To my mind, this is more an undertaking more suitable to the art of rhetoric than to the science of dialectic. It is not a matter of forensics applied to sociology and economics and directed at the purely rational faculties of the mind; but of persuasion directed the “chest” — as C. S. Lewis taught, the seat of magnanimity, “of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiment.” We must demolish Socialism as an ideal. But, again as Lewis taught, we late moderns are but “men without chests,” and so the task is made more arduous.

We must not concede to Socialism a nobility of ideal it does not possess. It will hardly matter to the Socialist that Socialism “doesn’t work,” for his concern is not with what works and what does not; rather it is his concern to conjure ideals, sweet, intoxicating ideals, and project them onto a blank screen as it were, isolated from concrete history and daily life; and from these a grand sweeping, unreal critique, now implicit, now explicit, of reality. In this glow of unreality the critique appears unanswerable. Therefore he will point to those who go hungry, or those whose sickness could be but is not alleviated, or to any number of vivid privations — all with pressing implication that his system, Socialism, can end the privations. This is a cunning rhetorical device. He is not engaging in dialectics, in a learned discourse, a sober weighing of means and ends on the question of which philosophy ought to guide our political economy. He aims rather at stimulating our naked and unguided sentiment; for him what is important is that our emotions are troubled, that we feel the bite of shame in perceiving our own comfort and plenty; and, since he is still, as yet, a merely hypothetical character, I feel no qualms about imputing to him motives of a baser sort. I say, then, that he aims at misleading our sentiment, perverting its purpose, and thereby deceiving us in a very profound way.

Now nothing could be farther from my mind than a desire to denounce the art of Rhetoric. I am a great admirer of that noble discipline; a greater admirer still because it has fallen of late into such undeserved disrepute. Indeed, I think that precisely the problem under examination here — the problem of Socialism — has a great deal do to with the discredit of Rhetoric as an art; and it must be a very real problem indeed if it has cast under suspicion the art whose champions go by names like Cicero, Burke and Lincoln. But the art of Rhetoric has fallen into disrepute because we have forgotten the principle propounded by Aristotle: that what makes a sophist is not his faculty but his moral purpose.

The method of the Socialist Rhetorician, in fine, is to subtly force a decisive comparison between ideal and praxis, namely, between the ideal of Socialism and the practice of Capitalism. His moral purpose is dubious because his rhetoric hinges on a deceit. He will not play fair; he is a cheat. He has put everything at the service of his politics, including any sense of honorable argumentation. The rules of honorable argumentation demand that when a challenger wishes to critique a system, he must take its best case and refute it. He must point to flaws inherent to the system, not ancillary or incidental to it. Above all, he must endeavor not to blur the bright lines between Politics and Philosophy, lest we forget that the former is but an approximation of the latter, even in the best of circumstances. The state of rhetoric in our day can be pretty well suggested by the fact that this simple principle of discrepancy must be repeated unceasingly. That a rhetorician can get away quite easily with a unaccountable shift or elision from ideal to reality, and back again, as often as is needful to his designs, tells us that men are not trained properly. Stable sentiment has not been cultivated in them sufficient enough to recognize and call out a dirty trick when it appears.

Without plunging into a systematic critique of Socialism, which is outside the scope of this letter, what I would recommend to my correspondent is that he forget attacking Socialism because it doesn’t work (the politics of it), and begin attacking it on its own principles (the philosophy guiding it). Admittedly this is a greater burden on the intellect, but I believe my correspondent is up to the challenge. What he must demonstrate is that Socialism is evil even if it does what it says it will do; that to destroy the principle of private property is to amputate an irreplaceable part of what it means to be human, what it means to labor and create and be fruitful; in religious terms, that it is a heresy, an innovation that will annihilate, a revolt against the nature of man and the natural order of the world; in short, that it fails not because it doesn’t work, but rather it doesn’t work because it fails — fails utterly to reflect in any meaningful way the truth about Man and Society.

