TERRY EAGLETON 5

I continue to share thoughts here about Terry Eagleton’s 2009 book “Reason, Faith, and Revolution”.*

Eagleton (p.27) now starts to land some hard punches, to the reader as well as to the New Atheists and Ditchkins.

“The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don’t end up dead it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body. Those who do not see this dreadful image of a tortured innocent as the truth of history are likely to adopt some bright-eyed superstition such as the dream of untrammeled human progress for which, as we shall see, Ditchkins is a full-blooded apologist.”

Eagleton is on to something here – something really big.

While the human psyche’s tendency to try to sugar-coat the terrors that confront it has always exercised a deforming gravitational pull on any world-class religion – trying to make its Vision less frightening and less demanding – yet the New Testament, and especially the Gospels, simply won’t let you do that in Christianity and the other religions of the Book.

The reality of what happens in this incomplete world, shot through with the energy and consequences of the less-evolved and basal and un-Genuine human energies, screams out from the Crucifixion and every little crucifix.

The urge to escape that sight and that Message, added to any less-religious or less-theological urge to throw aside the knapsack of consciousness in order to flee faster, has resulted in smarmy, sentimentalized goo-goo passivity, happy-faced burbling (and some god-awful churchy guitar music), or – on the other hand – robust and maniacal insistence that no matter how many ‘problems’ human existence poses, the human Mind and the human Will can either withstand or conquer them.

And as the West grew out of the threateningly dark forests of the Middle Ages into the ever-improving material world of the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, into the Modern age of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, it seemed possible that ‘religion’ was just a left-over nightmare, a residual depression and shock left over from days when human beings were terrified by rampant disease and burdened by the sheer physical challenge of existing and sustaining what little bits of life could be managed.

In the United States, especially as its almost story-book combination of natural resources and insulation from the ancient and dangerous national feuds of the Old World combined to create the appearance of a totally fresh new Start for humanity, the illusion could more easily find the space and fuel to burn as a large and powerful flame. (If, of course, you were willing to not-see what had to be done to the indigenous peoples and what had to be done to the imported enslaved peoples.)

But Truth and Justice – not simply as abstract empty concepts to be filled by whatever good intentions and thoughts an individual might have, but rather as aspects of a Multi-Planar, God-sourced Reality – have no easy time of it in this world, and those who dare to commit to Truth and Justice are going to find themselves in boiling in hot water or encased in frigid ice very quickly. The gravitational pull of Primitiveness and Sin (not the same thing) must always be taken into account; the ‘powers of this world’ are built into it because they inhere in human beings.

And the numbing, shocking Truth of Christ’s Crucifixion is that this is the way things are, and that God’s recommended response is to endure suffering while staying true to the Genuine and Echt still struggling to be born into actuality. Make your commitment and take your lumps, relying in faith on that relationship with God that is always available, even if your personal shopping list isn’t going to be filled right away.

You have to learn how to handle the ‘birth-pangs’ of a humanity that is only tenuously and inconsistently clawing its way up from its own violent, lumpish Primitiveness and selfish Sinfulness.

In other Posts I have used the image of the Resistance agent in Occupied Europe in WW2: you know London is ‘there’, you know that sooner or later the Liberation is going to come, you get assorted responses – often in code – to the radio messages you transmit with your dinky little set, and occasionally you actually get an airdrop out of the dark of the night sky. And that’s pretty much what you have to go on to keep on going. But you know London is there and that the Liberation is being planned and that someday the day will come.

And if you are a Resistance agent with a particularly clear-eyed grip on your situation and on the nature of things in an Occupied world, then you don’t try to turn London into a teddy-bear or give up on London and figure you and your posse can handle the full weight of the Nazis all on your own.  This is not kid-stuff.

And yet keeping on in an Occupation, and trying to help Liberation along according to your own poor power to add or detract … this is a discipline (askesis, in the Greek) that brings life even as it guarantees exertion and pain and lots of discouragement and irritation. Again, this is not kid-stuff.

And there’s a difference between carrying-on some semblance of acceptable daily life in order to mask your Liberation allegiances from the ever-observant Nazi demonry and simply caving to the pressure to conform to the (mis-)Shapes of the Occupied World and just go along to get along.

This is never an easy line to draw. But like an ‘event horizon’ line, it’s one of those dynamic realities that you always have to keep your eye on, even if you can never get a solid fix on it.

The Catholic approach, a curious blend of ancient Roman and Mediterranean, has always been to set up an ideal and then urge everybody to try for it, fully aware of the fact that nobody can ever fulfill the ideal perfectly in this life. The Church’s law is called ‘canon’ law from the Greek kanon (let’s not get into the letters of the Greek alphabet), which means ideal.

Considering her mandate to extend to all humanity the Church has always realized that you can’t stuff everybody into the same box when it comes to how individuals are equipped to face the various realities and consequences of Sin: different people have different skills and weaknesses, and the best you can do is help them stay committed to the ideal and make allowances for when they fail (as all human beings inevitably do fail, one way or another). You can’t expect everybody to become ‘maquis’, living out in the woods and blowing up supply trains; you can’t expect everybody to have the same strengths and skills. But you can keep alive their faithfulness to Liberation and help their commitment along as best you can.

This ‘abundance of life’ that Christ talked about – I think of it as owning a musical instrument and finally getting it tuned so that it consistently makes music at the height of its possibilities as an instrument. Or again: as an automobile whose gears you have learned to operate, so that when you take it out onto the highway you are in ‘drive’ gear and not one of the lower gears that hold the engine back when you’re trying to drive at speed – and so the car swishes along.

In other words, this ‘abundance’ is the equivalent of reaching in this dimension and within your own Self that narrow-band (as in Narrow-Gate of the Gospels) of consciousness where you are operating out of your most Genuine and Echt energies that comprise the Image of God within you while at the same time you are attuned to the powerful transmission beam of God’s abiding Energy flowing into you.

This ‘narrowness’ of the Echt path is precisely what the Boomers rejected: since all life was groovy and (young) people were basically reeeely groovy, then you could wade into life as if it were a combination of Sunday-buffet and picnic at a nudist beach. Wheeeeeee! The Church, like all of the Axial religions, has always been more cautious: navigating in the narrows between Scylla and Charybdis, where the dangerous dynamics under the surface could pull you into one or the other of the lethal rocks … the wise captain doesn’t drive the great vessel and her burthen of souls at high-speed and over-confident self-assurance. This is why kids can’t be in command of ships.

The soul at this level of operation is not simply a radio for transmitting and receiving messages; it is not simply an instrument tuned to its highest competence. It is also something of a lung: drawing in great amounts of fresh air from the Source and converting that into energy to continue. This is not for kids.

None of this is accessible to Ditchkins and atheism.

They limit themselves to the single base Plane of existence, which isolates human beings from any Beyond. And then they have to try to make a decent meal out of what’s left.

The consequences of this are clear, as Eagleton sees (p.32), in how they approach ‘love’. For the Mono-Planar types ‘love’ can be nothing more than personal ‘feelings’ and/or  physical coupling. That love can mean Love in the far more capacious and awe-some and awe-full sense of a relationship that is Grounded in and participates in the life-force of God … they have no room for that; they can’t allow for it.

There isn’t a God and therefore human beings aren’t made in any Image of God. In a single stroke they wind up uprooting this Plane of Existence from any other Higher Plane and they also denude the human being of any Larger or Higher relationship, Help, or Source of self-understanding. A human being trying to figure him/herself out without God is an isolated islander trying to figure out the automobile. They may well wind up taking a dump in it and thinking it’s a nifty out-house and nothing more. Happens all the time.

Eagleton quotes Aquinas (p.32) who figured that the fog of Sin (let alone the ignorance of not-realizing you are made in the Image of God) keeps human beings from using the power of sex well. If humans don’t have any knowledge of the Image, then sex has no Larger Framing context: it’s just some groovy fun-thing to do for a little momentary pleasure – it has no Larger context or Purpose (and no ill-consequences).

And without the context of that Framing Image then there’s no sense of a governing relationship as a framework into which sex-activity has to fit. It breaks loose within the self and just runs wild (and by ‘wild’ I don’t mean ‘free’).

