The City Spring 2012

THEÂ CITYÂ From Institutes of the Christian Religion, by John Calvin, translated by John Allen, originally published in Geneva in Latin in 1536.

The Lord commands us to be good to all men universally, a great part of whom estimated according to their merits are very undeserving. But here the Scripture assists us with an excellent rule when it inculcates what we must not regard the intrinsic merit of men but must consider the image of God in them to which we owe all possible honor and love. Whoever therefore is presented to you that needs your kind offices, you have no reason to refuse him your assistance. Say that he is a stranger; yet the Lord hath impressed on him a character which ought to be familiar to you, for which reason He forbids you to despise your own flesh. Say that he is contemptible and worthless; but the Lord sows him to be the one who he hath deigned to grace with his own image. Say that he is unworthy of your making the smallest exertion on his account; but the image of God, by which he is recommended to you, deserves your surrender of yourself and all that you possess. If he not only has deserved no favor but, on the contrary, has provoked you with injuries and insults, even this is no just reason why you should cease to embrace him. He has deserved, you will say, very different treatment forom me. But what hath the Lord deserved? Who when he commands you to forgive men all their offences against you, certainly intends that they should be charged to himself. This is the only way of attaining that which is not only difficult but utterly repugnant to the nature of man; to love them who hate us, to requite injuries with kindnesses, and to return blessing for curses. We should remember that we must not reflect on the wickedness of men, but contemplate the Divine image in them, which, concealing and obliterating their faults, by its beauty and dignity allures us to embrace them in the arms of our love.

A publication of Houston Baptist University

SPRING 2012

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THE CITY Publisher Robert Sloan Advisory Editors Francis J. Beckwith Adam Bellow Paul J. Bonicelli Joseph Bottum Wilfred McClay John Mark Reynolds Editor in Chief Benjamin Domenech Books Editor Micah Mattix Writer at Large Hunter Baker Contributing Editors Matthew Lee Anderson Ryan T. Anderson Matthew Boyleston David Capes Victoria Gardner Coates Christopher Hammons Anthony Joseph Joseph M. Knippenberg Louis Markos Peter Meilaender Dan McLaughlin Paul D. Miller Matthew J. Milliner Russell Moore Robert Stacey Joshua Trevino

THE CITY Volume V, Issue 1 Copyright 2012 Houston Baptist University.

All rights reserved by original authors except as noted. Letters and submissions to this journal are welcomed. Cover photo by Joshua Trevino.

Email us at thecity@hbu.edu, and visit us online at civitate.org.

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4CONTENTS$ Lessons from History Louis Markos on Saint Augustine Paul D. Miller on Alexis de Tocqueville Paul Bonicelli on Andrew Jackson

4 18 36

Features A Conversation with Mary Eberstadt Paul Rahe on Catholicism and Conscience Tim Goeglein on Tea with Russell Kirk

47 58 67

Books & Culture Ryan T. Anderson on the Morality of Capitalism Aaron Belz on Reclaiming Wendell Berry Burwell Stark on Teddy Roosevelt and Football Micah Mattix on The Confederacy of Dunces

73 92 96 100

A Republ ic of Letter s Hunter Baker

105

Poetry by John Poch

45,104

The Word by G.K. Chesterton

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W ISD OM & T HE C ITY OF G OD 4AUGUSTINE)FOR)TODAY$ Louis Markos

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n 410 A.D., the unthinkable happened. For the first time in 800 years, the invincible city of Rome was sacked and looted. Im‐ agine if the destruction of the World Trade Center on Septem‐ ber 11, 2001 had been followed by a full scale invasion of Manhattan; such a cataclysmic event would have left the citi‐ zens of America (and the world) gasping for breath, and for answers.

Nothing again would seem stable; it would be as if the end of civili‐ zation had arrived. Just such a sense of apocalyptic doom fell over the empire in 410.

In response, the pagan intellectuals of the day cast the blame for Rome’s demise on Christianity. On the one hand, Rome’s rejection of her traditional pantheon had clearly prompted Jupiter and his fellow deities to abandon the city they had nurtured and made great. On the other, the Christian ethic of turn the other cheek had left her weak and vitiated, unable to resist the virility and martial spirit of the bar‐ barians. Desperate to defend the reputation of Christianity, a Roman official named Marcellinus begged his fellow North African, St. Au‐ gustine, to write a refutation. The result was a massive, 22‐book tome with the epic scope of Virgil’s Aeneid and the philosophical‐ theological‐ethical layering of Plato’s Republic.

The pagan gods, argues Augustine in Books I‐X of The City of God, were not what made Rome great. According to Aeneid II, the future gods of Rome were not only too impotent to save their city from the Greeks; they had to be saved themselves by Aeneas, who carried the idols of Jupiter and his fellow gods from the flames of Troy to the hearths of Italy. Furthermore, long before Christianity came on the scene, the citizens of Rome’s once‐virtuous Republic had fallen into 4

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corruption—a decadence attested to by such pagan writers as Virgil, Cicero, Sallust, and Varro. Christians, in contrast, were ethical, moral‐ ly self‐regulating citizens who obeyed the law. As for the pagan phi‐ losophers who accused Christianity of bringing on the Fall of Rome, they served gods who were not only incapable of providing a firm ethical base for their earthly lives, but who could not guarantee them eternal life in heaven.

Having set the record straight on the relative merits of paganism and Christianity and the role they played in 410, Augustine goes on in Books XI‐XXII to trace the origins, historical developments, charac‐ teristics, and final ends of those two cities that make up the theme of his work. The earthly, temporal City of Man was founded by the en‐ vious, fratricidal Cain and perpetuated by all those who live accord‐ ing to the flesh. Rome, founded by the ambitious, fratricidal Romu‐ lus, also comprised a part of the City of Man, as did all the kingdoms of the world that refused allegiance to the One True God. Though Augustine extols Roman peace, law, and civilization as good things, he makes it clear that the only City that will endure is the one whose foundation is God and whose citizens, who live according to the Spirit, dwell on this earth as pilgrims. The City of God and the City of Man, whose rolls include angelic and human citizens, stand in eter‐ nal opposition, and yet, for all of human history, they have existed side by side. Indeed, writes Augustine, “the former lives like an alien inside the latter” (XVIII.1).

For over 1500 years, The City of God has been hailed as a key text‐ book in the social sciences, offering invaluable insights into the histo‐ ry of Israel, Greece and Rome, the right ordering of political struc‐ tures, the proper relationship between Church and State, and the development of just war theory. All of these topics continue to be of paramount importance in our modern, global world, but they do not exhaust the wisdom contained within Augustine’s wide‐ranging, far‐ reaching, insanely‐tangential masterpiece. In what follows I shall mine The City of God for the timely advice it offers in two areas— biblical interpretation and interaction with other religions—that have proven to be stumbling blocks for the twenty‐first‐century church.

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rom the anti‐supernatural bias of the Enlightenment, to the higher criticism of the nineteenth century, to the Jesus seminar of today, the church has faced an ongoing crisis of biblical au‐ 5

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thority. Though the crisis has been strongest in the Protestant Main‐ line, Catholics and Evangelicals have also been affected by what Car‐ dinal Newman (in a note appended to his Apologia Pro Vita Sua) iden‐ tified as liberalism’s “mistake of subjecting to human judgment those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond and independent of it, and of claiming to determine on intrinsic grounds the truth and value of propositions which rest for their reception simply on the external authority of the Divine Word.”

Most of the departures from traditional orthodoxy that have com‐ promised the witness of the church—the acceptance and even cham‐ pioning of abortion and gay marriage; the embrace of universal sal‐ vation; the questioning of such key doctrines as the Incarnation, Trinity, and Resurrection; the rending apart of God’s justice and mer‐ cy; the substitution of the atoning work of the Cross for a social gos‐ pel of good works—are rooted in an orientation that privileges “hu‐ man judgment” over “the external authority of the Divine Word.”

When faced with the question, “Is the Bible the Word of God, or does it only contain the words of God?” the theological liberal will almost always favor the second option. And the same goes for a number of related questions: Is the Bible to be taken literally and historically or figuratively and allegorically? Are its pronouncements timeless and universal, or do they change from age to age and culture to culture?

Is each word and phrase inspired or only the wider message?

In The City of God, Augustine makes it clear that the Bible is the “fount of Christian faith” (IX.5). It holds complete authority in the life of church and believer alike, an authority that rests not only on its divine status but on its clear and demonstrable trustworthiness: “our Scriptures never deceive us, since we can test the truth of what they have told us by the fulfillment of predictions” (XVI.9). The Bible does not receive its authority from the community that reads it but from its reliability in all matters of faith. The God‐inspired truth of the biblical narrative is made manifest in the hundreds of Old Testament prophecies that were accurately fulfilled in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Christ.

And yet, the prophecies, sufficient as they are to substantiate the Bible as the Divine Word, form only a part of its uniqueness. In sharp contrast to the theological, philosophical, and ethical writings of the City of Man, which war with each other in their claims and asser‐ tions, the books of the Bible, despite being written over the course of 6

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centuries by a wide array of prophets and kings, priests and laymen, form a cohesive whole that attests with one voice to the Triune God. “How differently” than the confused, Babel‐like witness of the pagan City of Man, rhapsodizes Augustine, “has that other race, that other commonwealth of men, that other City, the people of Israel, to whom was entrusted the word of God, managed matters! No broadminded, muddle‐headed mixing of true prophets with false prophets there!

They have recognized and held as the true‐speaking authors of Holy Writ only those who are in perfect harmony with one another” (XVIII.41).

Augustine places much trust in the timeless unity of the scriptures, but his trust does not rest on some weak‐kneed fideism. Throughout The City of God, he maintains a high critical standard, subjecting the Bible to careful analysis. For example, though Augustine did not con‐ sider the authority of the scriptures to be compromised by copyist errors, he does counsel his readers to consult the oldest available manuscripts: “it is better to believe what we find in the original from which the translations have been made” (XV.13). Augustine shows equal scholarly discernment and restraint in assessing the pseude‐ pigrapha. After asserting that the “canon . . . must be kept immacu‐ late” (XVIII.38), Augustine explains why he does not accept as canon‐ ical (and therefore authoritative) the alleged prophecies of Enoch and Noah. Though these two men of God were true prophets, their writ‐ ings are too old to be authentic, or at least to be proved to be so. Au‐ gustine further adds—perhaps meditating on the careful distinctions that Paul makes in 1 Corinthians 7—that prophets can write some‐ times under divine inspiration and sometimes under human capaci‐ ty, resulting in writings that may be historically accurate but which lack spiritual truth (XVIII.38).

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ugustine’s most interesting textual analysis, however, is found in his discussion of the Septuagint (or LXX). With great brio, he retells the well‐known legend that the 70 (or 72) scholars who met at Alexandria to translate the Old Testament into Greek went into different rooms to work but emerged with iden‐ tical translations (XVIII.42). Without ridiculing or dismissing out of hand this beloved legend, Augustine argues that the LXX retains its reliability whether or not the legend is true: “For, even supposing that [the Seventy] were not inspired by one divine Spirit, but that, 7

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after the manner of scholars, the Seventy merely collated their ver‐ sions in a purely human way and agreed on a commonly approved text, still, I say, no single translator should be ranked ahead of so many” (XVIII.43). This is sound advice for any textual critic, past or present, but Augustine goes further. As a believer who knew not only that the Bible was no ordinary book but that the Holy Spirit was its ultimate author and interpreter, Augustine offers a fuller assessment of the unique status of the LXX, a translation in which the Apostles had full confidence and which the Greek Orthodox Church considers to be canonical.

Earlier in The City of God, Augustine, commenting on variations be‐ tween the original Hebrew and the LXX that increase the messianic nature of Old Testament prophecy, boldly suggests that “the transla‐ tors were inspired by the divine Spirit to depart deliberately from the original, for along with their duties as scholars they had rights as prophets” (XV.14). In Book XVIII he develops this thought further, positing that the Spirit used the combined witness of the original prophets and the Seventy to reveal deeply hidden truths:

For the same Spirit who inspired the original Prophets as they wrote was no less present to the Seventy as they translated what the Prophets had written. And this Spirit, with divine authority, could say, through the translators, something different from what He had said through the original Prophets—just as, though these Prophets had the two meanings in mind, both were inspired by the Spirit. Beside, the Holy Spirit can say the same thing in two different ways, so long as the same meaning, in different words, is clear to anyone who reads with understanding. The Spirit, too, could omit certain things and add others, to make it clear that in the translators’ work there was no question of their being bound to a purely human, word-for-word, slavish transcription, but only to the divine power which filled and mastered their minds. . . Whatever is found both in the original Hebrew and in the Septuagint, the one same Spirit chose to say through both.

This remarkable passage, which rests on a profound faith in Christ as the Word (or Logos), balances a commitment to the fixed truth of scripture with an openness to the dynamic nature of the Spirit’s work in the church. Truly, the timeless Word of God on which the Creeds of the Church are founded is the same Word which is sharper than a

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two‐edged sword and which cuts both ways, dividing bone from marrow.

Augustine’s assessment of the LXX may sound a bit abstract to modern ears, but he does offer a concrete example of a prophetic verse from the Old Testament whose full messianic meaning can only be gauged by combining the Greek Septuagint with the Latin Vulgate (which was based on the original Hebrew). The verse, Zechariah 12:10, reads thus in the King James: “And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn.”

