The Water Is Wide

As Civilization Decays, Christianity Overcomes?

I've heard more than one right-wing blogger over the past decade, including some evangelical Protestant Christians, refer to Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and assert that - as Rome once was - so now is the "American Empire" in decline. Although eggheads can (and do) quibble about comparing America to the Roman Empire, there is ample evidence (provided by secular and religious observers alike) of the present existence in modern Western culture of Dr. Carle Zimmerman's "Eight Patterns of Domestic Behavior" that signal the decline of a civilization.

Evangelical Christians referring to Gibbon's work is ironic. Gibbon stated in the last chapter of his book that "I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion." Gibbon was anti-Christian in his view, and believed that Christianity had "sapped" the collective Roman will to serve the survival of the State, and replaced it with the pursuit of purely "personal salvation" through Christ.

In his classic 1948 essay, Christianity and Religion, historian Arnold Toynbee disagreed with Gibbon.  Toynbee contended that religion does not serve civilization, but that civilizations serve religion.

If civilizations are the handmaids of religion and if the Greco-Roman civilization served as a good handmaid to Christianity by bringing it to birth before that civilization finally went to pieces, then the civilizations of the third generation may be vain repetitions of the Gentiles. If, so far from its being the historical function of higher religions to minister, as chrysalises, to the cyclic process of the reproduction of civilizations to serve, by their downfalls, as stepping-stones to a progressive process of the revelation of always deeper religious insight, and the gift of ever more grace to act on this insight, then the societies of the species called civilizations will have fulfilled their function when once they have brought a mature higher religion to birth; and, on this showing, our own Western post-Christian secular civilization might at best be a superfluous repetition of the pre- Christian Graeco-Roman one, and at worst a pernicious back-sliding from the path of spiritual progress. In our Western world of to-day, the worship of Leviathan --the self-worship of the tribe-- is a religion to which all of us pay some measure of allegiance; and this tribal religion is, of course, sheer idolatry. Communism, which is another of our latter-day religions, is, I think, a leaf taken from the book of Christianity --a leaf torn out and misread. Democracy is another leaf from the book of Christianity, which has also, I fear, been torn out and, while perhaps not misread, has certainly been half emptied of meaning by being divorced from its Christian context and secularized; and we have obviously, for a number of generations past, been living on spiritual capital, I mean clinging to Christian practice without possessing the Christian belief --and practice unsupported by belief is a wasting asset, as we have suddenly discovered, to our dismay, in this generation.

[...]

On the theory that religion is subservient to civilization, you would expect some new higher religion to come into existence on each occasion, in order to serve the purpose of tiding over the gap between one civilization and another. If the truth is the other way round --if it is civilization that is the means and religion that is the end-- then, once again, a civilization may break down and break up, but the replacement of one higher religion by another will not be a necessary consequence. So far from that, if our secular Western civilization perishes, Christianity may be expected not only to endure but to grow in wisdom and stature as the result of a fresh experience of secular catastrophe.

[...]

And then one may look forward to what may happen when Caesar's empire decays --for Caesar's empire always does decay after a run of a few hundred years. What may happen is that Christianity may be left as the spiritual heir of all the other higher religions, from the post-Sumerian rudiment of one in the worship of Tammuz and Ishtar down to those that in A.D. 1948 are still living separate lives side by side with Christianity, and of all the philosophies from Ikhnaton's to Hegel's; while the Christian Church as an institution may be left as the social heir of all the other churches and all the civilizations.

There is much, much more food for thought (and for the soul) in Toynbee's essay.

I think that the critics, religious and secular, who cite Gibbon are correct in her belief that America (and Western culture) is in decline. As Toynbee asserts, "Caesar's empire" always falls after a few hundred years' run. His contention that the "secular worship" of the Leviathan, as well as the separation of democracy from its Christian roots and its secularization, have doomed the "democratic empire," is compelling, notwithstanding current "Neo-conservative"  views to the contrary (best articulated in Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man). Obviously, we won't know until we look back from the future, will we? I don't imagine many Romans realized they were in the the end game while they were playing it.

Maybe, as has been speculated by others, Pope Benedict XVI is preparing Christianity (as embodied in the Roman Catholic Church, at any rate) for a new "Dark Ages." Maybe, once this "pernicious back-sliding from the path of spiritual progress" of a civilization is destroyed, a more powerful Christianity eventually will emerge and move forward.

