Ultimately war would begin to ravage the British Isles, and the king would steadfastly refuse to capitulate to Puritan demands that would have resulted in the destruction of the Anglican Church. The king's cavaliers fought valiantly, but the gathering storm of determined Puritan rebels, aided by an emerging class of wealthy merchants, proved too strong for them. The targets of the enemy — then as now — were chiefly the Prayer Book and the Apostolic Succession. King Charles could have saved his own life, and probably his throne, had he been willing to destroy the English Church in the bargain. But the Church was his mother, at whose knee he had been taught the love of his blessed Savior, and the king took seriously his anointed role as her Defender. Charles wrote thus in 1629:

“For we call God to record, before whom we stand, that it is, and always hath been, our own heart's desire to be found worthy of that title, which we account the most glorious in all our Crown, Defender of the Faith.” [. . .]

The life and death of King Charles the Martyr is instructive in these last days, when love and loyalty are so little valued, and when both Church and State appear to have lost their divine sanction in the eyes of men. He reminds us that the Faith of our fathers is ever in need of valiant defenders and staunch confessors; he proves that traditional Christian orthodoxy is not incompatible with a charitable tolerance; he shows us that this broken world contains no lasting kingdom, that ultimately we are meant for the eternal Kingdom of Heaven. Let us then imitate the zeal and steadfastness of our beloved Anglican saint, and seek his intercession for our little corner of the Church that owes so much to him.

The Communists, for example, in their unspeakable barbarism, turned this seventeenth-century monastery into a concentration camp. And they initiated the great system of cruelty and exploitation known as the Gulag — the largest system of slavery in the modern world — at this fifteenth-century monastery. They destroyed this fourteenth-century church, and impoverished this town.

Amazing photographs of a civilization brought to ruin by modern man’s frenzied revolt against God and Law.

(Via Lew Rockwell.)

The red States I have visited. See my blogs (here and here) for discussions of my travels and the beauty of the States.

(Via Mark Butterworth.)

Some 47 percent of parents want teens to be taught that “young people should not engage in sexual activity until they are married.” Another 32 percent of parents want teens to be taught that “young people should not engage in sexual intercourse until they have, at least, finished high school and are in a relationship with someone they feel they would like to marry.”

When these two categories are combined, we see that 79 percent of parents want young people taught that sex should be reserved for marriage or for an adult relationship leading to marriage. Another 12 percent of parents believe that teens should be taught to delay sexual activity until “they have, at least, finished high school.” Only 7 percent of parents want teens to be taught that sexual activity in high school is okay as long as teens use contraception.

(Via Brothers Judd.)

“It is clear, then, that rhetoric is not bound up with a single definite class of subjects, but is as universal as dialectic; it is clear, also, that it is useful. It is clear, further, that its function is not simply to succeed in persuading, but rather to discover the means of coming as near such success as the circumstances of each particular case allow. In this it resembles all other arts. For example, it is not the function of medicine simply to make a man quite healthy, but to put him as far as may be on the road to health; it is possible to give excellent treatment even to those who can never enjoy sound health. Furthermore, it is plain that it is the function of one and the same art to discern the real and the apparent means of persuasion, just as it is the function of dialectic to discern the real and the apparent syllogism. What makes a man a ‘sophist’ is not his faculty, but his moral purpose.”

— Aristotle, Rhetoric.

Mr. Gelernter opens this way:

Paul Johnson’s Art: A New History is not so much a book as a sparring partner. It is a chronological, comprehensive narrative, brilliant and cranky by turns. Brilliance predominates, but if you intend to read Johnson seriously (as he must be read), bring boxing gloves.

Just last night I happened to be flipping through Johnson’s A History of the American People (more is revealed by the conspicuous “a” in his titles than ever has by a single letter). Mr. Johnson is a thinker to whom one returns regularly for counsel. But, as Gelernter suggests, like any good counselor, one cannot accept all his advice; most of it, perhaps, but not all. What does Johnson think of St. Augustine? “The dark genius of imperial Christianity” (A History of Christianity). Hmmm. When does Johnson think the modern world began? “The modern world began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a solar eclipse, taken on the island of Principe off West Africa and at Sobral in Brazil, confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe . . . In particular, the motions of the planet Mercury deviated by forty-three seconds of an arc a century from its predictable behaviour under Newtonian laws of physics” (Modern Times. Alright.