But, I wonder, is possible to duplicate? It seems to me that distraction is not distraction if it is deliberately cultivated unaided by external events; in short, that to attempt to distract oneself, in a moment which nevertheless requires concentration, is to plunge into a kind of whirling practical solipsism, something analogous to trying to concentrate on not losing concentration.

Anyway, on the more practical side, I did manage to identify and correct a problem in my swing, which should help, solipsism or no solipsism.

I grew up in Denver, Colorado; now I live in Atlanta. Among the virtues of the American South (which are legion) is the weather, which includes a nearly year-long golf season. You can’t beat that.

To this question “Is there anything?” St. Thomas begins by answering “Yes”; if he began by answering “No,” it would not be the beginning, but the end. That is what some of us call common sense. Either there is no philosophy, no philosophers, no thinkers, no thought, no anything; or else there is a real bridge between the mind and reality.

Elsewhere in his sparkling little book on Aquinas, Chesterton phrases things with even greater playful brilliance: “If the morbid Renaissance intellectual is supposed to say, ‘To be or not to be — that is the question,’ then the massive medieval doctor does most certainly reply in a voice of thunder, ‘To be — that is the answer.’”

At the center of the philosophy of Natural Law is a tremendous Affirmation; that the world is intelligible, that our perception is not, in its essence, a delusion, that our efforts to discern the order of the world are not futile. By its simplicity, all is illuminated: especially that which must be illuminated by Revelation. So much of the history of modern philosophy has been a dreary retreat from this affirmation, a great scurrying, feverish effort to construct systems to overturn the first principle, and the simple common sense of men.

• The scholarly recovery of Ronald Reagan from the clutches of his facile detractors continues apace. A volume of his personal letters has appeared, containing within it, it seems, evidence enough (if the earlier volume of radio commentaries was somehow not enough) to bury the charge that he was a pleasant simpleton led by his nose by ideologues. Steven F. Hayward observes:

  There is much more to be pondered in Reagan's letters, including his religious piety, his shrewd mix of practicality with ideological conviction, and his nuanced view of government. “President Lincoln said it is possible to be loyal to government and still be critical of those in power. You will never hear me assail our system or the Constitution,” he wrote in 1977. In other words, Reagan was not the simple anti-government libertarian he is sometimes described as being. He showed a grasp of the real problem when he wrote in 1979, “The permanent structure of our government with its power to pass regulations has eroded if not in effect repealed portions of our Constitution.”

• “No intelligent human,” writes Colby Cosh in a review of Florence King’s most recent collection, “can wear the label ‘conservative’ with complete comfort, except insofar as he has decided that his private definition of the term is the right and proper one.” Well said.

• Opponents of abortion finally seem to be taking seriously that ancient injunction to be “wise as serpents.”

• Don’t miss my friend Noah Millman’s excellent reflections on fatherhood in the pages of First Things. His perspective is a unique one.

I admire your bravery in announcing this publicly, Edward, and I think the appellation of "nightmarish" to your parter’s potential return to tyranny is just. Nevertheless, these personal facts cannot blur the issue of principle before us. To tether politics stubbornly to the personal is to make of it an activity which reduces, in the end, to the exercise of sheer, naked will — a condition none of us, upon reflection, desires.

To reiterate what has been said many times, here and elsewhere: there are indeed strong “compelling rationales” against gay marriage. There is, first, the argument from Natural Law, which holds that the State has no authority to take into its hands and radically transform an institution, the roots of which lie in the nature of men and women as complimentary sexual beings, that predates the modern State by several millennia.

There is also what we might call the argument from Political Philosophy, which holds that, even if the State were given such authority, in some “social contractarian” transaction, it cannot undertake this innovation except through mechanisms which decisively reveal, for all to see, that a consensus of We the People (us the people for you grammarians) has developed and matured. This innovation, if it happens, must not be an act of usurpation by a factional minority, but of republican consensus. More: the consensus itself must not comprise a bare majority, or a mere plurality, but instead reflect the “deliberate sense of the community” (as Publius in The Federalist aptly phrases it). Still more: even a solid majority, if it is achieved, must be able to pull along in acquiescence most of its opponents. That is how republics operate.

