The news from Amherst has been bouncing around the internet, and by and large, the administration and many of the alumni are pleased: A Scalia was invited; the visit stirred arguments and conversations on the campus; and many students, to their surprise, found something appealing and instructive in a conservative jurist. But in the reactions it triggered, the visit also brought out everything that is unlovely in the colleges of our day. Most of the students were sensible, but many were credulous, and a distressing number, joined by their teachers, managed to debase themselves. The curtain was lifted just a bit, and even the good of the occasion cannot efface what was revealed that day. Shown, in a lingering flash, was something hateful and vicious in the souls of some people who style themselves professors, and take, as their vocation, the shaping of younger souls.

Elsewhere on the same fine website, there is an instructive exchange over a case decided last week by Scalia’s own agency, the United States Supreme Court, concerning one of the great Controversies of this Republic.

I have not yet seen the film, but will probably post a review here when I do.

Also, for an essay that moves as it illuminates on this huge and terrible subject, see the great and Venerable John Henry Newman’s sermon “The Mental Sufferings of Our Lord in His Passion.”

Fr. Murray summarizes this theology thusly:

There is therefore no eternal order of truth and justice; there are no universal verities that require man’s assent, no universal moral law that commands his obedience. Such an order of universals is not empirically demonstrable. Truth therefore is to be understood in a positivistic sense; its criteria are either those of science or those of practical life, i.e., the success of an opinion in getting itself accepted in the market place.

I will not permit the secular Liberal to slip loose from the bonds of his own logic and comport himself as though he has taken no position when in fact he has taken a very radical position. “In truth,” wrote Chesterton, “there are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it and those who accept dogmas and don’t know it.” At best we can say that Liberals do not know that they have accepted theological dogmas. Their theology is a negation; but it is real. It is still a dogma about Truth to declare that there is no Truth, or at least no dogmas about Truth.

Fr. Murray goes on:

With this view of truth there goes a corresponding view of freedom. The essence of freedom is “non-committalism” . . . To be uncommitted is to be in the state of grace; for a prohibition of commitment is inherent in the very notion of freedom. The mind or will that is committed, absolutely and finally, is by definition not free. It has fallen from grace by violating its own free nature. In the intellectual enterprise the search for truth, not truth itself or its possession, is the highest value . . . Religion itself is not a value, except insofar as its ambiguous reassurances may have the emotional effect of conveying reassurance . . . Nevertheless, religious freedom, as a form of freedom, is a value. It has at least the negative value of an added emancipation, another sheer release. It may also have the positive value of another blow struck at the principle of authority in any of its forms; for in this school authority is regarded as absolutely antinomous to freedom.

Secular Liberals will of course detest the use of terms like “state of grace” in the description of their theology, but, unless I am in error, they will be unable to reject the description itself. And I hope it is clear by now that it is a description of a theory the content of which is a set of highly-articulated claims about the truth of Creation. It is not mere agnosticism. Nor is a supreme denial possible; as Aquinas put it in a passage I quoted last week, “It is self-evident that truth exists, for he who denies that truth exists concedes that truth exists. Indeed, if truth is not, it is true that truth is not.” The word theology is the proper one here, for this interpretation of the First Amendment contains specific and sectarian content about religion and the church. It answers, in its own way, Pilate’s question to Christ: “What is truth?”

Issuing from this theology is also a distinct political philosophy which holds that civil society is the highest expression of the human condition; nothing stands above or outside civil society, and its legal manifestation the state, in judgment of it. In short, there is no Church. As Fr. Murray puts it, “the churches are englobed within the state,” and “possess their title to existence from positive law.” They are not sovereign entities, and certainly not above the state. Separation of church and state means more nearly subordination of church to state. Traditionally, this political philosophy has been given a name: Jacobinism.

James Hitchcock has a disconcerting essay in a recent First Things documenting the fruits of this Jacobin anti-theology in the legal profession. It is instructive to see just how effortlessly Open Society Liberalism slides into an incipient despotism. As Chesterton put it in his playful way, “most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. It is no answer to say, with distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.”