There are times when the felicity and power of Johnson’s prose provokes me to literally laugh out loud in exhilaration. It is analogous, perhaps, to the thrill of watching a great athlete take command of a game: the sheer human energy behind his writing, the immense vigor of mind, is a cause for joy.

Gelernter writes,

You cannot write effectively about art unless you understand religion; Johnson understands. Writing about Byzantine icons, he explains the “state of continuous creation” that yields intermingled religious and aesthetic values: painters start the process but ongoing devotion carries it forward. The “drippings of wax, the oleaginous layers created over centuries by oil lamps set in front of the image” become part of it, mellowing and deepening and changing it. After a discussion of the complex history of St. Peter’s in Rome — a discussion taking in Bramante and Sangallo, Raphael and Michelangelo — Johnson asks: “So who built St. Peter’s?” His answer: “God and time.”

I think it worth quoting Gelernter’s conclusion in full; it is enough (were I not already bogged down with a half dozen books to read) to make me want to rush out and buy Johnson’s history of art right now:

In short: Paul Johnson paints with a broad, confident, springy, heavily loaded brush. The effect can be mesmerizing, even Titianeseque; or infuriating. The History must be sipped carefully, respectfully, warily. It is a book that demands to be challenged and argued with.

Yet there is no one with whom I would rather argue. “The medieval cathedrals of Europe,” says Johnson, “are the greatest accomplishments of humanity in the whole theater of art.” That sort of statement is what Paul Johnson is for; what art-history books ought to be for. It is not only bolder but truer than the typical heavily-hedged academic pronouncement. No statement loaded with qualifiers can get up enough speed to leap the wide gap between the everyday commonplace and the life-expanding truth. But Johnson leaps that gap all the time, and makes it look easy. He is, after all, the most eminent thinker to write art history in our time.

NB: I’ll add a link to Mr. Gelernter’s review here, but I warn the reader that viewing it requires a pretty sophisticated version of the Adobe Reader program. I expect that most computers do not have it.

“Wherever wealth, politeness, talents, and office, lend their aid to the inherent efficacy of virtue, its influence is proportionately greater. In this case the example is seen by greater numbers, is regarded with more respectful attention, and felt with greater force. The piety of Hezekiah reformed and saved a nation. Men far inferior in station to kings, and possessed of far humbler means of doing good, may still easily circulate through multitudes both virtue and happiness. The beggar on the dunghill may become a public blessing. Every parent, if a faithful one, is a public blessing of course. How delightful a path of patriotism is this?

“It is also to be remembered, that this is the way, in which the chief good, ever placed in the power of most persons, is to be done. If this opportunity of serving God, and befriending mankind, be lost, no other will by the great body of men ever be found. Few persons can be concerned in settling systems of faith, moulding forms of government, regulating nations, or establishing empires. But almost all can train up a family for God, instill piety, justice, kindness, and truth, distribute peace and comfort around a neighborhood, receive the poor and the outcast into their houses, tend the bed of sickness, pour balm into the wounds of pain, and awaken a smile in the aspect of sorrow. In the secret and lowly vale of life, virtue in its most lovely attire delights to dwell. There God, with peculiar complacency, most frequently find the inestimable ornament of a meek and quiet spirit; and there the morning and the evening incense ascends with peculiar fragrance to heaven. When angels became the visitors, and the guests, of Abraham, he was a simple husbandman.”

— Rev. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, secretary of the Hartford Convention, demonstrating the kind of things that occupied the minds of men of the early American Republic, in a sermon of July 4, 1798.

What sort of person says “groovy,” anyway? The last time I heard it used non-ironically was by a crooked lawyer in the movie To Live and Die in L.A. He was shot to death directly afterward and quite deservedly so. With its connotations of kaftans, flower power and “The Pope Smokes Dope,” its use today suggests superannuated hippies nostalgic for the Golden Dawn of the 1960s. But Nick Gillespie, Reason’s editor and presumed builder of the Pantheon of Groovy, is in his 40s and was thus barely toilet-trained during the Summer of Love. So the only nostalgia here is for a place that has never existed and never shall: Utopia.