And in the process sex may get mixed up with all sorts of primal emotions and urges and passions like anger, the quest for power, and the primitive lust for violence that so often consumes personalities that have no Larger motivations (or Help) to refine or boundary the primitive utterly self-oriented (I call it self-collapsed, where the self collapses in on itself like a black hole in space).

Think of newbie fireman-trainees: they don’t realize the terrific force of water under pressure that drives the nozzle of a large fire-hose. A standing joke used to be to let the kid loose on the training field all by himself holding the nozzle. Then the pump-engine is turned up, the water flows under pressure, and the nozzle starts bucking like a wild living thing – and assumes a life of its own, the nozzle writhing in his hands and spraying a dangerously powerful stream of water all over the place, and even begins walking him all over the field as it mindlessly gives off energy. (There’s a dark side to it: not only the stream of water but the metal nozzle itself can inflict lethal injury if they get loose from the handler’s control and simply start some crazy dance on their own; they will strike whatever can’t get out of their way.)

Sex can quickly become like that. And things don’t improve when the Boomers figure – as they did and have now allowed subsequent generations to figure – that it’s all ‘fun’ and there are no consequences, and that any attempt to control the stream and the nozzle are just signs of ‘conformity’ and lack of imagination.

Sex is a human energy like any other. If there is no Framing context of Purpose then it will run riot like an incompetently-handled fire-hose. And if on top of all that you wind up with a culture that will not or cannot insist on any Mastery, then the whole dangerous lunacy is erected into a Plan and people regress to their limbic and animal elements. This is not progress. This is not liberation. This is not maturity. This is not for kids.

Jesus, Eagleton notes (p.31), seems in the Gospels not to have much respect for the family. He is continually calling his disciples away.

Eagleton offers the thought that this is due to Jesus’ human awareness that the actual end of time would probably be coming very soon, so the work of sustaining a family and participating in one was – like all other human occupations – going to be ending soon anyway. Sort of as if Jesus expected the Allies to be landing in a couple of days so it’s time to put aside the ‘usual’ and ‘ordinary’ tasks and get ready for the Liberation.

Maybe.

But I think Jesus was using a sense of exaggeration as a rhetorical device: He was constantly trying to get His hearers to think Beyond (not outside-of) the Box of this-world and this Mono-Plane. And He was always aware that the human tendency is to seek a little comfort and predictability wherever it can be found, and then just pull of the trail and set up camp there. (Remember when Peter, having just watched the eye-popping vision of Jesus conferring with Moses and Elijah, came up with the idea that we should put up three tents and just stay here in this groovy place where great stuff happens.)

Jesus wanted to get people used to thinking Beyond the Box, thinking ‘on the Multi-Plane’, seeing and sensing things from the perspective of a Beyond that is not simply ‘coming along’ someday, but rather a Beyond that is continually and continuously here now, participating in this Plane’s activities and always inviting humans to participate in its energy right here and right now. (So ‘stop looking around’, stop searching ‘the sky’, and use your Image-of-God ability to tune into that Beyond right here and right now.)

The disciples were trying to play checkers on what was really a Vulcan chess-board. Jesus was always trying to get them Beyond checkers and even beyond the Single-Board idea, and to see and grasp the Reality of the Multi-Plane.

And the narrow-gate to all that was within them.

So I don’t ever sense that Jesus was anti-family. I think where He was going with it was that if you don’t have a genuine Multi-Planar Grounding then you aren’t really ever going to be able to develop the experience of the family to its full possibility. If you aren’t an Echt Self, sustained by that Beyond while working toward the Image of God within you, then whatever family activity you engage in is never going to get off the ground; your family relationships and your kids are never going to get the full benefit of what ‘family’ can be when it is lived among humans committed to the Image of God within them and living within an active relationship with the God in Whose Image they are each and all made.

This concept of family is not kid-stuff.

The Church always had to try to keep this complex Vision alive, and you can see where it would be hard to keep alive among Nobel prize-winners or the student-bodies (or faculties) of the world’s most prestigious universities, let alone among the hugely-varying competences of human beings generally. (Which is not to say you need Mensa-level intelligence or a degree from an Ivy to embody and embrace the Christian message … not hardly.)

In this sense then, all genuine Christian theology is ‘liberating’; it seeks to help humans ‘live Beyond the constraints of the Mono-Plane’, to live closer to that Beyond and that Multi-Planar Reality in Whose Image they are made to begin with. You learn to live beyond the basal and primal within yourself and you learn to live in participation with the great Graced energies of God coursing through this PoE from Beyond and seeking to draw humans into the life of the Beyond which is the Image in which they are made in the first place .

There’s a marvelous, dynamic symmetry to it.

But this is not simply a matter of having some ‘faith’ or any ‘faith’. Faith, like loyalty, is only as good as that in which it is invested. Many humans have given their faith, their loyalty, their integrity, to evil causes (the success of the Third Reich and the ‘master race’ or the success of the Communist vision of human life, for example) and yet it has led them horribly off the Echt human path into monstrousness.

This much Eagleton sees (p.37). And he takes it further: the New Atheists will claim that they too seek ‘faith’, although it will be in ‘human progress’ or in this or that this-dimensional ‘cause’ (he uses the two specific examples of “feminism and anti-colonialism”).

But these objects of faith are insufficient as primary Grounds toward which and upon which to anchor a human self (let alone a collective movement of many humans). They are all Mono-Planar and are themselves ‘creatures’ or constructs; human constructs are incapable of serving as Ultimate Grounds for humans.

Such constructs may legitimately serve as expressions of a Genuinely Grounded human activity (although that constitutes an analysis all its own, separate from my general discussion here).

But this is precisely where atheism fails. Because by definition no ‘cause’ can be Grounded in anything Beyond, nor can any human being be grounded in any Beyond. In the atheist vision, there is no Beyond and no Multi-Plane.

Which means that there is no Boundary and no Shape imposed by any Beyond. The this-dimensional construct and the this-dimensional human being are ‘liberated’ from Shape and Boundary.

This is not liberation; this is Shapelessness. And Shapelessness is not a good thing for human beings; and lack of Boundary is not a good thing for human energies.

So, Eagleton says (p.37), the Ditckins-types are wayyyy off course when they say that the world is sort of nice, and would be a whole lot nicer, except for the dark derangements of ‘religious believers’.

A world Flattened and squashed into its most basic levels, and human beings equally Flattened and un-Shaped … this is not a happy picture. And the atheists – even if on the surface ‘optimistic’ or ‘progressive’ – have to adopt a looney sort of happy-face vision of things in order to keep on going.

There’s a reason why Larry McMurtry (if memory serves) described this earth as “a boneyard mostly, but pretty in the sun”. The atheists have to concentrate on the ‘pretty in the sun’ and ignore the ‘boneyard’. And worse, they have to ignore how the Mono-Plane creates a boneyard within the individual human being.

You can see, perhaps, why they don’t want to go into these matters.

But that hardly makes them ‘radical’ or particularly insightful. As Eagleton notes (p.39) one of the Ditchkins triad, Daniel Dennett, actually thinks the invasion was a good idea except that it wasn’t carried out properly. There’s nothing radical there; in fact it’s conventional in a frighteningly in-the-Box and conformist sort of way.

If there are no boundaries, if there is no Boundary and no Shape, then what’s wrong with murder, for example?

Current and recent generations of young have a problem with that (if you press them enough to think beyond simply parroting the ‘sensitive’ or Correct answer).

Is it wrong simply because there’s a law against it? Then if the government passes a law that makes murder legal it’s OK to do it.

Is it wrong because it serves no useful purpose? But what if by murdering a parent can get money to support his/her children? That’s a useful and good purpose.

Is it wrong because it ‘feels wrong’? But feelings change. And on top of that, at any given time different human beings can have different feelings.

What makes murder wrong such that a general moral and legal ban upon it can be enacted and enforced?

And what justifies such a ban being valid even for other cultures and other times? To kids raised with the idea of ‘total autonomy’ and a non-judgmental ‘respect’ for any thoughts that anybody ‘has’ or ‘likes’, what justifies you intruding upon others’ preferences?

It’s frightening how many today would be caught like a deer in the headlights if the questions were put to them.

They have been trained that there is no Beyond and that you can’t go around interfering with people’s ‘total autonomy’ (unless you’re a government that ‘gets it’ and then you can impose anything on anybody who ‘just doesn’t get it’).