A final note: in a portion of Toynbee's essay that is not included in this post, he utters his oft-quoted  phrase "It [the Roman Empire] died not by murder, but by suicide." So will ours.

Reagan, Relativism and Insufferable Pretentiousness

I had dinner a few years ago with a another lawyer and two lobbyists/public relations "specialists" from Washington, D.C. The other lawyer was a died-in-the-wool Southern liberal of the "old school" (meaning late 60's, early '70's vintage) who still believes that he and his ilk are the "New Elite," destined to rule the world by dint of their superior performance on standardized tests. The two lobbyists, a man and a woman, were veterans of both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations. The dinner conversation became more lively with each bottle of wine consumed.

My leftward leaning lawyer acquaintance told us that he was living and working in Europe for much of the 1980's and was "embarrassed" that Reagan was our President. He said that to Reagan was too simplistic, to folksy, too unsophisticated for European tastes. He said he had a hard time looking his European friends in the eye during that time period. I responded that it's hard to look a man in the eye when your nose is shoved up his ass. The Republican operatives sat back grinning, letting me do the heavy lifting. That was fine by me.

As I reminded my liberal dinner companion, one of the major aspects of Reagan's legacy was his rejuvenation of the idea (fallen out of favor in the 20 years preceding his election) that there exist basic principles that are correct for all people at all times. He rejected "moral relativism," not in a cruel or hateful way, but nevertheless, with determination. He articulated, in terms that non-intellectuals could understand, the central idea that America must adhere to and promote the basic principles upon which this country was founded and which are embodied in our Declaration of Independence and our federal Constitution. These principles are not merely "opinions" or "preferences," on a par with other principles or preferences; they are fundamental principles that the people who founded this nation believed were more worthy of acceptance than principles that opposed, and that continue to oppose, them. They are "good" in an absolute sense, and they are superior to contrary principles.

Moral relativism holds that no specific values ought to be considered to be superior to any other specific values, in an absolute sense. Perhaps in a given situation at a given time, a particular value ought to prevail, but in other circumstances, at other times, other principles could prevail. There is no such thing as a value that is "absolutely correct," other than the value that no value is absolutely correct. Of course, moral relativism, when applied to political values, undermines liberal democracy itself. Yet, for many reasons, relativism will continue to be embraced and promoted by many in our individualistic society. Certainly, the concept of relativism seems to hold sway in Western Europe, at leas that part of it that is not becoming, through a demographic freight train that is barreling down the tracks, Muslim. Muslims don't seem to buy off on relativism.

Those Americans who did not live through the period from John F. Kennedy's assassination until the end of the dreary administration of "Lust-In-His-Heart" James Earl Carter may not understand the miasma that encompassed America at the time Reagan first ran for President. Moral relativism had so seeped into the intellectual and cultural elites of the US (not to mention the rest of the "civilized" world) that the American people were being advised by many of their own most-influential political and intellectual leaders that we had failed to achieve the ideals in which we professed to believe; that those ideals were not achievable by us, and, therefore they were not achievable by others whose "cultures" were less amenable to their adoption than was ours; that they were not entitled to preference over other principles; and that only our unjustified arrogance led us to continue to proclaim their superiority. Moreover, these same doomsayers, by their words and their actions, told us that we were a declining power, bereft of the right to assert our supremacy or the supremacy of the principles of our political system. Carter's administration was the embodiment of this vapid and demoralizing "settle in for the decline and fall" viewpoint.

1980 brought us Reagan, and the tide turned. He may not have been as sophisticated in his outward manner as Kennedy or Roosevelt. He might have sounded even "folksy" (although anyone who listened to Carter or, even worse, Johnson, had little to criticize by way of comparison). Yet, he spoke plainly and clearly. While he was firm, he was not mean spirited (as much political discussion has become since he left office). The majority of the American people liked both him AND the ideas he expressed. They struck a fundamental chord. He pushed the country back to the center, where most Americans feel most comfortable. More importantly, however, he told that majority that America and its political values were still great ones, worthy of our dedication to them, and, if required, of our sacrifice to protect and promote them. He gave us hope. He energized us. Frankly, I think he saved us from a downward spiral.