Reason includes on its list the despicable pornographer Larry Flynt; any man who imagines such figure is admirable has forfeited his claim to intellectual seriousness, and may have forfeited his claim to intelligence altogether. He has, at least, proven himself in all likelihood a colossal dupe, having taken the clever misrepresentation of said pornographer in a film for history. Mr. Grace comments succinctly: “What is the nature of Flynt’s expression? ‘Chester the molester,’ the depiction of a woman being put through a meat grinder, the reduction of the erotic to the clinical detachment of the livestock buyer and the mortician.”

A masterful, if disheartening, essay.

The most detested clause of the Act reads,

That if any person shall write, print, utter, or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States . . . then such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years.

Sounds fairly severe, I admit. But consider the final clause, in Section 3: “That if any person shall be prosecuted under this act, for the writing or publishing any libel aforesaid, it shall be lawful for the defendant, upon the trial of the cause, to give in evidence in his defence, the truth of the matter contained in the publication charged as a libel. And the jury who shall try the cause, shall have a right to determine the law and the fact, under the direction of the court, as in other cases.” Jury trial, truth as an absolute defense: that is rather more than your average transgressor of political correctness receives from his inquisitors, and quite a bit more if the transgressor is subject to the “justice system” of a major American university.

The principle worth emphasizing here is that the liberal Utopia of the Open Society is a fantasy, pure and simple — and, because of its astonishing influence on the minds of modern men, a particularly ruinous fantasy. In no society is it possible for all questions to be open questions. In other words, every society will have its orthodoxy, which it will defend by placing a price so high on heresy that most people will either (1) forsake their heresy or (2) keep silent about it. The real question thus becomes, What is a given society’s orthodoxy? Ours we might suggest with the laden and increasingly debased word tolerance, but is better examined with clearer language: managerial socialism, bureaucratic usurpation, cultural Marxism, etc.

I’ll wager the Sedition Act was preferable to the armed doctrine of political correctness.

The real purpose behind the superficially bizarre rituals of an American election — caucuses, primaries, televised debates, concession speeches — is not to provide an exercise in democracy; it is to test the inner resources and character of the candidates, and to do this by exposing them to a grueling series of artificially induced crises that simulate those that he will ultimately have to face as president. The American electoral process is, in a way, like the simulated testing done by the manufacturers of automobile tires — we want to know which ones are reliable before we put them on our cars, rather than afterwards, and that is why the American people tend to respond so harshly to those candidates who fail to make the grade during this our national period of candidate testing.

And the good Doctor failed miserably. Even for a party on the verge of full-blown madness, this madness appears to be too much to swallow all at once (though I hasten to add that Dean, like the Monty Python character, is not dead yet).

Iowa was Dean’s first crisis — and he blew it; and in doing so he lost far more than the Iowa caucus: he lost the reputation as a man who could be trusted to act calmly and rationally in the midst of adversity. And that is a lesson that the American people will not quickly forget. We do not live in a world where we can afford to.

Another fine article by Mr. Harris, whose much-anticipated (at least by me) book will appear next month.

The function of the Supreme Court, which is both unanswerable and unaccountable, is to impose things that the congress fears to touch. That is, it establishes programs desired by the ruling political class which could not possibly be democratically enacted. While formally a judicial organ, the Court is in reality our Ministry of Culture and Morals. It determines policy regarding racial integration, abortion, pornography, immigration, the practice of religion, which groups receive special privilege, and what forms of speech shall be punished.

Elsewhere he writes, echoing in more colloquial language the arguments of such as, say, The Federalist:

Large jurisdictions discourage autonomy. If, say, educational policy were set in small jurisdictions, such as towns or counties, you could buttonhole the mayor and have a reasonable prospect of influencing your children’s schools. If policy is set at the level of the state, then to change it you have to quit your job, marshal a vast campaign costing a fortune, and organize committees in dozens of towns. It isn’t practical. In America, local jurisdictions set taxes on real estate and determine parking policy. Everything of importance is decided remotely.

To read some of the documents, pamphlets and speeches of the early Americans, as I have been doing recently (assisted by one of Liberty Fund’s marvelous collections), is to be astonished — at once by the philosophical sophistication and seriousness or our ancestors, and by the precipitousness of our decline in recent decades. Abraham Lincoln, at age 28, alone composed and delivered a speech (the justly famous Lyceum Address) that is well beyond the powers of any given team of the best speechwriters of our age, armed with the Internet and pollsters and many days of preparation. The meanest congregant at the smallest rural church in colonial Massachusetts understood in greater depth the principles of republican government than does the average dean?s list university graduate in political science today.