So they reach a certain point – and it doesn’t take long to reach it – and simply disconnect: who knows? It’s just the way things are.

This is no type of Citizenry upon whom to ground the governance of a government, nor upon whom to rely for the sustainment of democracy against a government increasingly seeking to engorge its writ.

The question of ‘liberation theology’ comes up (p.39). This is an approach that arose among Western missionaries especially in Latin and South America in the difficult and contorted period when US interests supported repressive (and thus reliable) governments and established elites whereas the peasantry might have been susceptible to Communist agitation. (Whackulently, the US support for the repressive governments drove the peasants even closer to the Communists who promised ‘liberation’ where the US was clearly bringing nothing but more repression.)

In these countries, so often of a dense Catholic heritage through the work of earlier centuries of missionaries, the hierarchy – caught as so often between governments with the power to kill and the Gospel – tried to thread their way and make accommodations. (Matters not made any easier by the class-origins of many of the members of the hierarchy.)

Some missionaries and theological thinkers came to believe that the Gospel demands not simply prayer for the poor, but immediate action. Which, in terms of ‘giving alms to the poor’ has a long and respectable Christian heritage.

But then further, they came to believe that no Christian can be Echt unless s/he works to change the material conditions which oppress and make the poor dependent on alms to begin with. Which moved things further along a difficult road.

Culture is never easily messed with, nor should it be. Human beings are culture-making beings and rely on culture to Shape them and in some ways mediate their relation to the Beyond.

But government is not the same as culture. And the American Revolution was certainly clear on that point, precisely seeking to limit the incursions of Leviathan in the large and more vital culture and society of the Citizens.

So how far can – or must – a committed Christian go toward changing the governmental policies or structures that oppress the poor, and often violently so?

What happens in a theological approach where the individual Christian is not morally justified in not working to change conditions, no matter if it leads to overt – perhaps deliberately intended - violence in the service of the poor?

This is a hugely fraught matrix of issues and questions.

But surely atheism can offer little beyond adopting either a happy-face approach or an acquiescent passivity or simply engaging in political revolution.

It can only offer some form of political illusion or political action, on the basal PoE, because there is no Larger Framework that atheism admits and there is no Help from any Beyond. Atheism plays on no Larger Board or Boards.

The line between intensified spiritual commitment and intensified political action is as close as you come to a tectonic plate-boundary in religious matters. There is no clear and easy way through it and the Church’s vision is to thread its way carefully; ‘damn the torpedoes’ works in war (sometimes) but it’s no basis for a system of government or cultural guidance. Had they not been so turned-off by things-military, the Boomers probably would have found Admiral Farragut’s brassy words at Mobile Bay to be a perfect capture of their sense of things.

So once you take Shape and Boundaries out of the equation – and the Beyond that gives them their capital-importance – then human beings become Shapeless and invertebrate. Yet they remain still possessed of all of their vitalities and energies. Especially if those human beings are not aware of the Challenge to increasingly operate out of their Higher, pre-frontal brainparts and are simply allowed to mistake the Shapeless vitality of the Lower, limbic brainparts as ‘life’ and ‘freedom’.

And if this is a bad way to raise kids, it is even more frakkulous to skew an entire society’s culture such that this sort of dreck is passed on as cultural wisdom and required of any member of the culture.

The Axial religions are each in their way aware of the ‘narrowness’ of the Genuine Path.

The Catholic Church – going back to the days when the Roman emperors and their empire collapsed, leaving the Church more or less in charge of culture and civilization in the West – is painfully aware of how much care must go into the construction and navigation of a Culture.

Like a great ship, a Culture must be handled with deliberation and care and prudence and caution. You don’t just play with them like you would with your personal motorboat out in the harbor or out on the lake on a summer Sunday afternoon.

There’s a reason why your 747 or 777 pilot doesn’t play games up in the air; no fancy loop-the-loops or flying real low to scare the chickens in the barnyard.

In a way, you have to handle a Great Culture the way you would fly a WW2 bomber, and not a WW2 fighter plane. The fighter pilot, so often alone in his highly-maneuverable aircraft, precisely has to operate on quick, instinctual responses in order to win his dogfight; thus he does his job. Whereas the bomber pilot has to hold his big, lumbering craft steady – no matter how much flak and threat from enemy fire and fighters, no matter what the weather and wind conditions are – in order to provide a steady and accurate run into the target; thus he does his job.

Trying to handle a Great Culture as if it were a personal pleasure boat or a fighter-plane isn’t going to work well at all. In fact it’s going to wreck lives and ruin the craft itself.

All of that has been going on for the past few decades around here. Yes, it was going on earlier than that – think of kids raised in the Jazz Age of the pre-Depression 1920s. But the Boomers were much more numerous.

And then when certain advocacies began to put forth various philosophical ideas as ‘justifications’ for creating more ‘social space’ for themselves, then the impatience and inexperienced callowness of the Boomer youth was erected into a Plan. And into national cultural policy.

The New Atheists are just the most recent ‘public intellectuals’ who are surfing the need of various influential ‘elites’ to get rid of any obstructions to this whakkulent Plan.

And one of the biggest of those obstructions is God-Religion-Beyond. And especially in the US, the Catholic version of Christianity, which stubbornly stands as a reminder that there is a Beyond; that there is a certain Shape and certain Boundaries which are built-into human beings and must govern their actions; that this is not a matter of ‘preference’ but rather a sober and accurate assessment of Reality at its most profound and Genuine level; and that conducting a human life is not something to be left to kids and the whimsy of ‘feelings’ and passing preferences.

So long as there is enough pressure to deny all of those elements, the New Atheists will always sound like they are making useful sense.

But they aren’t. Not hardly.

NOTES

*New London: Yale University Press. ISBN: 978-0-300-15179-4

ROSS DOUTHAT ENDS RELIGION

From that same edition of ‘The Atlantic’ another ‘Idea’ the mag considers worthy of note is Ross Douthat’s short piece entitled and declaring that “The Catholic Church Is Finished”.

His thesis is that the pedophile priest crisis – on oxygen provided by his own paper, ‘The New York Times’ – is the end for the Catholic Church, taking its place as the Church’s Watergate or Waterloo or as “another Reformation”.

There’s a little incoherence in that last: the Reformation took place in the 16th century and, not to put too fine a point on it, the Church survived that and actually emerged stronger and in some ways ‘reformed’ herself.

As for the Watergate trope, I can understand any paper’s (and any reporter’s) burning desire to repeat the exploits of the journalism establishment in those halcyon days. But I’m not sure that you get the same level of intentional cover-up, the same ‘smoking gun’ excitement. Especially once you make rather necessary allowances for the interchange between various levels and jurisdictions of this world-wide Church’s governance and for efforts – not at all respected here – to avoid a hasty race to judgment that might well be a misapplication of the sovereign legal authority (which can impose defrocking or even excommunication on a priest, destroying both a life-calling and perhaps spiritual membership and identity itself).

Anyone who can – say – ‘understand’ the Pentagon’s desire not to let too much out, or too soon, about – say – Abu Ghraib or Gitmo or, more proportionally accurate, the mistakes or even misdeeds committed in the course of military operations, can surely grasp the need any large organization has not only for ‘protecting itself’ by the too-glitzy ‘cover-up’ but even ‘protecting itself’ by preventing the too-hasty application of its own laws before everything is known and considered.

And rules of evidence apply in the Church law more than they do in the military law setting, and beyond that, the Church may be far less into the ‘cover-up’ business than the Pentagon or the CIA or various other elements of the US government. Surely the ongoing refusal to prosecute the high-level attorneys who approved torture and advised how best to avoid torturous activities being actually colorable as ‘torture’ in the legal sense … surely that ongoing refusal doesn’t spell the end of Obama’s Administration or of the US government.

Which is not to say that I condone or approve of the sexual violation of anybody by anybody else, especially when one of the parties is at least legally a ‘child’.

But then again, there are all those teens who have been scooped up and are languishing in various US government ‘black sites’ and facilities here there and everywhere around the planet. And who has even bothered to count, let alone ‘report about’, the number of children, women, and certainly adults who are dead or permanently maimed because of military operations that went awry, were not too particular in their ‘authorized targets’ to begin with, or were the poisoned fruit of the poisonous tree of a fundamental flaw at the level of strategic vision in the first place?