This amazing prophecy, which looks forward not only to the cruci‐ fixion but to the end times, when many Jews will turn to Christ as messiah, is rendered differently, Augustine explains, in the Vulgate and the LXX. Where the Vulgate gives, “they shall look upon me whom they have pierced,” the LXX reads, “And they shall look upon me as one whom they have insulted.” Musing on these seemingly contradictory translations, Augustine the orthodox believer and tex‐ tual critic suggests that if “we combine the two readings, ‘insulted’ and ‘pierced,’ we get a much fuller picture of our Lord’s passion than by taking either the Septuagint or the Vulgate reading by it‐ self”(XX.30). Through the dual inspiration of prophet and translator, the same verse in Zechariah is able to point ahead both to the means of Christ’s sacrifice (“pierced”) and to the fickle crowd’s response to that sacrifice (“insulted”).

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hough Augustine’s personal and scholarly immersion in the Bible (especially the Psalms) was total, he seems to have been particularly drawn to Genesis. In addition to writing a full length commentary of the first book of the Bible and devoting the last three books of his Confessions to an almost obsessively close reading of Genesis 1, Augustine interlaces the political and philosophical musings of his City of God with an ongoing analysis of the Creation, the Garden of Eden, the Fall, and Cain’s slaying of Abel. Particularly in his analysis of the days of creation, Augustine weighs carefully every word and phrase. While leaving open to interpretation the length of the “days” of Genesis 1 (XI.7), Augustine treats the account 9

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itself as “sacred and infallible Scripture” (XI.6) and takes seriously each detail. As a result, Augustine, far from falling into some narrow, anti‐intellectual “fundamentalism,” succeeds in making an observa‐ tion about our universe that would not be revealed to science until the full nature of the Big Bang was uncovered: “the world was made not in time but together with time” (XI.6).

Later in The City of God, Augustine mounts a spirited defense of the early chapter of Genesis. In answer to smug critics who disparage the reliability of Genesis because it does not explain where Cain got his wife or how he built a city when there were apparently no other peo‐ ple alive to build it—such critics are still with us today—Augustine explains that the author of Genesis 4 “was under no obligation to mention the names of all who may have been alive at the time, but only of those whom the scope of his work required him to mention” (XV.8). He further explains that whereas marriage between brother and sister was allowed in the beginning when “natural necessity compel[led] it,” it was later condemned by morality and custom, partly as a way to spread love and affection beyond the confines of tight, insular families (XV.16).

Readers uncomfortable with the seeming literalism of Augustine’s handling of Genesis may wish to remind me that Augustine himself said in his Confessions that he could not understand and accept the Old Testament until he learned to read it allegorically. Augustine did in fact make such a statement; indeed, he helped teach the Middle Ages how to identify allegorical meanings in scripture. Nevertheless, modern Christians who fear the dangers of dead literalism must re‐ sist falling into the Enlightenment trap of turning literal/figurative and historical/allegorical into simple either/or dichotomies. At sever‐ al points in The City of God, Augustine takes pains to explain that al‐ legorical readings of scripture, though valid, must not be allowed to usurp the literal, historical sense. Rather, the two must be held in a creative balance and tension that maintains biblical authority while allowing for deeper spiritual meaning.

Thus, in Book XIII, Augustine argues that Eden is an historical and real place, even if it can also be allegorized to represent the life of the blessed (with the four rivers standing in for the classical virtues) or the Church itself (with the same rivers standing for the four gospels).

“No one should object to . . . the allegorical interpretation of the Gar‐ den of Eden, so long as we believe in the historical truth manifest in 10

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the faithful narrative of these events” (21). Speaking more generally, Augustine insists that proper interpretation of the Old Testament must attend to the historical meaning before moving on to higher allegorical levels: “I do not censure those who may have been able to carve out some spiritual interpretation from every historical fact re‐ counted [in the Bible], so long as they take good care first and fore‐ most to adhere to the historical fact” (XVII.3). By arguing thus, Au‐ gustine puts a limit on bizarre and fanciful allegorical readings, while protecting the integrity and authority of the literal meaning of the inspired Word of God.

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he seriousness with which Augustine takes up the interpreta‐ tion of scripture is both bracing and instructive. By following his example, the twenty‐first century church can regain its respect and awe for the Bible as God’s unchanging Word in a chang‐ ing world. Indeed, if we are to understand the nature of our world and ourselves—including the ever‐contending domains of the City of God and the City of Man—then we must (to borrow a distinction from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy) learn again to trust the timeless truths of the Bible and doubt our own historical moment. Augustine, living in a time of political, social, and cultural ferment, did just that and was inspired with a vision of the greater forces that propel history forward and of the final telos (purposeful end) of the human person.

Those forces and that telos Augustine found in the Bible, but he en‐ countered them first in the Aeneid of Virgil and the dialogues of Pla‐ to. Though Augustine’s faith in the absolute authority and centrality of the Bible was as great as that of Luther or Calvin, he never suc‐ cumbed to a temptation to which many heirs of the Protestant Reformation have fallen prey: that of treating the Bible as the sole source of truth and thereby dismissing other, non‐Christian theologi‐ cal, philosophical, and ethical writings as potential sources of wis‐ dom. In The City of God, Augustine avoids this temptation while sim‐ ultaneously avoiding its opposite—a relativistic, inclusivist approach that treats the Bible as merely one text among many. Instead, Augus‐ tine uses the Bible as a touchstone to measure the claims made not only by the pre‐Christian writers of Greece and Rome but the Stoics and Neo‐Platonists of his own day as well.

Books V‐VII of the Confessions explain the origin of Augustine’s finely‐honed talent for discerning the merits and dangers of non‐ 11

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Christian writings. Before becoming a believer, the young Augustine spent time as a member of the flesh‐denying Manicheans and the more sophisticated Neo‐Platonists. Whereas the gnostic doctrines and strange rituals of the former were rejected and abandoned by Augustine, the Plato‐inspired teachings of the latter played a vital role in leading him to true faith. The Bible alone taught him that the Word became flesh, but his study of Plotinus and Porphyry helped open his eyes to, and prepare his heart for, the existence of an Eternal Word. As a result, Augustine learned to discern between heretics who twisted the scriptures and genuine seekers from other religions who yearned for higher truth.

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hough there are times in The City of God where Augustine the apologist defends the pure doctrines of the Church against those of other religions, his general stance is best expressed in an early chapter when he disputes those who say that Rome’s great‐ ness was caused by fortune or fate: “For the moment, my argument is not directed against sincere pagans, but only against those who, in defense of what they call gods, attack the Christian religion” (V.1).

Augustine acknowledges the existence of sincere pagans, distin‐ guishes them from active enemies of the church, and deigns to enter into conversation with them and their theories. He acknowledges as well that throughout the long, dark centuries before the coming of Christ, there existed a remnant of righteous pagans: pre‐Christian Gentiles who, though ignorant of the Law and the Prophets, glimpsed divine truths about the nature of God, man, and the uni‐ verse and lived lives of relative piety and virtue. While meditating on the impotence of the ancient gods to protect their worshipers from calamity, Augustine adds, “I except, of course, the Hebrew nation, and a few individuals beyond its pale, wherever by God’s grace and His secret and righteous judgment they were found worthy” (III.1).

Augustine, like so many of the early and medieval Fathers of the Church, counted Virgil among that hidden leaven. Though Augus‐ tine does not hesitate to reveal errors in the Aeneid, he more often accepts Virgil’s view of history as inspired and definitive. Virgil is the “greatest and best of all poets” (I.3), someone who was used by Yah‐ weh to sing the glory of Augustus’s Rome—a Rome whose Pax Romana prepared the way for the coming of the Prince of Peace even as its political and judicial structures prepared the way for the Ro‐ 12

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man Catholic Church. On an even deeper level, Virgil’s celebration of the City of Rome points to that greater City of God which is the sub‐ ject of Augustine’s book. In a sentence guaranteed to give Virgil‐ loving Christians goose bumps, Augustine offers the following de‐ scription of The City of God: “In that land there is no Vestal altar, no statue of Jupiter on the Capitol, but the one true God, who ‘will not limit you in space or time, but will give an empire universal and eternal’” (II.29). The phrase that Augustine places in quotes is lifted directly from Aeneid I, where it forms part of Jupiter’s grand prophe‐ cy of the future glory of Rome. By using the phrase to describe the celestial city, Augustine affirms that Virgil was a proto‐Christian prophet who somehow glimpsed a grandeur and majesty that trans‐ cended the finally fleeting glory of Augustus and his empire.

And as he finds historical and eschatological truths in Virgil’s Aene‐ id, so does he find theological ones as well. As a former Manichean, Augustine knew how vital it was for Christian philosophers and apologists to defend the intrinsic goodness of matter and the body.

Our flesh is not, as the Gnostics taught, inherently evil; neither is our body a prison house from which our soul seeks to escape. In order to demonstrate that this great truth was known and accepted by the wisest of the righteous pagans (the Neo‐Platonists), Augustine turns to a scene in Aeneid VI where Aeneas, during his descent into the underworld, meets souls who long to return to earth and inhabit new bodies. Aeneas is taken aback by the souls’ desire to be incarnate again, but the desire is nevertheless recorded and defended by Virgil, whom Augustine accounts an inspired mouthpiece of the Platonists:

From this it is clear that, even if the belief [in reincarnation], which is absolutely unfounded, were true, namely, that there exists this unceasing alteration of purification and defilement in the souls which depart from and return to their bodies, no one could rightly say that all culpable and corrupt emotions of our souls have their roots in our earthly bodies. For, here we have the Platonists themselves, through the mouth of their noble spokesman, teaching that this direful desire has so little to do with the body that it compels even the soul already purified of every bodily disease and now subsisting independently of any kind of body to seek an existence in a body.

Along with Arianism, Gnosticism has plagued the church for two millennia. Its heretical teaching that the flesh is inherently sinful ren‐ 13

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ders the Incarnation an impossibility and makes a mockery of the great promise made manifest on the first Easter morning: that we are not destined to be disembodied souls but will be clothed for eternity in Resurrection Bodies. Of that great promise, Augustine finds glimpses not only in the Psalms and the Prophets but in an epic po‐ em written by a righteous pagan who died nineteen years before the birth of Christ.

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ugustine’s respect and love for Virgil is made manifest throughout The City of God, but the Bishop of Hippo saves his greatest admiration for Plato. Plato did far more than stumble by accident upon a few scattered bits of proverbial wisdom.

He was nothing less than a pagan prophet who, on the basis of gen‐ eral revelation (transmitted through conscience, reason, and the or‐ der of creation), identified, defined, and passed on to his heirs time‐ less truths that would prove invaluable to the Fathers of the Church.

Plato, writes Augustine, is “a master rightly esteemed above all other pagan philosophers” (VIII.4). His true followers “have perceived, at least, these truths about God: that in Him is to be found the cause of all being, the reason of all thinking, the rule of all living” (VIII.4).

Indeed, “none of the other philosophers has come so close to us as the Platonists have” (VIII.5). In sharp contrast to their idolatrous and superstitious brethren, Augustine adds, the Platonists “acknowl‐ edged the true God as the author of being, the light of truth and the giver of blessedness” (VIII.5).

Clearly, the Platonists paved the way for the full revelation of Christ and the New Testament. But they did something else of equal value. Immediately after extolling the virtues of Platonism, Augus‐ tine lays down a philosophical challenge that is particularly relevant to our own age. Those philosophers, Augustine asserts, “the materi‐ alists who believe that the ultimate principles of nature are corporeal, should yield to those great men [the Platonists] who had knowledge of so great a God. Such [materialist philosophers] were Thales, who found the cause and principle of things in water, Anaximenes in air, the Stoics in fire, Epicurus in atoms” (VIII.5). Living as we do in a post‐Enlightenment Age where materialistic, secular humanistic thought has seized control of every discipline in the academy, and where scientists, social scientists, and even most humanists insist on positing a material origin for everything, we need to pay heed to Au‐ 14

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gustine’s warning. When philosophy, and, by extension, the liberal arts, allows itself to be hijacked by philosophical materialism and methodological naturalism, universities falter and lose their connec‐ tion to eternal truths and fixed standards. The rigidly evolutionary mindset of the last 150 years does not mark a progression in philoso‐ phy, but a return to the materialistic theories of Pre‐Socratic philoso‐ phers whose reductive worldviews Plato decisively dealt with 2,400 years ago!

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t is well known that for most of the Middle Ages, the Timaeus was the only Platonic dialogue available (though Plato’s ideas contin‐ ued to be conveyed indirectly through Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, and Plotinus, among others). A close reading of The City of God makes it clear that this was essentially the situation by 410, a rather lamen‐ table situation aided by the fact that even the great Augustine had little knowledge of Greek. And yet, one cannot help wondering if this was not divinely ordained. Of all Plato’s dialogues, Timaeus comes closest to expressing Christian truths; indeed, it is perhaps the only Gentile, pre‐Christian work that approaches the great and distinctive biblical teaching of creation ex nihilo. It is certainly one of the few that speaks of creation as a good and positive thing with which the Crea‐ tor was pleased.