Here is Mr. Reed again:

The media have two governmental purposes. The first is to prevent discussion and, to the extent possible, knowledge of taboo subjects. The second is to inculcate by endless indirection the values and beliefs of the permanent political class. Thus for example racial atrocities committed by whites against blacks are widely reported, while those committed by blacks against whites are concealed. Most people know this at least dimly. Few know the degree of management of information.

I am haunted often by the prophetic words of Salvian as the Roman Empire decayed: “Rome is luxurious but it is filled with misery. It is dying but it laughs.”

Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status. In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is a felony. Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is he who will be treated as a criminal, for violating the LAPD's rule against enforcing immigration law.

The LAPD's ban on immigration enforcement mirrors bans in immigrant-saturated cities around the country, from New York and Chicago to San Diego, Austin, and Houston. These "sanctuary policies" generally prohibit city employees, including the cops, from reporting immigration violations to federal authorities.

Such laws testify to the sheer political power of immigrant lobbies, a power so irresistible that police officials shrink from even mentioning the illegal-alien crime wave. “We can’t even talk about it,” says a frustrated LAPD captain. “People are afraid of a backlash from Hispanics.” Another LAPD commander in a predominantly Hispanic, gang-infested district sighs: “I would get a firestorm of criticism if I talked about [enforcing the immigration law against illegals].” Neither captain would speak for attribution.

Isn’t that great?

He writes first to summarize PETA’s views: “[PETA] asserts that, because animals are living, sentient beings, they possess the same rights to self-determination and freedom from cruelty and exploitation that humans do.” This, he assures us, is an “eminently defensible moral position.” Here even the experienced reader pulls up short. At the very least, we might interject that to assert is not to argue, far less is it to persuade. We might go further and argue that there are no rights absent correlative duties or obligations, that the rights of man can only be discerned within a conception of the nature of man, which nature includes the duties he owns to God, to country, to his fellow man, etc. And it is very hard to understand how a swine or an ape can be conceived as a duty-bound creature.

The object of Dr. Hill’s ire is Wesley Smith, an industrious and cogent enemy of the Brave New World of biotechnology and bioethics. Hill asseverates, “Behind Smith’s umbrage [at PETA] lies the conviction of creationists and their fellow travelers that humans are the specific handiwork of a supernatural entity and, as such, enjoy a unique and privileged place among living beings.” Imagine that: the “handiwork of a supernatural entity.” Where could such an outlandish idea have come from? But Dr. Hill’s sneer is a revealing one: In his mind, those who maintain the moral equality of men and beasts are mainstream, “eminently-defensible” in their views, while those who cleave to the truth of the biblical creation story as against the strange alternative narratives of modern scientism are “fanatics.”

In short, Dr. Hill’s is a world apart. He presents to us as almost given a philosophy utterly alien to our tradition as Americans, Westerners and descendents of the civilization of Athens, Jerusalem and Rome. He presents this philosophy as the conclusions of sweet reasonableness; and the opposition of this Great Tradition as mere fanaticism. His contempt for the Great Tradition is palpable. He is, in the most profound sense, in revolt.

Dear Sir:

I write to convey to you my profound alarm and disgust at the proposal by President Bush for a large-scale amnesty and “guest worker” program for illegal immigrants; and to urge you, as my representative in the august institution of which you are a member, to do everything in your power to scuttle, obstruct and finally defeat it.

I write as a supporter of the President, and it brings me no pleasure to break with him so drastically: him whose words and actions after September 11 have inspired in me a real sense of loyalty and admiration; whose determination in an awkward and taxing war has been commendable; whose moral clarity, beleaguered on nearly all sides by the relativism, despair and unbelief of the decaying modern world, has been worthy of esteem. I have other disagreements with Mr. Bush, some large, others more trivial; but nothing approaches the level of disappointment and frustration provoked by this brassbound amnesty proposal. If he persists in this obduracy, this near-madness, I do not know whether I can in good conscience lend him my support in November, loath as I am to see someone like Gov. Dean elected.

I will not mince words: This proposal is as radical an innovation on the constitution of this nation as has ever been recommended. It is revolutionary in nature; if pushed to its logical conclusion, it would mean the gradual overthrow of what we all know as the United States of America, and its replacement by something else altogether — in sum, something less secure, more disorderly, and less free, and less worthy of the admiration of its citizens and loyalty of its patriots.