The only thing that embarrassed me was that I wasted valuable time listening to a would-be intellectual "strike a pose" and insult our other dinner guests by berating a man for whom they worked and in whose ideas they believed, because, I assumed, that man didn't wear an Armani suit, puff French cigarettes, and affect a mid-Atlantic accent. If Reagan embarrassed him so much, I couldn't imagine how he could bear the then-current shame of George W. Hell, why wasn't he living, right now, in a cozy little villa in the south of France with Elton John?

The lobbyists took it all in good stride, but then the leftard was their client and they had to let it slide. As long as he paid his bills promptly, much wrongheadedness would be tolerated. I'm not as forgiving...but I'm working on it.

What Is Truth?

Ever since George Bush left office and Rod Dreher dropped his "Bush Lied, Troops Died" meme, Rod's been readable. That's a good thing, because I genuinely like the guy and what he has to say. Today's opinion piece in The Dallas Morning News was another gem. Although framed as advice to recent graduates on what he wishes he'd heard from a commencement speaker, that subject is only a platform for one of Dreher's customary themes: there exist truth and virtue and the pursuit of both is the goal of a meaningful life. These are laugh-worthy concepts to a relativist, but meat and potatoes to we bipeds whose knuckles still scrape the asphalt when we walk.

An excerpt:

...[U]nless you're an incurable romantic or an American politician, you eventually will learn that life is more tragic than you were led to believe. You will discover your own limits. You will fail at something, even if you succeed by the standards of the world.

That failure may save you; success may destroy you. A friend grew comfortably wealthy in high finance but looked around one day, horrified to see what luxury had done to his colleagues' character. Shaken, he left the firm and embraced his ancestors' Judaism. He eventually quit finance entirely, fearing the inevitable consequences of Wall Street's money-driven collective madness. They all thought they were invincible.

Four months later, the stock market crashed. Every one of his friends was wiped out. What happened to them is tragic, in a way, but not the worst thing. Leon Bloy, the French Catholic novelist, had it right when he ended one of his novels with the following line: "There is but one tragedy, not to be a saint."

In secular terms, this means the only thing that matters is a life of self-sacrificing virtue, whether a prince's or a pauper's. People wonder how to get what they want but rarely think about what they should want. Don't be true to thine own self; be true to the truth. Most of us will never become rich or famous or even be remembered over time. But the capacity for everlasting greatness, as Bloy saw, lies within us all.

You don't fully control your fate, but you do control the formation of your character. That matters in ways we cannot foresee and can only appreciate once we lose the illusion that we are self-created.

To some extent, I think Dreher's like Garrett Morris' character on Saturday Night Live, whose closed captioned translation of the weekly anchor report for the deaf consisted of shouting. No matter what Morris said, the deaf weren't going to get it because they didn't comprehend the medium, much less the message. Dreher's offering his opinions in the opinion section of a daily newspaper. The people he needs to reach aren't reading newspapers much anymore. More importantly, so many of them have been raised in a secular, relativist culture that scoffs at many of the concepts discussed by Dreher, like "virtue" and, certainly, "truth." Dreher's shouting at the deaf.

Dreher's often speculated as to how a culture that doesn't share basic truths will survive. Greatly influenced by philosopher Alasdiar MacIntyre's bleak view of contemporary moral discourse, as set forth in his work After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Dreher's as pessimistic as is MacIntyre about the ability of Westerners (that includes us, folks) to comprehend one another when we discuss the concept of what it is we "ought to do," much less come to any consensus about "virtue" that we can use to bind ourselves together in a coherent body that will survive from generation to generation. Rather, we face the increasingly likely prospect that while we continue to talk past one another, we will become "atomized" (as another political theorist, Francis Fukuyama, put it so well), with few ties that bind us and little strength to those few ties that do. As a consequence, MacIntyre speculates and Dreher asserts, that a "new Benedict" will emerge, a successor to the original St. Benedict, whose monastic order kept alight the flame of intellectual, spiritual and religious virtues of Western civilization during the long, dark period following the collapse of the Roman Empire.

For Dreher, this light will remain shining through the coming dark ages in small communities of like-minded Christians who, like the earliest Christians, will suffer for their beliefs but will not relinquish them nor permit the light to be extinguished. They will be, I assume, as Chesterton (again) so well described those early martyrs to the faith:

And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never been darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like an unearthly phosporescence, blazing its track through the twilights of history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightning by which the world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it more illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable: the halo of hatred around the Church of God.