Augustine, one of the great defenders of matter and flesh against the heresies of Gnosticism, marvels again and again at how percep‐ tive Timaeus is in its treatment of creation. And as he marvels, he wonders what the source might have been for Plato’s surprising dec‐ laration “that the best reason for creating the world is that good things should be made by a good God. It may be that [Plato] read this Scriptural passage or learned it from those who had, or, by his own keen insight, he clearly saw that ‘the invisible things’ of God are ‘understood by the things that are made,’ or, perhaps, he learned from others who had clearly seen this.” The passage Augustine en‐ closes in quotes is taken from Romans 1:20; in this verse, Paul ex‐ plains the nature of general revelation and how God spoke even to the pagans through the power and beauty of the cosmos. Regardless of whether Plato gained his knowledge from general revelation, by reading Genesis 1, or by having it read to him by someone else, the fact remains that Plato was aware of the goodness of creation.

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This awareness is vital, for there were many in Augustine’s day—as there are still many today—who too quickly blame Plato for the he‐ retical teachings of the Gnostics. Augustine sets the record straight on this misconception. In Book VIII, he makes it clear that the true heirs of Plato are to be found among the Neo‐Platonists, in particular, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, and Apuleius. Later, in Book XIII, he highlights a specific area in which Plato and the Gnostics part com‐ pany. According to the Gnostics, the soul “will be perfect only when it returns to God simple, solitary, and naked, as it were, stripped of every shred of its body.” This teaching, which stands in stark opposi‐ tion to the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body, lies at the root of Gnosticism’s dismissal of matter and the body. It is a teaching, Augustine writes, which Plato did not share.

Indeed, not only did Plato not view the body in wholly negative terms; in the Timaeus he provides a pre‐Christian, extra‐biblical glimpse of the Resurrection Body. In one of the most memorable pas‐ sages of Timaeus, God tells the lesser gods that he is able to hold body and soul together in an indissoluble link and promises them that they may remain forever in the same body if they do not become corrupt.

Surely Plato would not have included such a divine promise if the body were inherently evil! No, concludes Augustine, those Gnostics and so‐called Neo‐Platonists who claim that the body can only be a prison and a chain, “forget that their very founder and master, Plato, has taught that the supreme God had granted to the lesser gods, whom he had made, the favor of never dying, in the sense of never being separated from the bodies which he had united to them.”

Still, though true Platonists “are not so senseless as to despise earthly bodies as though their nature derived from an evil principle” (XIV.5), they do not rest content in a mere earthly existence. Plato knew something that many Christians, in Augustine’s day as well as our own, often forget: that there is no happiness apart from God. Platonists, writes Augustine,

are deservedly considered the outstanding philosophers, first, because they could see that not even the soul of man, immortal and rational (or intellectual) as it is, can attain happiness apart from the Light of that God by whom both itself and the world were made, and, second, because they hold that the blessed life which all men seek can be found only by him who, in the purity of a chaste love, embraces that one Supreme Good which is the unchangeable God. 16

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Plato, that is to say, urges us to seek after the Beatific Vision, a pur‐ suit that drives the true Platonic initiate as firmly as it does the ma‐ ture Christian.

“The bodies of irrational animals,” Augustine reminds us in a pas‐ sage reminiscent of Timaeus, “are bent toward the ground, whereas man was made to walk erect with his eyes on heaven, as though to remind him to keep his thoughts on things above.” In Romans 11:11, Paul suggests that one of the reasons God lavished salvation on the Gentiles was to make rebellious Israel envious. In The City of God, Augustine treats sincere Neo‐Platonists as fellow travelers on a spir‐ itual journey; they may dwell outside of God’s grace as a result of their adherence to erroneous doctrines, but the purity of their lives nevertheless stands as both an indictment and an encouragement to believers who have forsaken the call to be perfect, even as their Fa‐ ther in heaven is perfect. In a similar manner, Christians today who have grown lax in their faith and given up on the godly pursuit of holiness should be ashamed and struck to envy by the righteous lives of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists who pray, fast, and meditate with great fervor and discipline. Such zealous seekers after the Beatif‐ ic Vision are the new Platonists of our materialistic age.

Louis Markos (www.Loumarkos.com), Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities.

His two newest books are Apologetics for the 21st Century (Crossway) and Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis (Biblica).

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T OC QUEVILLE & T HE T EA PARTY [order0and0liberty{ Paul D. Miller

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he rise and success of the Tea Party in American politics may be one of those moments, rare but always recurrent in our history, when a new movement steps forward to offer a new interpretation of the country’s first principles.

The abolitionists, the progressives, and the Civil Rights movement each won a “new birth in freedom” in different ways in their respective eras. They embody Thomas Jefferson’s belief that every generation needs a new revolution.

Yet each new founding accomplished its goals only by handing the government some new powers. The abolitionists applied civil rights to all Americans regardless of race and, in so doing, greatly empow‐ ered the federal government to hold the states accountable for their treatment of African Americans. The progressives changed the rela‐ tionships among the market and the government, greatly empower‐ ing the latter to regulate and interfere with the former. And the Civil Rights movement completed the work of the abolitionists, but again only by enabling the federal government and its courts to override and regulate the states.

By comparison, the Tea Party movement may be something unique in American history: a fundamentally conservative, anti‐government populist uprising. Populist movements tend to have a specific agenda and they seek to seize the government so as to grant it new powers to enact that agenda. But for the Tea Party, the government is the agen‐ da. The Tea Party seeks to win power not to pass laws on education, or welfare, or civil rights, but to refashion how power is created, le‐ gitimized, and wielded in the United States. That accounts for the Tea 18

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Party’s near‐obsession with taxes and the budget. Money is power, and beneath the Tea Party’s talking points about restoring job crea‐ tion and entrepreneurship is an obsession with power: the govern‐ ment’s power to seize citizens’ wealth versus the citizens’ power to use her wealth as she sees fit.

But if this is indeed a moment to redefine the meaning of the Amer‐ ican constitution, our most pressing questions are not of public poli‐ cy—taxes, the budget deficit, health care coverage, or the merits of green infrastructure. They are questions of philosophy. What is gov‐ ernment? Why do we need create a large human institution and grant it the legitimacy to wield power over our lives? What dangers does it pose? And how do we design it to use its power properly?

This is an especially important exercise to undertake because differ‐ ent traditions of political thought—libertarian, utilitarian, and reli‐ gious—approach these questions differently and can often obscure an underlying unity to American political thought. The Tea Party has brought about the most fundamental debate about the meaning of the American experiment in self‐government in a generation.

In carrying out this debate, it has become clear that libertarians and social conservatives need each other. By themselves, they look to out‐ siders narrow, shallow, and extreme. Libertarianism is heartless and cruel to its critics; social conservatism, bigoted and ignorant. More importantly, even on their merits they are insufficient. Neither by itself offers a coherent ideology on which a feasible political agenda can be based. Social conservatism fails to address the realities of cul‐ tural pluralism and is often reticent to grant the liberty enjoyed by a majority culture to minorities. Libertarianism errs in the opposite way, ignoring the vital cultural foundation of ordered liberty and the government’s role in fostering and supporting it. Both together start with a common insight—that human nature requires government to exist, but also to be restrained. That insight, in turn, should support a common agenda for ordered liberty: the devolution of power and renewal of local liberties.

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ny philosophy of government must start with a philosophy of human nature. The Book of Genesis says that “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continu‐ ally,” (Genesis 6:5). King Solomon wrote “There is not a righteous 19

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man on earth who does what is right and never sins,” (Ecclesiastes 7:20). The prophet Jeremiah lamented that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?”

(Jeremiah 17:9) The Biblical view of man is that he ignorant and fool‐ ish at best, downright bestial and wicked at worst.

This is not a uniquely Jewish or Christian view. Plato warned in The Republic against the “wild and brutish” part of the human soul which, given free rein, will drive man almost literally mad. A man led by his passions “will shrink from nothing” including incest and parricide. And Plato believed this was a universal trait of humanity: “every one of us—even those accorded the highest degree of respect‐ ability—harbors a fierce brood of savage and imperious appetites.”

Even Aristotle, a thinker with a much sunnier view of man, was acutely aware that men’s conceptions of justice were shaped by their self‐interest. The rich and the poor define justice in ways most favor‐ able to themselves, the poor advocating for equity of distribution, the rich for equity of merit. Thomas Hobbes, reflecting a pessimistic mix of Puritanism with Enlightenment secularism, wrote “I put for a gen‐ eral inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”

Even recent social science has gravitated away from the naïve and simplistic rational actor or behaviorist models of human nature. Em‐ pirical research about how humans actually behave and make deci‐ sions had led towards a more complex description of human beings whose professions of objective reasoning are limited by bounded rationality, misperception, imperfect information, cognitive bias, wish‐fulfillment, and self‐delusion. Simply put, all human beings are capable of malice, irrationality, ignorance, stupidity, cowardice, and sheer barbarity.

Different traditions of thought—religious and secular, speculative and scientific, ancient and modern—have come to some version of the same conclusion: people are generally stupid and evil. Most im‐ portantly, the human capacity for stupidity and evil is something fixed and unchangeable absent divine intervention. This view differs decisively from the view of human nature found in socialism, com‐ munism, and the “progressive” liberal left, all of which are premised on the improvability, even perfectibility, of mankind.

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he stupidity and wickedness of human nature have political implications. It means that most governments are stupid and evil. As Hamilton and Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, “What is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on hu‐ man nature?” Governments are little more than vast collections of stupid and evil people acting in concert. Governments therefore typi‐ cally act with malice, irrationality, ignorance, and barbarity as a mat‐ ter of course. There is no reason to expect otherwise, and history bears out that verdict. That is why governments often bear a strong resemblance to organized crime. As Augustine asked, “Take away justice, and what are kingdoms but great robberies?” Most govern‐ ments throughout history have been little more than gangs of thieves and murderers. This insight is the seed of libertarian thought. Liber‐ tarians rightly fear the destructive potential of human nature when it is organized and given expression through great concentrations of power, particularly of political power.

That is why libertarians view the power of the United States Gov‐ ernment, and the growth of the regulatory state since the 1930s and the national security state since 1945, with alarm. The government has dozens of agencies to coerce citizens on scores of different issues and can invoke seemingly infinite reasons to compel behavior. The government can seize your property in order to give it to someone who will make more profitable use of it, according to Kelo vs. City of New London. It can seize your property without just compensation to protect the environment, or for months or even years without charg‐ es if it claims your property was involved in drug trafficking. It can arrest and imprison you for weeks as a “material witness” without filing charges or issuing a writ of habeas corpus. Under hate speech laws, the government can arrest you for saying things that offend others. The government routinely confiscates up to half your wealth in taxation, mandates that you buy auto and health insurance, regu‐ lates which chemicals, foods, and drugs you can and cannot con‐ sume, and decides when and where you can pray and erect symbols of your religion. If it claims you are a terrorist, it can simply kill you.

The government advances plausible justifications for most of these powers considered individually. But libertarians understand that government inevitably seeks to accrete power, like a law of nature.

They see few checks on the growth of the federal government’s juris‐ diction and powers of enforcement, and they know where this trend 21

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concludes. And they also understand that government does not need to be vested in the hands of one man to be tyrannical. Democracies are just as capable of becoming tyrannical: all they have to do is dis‐ regard law and govern by raw power.

Tyranny is, in fact, not really government at all. Under a tyranny men do not live under laws, but under the whim of other men. There is no predictable mechanism for resolving disputes. There is no real security or public order because the tyrant—whether a man, a mob, or a bureaucracy—may, at any moment, decide to rob or murder any citizen. The tyrant’s decisions are arbitrary, unreliable, and final. John Locke asked regarding tyranny, “I desire to know what kind of gov‐ ernment that is, and how much better it is than the state of nature, where one man, commanding a multitude, has the liberty to be judge in his own case, and may do to all his subjects whatever he pleases, without the least liberty to any one to question or control those who execute his pleasure?” It is, in fact, no government at all. “Much bet‐ ter it is in the state of nature, wherein men are not bound to submit to the unjust will of another.” This is the libertarian paradise.

However, it is difficult to organize an effective and long‐lasting tyranny because it requires intelligence and cooperation to design and sustain a highly‐organized system of oppression. Man’s stupidity happily limits his capacity to implement man’s evil. Cooperation must come voluntarily through trust or it must be coerced through terror. Trust is hard to sustain because people are evil—even tyran‐ nies are undermined by corruption, petty graft, turf wars, and bu‐ reaucratic infighting. Terror, on the other hand, is hard to orchestrate and sustain because people are stupid—totalitarianism is a complex and sophisticated undertaking. Libertarians are right to fear tyranny, but they often give proto‐tyrants more credit than they’re due. As a result, dire libertarian warnings about the encroachment of the state often sound like Chicken Little or the boy who cried wolf.