The proposal counsels that a nation may strengthen its laws by their subversion; secure its borders by their obliteration; enrich its citizenry by their impoverishment. Its idle and pompous implication is that the law of supply and demand does not apply to the labor market; and in its intransigent ignorance it slanders the American people with the facile charge that they “disdain” to do certain jobs; that only illegal immigrants “will do the jobs that Americans are unwilling to do.” When exactly the Editors of, say, The Wall Street Journal took leave of their usual economic sense is anybody’s guess, but it is clear to anyone retaining it that Americans will do said jobs, if only they are paid well enough for them. It is clear, moreover, that Americans cannot do said jobs when illegal immigrants, because they exist outside the minimum wage laws, payroll tax laws, etc., can outbid them in every case.

The proposal offers “temporary” employment to — well, to anyone on earth; and though we are assured it is indeed “temporary,” no end date is set for the program, meaning that it is in fact not temporary. President Bush is, as many have pointed out, essentially recommending the merging of the American and Third World job markets. Nor is not all: as others have pointed out, the proposal also includes some vague promises that, in the event that a temporary worker returns to his native country after working a number of years, the United States will cover the cost of his retirement benefits. President Bush is thus recommending the merging of the American and Third World welfare bureaucracies. Nor is that all: the President and his spokesmen have repeatedly talked solemnly about the government “matching” employers with employees — first, we are assured, with American employees, but then, failing that, with immigrant employees. In short, the President recommends state planning of our private employment structure. Rare indeed has there been so brazen an assault on our traditional American system of free enterprise. Nor is that all: the proposal in effect recommends that we bring in and legalize a whole new working class in competition with the working class we already have. In other words, it recommends that we besiege those among us most vulnerable to economic pressure and insecurity with a massive new influx of economic insecurity in the form of dramatically amplified competition. Marketed as compassionate, it is in fact cruel and iniquitous. It is positively Marxian in its capacity to unleash anarchy and discontent among the proletariat.

The President insists that he opposes “amnesty” — this in the teeth of the plain fact that his bill does exactly that, by offering a path from illegal alien status to permanent resident and ultimately, citizenship. In addition, he proposes to increase the number of green cards issued, which would also facilitate the movement of illegal immigrants to legal status. In short, he misrepresents his proposal.

There is a great host of other solid reasons to oppose this stupidity — economic ones like the fact that an artificially depressed labor market will retard technological advances and mechanization, political ones like the fact that more means of documentation present more opportunities for forgery, a particularly worrying prospect in light of our threat from terrorism — but at base it must be opposed because it constitutes a radical and ultimately, perhaps, fatal attack on one of our most cherished possession as Americans: our citizenship. It undertakes to annihilate the honorable distinction made in very first words of the United States Constitution: “We the People of the United States.”

We the People will be no more — abolished by the cupidity of business, the cynicism of politicians, and the astonishing folly of intellectuals. And so I beseech you to apply your common sense, the common sense of your constituents which you hold in trust, and lend your strength to the effort against this proposal; that it might die the unmourned and lonely death it deserves.

Sincerely,

Paul J. Cella III

As Willmoore Kendall noted once in dismantling Mill’s preposterous philosophy, the only instance we have of a nation adopting Mill’s prescriptions is the Weimar Republic, which quickly decayed into Nazi Germany.

What is mercifully absent from this publication is the preoccupation, often lapsing into obsession, with our modern-day Versailles: Washington, D.C., and especially Washington, D.C., as it is embodied in the Executive Branch of the federal government. It is not that politics is ignored by CRB, but rather that it is viewed from a distance, and with a proper perspective; and it is assigned its proper place in the grander scope of the Western tradition. That is, politics is emphatically set beneath its master, political philosophy.

Long may this journal prosper.

Some of the leading lights among democracy’s “friendly critics” — as the title of the conference dubbed them — gathered [in November] at Berry College in Rome, Georgia, about 60 miles northwest of Atlanta. The topic was apposite: for of late few words have been nearer to the lips of politicians and public figures, protestors and pundits, than the word democracy. And rare indeed has been its mention as an object of criticism, friendly or otherwise.