As it happens, we have just the mechanism for this: the Constitutional amendment process. Failing that, proponents of gay marriage can turn to state legislatures or Congress. But for this to be accomplished through the action of the least representative, the least accountable and the least flexible branch of government, against the wishes of the majority of We the People, and against the laws duly-enacted in our august republican bodies, would comprise an act of usurpation without parallel.

Those who, out of a combination of legitimate humanitarian concern and unfortunate economic ignorance, attempt to accelerate this process by means of legislation prohibiting child labor only add to the very misery they claim to be alleviating. It is only because such humanitarians have spent their lives in the fantastically wealthy capitalist societies of the West that they could have failed to realize that dire poverty, which makes child labor inevitable, has been the lot of the entire human race for the great majority of its history. The fact is, legislation or no legislation, the typical family in a very poor country still needs the income the child’s work brings. If the law prevents their children from being employed legally, then — children illegally, where conditions are almost certain to be far worse. In fact, in exceedingly poor societies where liberal humanitarians have prohibited child labor, it is not uncommon to find that the children wind up in prostitution — hardly an improvement in their welfare, to say the least. In fact, Oxfam, the British charity, recently reported that when factory owners in Bangladesh gave in to pressure to fire child laborers, thousands starved or went into prostitution.

The essay is chalk full of similar provocations. (Here is a thoughtful demurral from Jim Kalb.)

(Via The New Fugitive)

The college basketball tournament is distinguished from so many other sports because the great majority of its participants are in it only for the love of the game. Some small fraction, it is true, will make it to the NBA; and it is also true, naturally, that these few often carry their teams to victory; but many more will not, yet it does not diminish, but rather probably intensifies, their exertion. Men will collapse with leg-cramps, dive headlong into the crowd in hopeless pursuit of a ball, weep when defeat catches up with, and weep when it is overcome.

This is athletic competition of the first magnitude. It is man as Man.

[Europe] now awakens to the very nightmare which it hoped, in its uneasy, guilty holiday from history, never to face. Now face the horror it must, exactly 911 days behind America, lagging in all things, and most of all in hope. Whether the culprits of the Madrid train bombing are the ETA, grown monstrous on the assistance of Al Qaeda or the Al Qaeda itself makes no palpable difference. If a handful of Marxist terrorists can be responsible for the worst carnage on European soil since World War 2 it is almost comforting to hope that a more practiced demon, rather than a resurgent imp, had been the culprit. In the blackness of despair one can distinguish between shades of night.

Or again:

Tony Blair, alone among the major leaders of Europe had both the wit to see the danger and the fortitude to face it. He is a flawed figure, beholden to the social policies of the British Labor Party, yet for all that the only one with a sure voice, the only captain fell and terrible now that the issue is joined. And like another British leader thrust unwilling into the crucible he can count on the immense potency of the United States of America on that dark plain whose end he cannot see.

What could possibly be appended to such craftsmanship?

Modern Liberalism is our orthodoxy; or is very near to becoming it, notwithstanding the resistance that still endures. That resistance was far stronger 35 years ago, but perspicacious critics like Messrs. Wilhelmsen and Kendall could perceive even then that it was in retreat. The orthodoxy of Christendom, which had prevailed, mutatis mutandis, for the great bulk of American history, was disintegrating, and something new rising to replace it. James Hitchcock’s recent catalogue of the attitudes of many prominent legal minds makes for a good representative sample of this new thing. Here we have the clerics of an ascendant orthodoxy — those who are, as Jim Kalb puts it “busily drawing out the obvious implications of liberal pluralism: the suppression of everything that isn’t liberal pluralism.”