In fact, there is an equally dangerous possibility at the opposite pole from tyranny. Government is a difficult art, especially large, effective government over an expansive territory. Many governments fail not only to impose a tyranny worth fearing, but any semblance of government at all. The evilness of human nature can be channeled into oppressive concentrations of power, but the stupidity of human nature can sometimes take over and simple resist any exercise of power in institutions, governments, and entire nations at all, a point 22

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libertarians routinely miss. In that circumstance human stupidity and evil is not concentrated in one locus of power; it is instead manifested in the absence of any power at all. In other words, if libertarians fear human nature when it is organized, social conservatives fear human nature left to run amok. The result is social breakdown and state fail‐ ure. In the complete absence of government, authority, or order, hu‐ manity is left in a state of nature, which is to say, a state of anarchy, war, and chaos—dilemmas for which libertarians have no solution.

Thomas Hobbes gave the famous description of the state of nature, and it reads like a contemporary journalist’s account of Somalia, or Detroit in the 1970s. It is the social conservatives’ nightmare:

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building…no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Social conservatives look at evidences of growing cultural chaos with alarm. Rates of crime, divorce, teenage pregnancy, out‐of‐ wedlock births, drug use, school dropout and illiteracy are high or rising. High school and college curricula do not convey the same content, at the same rigor, or to the same standard that they did for past generations. Education appears now to inculcate the lack of val‐ ues instead of their presence. “Emergent” and “seeker‐sensitive” churches offer concert‐like entertainment rather than spiritual nour‐ ishment. Public discussion is more blunt, crude, and dissonant. The worldviews reflected in commercially successful television shows, film, and pop music are increasingly coarse, inhumane, and barbaric.

High art is celebrated for overtly and publicly mocking traditional values. The atrophy of sustained relationships into bite‐sized Face‐ book and Twitter encounters is a sign of the times. Anarchy has not yet arrived, but we are slouching toward it.

To a social conservative, big government may be intrusive and ex‐ pensive, but it also the only institution holding the line between us and the barbarians. We need a powerful government because the enemies of civilization are powerful. Drug cartels, the mafia, violent gangs, pedophiles, pimps, child pornographers, hackers, pirates, and 23

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terrorists are the Visigoth Army at our gates. The FBI and the Marine Corps may be jack‐booted, but the boots are made in the USA and they march to our tune.

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ivilization is under perennial threat from tyranny and chaos.

Tyranny is the concentration of too much power; chaos is the complete dissolution of it. Libertarians fear tyranny; social conservatives fear chaos. The former fears the growth of government is the road to serfdom. The latter fears the center cannot hold and embraces government as the tool with which to fend off social anar‐ chy. The evils are the Scylla and Charybdis through which statesmen must steer the ship of state. And because human nature is fixed, the ship is never in the clear. The perils are forever just off the port and starboard. Statesmanship consists largely of recognizing which dan‐ ger looms closer and edging the ship a little further off, even recog‐ nizing that to do so is to bring the opposite danger a little closer. The question of the moment is: which is closer? Does the government wield too much power, or not enough?

The problem confronting conservatives, and the Tea Party, is that there is little agreement about which is the greater danger today. Lib‐ ertarians and others respond to social conservatives’ concerns with a shrug. They point out that the U.S. economy and political system continue to hum along, arguing that every generation has its doom‐ sayers who believe things were better back then and the world is going to hell in a handbasket tomorrow. Social conservatives lack perspective and are only masking their bigotry as concern for social stability. Meanwhile the growth of governmental power is the true threat that has caused great powers to collapse in the past.

Social conservatives respond that libertarians are a little paranoid in their fear of the American government’s supposed “oppressions.”

Libertarian fears are the fevered conspiracy theories of people privi‐ leged to live in the freest society in the history of the world. Mean‐ while, libertarians (and liberals) fail to understand the role of culture and society in a nation’s long‐term life. Culture is the foundation be‐ neath the economic and military greatness of our country. Without it, no amount of budget‐cutting, government shrinking, or tea‐partying will make a difference. To a social conservative, culture is the sum total of the intellectual and ethical capital of the population. Investing in and protecting our culture means schools turn out educated peo‐ 24

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ple who will innovate, prosper, and not snicker at the words “civic responsibility.” It means families stay together and raise honest, whole, decent children who do not grow up to be burdens on the welfare state or penal system. It means churches and synagogues, the YMCA and Boy Scouts, are a real part of their communities, free to support families without being burdened by invasive state regula‐ tions ensuring their compliance with a social engineering project.

Ignoring the clear warning signs of an unhealthy culture is to fail to see that the bridge is out, the train is going full speed ahead, and the brakes are broken. If you look out the window, the view is nice and the ride feels fine. You have to know how the train works, and look ahead down the tracks, to understand the danger.

What if both sides are right? What if, like the blind men feeling the elephant, libertarians and social conservatives have both identified partial, incomplete aspects of a broader, deeper problem? Plato be‐ lieved that to be the case—that anarchy and tyranny support and feed off each other in a strange and devilish symbiosis. He witnessed in Athens a democracy so unable to enforce basic order that it de‐ scended into anarchy—and then it turned to tyranny to save itself.

Plato argued this dynamic was inherent in democracy, where he argued liberty becomes a kind of religion. It becomes so bad that de‐ mocracy makes “the souls of citizens so hypersensitive that they can‐ not bear to hear even the mention of authority.” In the name of liber‐ ty, people shuck off all forms of authority. Sons rebel against fathers, students against teachers, slaves against masters, and ultimately citi‐ zens against government. The excess of liberty leads to ruin, anarchy, and state failure. In the midst of social breakdown the people will freely elect a “protector” to bring change and restore order. The pro‐ tector wins the support of the mob through economic populism: he “hints at the cancellation of debts and the redistribution of property.”

Because he has the unquestioning support of the mob, he can easily overstep his bounds and act above the law. In this way liberty leads to tyranny like an iron law of nature: “excess in one direction tends to provoke excess in the contrary direction.” For Plato the argument between libertarians and social conservatives is the bickering be‐ tween two allies on the right side of a losing war.

And we may be seeing the early stages of the convergence of trends in the United States, which means libertarians and social conserva‐ tives are both right, in their own way. Libertarians are right in poli‐ 25

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tics: the government has grown beyond all reason and threatens to become an overbearing Leviathan. Social conservatives are right in culture: disorder and degeneracy are on the rise and threaten the long‐term foundations of civilization. The trends reinforce one an‐ other. As social disorder grows, the state grows to meet the increas‐ ing demands made on it. And as the state grows, private and non‐ profit associations that constitute the remnants of a healthy culture are pushed out and replaced by government.

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lexis de Tocqueville described this reciprocal cause‐and‐ effect with remarkable and prophetic insight. “The more government takes the place of associations, the more will individuals lose the idea of forming associations and need the gov‐ ernment to come to their help. That is a vicious circle of cause and effect.” Tocqueville believed the growth of government, even if for benign purposes, was threatening to liberty because it subtly under‐ mined the cultural underpinnings of a healthy democracy. “The mor‐ als and intelligence of a democratic people would be in as much dan‐ ger as its commerce and industry if ever a government wholly usurped the place of private associations.” Taking over retirement insurance, health care, the banking system or the auto industry isn’t just bad economics: it teaches people an unhealthy reliance on the public dole, which may then force the government to continue run‐ ning private industry as people forget the skill of doing it themselves.

Government cannot recreate by fiat the culture of democracy that its own programs undermine. “A government, by itself, is equally incapable of refreshing the circulation of feelings and ideas among a great people, as it is of controlling every industrial undertaking.” The effort itself takes government beyond its rightful sphere and lays the groundwork for tyranny. “Once it leaves the sphere of politics to launch out on this new track, it will, even without intending this, exercise an intolerable tyranny. For a government can only dictate precise rules. It imposes the sentiments and ideas which it favors, and it is never easy to tell the difference between its advice and its commands.” Once the government arrogates to itself the responsibil‐ ity to nudge us into good behavior and foster in us good habits, it is acting less like a democratic government and more like a church—a church with armed police, tax collectors, and an army.

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This is, Tocqueville believed, a new kind of oppression, different from the cruel tyrants of the ancient world. Despotism in American “would be more widespread and milder; it would degrade men ra‐ ther than torment them.” American tyranny will not rob and kill people. It would be “absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provi‐ dent, and gentle.” It appears benign, but has the subtly dangerous effect of engendering a culture of dependency. “It would resemble parental authority if, father‐like, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tried to keep them in perpetual childhood.” It grows so large and powerful that it does not just push out the private sector; it pushes out individual agency. It does not kill men, but it does kill their spirits.

It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances. Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living? Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties.

The all‐powerful nanny state does not stop at engendering a cul‐ ture of dependency among individuals. It seeks complete control over society through “administrative despotism,” through a regula‐ tory state which smothers innovation and energy:

It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men’s wills, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.

Big government essentially creates the conditions for anarchy by undermining healthy culture through large programs and invasive social policy, and then makes itself indispensable by moving in to stave off disorder with powerful regulatory, law enforcement, and 27

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national security powers. Its presence threatens Tocqueville’s new kind of tyranny, but its absence threatens chaos.

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his is why libertarians have a point, even though the govern‐ ment is not overtly oppressive. The United States Government costs $4 trillion per year, about one‐quarter of the U.S. econo‐ my. It employs two million people, not counting the armed forces or the postal service, more than any other institution in the country.

Even disregarding the law enforcement and national security powers libertarians traditionally worry about, the scope and reach of the fed‐ eral government’s activities have expanded dramatically over the past century. It built the roads you drive on, funds the schools you attend, regulates and taxes the place you work, polices the quality of the food you eat, regulates the bank you save in, and monitors the gas‐mileage of the car you drive. It regularly observes most of the earth’s surface from orbit, is the world’s largest dispenser of grants for scientific research, decides on the technical standards by which the internet is governed, flies astronauts, satellites, robots, and tele‐ scopes into space and onto other planets, and deploys military per‐ sonnel to dozens of other countries around the world. The United States Government is quite simply the largest, richest, and most powerful institution ever created in the history of human civilization.

Many of these public programs are, considered individually, bene‐ ficial. But there are dangers inherent in a large and powerful gov‐ ernment. First, its very existence, even if benign, pushes out the vol‐ untary private actors who might otherwise engage citizens in the work of governance. Big government undermines public‐ mindedness. “Administrative centralization only serves to enervate the peoples that submit to it, because it constantly tends to diminish their civic spirit,” as Tocqueville put it. That is a bad thing by itself.

But it can lead to a second, greater danger. Big government is the first step towards tyranny.

But this is also why social conservatives have a point: culture mat‐ ters. Populist social conservatives often have a shallow understand‐ ing of culture and the dangers to it—the biggest threat to the family is not gay marriage, it is straight divorce—but their basic insight is correct. Schools, families, and churches are the most important insti‐ tutions of civilization and the strongest bulwark against both tyranny and anarchy. They are the very font and source of all power and abil‐ 28

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ity to have any kind of society in the first place. And they have un‐ doubtedly lost much of their authority, respect, and heritage over the last century. Without them, the crisis spreads across generations.

How do we escape the vicious cycle of social breakdown and gov‐ ernment growth? How do we revive an active, educated, moral citi‐ zenry without a central power? How do we reduce the power of gov‐ ernment without unleashing unpredictable forces? How do we avoid tyranny without inviting chaos, chaos without inviting tyranny?

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he problem with both libertarianism and social conservatism is that they seem to assume that there is a fixed set of policy proposals, now and forever, which will solve our problems.

They can sometimes become rigid, ossified ideologies. But true con‐ servatism recognizes that there is no policy solution that will forever do away with one or the other great danger. Utopianism is funda‐ mentally unreal. There is no policy agenda that is correct for all states in all times. Some states are closer to tyranny, some to chaos. What may be wise for one could be catastrophic for the other. True states‐ manship will look different and propose different solutions depend‐ ing on the particular circumstances of the moment.

The solution is not simply to cut taxes and spending, shrink the state, and repeal Obamacare. Libertarianism only works when the public is educated, responsible, and active enough to maintain civil society with a minimal state. Social conservatives would argue, plau‐ sibly, that the American public manifestly is not. The sudden depri‐ vation of public support from a people with an unhealthy culture could accelerate social breakdown and hasten the day mere anarchy is loosed. Tocqueville again: “There can be no doubt that the moment when political rights are granted to a people who have till then been deprived of them is a time of crisis, a crisis which is often necessary but always dangerous.” We have been inured to the overbearing Federal state for so long that it is unclear what would happen if we were suddenly called on to assume responsibilities for welfare, edu‐ cation, or social policy. Congressional conservatives have focused overmuch on taxes and the budget because they are the most visible and concrete policy areas where this contest for power is being played out. But those battles are ephemeral, with victories that can be undone in the next budget cycle. And libertarians have failed to pro‐ pose what would realistically take government’s place.

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Nor is the answer simply to ban abortion and same‐sex marriage or let the Federalist Society rewrite the Constitution. Legislating healthy cultural practices, like Prohibition, treats the symptoms, not the caus‐ es, of social breakdown. More importantly laws like Prohibition have a tendency to not work and, in the course of failing, discredit their advocates. “Laws are always unsteady when unsupported by mo‐ res,”—that is, habits and beliefs—“mores are the only tough and du‐ rable power in a nation.” Passing a law that the people don’t believe in and are not habituated to obey is unlikely to work. Using govern‐ ment to enforce good culture is like a parent moving into his kid’s college dorm room to ensure he doesn’t drink or have unsafe sex. If you haven’t inculcated good habits in your kid before they move away, you’ve already failed; trying to catch up by moving to college with them is not good parenting; it is overbearing and kind of creepy.