The conference drew academics and students alike (the latter enticed in part by the reward of classroom credit, a fact which may explain some of the nodding of heads I witnessed). Featured speakers included such luminaries as Eric Cohen of The New Atlantis, Patrick Deneen of Princeton, Werner Dannhauser of Michigan State, and Daniel J. Mahoney of Assumption College. All had engaging and valuable things to say about democracy and its entangling alliances or confrontations with other constituents of the American mind: religion, philosophy, popular culture, bioethics, to name a few.

What is striking about democracy, upon reflection, is its lack of concrete definition, and thus its slippery usefulness as a catchphrase. Does it signify simple majoritarianism? Is it contrasted with the ideal of the republic, or included therein? Is it a bulwark against tyranny, or a prelude to or facilitator of the most awful forms of it? Most of these questions were addressed, either directly or indirectly, and many other similar ones were raised.

Lord Acton once noted ominously that democracy seems to be linked in a strange and singular way with slavery; and this inference, perhaps — though he did not state it explicitly — suggests the trepidation that reposed at the base of Eric Cohen’s discussion of biotechnology and democracy. What our scientific and material mastery over life allows us to do, or soon will allow us to do, is enslave our descendants, as it were, and harvest them as raw material for our benefit. Mr. Cohen spoke of the worry that we may become “a nation whose need for health has made us morally mad” — which called to mind an appalling slogan I heard recently uttered by an ethicist in the course of dilating on in vitro fertilization: “wombs for rent.” When men begin speaking glibly in phrases like that (“wombs for plunder” seems more accurate), it is simply not hyperbole to wonder aloud whether human beings will again be property. The FDA, in groping for a way to regulate biotech research, already treats embryos as products intended for some manner of consumption. This is what, to my mind, is most conspicuous about biotechnology: its tendency to concentrate an almost unearthly power in the hands of those who already wield a great deal of it.

Meanwhile there was Werner Dannhauser, in a learned talk delivered with a very able sense of comic timing, declaring forthrightly that the subject of his paper, Friedrich Nietzsche, was no friendly critic of democracy at all, but rather a “bitter enemy.” He summarized Nietzsche’s judgment on democracy as “a response to the death of God of unusual stupidity.” This because democracy by its nature is linked inseparably to five things which Nietzsche disdained with a witty unrelenting scorn which was popularized in America by his admirer Henry Louis Mencken: 1) progress, 2) compassion, 3) equality, 4) Christianity, and 5) peace. Nietzsche’s attitude toward this last, Prof. Dannhauser averred, was aptly rendered by George C. Scott’s portrayal of Gen. George Patten in the famous film of the same name, in which Patten exclaims of war: “God help me, I love it!”

Nietzsche’s great virtue was his candor; to rely on an anachronism, we might say he was endearing politically incorrect. This age of cant and preening priggishness could prosper by a strong dose of candor, and Dannhauser’s recommendation of Nietzsche was persuasive in this respect.

Modern democracy, several participants agreed, often functions as a program or method of attempting to assimilate irreconcilables; and all the effluvia of cant and catchphrase represents an effort to paper over the failure to accomplish the impossible. For example, many modern democrats of a certain frame of mind imagine that we can simultaneously have prefect personal autonomy — Prof. Patrick Deneen spoke hilariously in this context of an earlier conference at Princeton dedicated to the defense of “voluntary amputation” of “oppressive limbs” — and thriving community. Such a social condition is in a strict sense impossible; if men are perfectly autonomous, they must be empowered to obliterate community by means of their unconstrained choices; while if real community is to exist, it must hold real power, whether legal, moral, or merely conventional, to command the assent of its members. The society of perfect individual autonomy is the ideal of the Open Society, in which all questions are open questions. But of course this is a dreary contradiction: for what it really means is that all questions are open questions, except the question of whether all questions are open. No society can suffer its very legitimacy to be questioned brazenly and indefinitely: and in this basic sense all societies are closed. Here we might adduce Thomas Babington Macaulay’s acerbic barb about Socrates: “The more I read him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him.”