The hatchet is in the air; and its target is the great Tree of Religious Liberty in America. If the First Amendment must be read, as so many of our judges and law professors tell us (though not in so many words), as an article of faith in militant secularism; if Open Society Liberalism, rushing headlong down its own logic, succeeds in dogmatizing the First Amendment — it is because men moved too late.

[Part II to follow at a later date.]

There are four genuine Liberalisms. Pre-Liberalism’s outstanding representative is Adam Smith (and one might add: Edmund Burke). The Pre-Liberals did not use the Liberal label simply because this term was only born in 1812, when it was applied to the supporters of the Spanish Constitution of Cadiz. The Liberal appellation was promptly adopted in France, and in 1816 Southey used the Spanish word liberales for the first time in an English text, and Sir Walter Scott spoke of liberaux with a French spelling. Soon we see the rise of the “Early Liberals” on the Continent, mostly aristocrats with Catholic roots, initiating an intellectual movement which lasted until the end of the nineteenth century. Tocqueville, Montalembert, and Acton were its main representatives, but I would like to add the name of an agnostic Basel patrician — Jacob Burckhardt [Hayek did the same — ed.]. This second phrase of Liberalism had a primary cultural and political, not an economic character. The Old Liberals constituted a third phrase. [. . .]

The Old Liberals were strongly interested in economics, but also in cultural and political matters; they were “progressive,” anticlerical, in philosophic matters profoundly skeptical, and convinced that dogmatic beliefs automatically led to intolerance [John Stewart Mill? — ed.] They frequently (though not always) failed to share the antidemocratic feelings of the Early Liberals, favored the separation of church and state, and not rarely were allied with (deistic) Freemasonry.

The Neo-Liberals appeared only after World War II. They were strongly inspired by Early Liberalism and differed from the Old Liberals by their greater sympathy for Christian values, their greater toleration for some state intervention, and their leanings toward Conservatism. Their most eloquent spokesman was Wilhelm Ropke. The rupture between Old and New Liberals became evident in 1961 when the Neo-Liberals left the Mont Pelerin Society. However, what today is called Liberalism in the United States (and nowhere else) is the very opposite of all forms of Liberalism and is nothing but watered-down socialism. North America, being a gigantic island in the world ocean, is frequently the victim of the perversion of terms.

Fascinating stuff, eh? Elsewhere he gives a rousing cheer for the Poles, whose remarkable contributions to our civilization are so often forgotten:

Poles and freedom! Not only in their own country did they practice it[*]; Polish freedom fighters were active in many parts of the world. Two noblemen survive in the memory of the United States — Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Kazimeirz Pulaski, the only U.S. general who died in the War of Independence on American soil. (Nor should one forget Henryk Deminski and Jozef Bem, who played a similar role in the Hungarian Rising of 1848-49.) In the battle of Liebnitz, the Poles and the German Knights diverted the Mongols from the plains of North Europe; the Poles defeated the Turks in 1683 at the gates of Vienna; and in 1920 they defeated the Bolsheviks in front of Warsaw. Three times they saved Western civilization. Does the world realize it? Of course not!

It might be added that once the Bolsheviks did overpower the Poles (with the complicity of the West), they murdered most everyone (though not everyone) capable of that kind of heroism.
____________
* See Rousseau’s fascinating essay The Government of Poland for some discussion of the uniqueness of Polish political institutions.

The Open Society can be pretty comprehensively suggested by the following statement. All questions are open questions. The agitators for the Open Society — and, make no mistake about it, they were and are agitators — aimed at refashioning our society in such a way as to enshrine that statement as our guiding ideal. Their philosopher was John Stewart Mill, who argued in his famous work On Liberty that the central question in political philosophy — What is the good society? — could be answered thusly: the good society is that society which protects “the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral in may be considered.”