The emergence, maturation and ascendance of a new orthodoxy necessitates a severe reshuffling of ideological alliances among the constituents of the society which is undergoing this change. It cannot be otherwise. And it is increasingly clear that the big fault lines of this ideological shift are on the Right. For it is the Right whose duty and vocation has usually been to defend the orthodoxy, just as it is the Left whose vocation has usually been to criticize the orthodoxy, whether overtly (when the orthodoxy is weak), or subtly (when it is strong).

But the terrible conundrum for many on the Right is that the new orthodoxy is repugnant to them, opposed, in fact, to the nature of man, which it is their orthodoxy to hold up to men as true, irrevocable; and to discern its lineaments, and its mysterious complexity as something unique in the unique order of the universe, is their craft. So Conservatives, under this new orthodoxy, cannot be conservative; indeed, the day may dawn when they will be revolutionaries. Yet some will remain mere conservatives, and turn with loathing on what they see in their former comrades as a new threat to the established order which it is their business to defend. In brief, there will be conservatives whose project is to conserve the status quo, and Conservatives whose project it will be to restore the status quo ante; those loyal to the established order, and those loyal to a transcendent order that is not recognized. And they will emphatically not be allies. Wilhelmsen and Kendall go on,

Such a dilemma certainly faces any man who is aware both of the demands of the transcendent and of society, any man whose soul is turned out towards the truth of things as they are (that is, apart from political considerations), but also faces his responsibility as a member within a society that incarnates a way of life involving a certain (at least apparent) commitment to the Absolute.

But the situation today is exacerbated by the fact that modern Liberalism’s Absolute is a denial of the Absolute. Men are asked to venerate a negation.

It is in this context that politics in postmodern America will be best comprehended. In this context the strange and explosive fractures within what was once a more unified Conservative party will become clear in their causes and meaning; as, for example, it clarifies why some on the Right reacted so sternly against a symposium in the pages of First Things about “the judicial usurpation of politics.” The symposium and the reaction against it, in short, presaged a fracture into a Right that would become revolutionary in its opposition to a tyranny of courts and judges, and, against that, another Right that would be conservative of the status quo, even if the status quo included lawless courts and “robed masters.”

Other controversies which perplex may be illuminated by this dialectic. The fracture over amending the Constitution to prohibit homosexual marriage; the fracture over immigration; perhaps even the rupture over the film The Passion — all of these, I conceive, are related to the transformation of the public orthodoxy of this nation, and the response to that transformation of the men and women of the Right.
____________
* Thanks to Velleity of Velleities for this link.

On what basis do the conservative Episcopalians concentrate their energy and efforts on the one point of [Bishop V. Gene] Robinson’s homosexuality? Did this man not leave his family? Was he not allowed to remain a priest in active ministry? Where was the objection to these facts, where was the outcry then? Why no outcry about the bishops in the Episcopal Church (ECUSA) who have divorced and remarried, which, by the old canon laws of the Anglican Communion (and the teaching of Christ, I might add) is adultery? [. . .]

Mr. Robinson ought to have been defrocked, and if unrepentant still, excommunicated. Why? Because he is an openly “gay” man? No, because he is an unrepentant and notorious sinner. The discipline should have been the same had he left his family to live with another woman.

Mr. Hart has discerned and articulated a very hard truth which reposes uncomfortably near the heart (if you will) of the traditionalist response to the aggression of the sexual revolutionists. In brief, most are only traditionalist to a point: namely, the point where the hard edges and rigid demands of Chastity threaten to make them personally uneasy. They do not want to consider that Chastity, if it be a real thing of integrity, applies to “straights” too, and even applies to straights within their lawful marriages.

It strikes me as quite unlikely that opponents of the sexual revolution will be able to defeat it with half-measures, by ignoring their favorite sins while castigating those they disfavor. An unprincipled moral stand will not stand. Or so I conceive it in my more Roman Catholic moments. It is not insignificant to me that as large and fruitful an intellect as the one possessed by G. K. Chesterton was finally turned to Rome when the Anglican Church capitulated on contraception.