Once again, at some future point, the civilization we know will fall, as it must from its own lack of common purpose or, severely weakened by its relativist ethos, is overcome by a more robust, less atomized culture, one that rejects "whatever floats your boat" as the measuring stick for civic and personal virtue. Eventually, after the inevitable darkness that will follow, Christianity will prevail, and the small flame will, once again, blaze brightly and beat back the darkness. Dreher seems to be engaged in rallying those with similar views to engage in building these communities of light within a culture that is filled with lengthening shadows. He's said many times that fights like those against homosexual marriage and abortion "rights," while they should be waged, must be waged in a manner that preserves some small "right" to be different in a popular culture that will inevitably overwhelm the conservative Christian principles that have been rejected by a majority of those inhabitants of Western civilization today. In other words, he says the war for the popular culture is lost and we must look to preserve the legal right of minorities to believe and act on cherished principles of virtue in a society that has little, if any, truth left in it, other than to hold Christian values to be false ones.

That seems a bleak prospect, and no matter how much it appeals to my natural, man-given inclination to surrender to the pessimist I was and would be without my faith, I can't get onboard that train. Not only do I not understand how the new Benedict will find mountain redoubts that cannot be breached given modern mass media and technology, from what I've seen of the secular jihadists, they'll never be satisfied until traditional religious belief is extinguished from public life. I'd just as soon go down swinging than take that path, which I don't think will work.

However, before I can effectively engage in swimming against the tide of the deracinated mainstream of popular culture, I need to worry first about my personal circle of influence, which at the moment seems to be limited to me and my loving wife. Only if I succeed in getting out of God's way in my personal life will I have a chance of being saved. Only if I am saved will I be transformed in a positive manner. Only if I am transformed in a positive manner will I have any chance of influencing others in a positive manner. Only if those of us who profess to be believing Christians actually exhibit the transformative power of Christ to make ourselves stewards for the good of others will we have a prayer of transforming the culture.

I'm not surrendering to what Rod believes to be inevitable. On the other hand, until I get my own house in order, I'm not fit to fight this fight.

Red Sky In The Morning

The Times Are Nightfall, Look, Their Light Grows Less
---Gerald Manley Hopkins

The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;
The times are winter, watch, a world undone:
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run
Or bring more or more blazon man’s distress.
And I not help. Nor word now of success:
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one—
Work which to see scarce so much as begun
Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.

Or what is else? There is your world within.
There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.
Your will is law in that small commonweal…

Judy Collins, I Think It's Going  To Rain Today

Talk Is Cheap

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
 ---Theodore Roosevelt, in a speech at The Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910, entitled "Citizenship in a Republic."

It wasn't that Roosevelt had no use for critics, it was that he had little use for what he called "pure critics." In a much earlier speech, he gave his thoughts on such men.

"Criticism is necessary and useful; it is often indispensable; but it can never take the place of action, or be even a poor substitute for it. The function of the mere critic is of very subordinate usefulness. It is the doer of deeds who actually counts in the battle for life, and not the man who looks on and says how the fight ought to be fought, without himself sharing the stress and the danger."

Roosevelt's criticism of critics is timeless, and appropriate to recall at this time. We're in the early stages of a massive intervention by the US federal government into the financial system of the country in an attempt to avoid a long, deep recession and, even more dangerous, a depression. Critics of the recent actions of the Administration and Congress have come from all sides. Some of the criticism may turn out to be valid, especially in hindsight. The difficulty of suddenly staring into the abyss-and then trying to avoid running head-long off a cliff into it-by improvising a solution on the fly, is that you're likely to concoct a plan that is less perfect than one created by cool heads with more time for due deliberation. Yet, that's the situation that I understand occurred when Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke and other federal officials claim they realized that the US financial system was approaching liquidity and credit gridlock, and that the rest of the civilized world would quickly follow. The "bailout" program they hammered out with Congress over a two-week period includes (i) direct investments in non-voting equities (preferred stock and warrants) of US banks in order to give those banks capital to use to borrow and to lend, and (ii) the purchase of massive amounts of "toxic" assets from banks and other financial institutions in order to substitute cash or "clean" securities for those bad assets, again to provide collateral that those banks can use to fund the borrowings that they need to "operate" (especially, to resume lending not only to one another, but to American businesses and consumers).