George Soros contends that the Open Society is the only antidote there is to totaliatarianism. Indeed, he asseverates that all totalitarians share in common a firm belief in “absolute truth”; thus it is clear in the mind of George Soros that George W. Bush, being a professing and practicing Christian, is of one mind with all the great totalitarians of the twentieth century and the Islamic totalitarians of today. Subtlety is not Mr. Soros’s strength; and neither is philosophical rigor. Mill at least had the latter in some quantity.

But what I want to say here is that the philosophy of Mr. Soros is incoherent. On its own terms it refutes itself. And I want to show, at least in sketch form, that this philosophy of negation is a road to the most awful of tyranny. The heart of the matter is that the Open Society, if pushed to its logical conclusions, is no guarantee against totalitarianism but rather a precursor to it.

There was an Open Society in Weimar Germany, and in Spain before the Civil War. Where did they lead? The Open Society allowed men to talk endlessly, about anything, with no moral limits, just as it said it would — and they talked themselves right into war and terror and grinding, fanatical tyranny.

The simple fact is that by asking us to commit to no absolute truths, Soros is working to enshrine a very real conception of absolute truth. It is absolutely true, he says, that there is no absolute truth.* His orthodoxy is anti-orthodoxy. The philosophy of negation becomes its own rumbling behemoth, drawing to itself all the coercive apparatus of the State as it is articulated in a social order. And because the Open Society men will admit no truth outside of the Open Society ideal itself, there can be no limits on the methods or means of enforcing the negative orthodoxy. On principle they deny any standard or moral claim outside of the Open Society; therefore, on principle they maintain that there is no limit on what can and should be done to achieve and preserve the Open Society.

A man who cleaves to absolute truths, to a law of nature which is discovered and not created, will recognize that whatever he desires for society must be limited by the dignity and humanity natural to his fellow man. In short, his very recognition of higher law puts limits how he can use the instruments of coercion if and when he attains them. So, in a seeming paradox, it is the Open Society partisans who make the most ruthless tyrants.

It is true, of course, that even men who assent to natural law can be driven by sin and passion to abuse — even to the point of tyranny. It is also true that cunning men may cloak their rapacity in the comforting forms of natural law even as they plot to build the darkest of despotisms.

But my point is that a society, and its legal form the state, which recognizes a moral law of nature, is far, far less likely to descend or decay into tyranny. Its logic forbids it. On the other hand, the society which commits itself only to the “orthodoxy of negation” of the Open Society, while it may not necessarily become totalitarian, will tend toward that result. Its logic ordains it.
____________
* St. Thomas Aquinas answered this assertion eight hundred years ago: “It is self-evident that truth exists, for he who denies that truth exists concedes that truth exists. If truth is not it is true that truth is not.”

I came not to bring peace, but a sword.

Rights and duties. The two are inseparable. One cannot declare a right without concomitantly shouldering a duty. But even that formulation does not frame things properly. One does not declare a right at all; one discovers it — discerns it from the nature of man. The Declaration of Independence did not declare rights; it declared the independence of a nation — or, in the language of that magnificent article, it declared “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” entitle “one people,” namely, the American people. What the Declaration said about rights is was an articulation of things discovered, and as such must be contrasted with Declaration of the Rights of Man that emerged from the French Revolution.

If there is indeed a “right” to marry, then there must be an attendant duty. And here is where heterosexuals have debased the institution, with what is called the no-fault divorce: For it is clear from even a cursory examination of the wedding ceremony that our traditions reflect a profound understanding of the duties inherent to the institution of matrimony. Men and women go before their family, their friends, the State of which they are citizens — and they usually go before God — to profess their love for one another, yes; but more importantly, to bind themselves, one to another, in a vow that transcends romantic love. The vow: the solemn commitment to discharge certain duties: that is the tremendous focal point of the wedding.

When we as a society vitiated that sacred heart of marriage, by making the vow a mere contract, we inflicted ruinous damage on the institution. We made the wedding a mere profession of romantic love, real but almost invariably transitory. We tore marriage lose from its great binding force, the vow. Solemnity was replaced by sentimentality. Only the Roman Catholic Church has retained, at least in principle*, its hold on the centrality of the vow.