The effort to renew civilization is too broad and deep for any of these policy proposals to have much of a lasting impact, because it is fundamentally a cultural and spiritual effort. “Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, and the understanding developed only by the reciprocal action of men one upon another.” Alexis de Tocque‐ ville believed that the way to sustain and renew civilization, especial‐ ly democratic civilization, was to encourage face‐to‐face human rela‐ tionships. It is trite and clichéd but true: the first step in saving civilization is to go to school, get and stay married, spend time with your children, and go to church. Investing in relationships with the people immediately around you—in your family, at work, in church, in your neighborhood—is the single most important thing you can do because those relationships will renew your ideas, develop your understanding, and enlarge your heart. Relationships make you smarter, wiser, and more loving.

This is not a sentimentalist bromide or a recipe for quietism: form‐ ing relationships is a political act. Relationships are the strong bul‐ wark against the encroaching state. They take place outside the gov‐ ernment’s writ, create a society beyond the government’s reach, and foster ideas and activities government cannot direct. And this is es‐ pecially true when we go beyond our household and neighborhood.

Tocqueville feared the consequences of isolated men withdrawing to their little societies of family and friends. “With this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself…Each man if forever thrown back on himself alone, and there 30

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is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”

This is dangerous because it atrophies the very habits and skills needed to sustain self‐government. He wanted to see men and wom‐ en engaged continuously in relationships with other citizens, perfect strangers, to discuss and decide upon common problems.

Tocqueville called this the skill of association. For Tocqueville, as‐ sociation was the act of gathering with other citizens—not just family members, friends, and neighbors, but also perfect strangers—for a public purpose. Association is nothing less than the practice of self‐ government at ground level. Tocqueville believed self‐government didn’t simply mean voting (he hardly mentions elections at all in his entire work). Self‐government means actually participating in the decision‐making process. A true democratic republic puts the power of government into the hands of the people. City council meetings, town halls, the school board, your neighborhood watch are the most real institutions of democracy with which citizens will actually come into contact. Participating in them is more important than voting in elections for the U.S. Congress. “The most powerful way… in which to interest men in their country’s fate is to make them take a share in its government,” Tocqueville argued, “The civic spirit is inseparable from the exercise of political rights.” The face‐to‐face relationships we need to form are with our fellow citizens, even our political op‐ ponents. “If men are to remain civilized or become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.”

Government can either allow or usurp people’s opportunities to engage with other citizens on public matters. A highly centralized government gives me no incentive to talk to my neighbor about our common problems or to form an association to solve them. A highly decentralized one depends on my associating with others—the more opportunities to participate, the better. As Tocqueville wrote:

[The Founders] thought it right to give to each part of the land its own political life so that there should be an infinite number of occasions for the citizens to act together and so that every day they should feel that they depended on one another. Local liberties, then, which induce a great number of citizens to value the affection of their kindred and neighbors, bring men constantly into contact, despite the instincts which separate them, and force them to help one another.

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“Local liberties” are the answer. The solution is to devolve power away from the federal government, diffuse it among states, individu‐ als, civil society, and the market, but also to strengthen its exercise through our participation. This should be the unifying theme of American conservatism. It reflects an agenda based on the bare es‐ sentials, the common philosophical convictions of different strands of political thought: diffusing power among individuals (libertarian), civil society (social conservatives), and the market (entrepreneurs).

The solution is not to cut government, but relocate it. The solution is not to shrink government, but rebalance it from Washington to the states and localities. The solution is not to attack government as the enemy, but take it over as our right.

Decentralized government alleviates the danger of tyranny by dis‐ persing power among fifty states, six territories, three thousand counties, ten thousand cities, millions of associations, and one‐third of a billion citizens. Decentralized government alleviates the danger of anarchy by compelling citizens to stand up, take part in self‐ government, associate with one another, and form real human rela‐ tionships. Decentralization is the caulk and pitch, the rope and plank, that will keep our ever‐growing ship of state together, keep it from being torn apart by the centrifugal forces of anarchy, keep it from imploding under the weight of the centripetal forces of tyranny.

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f this description of our present situation is accurate, the most important initiative for restoring American democracy is the re‐ peal the 17th Amendment. The Founders intended the various branches of government to check and balance one another: even public schools still teach that much. But it is almost entirely forgotten that the Founders intended the checks and balances also to operate between the levels of government. Hamilton and Madison wrote in Federalist 51:

In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments [Federal and state], and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments [branches]. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.

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In Federalist 28, they wrote:

Power being almost always the rival of power, the General Government will at all times stand ready to check the usurpations of the state governments; and those will have the same disposition towards the General Government. The people, by throwing themselves into either scale, will infallibly make it preponderate. If their rights are invaded by either, they can make use of the other, as the instrument of redress… It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the state governments will in all possible contingencies afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.

The states were supposed to help control Washington, D.C. through a powerful tool: the United States Senate. According to the original Article I, Section 3, of the U.S. Constitution, state legislatures were to elect Senators to represent the state’s interests in Washington.

For a century they did so, and states remained the preeminent poli‐ ties in America. Even after the Civil War and the great centralization effected by the 14th Amendment, states remained considerably more powerful than they are today.

That ended in 1913. Well‐meaning Progressives believed the Senate was an undemocratic institution (a description the Founders would have taken as a compliment), and successfully fought to overthrow it.

The 17th Amendment to the Constitution establishes the direct elec‐ tion of Senators by the people of each state, cutting out the state legis‐ latures. The states lost their check on the federal government. This is no arcane bit of procedural minutiae. The Founders set up the checks because they knew “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

Federal officeholders and bureaucrats in Washington are ambitious.

They have legitimate powers and responsibilities. But unless some‐ one else’s ambition is made to counter their own, they will go beyond their legitimate powers. This is as certain as a law of nature.

History bears out the verdict. The history of federal policy since 1913 includes the New Deal, the Great Society, the departments of labor, education, health and human services, housing and urban de‐ velopment, energy, transportation, and homeland security, the FDA, SEC, EPA, FCC, NEA, NEH, NIH, TVA, AID, DEA, ATF, NASA, So‐ cial Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Amtrak, Fannie Mae, Sallie Mae, Freddie Mac, and scores of other agencies, boards, commissions, and corporations—all of which date after the 17th Amendment. Virtually 33

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everything the federal government does today, outside of taxation, trade, and national defense, started after 1913. The federal budget in 1913 was roughly around $20 billion in today’s dollars. It has grown 20,000 percent since then.

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he growth of the government is most often opposed by liber‐ tarians who worry about the prospects for tyranny. But the growth of federal power should be just as worrisome to social conservatives concerned about the state of American culture as it is to libertarians concerned about American liberties. The 17th Amend‐ ment not only handed the federal government unprecedented power to centralize lawmaking and administration. It also deprived citizens of the opportunity to engage meaningfully in self‐government.

Again, self‐government is not voting: it is participation. Three hundred million citizens cannot meaningfully participate in a delib‐ eration about anything. Meaningful democracy is impossible at the federal level. Biennial voting is not democracy. “It does little good to summon those very citizens who have been made so dependent on the central power to choose the representatives of that power from time to time. However important, this brief and occasional exercise of free will will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculty of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves,” wrote Tocqueville. The more centralized the decision‐making, the less citizens are involved, the less informed they will be. The right to vote is important—but under a centralized government the simple act of casting a vote be‐ tween two, and only two, parties means very little.

Participatory democracy is not a romantic ideal or a utopian vision.

The goal is not the direct democracy of ancient Athens (which horri‐ fied the Founders). The goal is something closer to deliberative rep‐ resentative democracy instead of sound‐bite mass media democracy.

The goal is to lower the ratio of citizens to representatives. That in‐ creases the likelihood that citizens will actually know who is making decisions that affect their lives, call their representative, attend a town hall, vote in elections, give money to a candidate, talk to their neighbors about public problems, and even run for office. (It may also diffuse the impact of money in politics. The hundreds of millions of dollars of political money that is generated every two or four years is currently highly targeted on influencing campaigns for 536 federal elective offices. As power shifts to state legislatures, some of that 34

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money would follow and be spread over the 7,382 state legislative seats in the United States).

The solution is not to increase the number of representatives in Congress. In 1788 there were 30,000 citizens for each member of the U.S. House of Representatives. A similar ratio today would require a Congress of some 10,000 members. Because that is obviously imprac‐ tical, Congress capped its membership in 1929 and the ratio has simply climbed higher and higher. Today it is close to 700,000 citizens per representative. But there are, on average, about 40,000 citizens for every state legislator in America. It is impractical to maintain a mean‐ ingful ratio for the federal government, but it is practical to move policy to the states where something closer to the original ideal of representative democracy can be revived.

Repealing the 17th Amendment will restore a fundamental check on the federal government. Senators representing states’ interests will be far more conscious of the 10th Amendment—“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the peo‐ ple.” They will be far more resistant to the federal government’s ten‐ dency to pass laws and create programs but delegate implementation to the states. They will never pass another unfunded mandate. States will start to assert their authority to pass the laws that they are in charge of enforcing and funding. These are good goals and worthy to be at the heart of a new conservatism. But even most states are too big to afford much of an opportunity for meaningful participatory and representative democracy. Repealing the 17th Amendment will begin to move power away from Washington and back to the states, but it is only the beginning of the revival of American democracy.

Paul D. Miller is assistant professor of international security studies at the National Defense University. Previously, he served as director for Afghanistan on the National Security Council staff and a political analyst in the U.S. intelligence community. The views in this article are the author's, not those of the U.S. government.

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O L D H I C KO RY ’ S IRAN SOLUTION ]the0jacksonian0return} Paul Bonicelli

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he problem of Iran and its determination to build nuclear weapons dominates the news at the writing of this essay and perhaps it still does. We might still be waiting to see if Israel and others will strike Iran. We might be in the midst of war and numerous terror strikes by Iran’s prox‐ ies. We might be in the aftermath of a war with the Mullah‐led re‐ gime in free‐fall as the nascent democracy we’ve hoped for takes power. Or perhaps the regime might have survived post‐conflict up‐ risings by killing tens of thousands; or perhaps the untried Iranian democratic forces will prove not to have been as interested in taking power as they are in revenge against Israel and anyone else who de‐ stroyed their nuclear weapons compounds.

What should the United States do given the nature of the Iranian threat? Let’s view the matter as a statesman would who has grand strategy in mind, who is focused on national interests, and not from the perspective of one whose goal is the immediate achievement of domestic political goals—pressures writ large in President Obama’s decision making in the run‐up to November.

It’s time to ask what Andrew Jackson, the 7th President of the Unit‐ ed States, would do. Such an approach takes us far away from our time and closer to the way we need to think about the Iranian prob‐ lem and, I would aver, all of our national security problems. Andrew Jackson is emblematic of the leader who understands grand strategy and the constitutional role of the president.

Jackson’s approach to national security, summarized, was for the United States to kill its enemies. It is not so much that Jackson made a formal pronouncement of a principle; rather, his actions as a general 36

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and a politician tell us what he thought. He was not the only presi‐ dent who understood this but he is most easily identified with the principle. That principle summed up is that no person, grouping of persons, or nation‐state has the right to perpetually and credibly threaten the interests of the United States, its citizens and their prop‐ erty. Put another way, the United States (nor any other nation‐state) is not obligated to live in perpetual jeopardy or anxiety because an enti‐ ty of whatever kind has the power and the motivation and the will to harm it. I would not make the case that Jackson desired and sought to actually kill our enemies in every case, nor that he was always right in how he secured our interests, whether he was dealing with the American Indians, the British, the French, the Spanish or the Rus‐ sians. I would simply argue that no matter from whom or from where the threat, Jackson saw his job clearly: eliminate the threat and with force if appropriate—and above all, demonstrate that he would not flag or fail in the objective of eliminating a threat.

Such a view does not preclude diplomacy (backed by force, else it is worthless), various forms of overt and covert measures—forceful or otherwise—or any other kind of activity that can persuade the threatening entity to cease being a threat. Prudent statesmen will treat war as a last resort if at all possible whether they are versed in Augustine’s just war doctrine or not. War is costly in many ways and free governments, above all, tend to abjure war when they can be‐ cause their voting publics are not typically inclined to sacrifice their progeny unnecessarily. Tyrannical states might go to war more readi‐ ly but they, too, have to be concerned with the loss of their power and perhaps their regime’s destruction if they are even perceived to lose a conflict.

According to this way of thinking, threats must be dealt with by whatever means necessary so that the threat ceases. Citizens expect this of government; it is an obvious first duty of any government, free or not, to protect the territory and citizens from enemy threats.

Why else form a government if not to protect these things? Self‐ preservation is the first purpose of a civil body politic. Governments are not formed primarily to facilitate commerce, establish a welfare state or even to secure the right to worship freely (the Pilgrims ex‐ cepted as a unique situation because they were not contemplating a separate republic). The American Founders and the theorists they read, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the Enlightenment, 37

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made the case for the establishment of independent and sovereign governments. The reformation of the US government with the adop‐ tion of the Constitution had as its first goal—explained in The Feder‐ alist Papers by men such as Alexander Hamilton—the preservation of the United States from the enemies poised to take advantage of our early weakness and disorder.