If Mr. Douthat and his paper are ‘patriotic’ enough to give the offending sovereignty – i.e. the US government – an indulgent Pass on all that, then I’m a little curious as to why they aren’t at least a little more ‘understanding’ in the Church matter.

Or at least that they might take the time to present coherent arguments why not. And why the Church is so worthy of being ‘ended’.

Otherwise my first thought is to wonder why they are creating so much noise and so little light (as Abe Lincoln said about the thunderstorm that caught him one night while out on the road riding circuit).

He does manage to get some history accurately: “the Church has been horrifyingly corrupt in previous eras and still survived”. Yes. Although I’d add that the Renaissance Papacy was reformed by the Church herself and there hasn’t been another outbreak of that sort of thing (which at the time was a style of governance that was pretty much par for the course in Europe, and elsewhere – and in some places still is).

The Church has had to take legitimate criticism. But the amazing thing about her is that she has made constructive use of that criticism in improving her operations. And few governments have ever called a system-wide top-level world-conference to consider Everything, as the Church did most recently in 1962-5 with the Second Vatican Council.

Indeed, it was that Council that earned the Church the apparently undying enmity of many American religious elites who were and are profoundly dissatisfied with the incompleteness of the updating, or the slow pace, or the concept of any Church governance except the current American conceptions of government by (pick one: populist democracy, knowledgeable elites, ‘the right kind’ or gender or sexual orientation or ethnic background or nationality of leaders).

And these Catholic elites in America are also upset that much of the Church’s rather comprehensive and age-old vision creates a formidable conceptual inconvenience for various currently politically influential ‘identities’ who aren’t used to being said No to, who have found themselves pandered to and deferred to by the US political establishment itself, and who would very much like – to use Henry II’s image – to “be rid of this troublesome priest”.

As best I can see, the Church is currently an ongoing inconvenience to the American Left (opposition to abortion, disapproval of overt homosexual behavior, support of the Family as an institution, refusal to ordain women, and in some cases for having an ordained priesthood at all). On top of all the governance stuff.

And to the American Right (opposition to unjust wars – including ‘preventive’, opposition to ‘torture’ – she’s been there-done that and earned her opposition the hard way, and concerned for the right of every human being to a living wage and the necessities of subsistence at a decent level, and her refusal to regress to a Biblical fundamentalism – also been there-done that and learned the hard way). And in general, her support of those capital letter concepts such as Truth, Justice, Virtue, Character and so on that are like holy water to a vampire when discussed in front of current American elites.

All in all, the Church presents a troublesome speed-bump to an awful lot of politically connected folks who are used to having their way.

And Douthat is being a tad sleazy himself by speaking about “this year” as if his paper and its subsidiary organs hadn’t been after the Church for the past quarter-century, and especially the past decade or so, in regard to the sex-abuse issue. But to mention all those previous Phases of the campaign – currently we’re in the 4th by my count – might give an unsuspecting reader grounds for wondering if this isn’t something of a vendetta, or an organized campaign like Tailhook as it was applied to the Navy back in 1991.

Then he ends his short piece by qualifying his thesis to the point of extinction: “But if the Church isn’t finished period, it can still be finished for certain people, in certain contexts, at certain times”. (I’ve heard of people existing in certain places, but in certain “contexts”?)

This suggests to me that he is up to an interesting MIRV-mix of objectives here:

First, he is signaling all around that the American campaign is willing to settle for the Church simply being erased as a moral and spiritual obstruction here and now in America. This is a big dial-back of Objective;

Second, he is signaling to the American anti-Church ‘faithful’ or ‘cadres’ that this is the new Party line;

Third, he is trying to make a nice, status-enhancing noise that will keep up his creds and his union card as a ‘liberal’ and that will keep him on the necessary Beltway A-lists for elite dinner parties while at the same time trying not to sound too shrill and uninformed (all those historical references tossed about).

But there is also a fourth bit: “for millions in Europe and America, Catholicism is probably permanently associated with sexual scandal rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ”.

In other words, this is what he hopes will be the case. And again, the campaign will now settle for that result, since it will for all its practical and political purposes have removed the Church as a rival to either Left or Right’s own Griff nach der Weltmacht, their own abiding desires to have untrammeled moral influence and unrivalled ‘autonomy’ to do whatever they think the world and the species need in order to be fulfilled.

(I can’t help but observe that Left and Right have come to an ominous but cozy bipartisanship in their recent invention of ‘humanitarian intervention’: under that doctrine, any country can be invaded if any of its citizens are declared by Washington to be ‘oppressed’ in any sense of that capaciously-defined term – and if while there rescuing the victims of the aforesaid oppression, the troops wind up in control of oil, strategically useful positioning, precious metals, or just nice scenery … well, that’s just God’s way of rewarding America for being His Deputy … neat.)

But I would say that the Americans (Leftists and Rightists together) have brought the proverbial knife to a gunfight.

And the manner of it is on this wise: The Church’s greatest strength has always been its ability to provide – with some degree of efficacy – a support for the abiding human desire to encounter the Divine. And a Divine that Grounds their lives, Cares for them, and seeks in divers mysterious ways to accompany their passage through this world (so often a Vale of Tears – ask the Iraqis).

The current American campaign, having failed to establish its own Flat vision of a world un-Accompanied, un-Guided, un-Assisted – and who, really, could be surprised? – now seeks not so much to establish itself through its own Vision, but rather to wreck the alternative (rival) Vision as embodied most stubbornly in the Church.

But, refusing to accept the existence of a Beyond, and a personal Deity, most of the elite strategists are operating in a ‘Battlespace’ limited to two-dimensions. The dimension of the Beyond is utterly beyond them – if I may – and so they keep finding themselves in a situation similar to that of an 18th century admiral whose fleet is transported in time to, say, World War 2 in the Pacific: utterly unaware that his target can operate beneath or above the surface of the sea, or at distances far beyond the range of the human eye at the masthead, he finds himself unable to strike a decisive blow.

They attack using tenuous matters or using ‘ideas’ – which have proven more than enough to cow the average Beltway pol but don’t really register with the billions of human beings who seek Encounter with the Divine. And those billions know that – however imperfectly – the Church always seeks to provide and support them in the satisfaction of that deep longing.

In that sense the Church is operating on truly 'interior lines': despite having a large institutional establishment, she operates in and addresses herself to the realm of the human spirit, especially as that spirit connects with what she unalterably proclaims as the realm of the Spirit, of the Divine, and the human relationship to that realm. Hers is neither a Flat vision nor a two-dimensional 'surface' Battlespace.

And many human beings respond to that, want that, need that.

But the American 'liberals' as they have evolved now precisely operate in a Flat, two-dimensional Battlespace because they either a) insist that 'spirit' is only a 'private' matter and perhaps an illusion like Marley's Ghost or b) deny that 'spirit' and the realm of 'spirit' and the Realm of Spirit exist at all.

Thus they are trying to 'take down' the Church as if it were just another earthly organization (like the Navy with Tailhook and all its follow-ons, as I have said before).

They are waging a two-dimensional campaign against a three-dimensional or four-dimensional entity, and they are trying to fight with their old familiar two-dimensional weapons. While in many cases also refusing to admit that those extra dimensions exist at all.

(Let alone taking into account the possibility, as Sun Tzu might point out, that within those extra dimensions there exists for the Church a powerful Ally.)

But the 'liberals' will keep trying, seeking to make the Church's entire existence depend on the occasional failures - some of them repugnant - of individual priests (the Third Phase that began in 2002) or of the Church's handling of them (Rome and Europe in the Fourth Phase that began this year).

So where all this winds up is anybody’s guess, but I’m thinking that the Church isn’t going to fall into the role that the elites have scripted for it, even here in America. The elites know what they want, but have no idea how to bring it about – nor have they even figured out if what they want is a workable objective in the first place. Sorta like the Iraq War, come to think of it. But the Church isn’t Iraq. Although it does indeed seem that Beltway elites are always and everywhere Beltway elites.

Why don’t I think their dampdreams will come true? Because I think that despite the wide success of Political Correctness over here, it hasn’t really been a deep success; and that like the officials of a certain German government between 1933 and 1945, there are many well-coiffed Beltway heads that look at the windows at the public ‘out there’ and wonder just how committed to The Great Revolution most of those really folks are. And that a lot of those folks haven’t so much accepted The Great Revolution and its New Order, nor have even acquiesced in it, but have simply learned how to keep a straight face and their thoughts to themselves.