An interesting thought experiment is to consider if there would be such a clamor for “gay marriage” if marriage were understood as legally binding beyond the nature of a mere contract. Calculate what thunder about “rights” would issue from the precincts of this most flamboyantly promiscuous of communities** if it were understood that to violate this vow is to stain one’s legal record: to make loans more difficult to attain, to supply potential employers with means for rejection, to damage one’s credibility in the court of law. In short, compute the change in the calculation of “marriage rights” if marriage were understood properly as a duty which binds a man’s sexual freedom, not merely in a customary way or privately religious way, but in an emphatically legal way.
___________
* For without question corruption has weakened the practice even among Catholics.
** If someone wishes to dispute this assertion, let him try with the evidence at hand.

— Hilaire Belloc

I await being dissuaded of this jaundiced view by the President’s more articulate defenders.

The point I want to raise is this: If America is everything that John Kerry says it is, what is it appropriate for us to do? The wells of regeneration are infinitely deep, but the stain described by John Kerry goes too deep to be bleached out by conventional remorse or resolution: better the destruction of America, if, to see ourselves truly, we need to look into the mirror John Kerry holds up for us. If we are a nation of sadists, of kid-killers and torturers, of hypocrites and criminals, let us be done with it, and pray that a great flood or fire will destroy us, leaving John Kerry and maybe Mrs. Benjamin Spock to take the place of Lot, in reseeding a new order.

Gentleman, how many times, in the days ahead, you will need to ask yourselves the most searching question of all, the counterpart of the priest’s most agonizing doubt: Is there a God? Yours will be: Is America worth it?

John Kerry’s assault on this country did not rise fullblown in his mind, like Venus from the Cypriot Sea. It is the crystallization of an assault upon America which has been fostered over the years by an intellectual class given over to self-doubt and self-hatred, driven by a cultural disgust with the uses to which so many people put their freedom. The assault on the military, the many and subtle vibrations of which you feel as keenly as James Baldwin knows the inflections of racism, is an assault on the proposition that what we have, in America, is truly worth defending. The military is to be loved or despised according as it defends that which is beloved or perpetuates that which is despised. The root question has not risen to such a level of respectability as to work itself into the platform of a national political party, but it lurks in the rhetoric of the John Kerrys, such that a blind man, running his fingers over the features of the public rhetoric, can discern the meaning of it:

Is America worth it?

That next-to-last passage is particularly haunting, for it is a bleak fact that the “root question” has indeed “risen to such a level of respectability as to work itself into the platform of a national political party.” In short, the question of America’s worth is an open question: Though shrouded by assorted devices of sophistry, political campaigns in this country have become, or are at least very close to becoming, plebiscites on this question. (And plebiscites, we should note, were horrifying things to the Framers of our constitution: precisely because they actuated the exercise, in politics, of naked will.) We are asked to answer — though rarely are we presented the question clearly — whether America as it is, is a society worth preserving. This is the unspeakable question on which we vote our consciences.

And there is a bleaker fact still. Though many have risen, like Mr. Buckley, to rouse us from our stupor, that we might answer, Yes America is worth it! — though many have risen, too few have been roused. There is a telling analogy in Europe, where an actor has made some rather mundane remarks, sub specie aeternatis, in defense of his civilization; and for the effort been branded a racist. This rhetorical violence against simple patriotism is hardly a novel event. It is most striking and most dispiriting, perhaps, when it issues from the mouths of those who fancy themselves as the opponents of the national party which made America’s worth an open question. Thus, to question the wisdom of mass immigration, as said actor did, is, here in America, to designate oneself a “nativist” — even for the party that fancies itself as “conservative.” Thus by a sly dialectical process the open question of America’s worth has corrupted our politics. Introduced on the Left as a revolutionary idea, it moves by an almost imperceptible osmosis to the Right, where it solidifies itself in implicit orthodoxy; and conservatives are left to preserve the structures of decline and fall.