While some of the more skittish of democrats may have concluded from this conference (and may conclude from my reflections on it) that democracy’s “friendly critics” are really mere enemies in disguise, let us recall that the Whigs of the 18th century — then the party of radical democracy — managed to nevertheless produce and nurture modernity’s greatest conservative: Edmund Burke, whose “friendly criticism” provided democracy with profound and subtle ballast against its own excesses. This ballast was perhaps most concisely and perspicaciously captured by G. K. Chesterton, despite the latter’s dislike of Burke: “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who just happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of their birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of their death.” By adding the strength of the nonrational — intuition, prescription, veneration: in a word, tradition — to rationalistic democracy, Burke gave it roots with which to anchor itself in the hearts and souls of men, and thus endure the vicissitudes of history.

Let us also recall that America’s founders were among history’s greatest friendly critics of democracy. The American Revolution, in Lord Acton’s words, “established a pure democracy; but it was democracy in its highest perfection, armed and vigilant, less against aristocracy and monarchy than against its own weakness and excess.” It is fair to say, then, that the conference at Berry College was all about rearmament and restored vigilance.

Moreover, it is irrefragably true that a hammer can be used to “bash in the skull of its owner, just [as] the saw may be used to cut him up into easily disposable bits.” But this truth does not dispose us to dismantle our saws and melt our hammers in a great conflagration of indignation.

Mr. Harris goes on to talk some good sense, with illuminating detours on Austria and William James, about what he calls the “visceral code” that a society inculcates in its members: it is the “primary motivational force” that operates “as conditioned reflexes.” The big issue for us — the issue to which an ethical politics must address itself — is an examination, and ultimately a judgment, of the content of that visceral code. But let us not imagine, like the energumen, the man possessed, that we can take this visceral code in hand, whatever its content, and mold it according to our wishes. Let us not, as Burke put it (though Mr. Harris may not appreciate me imputing to him a Burkean principle), fancy that we can cast the social state of our country “into the kettle of magicians,” by whose “poisonous weeds and wild incantations” we might “renovate” it.

Then comes a stern but valuable lecture directed at the intellectuals, who so often don the garb of Burke’s magicians. I hope the reader will excuse me for quoting it at length.

The intellectual, profoundly impressed by his own rationality, assumes that it is a product of his own individual mind. This is a myth, and dangerous one. Rationality is not something you and I possess as individuals; rather it is a process that occurs, if it occurs at all, between us. And it can only begin to occur among those individuals who, for some reason or other, are already willing to agree. [. . .]

We all know what acting reasonably means — it means obeying a code of conduct that is just as strict as the code governing the American queuing custom. It means not using violence against one’s opponent, nor personally attacking his personality, nor using fraud, nor making up false statements, nor fudging data. It means, in short, acting like a gentleman; and this means obeying a code of honor, and being ashamed at even the thought of departing from this code an iota.

The standard of reasonable conduct does not flow to us from rational arguments; rather rational arguments only have motivational power when they are exchanged by men who are already acting reasonably, and who have been instilled with the visceral code that permits us automatically and mindlessly to adopt the point of view of Adam Smith’s “disinterested spectator.” In short, you cannot argue men into being reasonable — but you can bring them up to be that way, provided you have devised a system of shame and honor that makes acting reasonable a common duty and a common destiny.

Mr. Harris’s concluding argument is yet more explicit: “[D]ebates over what is shameful and honorable in any society are really debates about the destiny of that society.” Or again: “To change a society’s code of honor and shame is to change the automatic and mindless habits of a whole community — and it is these collective habits which, in the last analysis, determine the quality of life that any civilization can sustain.” And again: what we are talking about are “habits of [the] heart, whose beat is not regulated by the reflective part of the society, but by those great masses of men and women who simply go about spontaneously and mindlessly upholding traditions that have been handed down to them from their parents and their grandparents.”

I would add — and let me be clear that I am now departing from Harris’s cogent analysis — that we should avoid making too much of the “spontaneous and mindless” element of society, dominant though it surely is. There is room for a “reflective” element, addressing itself to the destiny of society: but it is emphatically not isolated to the intellectuals. Instead it is suggested by a pregnant phrase appearing several times the greatest book on practical political theory ever produced by Americans: The Federalist. Hamilton writes in No. 71: “The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management of their affairs” [my italics]. In other words, self government, which is the American Proposition, affirms that the members of the community, acting through solemn mechanisms and rituals of discussion and consensus, do indeed have some say in the destiny of their society — not merely on the “surface-level” legislation of quotidian politics, but also on the deeper, more permanent level of Legislation, which includes a society’s concept of itself as embodied in things like a code of honor, or what Mr. Harris calls “the visceral code.”