Mussolini used to fear that too, but consoled himself with the fantasy that he was too personally full of magnetism for any large number of Italians to resist his seductive energies.

It seems, from reading Douthat’s piece here, that he is starting to feel the pull of that consolation. And Musso isn’t around to advise him: been there, done that, don’t .

Being a Catholic myself, I accept that in this remarkably dynamic and complex Universe, Musso certainly is rattling around somewhere – but the American elites, even if he came to them, would consider him merely “a bit of undigested beef”.

And they will bumble furiously on.

ADDENDUM

I try not to Post too often, to give readers a chance to read one before another one is up. But I had to put this Post up quickly for the following reason: I am certain that there are many American Catholics trying to do their best, priests included, and have to face daily the over-hyped opprobrium fanned by the assorted political and econonomic interests who find it convenient to carry on this campaign against the Church.

And I want to put a little perspective into things so that they all don't feel like they are being played for fools by some alleged monstrous world-wide sinister organization.

Nor am I seeking to 'minimize' the pain of authentic victims of failures by individual priests or hierarchs who have actually sought to minimize authentic grievances.

But perspective is needed here, just as much - as even the 'liberals' would insist - it is needed when judging the past decade's worth of activity of the US government here, there, and everywhere in the Global War on Terror (or whatever they are calling the thing nowadays - I don't get all the Party-line Memos).

ABUSING RELIGION

James Carroll, in a not-always displayed acuteness that cuts against the grain of ‘liberal’ conventional wisdom, piques the imagination today with a column that touches – but doesn’t dig into – the following thought: the intensifying ‘liberal-secular’ assault on all things religious (especially the tremendously handy and assorted-interests-pleasing Catholic sex abuse crisis) is directly proportional to the secular-liberal fear that its own ‘paradise’ now so clearly reveals itself as cracked (and perhaps crackpot) that it must ‘go negative’ in order to distract everybody from its own failures.

“A focus on religious failures”, he observes, “can let the broader culture off the hook”.

Of course, things are helped along – in a neatly self-licking ice-cream cone sorta way – by the Pope recently speaking about “sin within the Church itself”. The Pope is on to something here. But it’s hardly evidence of his originality: the Church has been saying that about itself since the beginning (and it is, at this point, ten times older than the American republic and rather more experienced in matters of this world and of the Next).

The Church embodies (though not fully) God’s presence in human history, but while the pinnacle of its Ideals reach into that Beyond which infuses it with Spirit and Grace, the roots of its historical edifice – like the Vatican buildings themselves – drive into the mushy flatlands of that humanity and its history of which it is composed.

Nor does it help that while trying to move humans toward living life in God (which, like B-29s trying to fly in the jetstream, requires some advanced development of the individual pilot’s skills), the Church can’t get too far ahead of the stubbornly less-advanced elements of human-ness. For every first-rate saint who has matched the mastery of sailing his or her human vessel to the utter mystery of the Divine Wind, there have been so many thousands whose religious capability remained anchored in the darker and more primal human gropings toward the Unseen.

But when it comes to humans and their histories, God seems persistently willing to work with what’s available, and the Church can’t get too far ahead of God either.

But, Carroll notes, “we are living through the simultaneous breakdowns of the two great secular myths that have defined Western civilization for 200 years – the socialist idea of equality and the organizing ethos of nationalism”. If We imagine – and not wrongly – that the Left for so long has tried to bring about a paradise of Equality, and the Right a paradise of Order, then We might also imagine that both have gotten somewhat ahead of human history.

Well, what the hey? How can you get anything done if you don’t get ahead and lead?

But if you get too far ahead, or too excited, you might stop trying to lead and simply try to pull.

And you won’t only try to pull History along, although you’re perhaps too far ahead for any good that you might accomplish; you’ll start trying to pull human-ness along.

And that doesn’t often end well.

The Church learned that the hard way long ago.

The much much younger Enlightenment West hasn’t yet learned that. Indeed, it holds itself being far too knowledgeable and adventurous to be held back by ‘old’ knowledge (don’t trust anything over 200 years old, the Enlightenment and Romantic West might say – at least until the Boomers knocked it down to 30).

Funny, but in the vampire movies – especially the best of them – it was the older vampire that the younger vampire must learn – the hard way, if necessary – to respect. There was knowledge and power that emanated from a lonnnnng ability to survive. A two-thousand year-old vampire would be much more capable than a two-hundred year-old one, and the youngster would do well to bear that in mind.

Of course, neither the revolutions of the Left nor the nation-states of the Right are really willing to see themselves as vampires. Though in a way there is a vampiric strain in both, as there is in all things human, and in humans themselves. But it’s a useful metaphor, I think.

And it makes for a certain patience and humility that youth never really grasps until later, if not – alas – until sometimes it is too late.

And then Consequences kick in and Life takes one of its nasty, but helpfully corrective, turns.

Although, Consequences having a life of their own and not being simply the cuddly resolved-in-the-third-act plot problems of Hollywood, things can never be quite the same again. Think of how ‘un-American’ the end of “Casablanca” really was: the hero (no great shakes in the looks department) didn’t wind up getting the girl, and ‘the other guy’ (no great shakes in the personality department) turns out to be successfully dedicated to a demanding life of self-sacrifice in the awesomely threatening face of awesomely organized evil.

(And, face it, in this day of self-assured, bleating, butter-greasy Beltway slickies, who can’t cast a wistful eye at Inspector Reynaud’s refreshing candor: “Make it ten thousand - I’m only a poor, corrupt official ” … ?)

So the Church, drawing upon a wisdom drawn from the Greeks and the Romans, developed canon law. The word ‘canon’ does not derive from the artillery piece, but rather from the Greek ‘kanon’ – target or ideal. You make a law to embody the Ideal, giving people something to aim at and to grow toward, while knowing that they are certain to fall short from time to time or even a lot of the time.

This is an approach to Law different from the approach that presumes everybody will and must fulfill it all the time. The ‘kanon-ical’ approach requires both stern-ness and patience, and the humility to realize that in this world even the guards and judges have probably (perhaps most probably) committed their share of law-breaking. Thus the balky and unruly human circus column makes its pilgrim way through Time. If it is a ‘line of march’, it is so only in that marvelously and stubbornly human way once ascribed to Italian military operations generally.

Carroll warms to his thought as he goes along: “The hollowing out of US institutions, from a Congress in the grip of political paralysis to an extravagantly funded Pentagon that cannot defeat enemies whose bombs are made with fertilizer, to an economic regulatory system that has no influence, much less control, over financial predators – all of this suggests a breakdown not just of government, but of the national idea”. [italics mine]*

To which antiphon one can only respond: Bingo!

He names, accurately but without getting into the much more painful specifics as to how they came about, so fundamental a catastrophe as “the collapsed structures of meaning”, which has cut humanity (in the West, at least) “loose from all moorings”. Like my favorite image of the Ferris wheel, broken loose from its struts and careening drunkenly along the midway (one of Spielberg’s most telling images, in my book).

In this country, this is all the result of Congress ‘bipartisanly’ choosing to pander both to Big Pain and to Big Money.

The Big Pain is the organized advocacy against ‘oppression’, impossibly broadly defined if you are going to engorge and deploy the powers of a theoretically limited Constitutional government to assuage its every manifestation.

The Big Money is – as always – the big money. But now with a twist, and a monstrous one. Whereas in the pre-1970 era of US history, the money itself was made by huge corporately organized productive enterprises, since 1980 or so the money is simply ‘there’, and the ‘big money men’ (not intended in a genderist way) are financial managers, who produce nothing but paper and reeking ‘instruments’ … and large bonuses, which they share with the pols who in grateful exchange have deployed their public authority to cage the dogs of regulation.

In fact, you might say that at this point the only thing the country produces is money (printing the stuff at will) and ‘instruments’.

Oh, and military stuff – which it both sells to other countries and uses against them (increasingly), in the service of ‘humanitarian imperialism’ or ‘resource imperialism’ or – the wave of the future – both, with the former fronting for the latter.