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rom the founding until the administration of President Bill Clinton, through Democratic and Republican administrations (and their forbears), American leaders understood the Jack‐ sonian principle whether they acknowledged him or not: we take clear notice and measure of those who threaten our interests and deal with them as best we can to eliminate the threats. Where we cannot eliminate the threat, we contain it as best we can with the effort al‐ ways in the end to be focused on the termination of the threat.

It is important to stress both parts of this: we must recognize and understand the threat on its own terms even as we seek also to miti‐ gate it if that is all we can do, but ultimately we aim to end it. It was understood that each nation must rely first on itself but can and will form alliances as a matter of right for self‐defense when necessary.

Not all administrations up to the time of Bill Clinton pursued the objective of threat elimination with the same vigor, competence or understanding. Some were far more successful than others in elimi‐ nating threats or at least mitigating them to the point of neutering them; that is, if they could not eliminate a threat, they reduced the attractiveness to the aggressor of acting on the threat. The will to act on the part of the aggressor was broken or at least stultified.

With the Clinton administration came a new way of looking at threats; it was the burgeoning of a way of thinking that began to dominate the Democratic Party in the late 1960s. Desiring to focus mostly on domestic matters, and bringing into his government like‐ minded individuals who had been schooled in international relations by the George McGovern wing of the Democratic Party (the policy and academic worlds), Clinton ignored foreign affairs when he could. When he had to pay attention, he desired to see all problems as either criminal issues (terrorism) or as problems to be solved in the context of the United Nations and other international organizations and regimes. A desire to operate from the standpoint of collective security replaced the previous emphasis on self‐help and alliances.

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Off the table was the first response of someone like Andrew Jackson: kill our enemies, or at least face them down for the threats they are and neutralize or mitigate them.

Since Clinton’s administration and the turning of the Democratic caucus in both the House and the Senate to McGovernites instead of (Scoop) Jacksonites, we now see that whenever the Democrats have power they operate from a profoundly new way of looking at foreign affairs and in particular the matter of threats to our national security.

The Obama Administration is the quintessence of this phenomenon.

Every appointee at the levels and in the positions that matter view threats such as terrorism, rogue nation‐states, and world order‐ changers as simply problems to be solved with talks and the signing of agreements, preferably at the United Nations. (The Obama Ad‐ ministration’s participation in the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime is an aberration. The U.N. mandate was exceeded because the President and his advisors were overtaken by the events of the moment and the need to end the absurdity they were courting by trying to protect the Libyan opposition from a cornered and bloody regime. But note: we are not to make a comparison to George W. Bush overthrowing Sad‐ dam Hussein and call Obama a hypocrite.) The Jacksonian wing of the Democratic Party is, if not dead, at least pining for the fjords.

So we entered a new era in foreign policy thinking with President Clinton, at least when Democrats are in power. How, then, has that had an impact on the threat we face in Iran?

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e have been faced for over 32 years with a serious threat to our interests in the form of the Iranian regime led by radi‐ cal Muslim clerics, an existential threat to our ally Israel.

They are directly and indirectly responsible for deaths of hundreds of Americans through terrorism and extra‐legal killing on battlefields.

They have never paid a serious price for the harm caused to the U.S., including the taking of hostages in the storming of our embassy dur‐ ing the Carter Administration. The mullah‐led regime is a textbook example of a threatening power that has been encouraged to pursue its interests through our inaction. For years they have continued to pose a threat and acted on their intentions because we have allowed it. That the Iranian regime cannot destroy the United States, take down our government or defeat us on the battlefield and on the seas is not the point. What is pertinent is that the safety of American lives 39

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and property and those of our allies is always at risk because the Ira‐ nian regime maintains a threatening posture toward us with the mo‐ tivation, the will and the means to harm. It is a “sworn enemy” in the truest sense of those words of the United States as well as our allies.

Its interests are in conflict with our interests and it is a mortal battle, as they never fail to state.

What have we done to protect our interests? Jimmy Carter’s Ad‐ ministration failed utterly to dissuade the Iranian regime from its course. His one attempt to actually reverse the gains they achieved when they stormed our embassy and took our diplomats hostage collapsed in the desert in a helicopter crash; he made no second at‐ tempt. But even under Ronald Reagan, the administration did not make the regime pay for what it did. Clearly Reagan’s posture and actions were much more confrontational regarding the threat, and his support of Iraq (along with that of several Arab states) in its war against Iran greatly mitigated the ability of the regime to make mis‐ chief in the region and against us. But Iran’s proxies in the form of terror groups continued to kill Americans and augmented regimes hostile to us and our allies.

It is important to note that Reagan never saw the problem of Iran as a matter of a diplomatic dispute that could be resolved with earnest talks that could lead to a peaceful coexistence if not friendship. He saw the regime as he saw the Soviet regime: another form of evil government that enslaves its own people and threatens the peace of the world in addition to being an existential threat to our allies and a serious threat to our well‐being. But he had a lot on his plate in the form of the Cold War, and during the length of his presidency the Iranian threat was somewhat mitigated by its being embroiled in a war with Iraq, whom we supported to a degree to keep an enemy fighting. Our unofficial policy for the Iran‐Iraq War was enunciated

by Henry Kissinger: “It is a war that both of them deserve to lose— and that should be our policy.”

The Clinton Administration also failed to deal with the threat from Iran, and sadly, so did the two Bush Administrations, the latter Bush actually acceding in 2007 to the notion that Iran was not still building nuclear weapons. It also tolerated Iranian killings of Americans on the border with Iraq, and Iranian support for those fighting the new democratic government of Iraq.

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e are now, according to many experts, less than a year away from an Iran with nuclear weapons. What are we doing now? At the insistence of the Congress, we have imposed harsher sanctions that are biting, but they came too late, long after the regime has been making great strides in building nu‐ clear weapons. Our current activity is characterized mostly by the fact that we are engaged in a debate about whether Iran is rational or not. That is not likely to be fruitful.

This debate intensified when Obama Administration officials testi‐ fied before Congress in February that Iran’s regime was a rational one and that it had not yet made the decision to develop nuclear weapons. Let’s spend a moment on this debate to demonstrate that answering the question, “Is the Iranian regime rational?” will not solve for us the question of whether to move against it.

Three different assumptions drive the debate: First, that the regime is rational as the West understands rational behavior, as even Stalin understood it, and so will not do anything that could provoke a harmful reaction. Survival is their goal and the mullahs won’t risk their positions or the advances they believe they have made in the name of Islam in the establishment of their de facto theocracy. Not to mention risk to their purses and those of their children. The regime is corrupt, of course, as are all tyrannies.

Second, the regime is rational but has a different calculus than we do or Stalin did. They will risk more to get ends we think are not worthwhile but are valuable to a theocracy. Or that due to the nature of the regime (extreme secrecy, isolated, disorderly with intermixed republican and clerical structures vying for power), they will miscal‐ culate and can’t really reason well because of who and what they are.

And third, the regime is irrational, with an apocalyptic mindset. It is dominated by men who seek to induce the coming of the Hidden Mahdi (the Twelfth Imam who will vanquish God’s enemies and thereafter bring peace) and who believe their interpretation of the Koran is the supreme guide to all questions political, scientific and economic. They are on a crusade to restore the greatness of Islam in the world no matter what the cost, specifically their sect of it, and so are not governed by logic or facts proved by testing and scientific methodology. We think of Hitler in this category.

Taken in reverse order, Assumption Three compels us to see the Iranian threat as the most dangerous because it is the most unpre‐ 41

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dictable. We can truly expect the worst of people who fit the category of irrational and suicidal—who contemplate setting off a nuclear holocaust to welcome the Hidden Mahdi.

Assumption Two brings little comfort. Just because we can catego‐ rize the regime as rational but having problems operating logically shouldn’t encourage us. International relations theorists for genera‐ tions have argued over the Rational Actor model and whether it real‐ ly gives us the kind of explanatory and predictive power we seek. I happen to put great stock in this model as a means to determine what options we should be ready to use, but we have to recognize its limitations that might well be demonstrated in the present Iranian case: regimes that isolate themselves from the world, whose leaders never have left or hardly ever leave their country or talk to anyone who does, who don’t know much about the modern world, are hard‐ ly able to calculate rationally because rational action requires access to information and the ability to question hypotheses. In foreign af‐ fairs conducted according to reason, surety is not attainable and not sought; probability is sought and flexibility is maintained.

So there remains Assumption One, the idea that the regime is as rational as any modern state can be. This is the best situation we can hope for, but problems remain. The Iranian regime has chosen a path of theocracy overlaying a pseudo‐republic. All its efforts to oppose the West both at home and abroad and to impose a strict Shia inter‐ pretation of Islam have left it economically deprived and politically unstable. Worse still, the Arab Spring has toppled Ben Ali, Mubarak, Gaddafi and perhaps quite soon Bashar al‐Assad. And Iran is in‐ creasingly surrounded by enemies and an emboldened Europe ap‐ parently ready to deal with the Iranian threat once and for all.

The regime has painted itself into a corner so that it might have little choice soon but to produce the weapon it believes it needs to protect itself, but that will be the very thing that causes its enemies to fall upon it. So just because the Iranian regime might be acting ra‐ tionally does not mean it is not the threat that many perceive it to be.

Its very rational behavior in the quagmire it produced for itself make it very dangerous indeed.

So, what is the United States to do if it faces a power that is dan‐ gerous whether it is acting rationally or not?

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doubt Andrew Jackson would suffer a lengthy discourse from professors and policy wonks on this matter. It would be enough for him to see that no matter how we characterize the thinking or ideology of the regime, its interests and capabilities can be under‐ stood and measured and we can see if they conflict with ours or not.

And if conflicting interests combine with capabilities, motivation, and demonstrated will to do us and our allies harm, the path of ac‐ tion is clear. Let’s examine our interests and those of the mullahs simultaneously to find it.

It is in our interest is to prevent the existence of another regime whose capability and will combine to our destruction if they choose it or if they err into it. A nuclear weapons‐capable Iran is not subject to regime change. If we seek the peace of the Middle East, we should eliminate or at least neuter a regime that seeks to overthrow the United States or its preferred order in the region.

It is in our interest to prevent the existence of a tyranny in the Mid‐ dle East that prevents or retards indefinitely the democratization of the region. It is in our interest to prevent another state sponsor of terrorism from existing in perpetuity—Iran is the state sponsor now that we have stopped Libya and Iraq from playing that role and the Syrian regime is busy trying to survive. It is in our interest to insure that yet another rogue regime with nukes is not sharing them with others, including terror networks.

It is in our interest not to allow the Iranians to believe they can be more adventurous because their nukes provide a firewall. They can even now with their paltry navy, we are informed by U.S. military war games, inflict serious damage on us if we try to prevent adven‐ turism in the Gulf. Why let them feel even more confident?

It is also in our interest to knock off another one of Russia’s allies in the region. The Russian regime is no longer democratic nor is it oper‐ ating in the interests of a community of democracies of Western‐ oriented powers. We should do what we can to weaken it further.

The root motivation for the United States in all of this is that we should not countenance forever a rogue state with the capabilities and intentions that Iran has. We should seek regime change, not con‐ tainment, when we can and when the status quo is an unacceptable threat. We face an enemy with the will, the determination, and the motivation to harm us. It has already been harming us for years, it recently tried to kill the Saudi ambassador on our own soil, it threat‐ 43

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ens to close the Strait of Hormuz and obliterate Israel, and it is even now building the weapons to harm us in ways that make 9/11 seem small by comparison.

What should we do? We might ask, “If Andrew Jackson were alive and attuned to all the tools that the modern US president has at his disposal, what would he do?” I believe the answer would be: public‐ ly and firmly ally ourselves with Israel, the anxious Gulf states and the bolder European leaders—and lead that alliance, from the front.

Announce that our objective is nothing short of the termination of the Iranian regime’s ability to threaten us. Apply political pressure on every part of the regime from a global perspective. Do the same with economic pressure. Implement covert measures. Stop counter‐ proliferation. Attack the well‐being of the leaders of Iran, including and especially the Revolutionary Guards. And above all, seek the end of the regime and abet the coming to power of democrats who desire peace with their neighbors and with the West. This latter objective is accomplished by supporting the forces of democracy, encouraging and aiding the internal opposition be they democratic forces, youth and civic forces, abused ethnic minorities, and any and all Iranians inside or outside the country whose goal is a democratic Iran that lives at peace with its neighbors.

Some of this has already been in process for a decade, mostly by the Israelis but with some US cooperation. But we need more of all of this, and with greater intensity and with a clear public and sustained message that the termination of the threat is our objective.

I can’t know with certainty what Andrew Jackson would do. But I do know how he thought and how he acted. By the same token, I can’t know what the Iranian mullahs are going to do. But I do know what they have done, what they have said, and how they have been thinking for 32 years. It seems quite reasonable to me to pit the thought and action of one of our toughest and wisest presidents against one of the most evil and dangerous regimes we’ve ever faced.

It is time for Old Hickory.

Paul Bonicelli is executive vice president of Regent University and a former assistant administrator of USAID. 44

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The Cross John Poch You can make one with your fingers, your hands, your whole body.

A common tattoo.

A corkscrew gone through itself, away from the wine and into the hand.