Mel Gibson’s depiction, he writes, “makes Pilate a far worse villain than Caiaphas.” It is Pilate’s very sophistication and cleverness that impeach him.

After all, Caiaphas believed that Christ had committed the ultimate sin of blasphemy by claiming to be the Son of God. As a leading representative of religious laws that condemned adulterers to death by stoning, he was almost bound to call for His execution. Caiaphas is making a terrible mistake. He may also have corrupt political motives for his actions. But he is plainly sincere in believing that, however conveniently, he has the law of God on his side.

Pilate is on much weaker ground. He condemns to death a man he believes to be innocent — and he does so, moreover, in a shifty manner that seeks to fix all guilt for the murder on Caiaphas and the mob and to exculpate himself.

Mr. O’Sullivan continues,

All that said, there is something sympathetic about Pilate. Almost anyone who reads the gospel account recognizes that the Roman procurator is in a fix — caught between his belief in Christ’s innocence and the danger of provoking revolutionary unrest by the Jews that would destroy his own career with his imperial masters in Rome. We all put ourselves in his shoes. We find ourselves hoping against hope that Pilate will make the right decision for his own sake as well as for the sake of Christ.

But as Gibson’s film makes horribly clear, he makes the wrong one. And in doing so, he establishes that courage is the handmaiden of the virtues. If we lack courage, we will find it very much harder to be virtuous against the crowd.

Yet there is also a less admirable reason why the modern world finds Pilate sympathetic. He is the patron saint of doubt and thus attractive to an age that regards doubt itself as a virtue — or at least as a mark of sophistication in the face of certainties with which we happen to disagree, whether they are the certainties of the religious right, or of fundamentalist Moslems, or of political ideologies. Many intellectuals, academics and (generally liberal) politicians have come to see doubt in these modestly heroic terms.

That is solid stuff.

Meanwhile, there is James Pinkerton, turning an analysis of the film into a wider examination of religion and politics. Mr. Pinkerton is at times an infuriating writer, but one cannot deny that he is often interesting and unpredictable. He agrees with Ben Domenech that The Passion is film more for believers than skeptics or unbelievers; and he projects that it will have the effect of helping to solidify Christians in reaction against the modern world.

[Gibson] will transform the heart and soul of many believers and some non-believers; in the process, he might well pull Christians in a more conservative, even reactionary, direction. But it’s hard to imagine that he and his movie will reverse the larger arrow of progress, which points to science, secularism, and rationalism. In fact, it’s quite possible that fundamentalism and Gibsonism will prove polarizing, driving out marginal believers, even as the hardshell base is hardened up. But of course, in a democracy, aggregate numbers of votes, as well as the intensity of individual voters, matters. So for all its power, “The Passion” could ultimately shrink the influence of the very institutions and belief systems that Gibson wishes to transform.

What Pinkerton is missing, I think, is the great relentless expansion of what Penn State’s Philip Jenkins calls the Third Church. This is the awesome variable that most of our Western secularists and Liberals would rather not add to the calculation. It is too huge and awful; a great menacing shadow on the horizon. Modern rationalism is a peculiarly Western fancy; and because it flattens the aspirations of Man by obliterating the tension, fundamental to all the fruitful societies of our ancestors, pagan or Christian, of a soul rooted by a physical life in the material world but reaching achingly, tragically, heroically toward its immortal Creator; because stale rationalism scorns Man’s aspirations, and answers his hoarse cries not with God’s thunder — as to Job: “where were you when the foundations of the world were laid?” — but with cruel mockery; because of this, modern rationalism will fail, if for no other reason than because its adherents, sunken with boredom, or stoic resignation, will not reproduce, while its opponents will always locate the procreative power of Man in the larger mystery of the Creation story, and the lesser, but still astounding mystery of their participation in it.

It is Distributism. Here are some Chesterton essays that introduce the philosophy. Particularly brilliant is “Sex and Property.”

(Via Peter Burnet at BrothersJudd.)