After all you can’t eat all those paper ‘instruments’ – or even all those benjamins, and you can’t run your car on them. For the necessities of life, you need other folks’ stuff. That’s what the ‘national interest’ is becoming, and that’s what the military will have to go out and grab – for as long as the game lasts. Which probably won’t be another two thousand years. Or maybe even another two hundred. Or even a tenth of that.

But this started out about the Church, so let’s not digress.

The Church, Carroll’s own paper now uneasily reports, is getting ready to stand up against the decades-long sustained effort to paint it as an ongoing Nixonian cover-up of what is essentially an ongoing sex-abuse enterprise.

I can’t help but think of Audi, in the 1980s, after several years of an American soap-opera stampede claiming that its Teutonic-engineered, high-performance automobiles lumpishly accelerated when the brake pedal was depressed (so the embarrassed drivers claimed in their civil court filings). After a spell of the then-unfamiliar horror-stories from this and that telegenically posed driver, Audi decided that the customer cannot always be presumed to be right, especially when there’s a bundle to be made by said customer(s) through a successfully staged lawsuit.

(Whereas the type of European who would buy an Audi might not perhaps wish to embarrass him/herself by such a gambit, a new generation of Americans – Audi discovered - felt that Pain and its pecuniary assuagement was a perfectly respectable business undertaking.)

So now the Church is going to break the ‘script’; rather than stand conveniently still as all manner of opprobrium is heaped upon it, or mumble or fumble in an effort to assuage its tormentors and hope that they will be appeased, the Church has decided to stand up – both to face its tormentors and itself.

Good. Should have been done long ago on both counts.

As to whether the larger strategic purposes of this long torment have been achieved – that the Church’s moral stature among its adherents and in the public eye has been sufficiently weakened so that it can no longer offer credible resistance to this, that, and the other programme of the Left’s and the Right’s pandered constituencies – remains to be seen, but I’m thinking not.

And at this point, as might be inferred from Carroll’s piece, this country and its people – and The People – are in dire need of the Beyond: for meaning and for mooring, as individuals, as communities, and as the Citizens of a Constitutional Republic that has lost both its bearings and its very grounding.

The Church isn’t perfect, but then has never claimed that it/she was. Which is a bit more than the US government can say at this point (whether in its Leftish reforms or its Rightist wars or its bipartisan ‘humanitarian imperialism’ deployed both domestically and abroad). The Church has never claimed to make History, nor to be its Shaper.

But in a way far deeper and wider and higher than any contemporary faddist can assert, the Church does indeed ‘get it’, and has, and will continue to.

The best this country can hope is to continue to share Time and History with her.

But if that is to be, then it will take more virtue than a flat and shallow ‘optimism’.

The courage of patience and humility would be a good place to start.

Especially if We can impose it upon Ourselves before Time and History do it for Us.

NOTES

*And you are welcome to give some thought to what is/was America's “National Idea”.

It seems to me that the Framers wanted to provide a reliable limited government that would create the stable ‘space’ wherein human energy, ingenuity and enterprise could flourish and the world would be able to see what a free people could accomplish when unhampered by despotism.

Beyond that they could not go without the government starting to take on the tasks and require the powers of God. Which would inevitably result in a ‘benevolent despotism’, which benevolence they mistrusted over the long run; it would morph into a mere ‘despotism’.

And that is precisely what has happened over time. Especially when, beyond the classic concerns for decent economic rights in the Depression that resulted in the New Deal of the 1930s, the hugely more intangible and questionable programmes of the late 1960s and early 1970s demanded a far more fundamental re-casting of the National Idea.

And then, of course, the revolutionizing advocates of that re-jiggering realized that their visions were sooo tenuous (if desirable, in a best-case outcome scenario at least) and questionable that any process of genuine public deliberation would quite possibly result in that re-jiggering being largely watered down. Thus their revolutionary play-book required that in the service of their visions the entire process of public-deliberation be side-stepped. Which was effected with the whole-hearted assistance of vote-desperate Dems, who enshrined their highly questionable ideas with the full authority of the Federal government.

Thus the paralysis of government which Carroll now sees. The Beltway is now so deeply indentured to the ‘revolutions of the identities’ for votes (and to the corporations for PAC cash) that hardly any pol is sufficiently ‘free’ to take any genuinely corrective and reformative action at this point.

Which is why I see the Beltway now as being in much the same mess as the Soviet ‘elites’ of the mid-1970s: they know they’ve made a hash of it and that things can’t go on like this, but they hope to just have their fun and then retire and get out of town; the new term for that – popular in elite circles – is IBGYBG: I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.

In other words: let’s make our money now, and by the time anybody figures out what we did, IBGYBG.

But of course, one of the consequences of that approach was that by 1990, 15 or so years later, the whole government and its ‘National Idea’ collapsed.

I worry that this, now, is what is in store for Us.

EDWARD SHILS AND THE IDEOLOGY OF THE REVOLUTIONS

I know I’ve been on and on about how the Revolutions of the late-Sixties and early-Seventies here bear much resemblance to the Content and Method of Marxist ideology, and of the Leninist, Stalinist, and Maoist incarnations of that ideology.

I hope you’ve realized by now that when I make that connection I am not fooling around looking to score cheap rhetorical points. Or make the simplistic argumentum ad Hitlerum or reductio ad Stalinum; that is to say, simplistically but vividly making a connection between something in the present and a truly and unarguably awful past.

As I have been working through the recent Posts on assorted ‘liberal-progressive’ commentators currently trying to move Us quickly and quietly past those ‘revolutions’ in order to restore some sense of ‘unity’ that the Democrats can rely on for electoral success, I have been circling around the fact that these truly ‘revolutionary’ Methods , as well as much of their Content, have had seriously damaging effects on the polity – intended or unintended.

So I cannot accept the implicit assumption of the commentariat that any continued doubt about or objection to the so-called ‘culture war(s)’ are merely left-over sour-grapes and unsuccessful ‘backlash’ against a gloriously good and marvelously achieved victory effected by the Left’s ‘revolutions’ over the past 40 years.

This is not merely a matter of ‘perception’ or ‘attitude’.*

The consequences are real and pretending (or ‘re-perceiving’) that they are not there will not counter their effects; these consequences cannot be wished away. They are not figments of anybody’s ‘sour grapes’ or imagination; they are the very real – and hardly unforeseeable – consequences of revolutionary Methods and they are now burrowed deeply into the national ethos.

And it was the vote-addled Dems – eventually joined by vote-hungry Republicans – that put the power of the government behind these Methods and the Content of the assorted agendas.
I came across an article by the political scientist Edward Shils, entitled “Ideology and Civility: On the Politics of the Intellectual”.** It was written in 1958, at least half a decade before the agitations of the later Sixties.

In that far-away era of the late 1950s, Shils was looking backward to Fascism and Communism, especially as those ideologies exerted deforming pressures on the intellectuals in the European countries, and actually in the form of McCarthyism – which never got very far here – had a bit of an effect in this country as well.

He is looking backward to examine some of the characteristics and dynamics of those aggressive ideologies’ revolutionary praxis and ideology. Fascism and Communism constitute, in his view, a ‘family’ with certain characteristics.

So this is something of an exercise in historical analysis in order to understand how intellectuals are affected by aggressive and assertive ideological pressures.

But to read it in the light of what has happened here since 1968 … is something of a revelation.

And that should be disturbing.

Shils looks at “ideological politics” (p.450): they “paralyze the free dialectic of intellectual life” and “introduce standards irrelevant to discovery and creation”; they constrict or break “the consensus necessary for a free and spontaneous order”. All politics must begin with some common ground; human beings cannot live in a continuous state of tension caused by a too-wide gap in fundamental assumptions.

While there is always some difference in goals and methods, with room for novel approaches, yet still humans can’t live in a state of constant fundamental ‘difference’. It may sound workable ‘in theory’, but the human community that can operate under such strain does not exist in actual reality.

Ideological politics (IP) take as their primary articles of faith that “politics should be conducted from the standpoint of a single, comprehensive, coherent set of beliefs” and that that set of beliefs “must override every other consideration” (p.450). You can see where there is no room for give-and-take at the very core of the IP enterprise. Instead of a politics that provides a forum for somewhat differing views on the best path to take and how to do so, you are saddled with a pre-determined ideological Content; the only Method is agreement and submission to that Content. This is a ‘politics’ hell-and-gone from what the Framers envisioned, both in Content and Method.