The simplest arm of a broken snowflake.

Pure outdoor torture furniture.

A Roman invention, but more important—a human invention.

Sexy on a rock star’s throat.

Does it make you mad? angry? cross?

Don’t cross me.

Don’t cross your eyes. They’ll stay that way.

Cross yourself. Stay that way.

Cross your heart? Hope to die?

A rose staked up, thorns and blooming all over. All over.

A wet but drying double-crested cormorant hangs in the air.

Mortal support.

The new math.

For instance, time’s crossroads times zero equals infinity.

A plus.

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Death’s Learjet, seen from below.

A God’s-eye view of a rush-hour intersection, crawling.

An old phone pole, calling.

Two high beams coming at you, blinding you.

The X of a kiss, turned a little tighter.

The X of murder turned a little tighter.

The X of buried treasure, found, turned a little tighter.

A lower case t, sans serif, sans seraphim.

The word torture has two t’s.

This poem has exactly one hundred t’s, all crossed.

Do you wish to cross-examine?

To a tee. To a tree.

Excruciatingly double crossed.

A million potential splinters.

The scarecrow that works forever.

Someone waits on a hill in silhouette.

John Poch is professor of English at Texas Tech University. He has published individual poems in Yale Review, Agni, Poetry, Paris Review, and other journals. His most recent collection of poems is Dolls (Orchises 2009) 46

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THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION RECONSIDERED [life0after0the0pill{ A Conversation with Mary Eberstadt Benjamin Domenech for The City: Mary Eberstadt is a research fel‐ low at the Hoover Institution and consulting editor to Policy Review. She was previously executive editor of the National Interest magazine, manag‐ ing editor of the Public Interest, a speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and a special assistant to United Nations Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick. Her most recent book, Adam and Eve After the Pill: Para‐ doxes of the Sexual Revolution (Ignatius), explores the unexpected con‐ sequences of the sexual revolution for society, particularly the unanticipated consequences for women’s happiness and family stability.

First, a broad question: Has the sexual revolution been good for women and if not, why not?

Mary Eberstadt: To go even more broad than that, I’d pose the question: has it been good for men, women, and children? Two years ago which was the 50th anniversary of the approval of the pill by the Food and Drug Administration, there was a lot of celebratory com‐ ments in the mainstream press about the pill, about how it had liber‐ ated women from the chains of their fertility, and so on. The mood was not exactly jubilant, but it was celebratory. And what I wanted to do with this book was point out that there’s also a darker side to all of this. There’s evidence that the pill hasn’t been bad for women, and I’m using the pill obviously as a metaphor for all of the sexual revolu‐ tion. There’s evidence that it has been bad for women. There’s evi‐ dence from the popular culture, from the sorts of magazine that 47

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women talk to each other in, from books, from social science that I cite in this book. There’s evidence that there’s more trouble between the sexes than there used to be. There’s evidence that the pill is, that the sexual revolution has been deleterious for men because of the increasing rates of consumption of pornography.

All of these are things we’re not supposed to talk about, but I find it fascinating that in many cases there is social science evidence to sug‐ gest that there are problems with the sexual revolution. We as a soci‐ ety don’t want to deal with those problems for understandable rea‐ sons. But you don’t have to know theology to see that there are problems in society that didn’t exist before the sexual revolution, and that are traceable to the sexual revolution, and those are the things that I tried to get at in the book.

The City: In terms of one of the myths of the sexual revolution that you highlight, it’s about the question of whether it’s made women happier or not.

Do you think that this is something that really can be measured? In the sense that it’s a difficult question to ask: “Are you happy relative to the way you were before this transitional event?”

Eberstadt: Well, one study that I cite which is done by two Whar‐ ton School economists a couple of years ago is actually called the “paradox of declining female happiness.” And again, this is secular social science we’re talking about. They used survey data from across the western world, not only in America. And what they found really surprised them. What they found was that it looks as if, as a group, women’s happiness has been declining over the last 35 years. And as they point out, this is really paradoxical, because over those same 35 years women have obviously made major breakthroughs in the workplace, there’s less discrimination against them, they’ve gotten better educated, and of course, they’ve also been able to avail them‐ selves of artificial contraception which our secular world tells us was supposed to make them happy too.

So, what’s going on here? What I argue in the book is that increas‐ ing the sexual marketplace the way the pill did, that is increasing the likelihood of multiple partners, increasing the likelihood of recrea‐ tional sex, has also increased the problems with commitment that people have. And this is a problem, again for men as well as for women. I’m not the first person to point this out. A couple of secular male sociologists, or social thinkers, were writing about this 10 or 20 years ago—George Gilder and Lionel Tiger. And they argued similar‐ 48

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ly that if you flood the sexual marketplace with available partners you’re going to have an effect on marriage and other forms of male/female commitment.

It seems obvious when you sit down to think about it, but again it’s one of those truths about the sexual revolution that we as a society don’t really want to face for understandable reasons. The sexual revo‐ lution is like a great big party that has gotten out of control and no‐ body wants to be the first one to leave, and nobody wants to get any‐ body else in trouble. But nobody actually really knows what to do about it at this point.

The City: There’s been a marked growth of articles and various speakers recently who are making the case for a total female libration from marriage. I am thinking particularly of Kate Bolick’s cover story in The Atlantic where she says that “it’s time to embrace new ideas about romance and family and to acknowledge the end of traditional marriage as society’s highest ideal.”

What do you think about that statement and what is your reaction to it?

And what do you think about the unstated or underappreciated dangers that come as a result of that?

Eberstadt: My first reaction, and it’s a strong reaction, is that peo‐ ple who say things like that are not stopping to ask the question, “what is it doing to children?” And this is a perfect example of what I tried to describe in the book. The sexual revolution has made people more callous toward children. The idea of purposefully creating a fatherless child, bringing into the world a child that has no father, is just so callous. And we are so jaded that we don’t always see that that’s the proper response to the statement that you just read me.

So, first of all I think it’s an excellent example of the kind of narcis‐ sistic thinking that the pill has helped to bolster. Second, I think it’s a very sad statement because to me what it says is that that woman is giving up. This is not a statement of liberation. It’s a statement of res‐ ignation and it is based on what has to be a really bleak view of hu‐ man nature and male nature especially, according to which they still can’t be trusted, that you can’t try to make a life with them. And I think that’s a very sad thing.

Third, as a general point about this kind of writing by women and for women, it is preposterous to me that anyone pretends to speak for all of womankind. If there were such a thing as united woman‐ kind it would only exist because women are thinking with their hor‐ mones and not with their heads. This stereotype always comes from 49

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exactly the quarters that complain that women shouldn’t be said to be thinking with their hormones. But that’s what they do when they stereotype in this way.

The City: Let me go ahead and quote to you a series of statistics from an article by Mona Charen: “According to the Pew Research Center, 44% of millennials and 43% of Gen X’ers think marriage is becoming obsolete. As of 2010 women held 51% of all managerial and professional positions as compared with 26% in 1980. Women account for the lion’s share of bache‐ lor’s and master’s degrees and make up a majority of the work force. Three‐ quarters of the jobs lost during the recession were lost by men. Fully 50% of the adult population is single compared with 33% in 1950.”

Now, this is the crux of what I’m concerned about. If you look at such a significant portion of Millennials and Gen X’ers who think marriage is be‐ coming obsolete, and a society wherein women are essentially trying to pair themselves with men who are less educated, underemployed compared to them, do you think that that is a bad thing for society, and if so why?

Eberstadt: When you quote the numbers about the Millennials that things look very dark indeed. And the reason is, of course, that many of them have grown up in broken homes. This is something else I try to get at in the book: it is very, very important to bring not just clarity to this debate but also compassion, because so many peo‐ ple are affected by the sexual revolution, the broken homes that it produced. I know I am, I know anyone with a family or an extended family have been affected by this. So first we have to understand that we are all in this boat together somehow. And that gives us an oppor‐ tunity to reach out in the right way.

A lot of these kids who think that marriage is over think this be‐ cause in their own lives marriage was over. And it’s very hard for a child coming from a broken home to feel as if his parents have both done something wrong. This is very natural. It’s natural to feel pro‐ tective of one’s parents in a situation like that and to resist the mes‐ sage that traditional marriage is something that should be pro‐ claimed as a positive thing.

We have to start by understanding what people in that boat are feeling. If we have the proper understanding of what they’re going through we may be able to reach them and to change things. So, what looks really dark if you just quote the statistics—the obvious decline in how traditional marriage is perceived by younger people—can 50

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actually be turned into something light if we really try to get on the ground and understand them.

The City: My next question is about men. Kay Hymowitz and other writers have highlighted again and again the rise of a culture among men who have given up on the dating scene, and do not view hook‐up culture as something that ends when you get a diploma but rather something that con‐ tinues well into what we traditionally have considered adulthood. She’s highlighted the problems of underemployed men who spend their time play‐ ing videogames and don’t essentially turn into marriage material.

How much of the reason for that do you think is found in the sexual revo‐ lution and the pill as opposed to the men themselves? And should we expect more from them?

Eberstadt: Well, on one level we should always expect more from all of us. But I think of the men described by Kay Hymowitz, and I know her book and I love her stuff, I think of those men as victims in all of this. Because traditionally what ever made men grown up? I mean, traditionally what makes most men grow up is having respon‐ sibility, having a wife, having a family. Once you give 100% control over reproduction to women and women alone, men are sidelined and this is again not a point original to me. Lionel Tiger argued in a book called The Decline of Males that this is the world the pill would bring about. It would bring about a world in which men—who were already as a group, not talking about any individuals, but as a group already more distant from domestic relations than women are—that this would make them even more so because in effect the contracep‐ tive revolution, although it liberated them for recreational sex, it also left them less important in the whole mix.

So, is it any wonder that we have all these people with their base‐ ball caps on backwards sitting in the basement playing videogames?

No. It’s no wonder at all. Some people actually saw it coming.

The City: I want to quote from Victor Davis Hanson who was in this case talking about military experience, but I think it’s interesting in terms of the situation of men today in America. He talks about the increasing lack of people in the leadership of the country who have experienced “the tragic notion that if you’re in a dead‐end job, you have to work with muscular strength, there’s no good and bad choices, bad and worse choices.” He talks about the reason for that worldview being that we have a subset of the male population that for a variety of reasons is essentially 19th century in men‐ tality. And what he means by that is “they are more likely to believe in 51

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transcendent religion. They’re more likely to believe in nationalism. They’re more likely to accept that tragic view that you can be good without having to be perfect, so they don’t become depressed or give up because of an error.”

And the people who represent that, from his perspective, have been a great salvation to the United States in military affairs.

I wonder about that stretching into the context of relationships. Do you think that maybe one of the reasons that men have this attitude, that Hy‐ mowitz and others have described, is because they essentially give up on the concept of relationship? They give up on the challenge of having to be the men that women have demanded them to be, or expected them to be. And in addition to that they are giving up on what necessarily would be demanded of them to take on these leadership roles in society.

Eberstadt: I come back to the old adage, adults don’t make chil‐ dren. Children make adults.

The sexual revolution has put pressure on all the parties involved.

It’s put pressure on the formation of traditional families. It’s made it easier for people to leave home. It’s made it easier for people to ex‐ periment sexually in a way that puts further pressure on marriage or commitment of any kind. That it seems to me is the central problem here. It’s from the point of view of a man, what’s the point in making a commitment that might easily be unraveled in an age of no fault divorce say. In making it harder to form homes the sexual revolution has made it easier for people not to grow up, and that’s not just true of men. I would argue it’s true of women, too. It’s been observed elsewhere that a lot of adults in America today live an extended ado‐ lescence. It’s not just the guys. They’re just the most obvious.

The City: Perhaps what’s lost there is the idea of the interdependence of the sexes—that we need and complement each other in certain ways. And I wonder, is the dawn of the pill and the ramification of the sexual revolution that was never anticipated turned out to be the loss of the smallest level of society that can exist with the interdependence of the sexes—the family and the children that come from that?

Eberstadt: I don’t think it’s lost altogether. I don’t think it’s a lost cause. I do think that the sexual revolution has been a tsunami and we are just kind of getting to the surface to see what happens after‐ wards. I really do believe this is an exploration that’s going to go on for centuries because it’s only been in the lifetime of middle‐aged people that relations between the sexes have changed this drastically.

It’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of observation to figure out 52

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all the fall out, to map this new world. That’s what I’m trying to do in a very, very preliminary matter is just try and map out a little of where we are once we get to the surface and we can see the damage that’s been caused.

The City: You pose a provocative question in your book about sex and food. And as someone who knows a great number of foodies I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about this. I actually think this is a very fascinating argu‐ ment, but I wonder if you could boil it down essentially for our readers in terms of the perspective that you advance.

George: Well, one of the main themes of the book is that the sexual revolution has changed more than just the obvious things. We’ve been talking about family breakup, and guys not growing up, and things like that, and that’s sort of on the surface of all this. But un‐ derneath I think it’s also changed all kinds of ways in which we oper‐ ate socially. And in the chapter you’re talking about I make the ob‐ servation that over the past 50 years people have gotten less and less moralistic about sex. We all know that of course. Look at the gay rights revolution. Look at the very phenomena of no fault divorce.