Free market ideologues have had a field day with the bailout program. Some particularly virulent criticism has come from academics and what I call "professional critics." Among the more annoying of the latter are a group of young, mostly male, conservative bloggers and/or magazine columnists whose working life experience appears to consist solely of having gone to graduate school and then (or simultaneously) becoming "influential" voices of American conservative intellectual opinion through their blogs and online magazine sites.

I tried to check out one particularly condescending and arrogant punk, one who is oft-cited by other bloggers I read, and all a Google search revealed was that the "expert" in question was a doctoral student in Byzantine History. Nevertheless, he felt qualified to sneer at Prof. Stephen Bainbridge for stating that while Bainbridge considered himself a believer in free markets, he thought that the current crisis was such a potentially devastating danger that exceptional governmental intervention was justified. This professional critic sniffed that the true test of a believer in free markets was that the "true believer" allowed those markets to operate without governmental "interference" when the consequences were "painful," not merely when they weren't. As best I could determine, this young man has little idea what he's talking about when he boldly dismisses "painful consequences." We're talking not about the market participants who caused the painful consequences as being the only ones harmed, but widespread pain being visited upon all of us. Moreover, the "pain" is a pain of catastrophic proportions: another Great Depression, not one of the relatively milder forms of economic recession I lived through as an adult in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, as "painful" as those were at the time we lived through them. Only a Kool-Aid drinking fanatic, or a young punk with an advanced degree, a fine intellect, a way with the written word, a hefty dose of ignorance, and profound lack of common sense, would cling to his ideology to that degree.

It might help some of these ivory tower dwellers if they actually understood how our banking system operates, at least in the real world, not in theory. They might also benefit from an understanding that the commercial banking system in this country is not a "free market." Banks are heavily constrained in their operations by laws, regulations and the policies of regulatory authorities, and by routine (and extraordinary) visitorial powers of federal and state supervisory authorities. The regulatory scheme may not function well much of the time (being designed and operated by fallible human beings), but government interference in its operations, from the birth to the death of each bank within it, is a fact of life. The "meltdown" of the banking system system was caused primarily by bad actors outside that system-the unregulated, free market renegades-but it was the regulated financial system that was about to freeze up, taking the rest of the US, and the world's, economy with it. Under the circumstances as outlined by Chairman Bernanke and Secretary Paulson, the action recommended was reasonable.

Knowledgeable participants within the financial system, and some current academics who have participated in the system in the past, criticized the initial proposals from the federal government. Some of those criticisms were valid, and some important suggestions from those critics were incorporated into the final legislation (or are being implemented by policies adopted after the legislation passed). I'm disappointed that these actions had to be taken, that the final bill was larded up with pork, and that the federal government operates so poorly, on so many levels. However, I didn't find any of the criticisms of the young punk conservative ideologues to be credible in light of my thirty-four years of participation in the financial system. Their lack of expertise, married to a faith in "big ideas" warped into an ideology, made their ideas worse than useless. It made them harmful.

Not that any of these blowhards will stop their snark. It's always difficult to explain the concept of "light" to a man blinded by the fact that his head's shoved up his ass eyes are turned inward. On the other hand, each of them now has one less potential source of "click-throughs" on their blogs and magazine web sites.

Boxing Ourselves In

The following is adapted from a comment I left on another blog:

Many of us seem to find comfort in wrapping all of our "enemies" up in the same neat little box, and this is a trait that's not confined to "the right" or "the left." It seems that many people view the fundamental disagreements we have in this country as "a war" and those with opposing views as "the enemy." The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and you're either on board for the Full Monty of my beliefs or you're a traitor or worse. It's a fight to the death. It's perhaps inevitable, since, as Alasdair MacIntyre argued convincingly, we don't even agree on definitions of our most fundamental terms, so we talk past one another and nothing appears to be left for us but "civil war."

We seem to be in a situation that resembles the late Alan Bloom's description of Nietzche's view of "culture wars":

Cultures fight wars with one another. They must do so because values can only be asserted or posited by overcoming others, not by reasoning with them.

Cultures have different perceptions, which determine what the world is. They cannot come to terms. There is no communication about the highest things. Communication is the substitute for understanding when there is no common world men share.

Culture means a war against chaos and a war against other cultures. 

This is a sad state of affairs.

Of course, the reason for this state of affairs is entirely the fault of "the enemy."

Rising Above It All

Syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer had her nose bent out of shape recently because a retiring general said that after he retired, he was going to write a book. This statement annoyed Geyer, who thinks that writing books should be left to the professional writer.