Further, “these beliefs attribute supreme significance to a single group or class – the nation, the ethnic folk, the proletariat – and to the leader and the party as the true representatives of … all virtue” (p.450). You can see things start to get interesting here if you include ‘gender’ or some other identity to the list of nation, ethnic folk, and proletariat.

For all practical purposes the Beltway’s over-eager embrace of advocacies already pretty drunk on ‘revolutionary’ examples went very far toward introducing here a truly Ideological Politics that has deranged the core dynamics of Constitutional politics; Constitutional politics is the ‘genius’ of the American political system.

Worse, IP “correspondingly views as the seat and source of all evil a foreign power, an ethnic group … or the bourgeois class” (p.450). That ‘correspondingly’, of course, includes the fact that such an ‘enemy’ – who, of course, must be ‘evil’ – is absolutely indispensable to IP: people have to be kept in line, kept on-message, kept ‘with the program’. They are not free Citizens but are members of a ‘team’ – and the very concept of ‘team’ involves an ‘opposing team’.

And since politics isn’t a game but deals with hugely serious human energies, then that ‘opposing team’ must be an ‘enemy’ or ‘the enemy’. There is no other way. And of course, in this town 35 or so years ago, ‘men’ and ‘white’ and ‘working class’ were all added to the list that Shils had compiled from the 1930s.

In fact, IP lends itself easily to the idea that people are not Citizens so much as they are members of an ‘army’ – because, of course, they are involved in a ‘war’ against whatever enemy has been selected from or added to the list.

The Identity Politics of Our modern American reality can be seen as a variant of Ideological Politics – the ‘good’ guys/persons are your own Identity, and the ‘bad’ guys/persons are whomever has been selected off the bad-guys/evil list. And if you enjoy several Identities, then you have a larger palette of ‘enemies’ with which to color your day.

Conversely, of course, if you are some Identity’s bad-guy, then in a system where the government has gotten into the Identity-pandering business, you are going to find yourself on the receiving end of a crusade. And if you are the designated bad-guy for two or more such favored Identities, then you are in that much more deep doodoo – and your government, as you might like to think it, is going to be part of the problem. A very big part.

It gets worse.

As Shils rightly observes, looking at the 1930s, IP is not content simply being a ‘politics’: its own self-declared “centrality” means that it must “radiate into every sphere of life – that it replace religion, that it provide aesthetic criteria, that it rule over scientific research and philosophic thought, that it regulate sexual and family life” (p.451). I recall to your attention that Shils wrote this in 1958, in case you’ve already started making some connections to more recent ‘politics’ around here.

And this ‘imperialist’ – if I may – aspect of IP flows directly from the IP-ers’ belief “that they alone have the truth about the right ordering of life, of life as a whole and not just of political life” (p.451). So either you ‘get it’ or ‘you just don’t get it’. Because there is only the one ‘it’, and they have it and you don’t. Which is not a really good basis for mutuality in politics. Especially if you disagree with their ‘it’, or that they have ‘it’ in the first place. Or that there even is one single ‘it’. And so forth.

It gets worse.

Shils rightly deduces that because of this belief that they are the sole possessors of the Right Ordering, the IP-ers harbor “a deep distrust of the traditional institutions – family, church, economic organizations, and schools …” (p.451). And you can see how the political and cultural life in any nation infected with IP is going to become a zero-sum game: there can be only one ‘winner’ and all the rest must ‘lose’.

It’s not hard to see how this distrust meant the sustained ‘deconstruction’ of all of American society’s anchoring institutions – all of them allegedly engaged in ‘oppressing’ everybody with the Wrong Ordering of life and love and mind and spirit and soul.

And it’s hard not to think that if Shils’s article had been more widely circulated half a century ago, then We might have all been a little more prepared when the onslaught of 1968 hit. And perhaps might have saved Our politics from the attack of the Ideologicals (after watching all those alien pod-people attacks on all those Saturday afternoons in the 1950s, did anybody ever think the real attack would come disguised as ‘progress’ and ‘reform’?).

Interestingly, though hardly illogically, Ideologicals do not really trust ‘politics’ and don’t think much of politicians. But of course; when you are in sole possession of the Knowledge of the Right Ordering, what would you find attractive in compromisers and half-way covenanters?

IP-ers paint the ‘political’ as a realm of tawdry compromise and bad faith; it is a realm of dark and murky complexity and a sort of sneaky realm where participants avoid the light of public examination and scrutiny. And it is ‘inefficient’ compared to the direct, ‘clear’, and oh-so-public posturing of the revolutionaries and their bright (and brilliant, of course) ideology.

Not only would you be antisocial if you refused to ‘get it’, but you’d have to be a monstrous dope as well.

And of course you would be a traitor: to your class according to the 1930s Left or to your country and your Volk according to the 1930s Right. Substitute ‘gender’ and ‘race’ or ‘Identity group’ and immediately you’re in disturbingly familiar and contemporary territory. And toss in that you’d be a ‘self-hating’ member of your group, if you’d like.

Which is probably why the vote-desperate Beltway bent so far over to please their new Ideological constituencies: the IP-ers weren’t just playing hard-to-get, they really didn’t like pols. And what they demanded pretty much deranged American politics. And the Beltway just went along with every shopping list and list of demands that was presented for immediate fulfillment.

But Shils had realized this from his study of the 1930s: IP-ers only allow themselves to be characterized as ‘political’ because that’s the “conventional” term; it’s a useful cover, sort of like sheep’s clothing. But really, and as they have worked in history, “it has not signified that [they] were ready to participate constitutionally in the political system” (p.451). And so it has been with Us: the ruling juntas and advocacies early on declared the Constitution “quaint” (and probably a lot worse than that: tainted to the point of irrelevance and illegitimacy by the ‘oppressive’ predispositions of the Framers).

In fact, he saw while studying what happened in the 1930s and before, “extra-constitutionality has been inherent in their conceptions and aspirations, even when their procedures have seemed to lie within the constitution” (p.451). In this country, it has taken longer to subvert things since – oppressive or not – the American polity remained for a time strongly grounded in the foundations the Framers had so carefully constructed.

And it gets worse.

Because Shils also realized that the IP-ers not only included the actual constitutional requirements, the laws and judicial decisions, in their list of things to get beyond, but also “the moral presuppositions of these” (p.451).

And that assault has been two-pronged.

The first prong is a direct rejection of any form of traditional morality.

For two reasons.

In the first place because any traditional morality was a rival to ‘revolutionary’ morality in the zero-sum, either-or struggle that is the flat, dark, violent world of Ideological Politics. A ‘God’ or any capital-letter being would both rival the authority that the revolution wants to wield and would also stand as a potential Judge of the revolution … and revolutionaries, like countries and individuals, don’t like to be judged – unless they own the judge.

And in the second place, because traditional morality implies some sort of Authority from Beyond the flat, single-dimension world of the ‘political’ and the revolutionary world; the world-view of revolutionary politics is that there is nothing except this world, and that people are ‘trapped’ in it and have no other options, and that therefore they must rely on ‘the revolution’ and its ideology and its cadres for whatever help and guidance there is to make their lives more bearable or – more attractively – to fulfill their lives.

The second prong - required by the stubborn and deep religiosity of the American populace – is an effort to discredit any religious organization with enough public stature to possibly oppose the revolutionary ideology. Far more subtle than Stalin’s blunt murder of Polish intelligentsia – including all priests – in the Katyn forest, Goebbels had tried to weaken opposition to the Nazi Party in heavily Catholic Bavaria by trying to arrest and try an entire monastery full of Catholic male religious for sexual perversions. (He had to call it off in the face of public opposition.)

Only in this way can ideologues replace the existing order with their own new (and oh-so-Right order). They have to destroy people’s faith and confidence in any other source of help and security; they have to literally cut off any alternative sources of people’s trust and hope, leaving people with only the revolution and its ideology as the source to whose authority people must submit.

And it gets worse. (And more familiar.)

“Ideological politics are alienative politics” (p.451). They try to divide people from the traditions and institutions of the culture that supports their lives, their hopes, and their efforts.

And so “ideological politicians feel no affinity with such institutions, and they participate in them for purposes very different from those who have preceded them in the conduct of these institutions” (p.452). I can’t help but think that after 40 years We are now saddled with a majority of politicians (especially at the national level) who no longer care – who in their careers have perhaps never really cared – to sustain and nurture (and, yes, ‘reform’) the traditional institutions and culture that comprise the ‘genius’ of the American approach to politics and government.

