necessarily crafting family policies whenever it makes economic policies, and that we ought to bias said policies in the direction of encouraging self-reliance by building the capacities for self-reliance. This emphasis on strong families and communities, in turn, reflects a “blue-collar social conservatism” as it exists in the wider world. I’ve always associated “blue-collar social conservatism” with local democracy, and respecting the habits and mores of decent communities.

I hate to pick on Pat Buchanan since, whatever his other flaws, he’s been an early and consistent opponent of the Iraq war and the broader “maximalist” view of the “war on terror.” Still, there seems to be a persistent confusion running through his recent writings that bears on the present troubles.

In his latest book, as well as his magazine, Buchanan has peddled the conceit that the conservative movement of Reagan and Goldwater has been “hijacked” by nefarious neo-conservatives who want to send America on a delusional messianic crusade to impose freedom and democracy on the world. By contrast, Buchanan wants the USA to return to what he argues is the traditional foreign policy of the fouders – non-interventionism (a.k.a. “isolationism”).

What he often seems to do though, is to conflate Goldwaterism/Reaganism with the isolationist “Old Right” that flourished in the years between the world wars. In arguing that the necons have hijacked the movement, he implies that they represent a radical departure from the tradition of Goldwater and Reagan. But I think by anyone’s reckoning Goldwater and Reagan were far more interventionist than isolationist, and this has been true of the post-World War II conservative movement as a whole. It was founded on the twin pillars of scaling back the state at home and defeating communism abroad. Non-interventionists either broke with the movement, or kept their views on foreign policy to themselves during the Cold War (for an excellent discussion of the various factions within the postwar conservative movement, see George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America).

To the extent that one accepts the logic of the Old Right – that domestic statism and foreign interventionism are simply two sides of the same coin – the conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan can only seem contradictory. The neoconservatives that Buchanan deplores have resolved the contradiction by making their peace with big government at home in exchange for aggressive government action abroad.

John Henry Newman once said that Protestantism was nothing but a halfway house between Roman Catholicism and liberalism. It may be that Goldwater-Reaganism holds the same place between the Old Right and the neoconservatism, and that Buchanan is trying to take up residence in that lonely halfway house.

There’s been a minor brouhaha over Thomas Woods’ Politically Incorrect Guide to American History (n.b. I haven’t read the book). Woods, a paleoconservative and frequent contributor to LewRockwell.com and The American Conservative, apparently takes a dim view of the North’s part in the Civil War (a.k.a. “The War Between the States,” a.k.a. “The War of Northern Aggression”(!)). Woods’ revisionism and his association with the unsavory League of the South brought down the wrath of the august The New York Times, which deemed it a “neocon” revision of American history.

The improbably named Max Boot took umbrage at this and penned a polemical review of Woods’ book at the Weekly Standard. Woods’ book, Boot correctly points out, is anything but a “neocon” rewriting of American history:

It tells you something about how debased political terminology has become when a leading light of the nutty League of the South is identified in the Paper of Record as a “neocon.” The original neocons, like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, were former Democrats who accepted the welfare state, racial equality, and other liberal accomplishments while insisting on a more assertive foreign policy than the McGovernites wanted. In other words, pretty much the opposite of what Woods believes. Woods is a paleocon, not a neocon. His online writings (helpfully collected by the blog isthatlegal.org) seethe with hatred for everything that neoconservatism (and modern America) stands for. Just after September 11, he wrote that the “barbarism of recent American foreign policy was bound to lead to a terrorist catastrophe on American soil.” Just before the Iraq War, he wrote that the Bush administration had undertaken an “open-ended commitment” to wage “war after war against the enemies of Israel, at America’s expense.” He blames this “imperial bluster” on “the neoconservative stable of armchair generals.”

From the sounds of things, Woods falls into the all-too common trap of being unable or unwilling to distinguish between a critique of the North’s prosecution of the war and sympathy for the slaveholders of the South. It is possible and entirely consistent to hold that a) the Lincoln administration’s abridgement of civil liberties and its embrace of “total war” were unconscionable and b) slavery was a crime that cried out to heaven for vengance. Indeed, one might see behind the destruction wrought upon the South a kind of divine judgment for its sins. Also, both of these issues are distinct from the question of whether there is or was a legal, constitutional, or moral right to secede from the Union.

This is rendered more distressing because I think we could use an honest reappraisal of Lincoln’s conduct of the war, if only because appeals to Lincoln’s precedent are often used as justification for similar measures in our own time (as in the piece linked above). But this is hard to do when it’s tainted with Confederate apologetics.

For his part, Boot writes as almost a parody of a neoconservative. Is there any war he doesn’t think the US should have been involved in? It seems not, since he has recently called for a kind of helot army with which the US will spread “freedom” at gunpoint around the globe. To have to choose between Boot’s manic interventionism and Woods’ Confederate nostalgia is pretty unappealing.

Part of the reason that the NYT and Boot are both so appaled by Woods may be that the neoconservatism touted by Boot is really not that different from mainstream liberalism.

Reason‘s Tim Cavanaugh puts it well:

I think it says more about how contemporary liberals view themselves than about our “debased political terminology” that anybody at The New York Times believes a neocon “revision” of American history would even be possible, or that it would differ in any substantive way from the way that history would be written by The New York Times itself.

The genius of neoconservatism is that it’s exactly in step with the progressivist, middle-of-the-road, big state view of American history they teach in school: The Articles of Confederation resulted in a disaster that taught the founders the value of a strong central state; the Whiskey rebels were dangerous kooks, not unlike the Branch Davidians of our own time; “States’ Rights” has always been a code word for slavery; President Woodrow Wilson was a man of vision but sadly was unable to achieve his goals for an international order; the America Firsters were even kookier and more marginal than the Whiskey rebels, and the best way to deal with one is to sock him in the jaw like in The Best Years of Our Lives; many well intentioned folks on the left underestimated the danger of the Soviet Union, but the anti-communist witch hunts of the fifties were a regrettable overreaction (the Left didn’t become dangerous until the late sixties and early seventies, when it embraced separatist and militant views that undermined the politics of consensus that made this country great); real civil rights progress only came when the federal government asserted its power over the refractory states; September 11 shocked America out of its isolationism and freed President George W. Bush (an excellent man, but distressingly shortsighted in some matters) from his naive opposition to nation-building. And so on.

Leave aside how much of it you agree or disagree with. What would the neocons add to the official version of American history? That Winston Churchill should have been made King of the United States as well as Prime Minister of Great Britain? That we missed a great opportunity by not jumping into the Franco-Prussian War? That we should have intervened on Sylvania’s side against Freedonia? The folks at The Times may have a narcissistic interest in highlighting small differences, but you can’t misuse language forever. When liberals look at the neocons, they see themselves.