"Yes," I said with a sardonic smile, "and when I retire, I'm going to be a general."

Ooooooo! Good one, Georgie Anne! I'll bet that one left the good general speechless.

Geyer makes no pretense about being a populist. Her description of this incident is her introduction to the main topic of her column, entitled "How Did Elitism Become a Dirty Word?" She mocks the notion that presidential and vice-presidential candidates should attempt to present the appearance that they are just one of the regular people, the typical American middle class citizen, the people Geyer refers to as "the mob."

I mention this chance encounter now, in the middle of the presidential campaigns, because it seems to be instructive of the sickness in these contests: the idea that our leaders have to be "just like us," that they have to have the same kitchen tables and sit around them wringing their hands over the same problems, that none of them can be superior in the slightest way or we will kill them dead with the moniker of "elitist." This is the infantile sense of the most important political campaign in the history of the greatest nation on earth.   

It's not that we're striving for higher and more respected levels; it's that we need to bring everybody down to lower ones. Genuine abilities and accomplishments have to be ignored and diminished, lest anyone look superior, even in a specialized knowledge or craft. How the genuinely talented Barack Obama made it to this level is just amazing. His problem is not his race, fellow citizens, it's that he's so elegant and smart!

After insulting Sarah Palin, she lets us in on her list of role models of "elitists" who we should honor for the "character and dignity" that they brought "to public service": "FDR, JFK, MacArthur, Acheson and the first President Bush." She dates herself with those picks, but they are telling. All come from wealthy New England or New York families, attended private preparatory academies, and (except MacArthur, who graduated from West Point), graduated from Ivy League universities (in fact, either Harvard or Yale). JFK was a notorious skirt-chaser, both before and during his presidency, but he looked good in a tuxedo and had a quick wit and a sense of "style," which I assume passes for bringing character and dignity into office. at least in Georgie Anne's circles. Neither Acheson nor MacArthur ran for president, they were appointed to their posts, MacArthur by his military superiors and Acheson by FDR (and later by Truman). I thought her screed was all about how "the mob" picks its presidents, but it appears to be about from which stratum of society both our national leaders and their minions should come and what "character traits" they should possess. Certainly, all of them shared intense personal ambition and fierce personal pride. In fact, according to several biographies of MacArthur that I have read, he was an egomaniac of monumental proportions and a martinet, to boot. My wife's uncle, who served on MacArthur's staff throughout WW II, opined that he might have been the most pompous asshole who ever walked the face of the earth, but her uncle's experience was finite as to space and time, so he couldn't be sure. He was the most pompous asshole her uncle had ever met in his lifetime, and he'd met a sufficient number to make a rough comparison.

What's a bit more troubling to me than the fact that members of these elites might be hugely flawed (just like the rest of us common folk) is that Georgie Anne never clearly elucidates what characteristics or qualities these "elitists" possess that enable the mob to recognize them as better than the mob, other than the fact that Obama is "smart and elegant." Is qualification to rule based upon those particular qualities? Intelligent GQ cover models are the ideal form of "national leader"?

Would it not be better to acknowledge that we are all different – we are not "all moms" or any other single thing – and that we should seek out the superior to rule our nation instead of the less talented?

The problem is this: Once you start with the egalitarian nonsense, which of course is what communist Marxism was all about, it's not only about politics; it's about our whole culture. Everything gets dumbed down for this one Mr. Average Man and Mrs. Mom, whether it's radio or television or public life. That's the price of not recognizing elites.

The "superior." The "less talented." To use these terms as a put-down of "egalitarian nonsense" is nonsensical unless you give us an better idea of what makes a man or woman "superior" to other men and women and what "talents" a member of "the elite" should possess to qualify him or her for membership. People in a society shot through with relativism have a tough time agreeing on those qualities when one attempts to define them. To use them without defining them is a non-starter for any discussion other than one that mocks Georgie Anne's lack of precision and clarity in expressing herself through the written word. I'd posit that her failures in this regard make her less than an elite columnist.

Of course, such a proposition is just the kind of personal insult that sets her blood boiling, isn't it? Sure it is. As proof that the entire rant is really all about her, she closes with a return to the presumptuous general.

And that's why generals think they can write books when they retire. We won't recognize that different people have different talents, abilities, strengths and weaknesses, and that we gain by identifying with their strengths, as they gain by immersing themselves in ours. That's not elitism; that's common sense.