It may be that once a question is opened, it can never again be closed, no matter what is exerted in the attempt to do so. It may be that the really crucial battle to fight, in the arena of ideas and politics, is that of whether certain questions should be closed. And it may be — indeed, I think it is — that here, on this crucial issue, our forefathers weighed resoundingly, in with those four pregnant words: “We hold these truths.” By thus declaring themselves as committed to certain propositions about the nature of Man and the State, they founded our nation. It should be astonishing in our day of license and clamor to reflect that America was made not by the opening up of all questions, but rather by the closing of certain supremely important ones. And I fear that once the Vietnam generation (felicitously described as the “counterculture”) publicly raised the question of whether America was at base a criminal society — even before the counterculture began its “long march” through the institutions — once this momentous step was taken, and patriotism was traduced in principle, there would be no turning back: The consensus was broken. This, indeed, in similar circumstances, was the insight of Edmund Burke when, upon seeing with his prophetic eye the calamity of the French Revolution, he bent the whole of his genius as a rhetorician and polemicist against the mere consideration by his beloved England of the principles of the Revolution. By doing so he shocked and dismayed his friends among the Whigs, who were enthused by it, and expected from Burke — Burke the defender of the American rebels, Burke the advocate of the subjugated Irish Catholics — a booming cheer for the French effort to (as they saw it) throw off the yoke of tyranny.

But whatever tyranny there might have been in France after Richelieu, there was nothing comparable in Britain; and Burke perceived that for the English to consider the principles of the Jacobins as they wafted across the Channel, was for them to embrace the same question we have embraced: Is our country worth it? The question, once open, could not subsequently be closed. Nor can ours today.

And the question for us — by us I mean “We the People” who still “hold these truths” — is how to restore what has been lost. It is indeed a task of restoration not conservation.

Football is a great game of hard work, sacrifice, the endurance of pain, precision, discipline, the love of brothers for one another, guts, spirit, the will to overcome adversity, and intense and sustained determination. Why, then, has the NFL been so dense as to allow its halftime show, year after year, to be a celebration of decadence and degradation?

If the moral morons the NFL hires to produce these shows set out to dramatize the last days of the Roman empire in all its legendary sickness, what would they do differently? Who are these seemingly drugged, indifferent, writhing pagan figures they now throw around the platform? These are not living human beings in action, these are sacks of flesh, writhing, grinding, pawing, acting out no higher appeal than bodily functions. They evoke no virtues of the human spirit. It is as if they wish to suffocate any spark of Jewish or Christian womanhood and manhood. It is as if they mean to corrupt, seduce, degrade. A more radically anti-Jewish and anti-Christian assault, embodying the sort of Wagnerian images of pagan disgust and decay that enraptured Hitlerian audiences, would be hard for them to produce.

Mr. Novak then gives his jeremiad over to some practical suggestions:

There are so many beautiful events in the history of our nation that our children and our families deserve to know, so many glorious episodes to dramatize. Why doesn’t the NFL stage a ten-year sequence of halftime shows that tell the great story of the Founding of our nation? For this story embodies all the virtues required by championship football, and many others besides. [. . .]

Our historians, novelists, dramatists, songwriters, and choreographers have certainly given us a rich mine of works that are the proper heritage of all our people. Why could these not be presented before worldwide audiences? Why can’t the NFL support the Herculean struggles of besieged families, and overworked schools, against the horrid drudge of a sick popular culture, and help parents and teachers to fire the imaginations of our children with ennobling images of greatness and achievement? Why does the NFL put our families through the sludge of an exhausted, desperate pagan culture that is going nowhere, and celebrates losers and freaks? Our families have enough enemies to fight through. Must they also fight the NFL?

That last line in particular rings in my ears, as a father: Our families have enough enemies to fight through. Must they also fight the NFL? I have often thought that the only good reason to have a television in one’s house is to watch sports. But how long will I be able to say with a straight face that that is a good reason?