Rather, “ideological politics are the politics of friend-foe, we-they, who-whom” (p.452).

That ‘who-whom’ is a reference to Lenin, who held as rock-bottom truth that all politics is merely a matter of who is doing what to whom. It requires a victim-oppressor view of human society and politics, where all persons are either oppressing or being oppressed, are victimizers or victims. And that surely strikes a contemporary note. And a profoundly disturbing one.

Bush the Lesser and his coterie surely had the chutzpah to trumpet this, in the best Fox-News style. But long decades before them, ‘oppressors’ and ‘victims’ were the watchword concepts of the Left here.

“Those who are not on the side of the ideological politician are, according to ideological politics, against him [or her]” (p.452). This spells death for a deliberative and widely-grounded public politics of deliberation, argumentation, and consensus-building.

Which ties in with my recent Posts where I have pointed out how, at this point, with the money running out and baaad consequences clearly more obvious to people no longer happily distracted by spending ‘credit-wealth’ that they no longer have, ‘progressive’ commentators and intellectuals are trying to get people to accept things as they now are and not ‘look back’.

Because ‘back’ there is the long stretch of decades where IP did an end-run around deliberative and consensus politics. Instead, ‘reforms’ were imposed from the top-down just as Mao tried in the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. The results here may prove to be as disastrous for America as they were for China back then. History, after all, hasn’t ‘ended’ and is most surely not ‘dead’.

In the IP world, ‘compromise’, ‘prudence’, and the art of what’s possible given present realities … all these are nothing more than foot-dragging and cowardice in the face of the demand to TOTALLY and IMMEDIATELY impose the ‘Good’ solution and eradicate all the ‘Evil’.

It is Shylock’s terrible mistake in thinking he could exact a pound of flesh with no adverse consequences and no messy complications.

But even more than ‘totality’, IP is “obsessed with futurity” (p.452). If you put up with a whole bunch of wrenching changes right now, and don’t waste time asking any questions, then at some point in the future all of this is going to work out to be the bestest thing in the world for you. Or, as Wimpy would put it to Popeye: “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” (a cartoon, nicely, that first saw the light in the era of the 1920s and 1930s).

There is a religious root to IP. Specifically, two of them.

First, the “millenarian” belief that God would come to Judge the Good and the Evil on the Last Day (p.459). While the Catholic Church downplayed it in order to focus people on their own spiritual and moral struggles in this life under the guidance and help of the Beyond, the Protestant impulse was to develop emotional intensity by emphasizing the ever-present Judgmental presence of God here and now.

Second, the Manichean belief that the world is fundamentally and clearly divided into the realm of the Good and the realm of the Evil (and often, the two forces seem equally matched). The Catholic teaching sought to blunt this dangerous simplicity by emphasizing the Divine Creation of everything and everyone, and the reality of Sinfulness in each person: there were not ‘good’ and ‘evil’ individuals, but rather the potential for ‘good’ and ‘evil’ existed in each human being. The focus thus became the individual’s and the community’s mastery of its own potentials for doing ‘good’ or ‘evil’.

The Protestant impulse trended, in its more outré forms, toward the believers (by definition ‘good’) separating themselves from the ‘non-believers’ (by definition ‘evil’).

And it didn’t take too much alchemy for a particularly dangerous blending whereby the Good got the go-ahead from the Lord of the Harvest to start separating the Good from the Evil RIGHT HERE AND NOW.

The American Left absorbed the Marxist-Leninist secularized version of ‘millenarianism’: there is only this material world, the evil is economic and class oppression, and the oppressed classes must rise up and eradicate the evil owner-class and share all material things (according to the dictates of a dictatorship of the proletariat). Change "economic and class" to "cultural and race/gender" and you've got the mis-named 'liberal' position of the past 40 years.

The American Right – during the Reagan era – embraced the previously marginal Protestant Fundamentalism that considered those who ‘believed’ to be both ‘good’ and also authorized by God to smite the evildoers and wreak judgment upon them.

Neither approach bode well for a trust in the ultimate decency of The People once they had gone through the slow process of deliberating and arriving at some decision or consensus as to what was possible for communal policy.

In the late Sixties here, I really think that the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist playbook was simply embraced by a cocky and righteous Left that figured it could ‘baptize’ the Methods and core presumptions in the service – not of ‘class’ – but of ‘race’, ‘gender’, and so forth. And anybody who didn’t agree with that ‘just didn’t get it’.

And in the early Eighties here, I really think that the God’s-Deputies playbook was simply embraced by a cocky and righteous Right that figured it could now go forth and stretch forth the nation’s hand as if that hand were God’s hand … and anybody who didn’t agree with that could merely be dismissed as ‘evil’.

Back in the day, St. Augustine – with his powerful intellect harnessed to the strong impulses to both good and evil that he saw within himself and in all the humans and organizations around him – was able to create a conceptual force-field strong enough to contain these monstrously powerful impulses. He even went so far as to realize that to the extent that it was subject to the deformities of this dimension, not even the Church (the Catholic Church at the time) could fully embody the Kingdom of God; this earthly dimension is one of permanent incompleteness and imperfection.

But over time, and certainly in the past few centuries, there was an erosion of the type of force-field that could hold it all together, and the awesome and oppositional forces broke loose.
And, as I proposed above, found their way into Our midst through both the Left and the Right in the past few decades.

And both Left and Right have lured Us on with guarantees that if We just follow them down their chosen path, We will reach a much better, perhaps perfectly completed and fulfilled world. Such promises, of course, are essential to getting people to disregard the utter novelty, potential monstrousness, and even outright wrongness of new agendas and programmes.

And as We saw in Vietnam, as things ‘go south’ with increasingly obvious clarity, governments and those who serve governments are reduced to the most dishonorable methods to keep up the illusion that things will work if you just give them a little more time. There is a light at the end of the tunnel; you will be gladly paid Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Ultimately, Western Civilization, as Shils sees it, will always be vulnerable to this violent, divisive, self-righteous impulse to divide Good from Evil here and now and totally, and to determine – with mere human wisdom – who is ‘good’ and who is ‘evil’ and to punish – with mere human authority – those who are designated, by whatever criteria, as ‘evil’ (p.463).

Because there abides deep down in the human heart the latent desire to be in direct, immediate, clear and un-doubtable contact with the power of the Beyond. Or at least with the ‘power’ that seems most capable of mastering the uncertainties of this world, this vale-of-tears dimension.

The Catholic Church had always taken the approach of ‘patience’, and a refusal to indulge in the excitements of ‘immediacy’ and ‘un-doubtable’ contact with the Ultimate. Humans were not designed to penetrate to such a level of directness, and had to make do with their more limited but still capable capacities to remain in faithful contact with the Ultimate.

But since the break-up of the Medieval European consensus (once called’Christendom’), under the influence of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Age of Revolutions in the face of mass industrialized society, this delicate tensive balance has been broken.

When Shils wrote this article, as I said, he was looking backward from the late 1950s to the 1930s and further; he was trying to make sense of how revolutionary developments had exercised a deforming power on intellectuals in Europe in those times.

I don’t know if he realized that within a decade, and here in the United States as well as in Western Europe, the dynamics of those revolutions – that he in 1958 considered of ‘historical’ significance – would burst forth anew, with some re-badging as necessary, but still exercising all their awesome deformative powers.

But they have and they did. And now We are faced with the wracked result of a culture and a society and a civilization and a Constitutional ethos that has been battered and corroded from both Left and Right for decades, with – alas – the full collusion of the government (which is now melted into one amorphous Beltway).

As Lenin famously asked (without attributing his quote to the Gospels): What then is to be done?

NOTES

*I’ve often used the very real example of the mess at the Service Academies, where any doubt about or objection to the re-arranging of the entire military ethos and its praxis in order to smooth the path for women in combat is actually considered nothing more than the perceiver’s ignorant misperception or willfully obstructive ‘attitude’ … which he will change (or shut up about and keep to himself) or else lose his career before it is even begun.

**Published in ‘The Sewanee Review’, Vol. 66, No. 3, pp. 450-480. It is available on-line through JSTOR if you have access.