No, Georgie, that's just your overestimation of your own talent, and a lack of understanding that writing well is something many people do who aren't professional newspaper columnists, people who do not use phrases that urge people to "identify with" the "strengths" of others or, even more muddle-headed, to "immerse themselves" in those "strengths." You, Georgie, are not as unique as you think yourself to be. That's a flaw you share with the rest of us, be we members of the mob or of the mob-averse. If that egalitarian proposition pricks your elitist's pride, that's unfortunate, but after all, it's only "common sense."

Of course, the entire column would have been short-circuited if Georgie Anne had realized that the appeal of a candidate who is "just like one of us" is not an appeal of the "dumbed down" candidate to the "dumb" voter. Rather, the appeal to the voter is that the candidate might actually understand the problems that the "less talented" voter wants the "more talented" political candidate to address once that candidate has been elected to office. It's a quality called "empathy." Some people actually value that quality in a candidate. To possess that quality, a candidate doesn't have to have to face the same problems on a day-to-day basis as does the voter, but the candidate has to convince the voter that he or she understands what the voter wants, that he or she "gets it." You can twist that understandable desire of the voter into a "Marxist" desire to "bring the candidate down to" the voter's level in terms of comparative "talents," but that twisting won't cure your clulessness. Like some politicians, some columnists simply don't get it.

The First Commandment

Stefan McDaniel at First Things responds to the left-wing British newspaper The Guardian's "fears" of the consequences of an Obama loss this November, specifically this one:

A generation of young Americans - who back Obama in big numbers - will turn cynical, concluding that politics doesn't work after all.

McDaniel not only doesn't share the fear, he thinks that if a consequence of an Obama loss is that youth turn away from politics, so much the better for them.

Not to trade in tired truisms, but I must repeat what seems to me the plain fact: The political process of a modern state is not the proper object of “faith” in any very strong sense.

Certainly, it is good that we have shown ourselves capable of acting for goals transcending the desires of our notoriously imperial postmodern Selves. And of course it is a relief to see that the desire for communal aspiration and effort is not dead. But a state containing three hundred and fifty million people spread out across an unthinkably vast stretch of land is a “community” only in an analogous sense. It’s not something you can put your whole heart into, or stake your happiness on. The only associations that deserve and repay that kind of investment are the ones that are in such bad shape: our families and churches. The sooner my generation learns this lesson, the better.

The danger, of course, is that we will retreat into vapid distraction and anxious jostling for money and prestige. But these things are plainly empty and cannot satisfy. In the end they must drive us back to the old, solid sources of meaning and community. It is better to shorten the exile by destroying any hope of consolation from false gods like politics.

When did I first hear the meme that if the Democratic candidate loses, youth will abandon politics? Oh, yes, I remember now: in 1968, when Eugene McCarthy blazed a trail for anti-war leftists by beating the snot out of LBJ in the New Hampshire primary, only to have Bobby Kennedy realize that Johnson was vulnerable, enter the primaries and snatch McCarthy's torch plumb out of his hand. Then, when Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles after winning the California primary, and--horror of horrors--Hubert Humphrey lost in November to Richard Nixon, the left predicted that young people would suffer a dire loss of faith in the political process. It didn't happen, did it? Four years later, many of those same young people were humping for George McGovern and watching on election night as the returns came in which showed Tricky Dicky handing McGovern a landslide whooping.

No, in young people, optimism, like hormones, springs eternal and reality rarely gets a choke hold on it.

On the other hand, McDaniel, a member of the younger generation, is right to call out his contemporaries on the false god of politics, and to assert that treating the political process with less fervor would be a good thing. In this, C.S. Lewis offered us his wisdom many decades ago.

A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion: to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other. But if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind — if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else — then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.

When you witness the venom, hatred and deception recently displayed by a number of those most consumed by the current presidential campaign, you begin to understand not only the symptoms of the disease but, perhaps, a clue to its cure. As McDaniel suggests, that cure lies in medicine more transcendent than either political party can provide.

I Gotta Get My Fred

Who among us hasn't "done some wonder loaf"?

Our parents may have been members of "The Greatest Generation," but we, surely, are "The Daffiest Generation."

And don't call me "Shirley"!

Now that really got me in the mood for some convention watching. How about you?