Look at the lack of stigma attached to out of wedlock births. Obvi‐ ously things have changed and they’ve changed for lots and lots of people. People have gotten less censorious about sex.

But at the same time there’s been this parallel movement that I find fascinating which is that people are more and more censorious about food issues. They attach moral weight to all kinds of things concern‐ ing the consumption of food. For example, organic, or vegan, or buy‐ ing from buying your tuna fish from a place that doesn’t catch dol‐ phins in their nets. And I’m not making fun of this—on a personal note I’m a vegetarian so I actually get to say this with some objectivi‐ ty. People have become more and more holistic about food.

My point in that chapter is that if you lay these two phenomena side by side it really looks like people took what had been their mor‐ al concerns about sex and latched them onto food instead. And my hypothesis is that this great big transformation happened because of the sexual revolution. And because, again, to go back to the party metaphor, nobody wanted to leave the party yet—people found it less appealing to be traditionalists about sex but they also seem to find it more appealing to be moralist about food. And I think these two things are related.

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The City: Your book arrives within the same period as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, which has sparked so much discussion. One of the things that Murray points out which I think is not a surprise to many but may be a surprise in the context of this discussion, is essentially that the dividing line of marriage between the white upper class and the working class whites is really significant, particularly when it comes to the acceptance level of co‐ habitation among the working class. I wonder could you extend your argu‐ ment to the effects of what Murray highlights when it comes to this divide.

Consider a few statistics from Murray’s book: in 1960 just 2% of all white births were non‐marital, 6% of births to white women with no more than a high school education were out of wedlock. By 2008 44% were non‐marital.

Among what he identifies as the higher class college educated women, less than 6% of births in 2008 were out of wedlock. That’s up only one percent‐ age point from 1970.

Is this a case where, as Murray says, there’s a need for a Victorian era rev‐ olution in terms of the way that the lessons of what’s best for children, what’s best for families, are passed down to the working class? How can we convince the working class, essentially, that this cohabitation approach that they’ve been sold is a lie?

Eberstadt: Great question. I do know Charles Murray’s book, I’ve read it twice in fact. I think it’s a wonderful, wonderful book. Essen‐ tially what you’re asking is: how do we put the genie back in the bot‐ tle? And that’s a question not only about the working class, but about everybody who is in this mix together. And I don’t think things are as bleak as a lot of traditionalists think they are. The reason is that whenever you start saying something is inevitable, some series of facts are going to come along and clobber you. If you think about all the predictions of inevitability Marxism, communism, claiming that they have inevitable victory on its side. That didn’t work. Think of things in your own lifetime that seemed inevitable.

When I was a kid it seemed just inevitable that almost all adults would smoke and smoke a lot. That changed. That changed drastical‐ ly. What I’m saying is that, when you have large social phenomena you can’t ever take for granted the idea that they are there to stay, for better or for worse. And my point about the sexual revolution is that it hasn’t been looked at that way yet, but the empirical record is such that it is high time that it get looked at that way. That is get look at as something that does not necessarily govern the world of 100 years from now the way it governs our world. People do learn from the 54

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factual record. Part of what I’m trying to do in this book is bring that factual record to light so that people can make more informed deci‐ sions about this. Now, how does that affect the working class? It’s not there yet but in the lives that everybody, whether they read this book or not, there are reasons to reevaluate the sexual revolution and the world that it has made.

I’ll give you another example. In Western Europe right now there’s a multi‐faceted crisis going on. In the financial pages it’s reported as a financial crisis, which is essentially that the large welfare states of Western Europe can’t sustain themselves because they don’t have the money. And the reason they don’t have the money is that they don’t have the population base. Now, to me this is not so much as a finan‐ cial crisis as a family crisis brought about by the sexual revolution.

And for all kinds of reasons I think one can image people making different choices in the future.

The generations behind us, immediately behind us, decided basi‐ cally to have very few children. Some people none. This experiment is very new in human history. It’s only been 50 years and it’s not im‐ possible that future generations will decide actually it would be bet‐ ter to have people who can keep you company in your old age. Or actually maybe family breakup is a lot more expensive than it’s un‐ derstood.

To the point about Murray’s book: I find his analysis fascinating about how the upper classes in America are more traditionally ob‐ servant, than the lower, they also go to church more often. But I would flip that around as a friendly amendment and say it’s a chick‐ en and egg problem. Maybe the reason that the people in the higher classes tend to be married more than the people in the lower classes is that family breakup is expensive. And divorce is expensive. And part of the reason they’re holding onto their money is that they’re holding onto their marriages.

I don’t think Charles Murray would have a problem with that ar‐ gument and I think we all know from our own lives that when peo‐ ple fail to form families in the first place, or when they have them and tragically lose them to divorce and related things, then financial problems to catastrophe is very often the result. So, I think there are two ways of looking at those statistics.

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The City: From the perspective of a young person who is either coming out of college or is college age, what would you say to them about the case for why that would be damaging both to them and to the child?

Eberstadt: Well, for starters for those who have been through it themselves, they know that intuitively. There is a great deal of social science evidence about this, an enormous amount. In fact, the late, great James Q. Wilson said 17 years ago or so that there’s so much evidence about the problems for children of non‐traditional family arrangements that even some sociologists now believe that he was correct. The sociologists didn’t want to believe it, but the evidence is there. And the question is, how do you use it without stuffing it down people’s throats and making them feel as is you’re pointing fingers at them and clobbering them with it? And I think it’s really tricky.

On the other hand, people do learn. People are rational creatures.

And it’s not an impossible thing to explain to a young adult that if he or she asks himself or herself what they want most, I think most peo‐ ple would still answer that they’d like to be in a committed relation‐ ship with somebody. We have human nature to work with here, is my point. And I think between it and being delicate and sensible about handling the empirical record, we can get through to people.

The City: I want to close with this. When it comes to your attitude to‐ ward the experience of the Millennial generation here, are we dealing with a problem that has a half life? In the sense that the people who are making the case that marriage is unnecessary, that child rearing is not necessarily some‐ thing that is affirming for women, that the sexual revolution was a great and grand thing, and has all these wonderful consequences, also tend to be people who don’t have many children.

And on the flip side, those who reject those arguments implicitly, whether they do so explicitly in their own minds or not, tend to have a lot of children and tend to raise them. Is this a problem that essentially will work itself out in society as those younger children grow up without opposition to marriage and acceptance of the ideas of the sexual revolution?

Eberstadt: There are a number of people who have written really well about this. One is Eric Kaufmann, an academic who wrote a book called Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? And his point is to work with demographic literature and statistics. He says this is what’s going to happen across the world in every religion, because in every religion the religious have more children. And across the board 56

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of the modern West secular people have fewer to none. And in the long run, he thinks, as the title suggests, that the religious will inherit the earth. I’m not a demographer so I tend not to go there, but I think there are other forces, too, that will propel people back toward more traditional arrangements.

This experiment of the world brought about by the sexual revolu‐ tion is a very new experiment if you measure it against the millennia of human history. Understanding the problems it has caused is the first step to living differently. In short, empirical fact is not on the side of people who say that the sexual revolution has been a liberat‐ ing thing for humanity. Empirical fact is on the side of those who say, this has a dark side that we’re only beginning to appreciate. And I think righting the balance between those two things is the first step we have to take in order to get to the point of changing hearts and minds.

Mary Eberstadt is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and consulting editor to Policy Review. Her most recent book is Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution (Ignatius).

Benjamin Domenech is Editor in Chief of T H E C I T Y .

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C ONSCIENCE & C ATHOLICISM ]the0catholic0burden} Paul Rahe

I

n my lifetime, to my increasing regret, the Roman Catholic Church in the United States has lost much of its moral authori‐ ty. It has done so largely because it has subordinated its teach‐ ing of Catholic moral doctrine to its ambitions regarding an expansion of the administrative entitlements state. In 1973, when the Supreme Court made its decision in Roe v. Wade, had the bishops, priests, and nuns screamed bloody murder and declared war, I believe the decision would soon have been reversed. Instead, under the leadership of Archbishop Joseph Bernadin, who became President of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1974 and the Cardinal‐Archbishop of Chicago in 1982, they asserted that the teaching of the Church was a “seamless garment,” and treated abor‐ tion as one concern among many. Here is what Cardinal Bernadin said in the Gannon Lecture at Fordham University that he delivered in 1983:

Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visible in support of the quality of life of the powerless among us: the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker.

Consistency means that we cannot have it both ways. We cannot urge a compassionate society and vigorous public policy to protect the rights of the unborn and then argue that compassion and significant public programs on behalf of the needy undermine the moral fiber of the society or are beyond the proper scope of governmental responsibility.

This statement, which came to be taken as authoritative throughout the American Church, proved, as Joseph Sobran observed seven 58

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years ago, “to be nothing but a loophole for hypocritical Catholic politicians. If anything,” he added, ʺit has actually made it easier for them than for non‐Catholics to give their effective support to legal‐ ized abortion—that is, it has allowed them to be inconsistent and unprincipled about the very issues that Cardinal Bernardin said de‐ mand consistency and principle.” In practice, this meant that, insofar as anyone pressed the case against Roe v. Wade, it would be concerned Catholic laymen orphaned by their church and the evangelical Protestants who flocked to the banner they unfurled.

I was reared a Catholic, wandered out of the Church, and stumbled back in more than thirteen years ago. I cannot claim to be a fully faithful Catholic even now, but I have been a regular attendee at mass since that time. Moreover, I travel a great deal and frequently find myself in a diocese not my own. In these years, I have heard sermons articulating the case against abortion thrice—once in passing in Loui‐ siana at a mass said by the retired Archbishop there; once in passing at the cathedral in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and a few weeks ago in a com‐ pelling fashion in our parish in Hillsdale, Michigan. The truth is that the priests in the United States are far more likely to push the “social justice” agenda of the American bishops from the pulpit than to in‐ struct the faithful in the evils of abortion.

I have not once in those years heard the argument against contra‐ ception made from the pulpit, and I have not once heard the argu‐ ment for chastity articulated. In the face of a sexual revolution that has produced childbirth out of wedlock on a scale unprecedented in human history, the bishops, priests, and nuns of the American Church have by and large fallen silent. In effect, they have aban‐ doned the moral teaching of the Roman Catholic Church in order to articulate a defense of the administrative entitlements state and its progressive expansion.

There is another dimension to the failure of the American Church in the face of the sexual revolution. As everyone knows by now, in the 1980s—when Cardinal Bernadin was the chief leader of the American Church and the man most closely consulted when the Vat‐ ican selected its bishops—it became evident to the American prelates that, in many a diocese, there were priests who were rampant homo‐ sexual predators—pederasts inclined to take advantage of young boys. The bishops could have faced up to the problem at that time; they could have turned in the malefactors to the secular authorities; 59

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they could have prevented their further contact with the young. They were called upon to do so in a report drawn on their behalf up by a psychologist, a lawyer, and an expert in canon law. Instead, under the guidance of Cardinal Bernadin and those of his cronies whom he installed in turn atop the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, they opted for another policy. They hushed everything up, sent the priests off for psychological counseling, and reassigned them to other parishes or even dioceses—where they continued to prey on young boys. In the same period, a number of the seminaries in which young men were trained for the priesthood became, in effect, brothels—and next to nothing was done about any of this until 2002 when the Bos‐ ton Globe broke the story and the lawsuits began in earnest.

There is, I would suggest, a connection between the heretical doc‐ trine propagated by Cardinal Bernadin in the Gannon Lecture and the difficulties that the American Church now faces. Those who soft‐ pedal the moral teaching of the Church in the interest of creating heaven on earth and who, to this end, subvert the liberty of others and embrace the administrative entitlements state will sooner or later become its victims.

Y

ou have to hand it to President Barack Obama. He has un‐ masked in the most thoroughgoing way the despotic propen‐ sities of the administrative entitlements state. And now he has done something similar to the hierarchy of the American Catholic Church. At the prospect that institutions associated with the Catholic Church would be required to offer to their employees health insur‐ ance covering contraception and abortifacients, the bishops, priests, and some of the nuns scream bloody murder. Now, finally, almost as an afterthought, when the hour is very nearly too late—they also raise objection to the fact that Catholic and even non‐Catholic em‐ ployers as well as corporations, large and small, owned wholly or in part by Roman Catholics and those of others faiths, will be required to do the same. These advocates consider the freedom of the Catholic Church as an institution to distance itself from that which its doc‐ trines decry as morally wrong to be sacrosanct. Yet what of the liber‐ ty of its members—not to mention the liberty belonging to the adher‐ ents of other Christian sects, to Jews, Muslims, and non‐believers—to do the same? This they were, until cornered themselves, perfectly willing to sacrifice.

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This inattention to the liberties of others is doubly scandalous (and I use this poignant term in full knowledge of its meaning within the Catholic tradition)—for there was a time when the Catholic hierarchy knew better. There was a time when Roman Catholicism was the great defender not only of its own liberty but of that of others. There was a time when the prelates recognized the liberty of the Church to govern itself in light of its guiding principles was inseparable from the liberty of other corporate bodies and institutions to do the same.

I do not mean to say that the Roman Catholic Church was in the more distant past a staunch defender of religious liberty. That it was not. (Within its sphere, the Church demanded full authority. It is only in recent years that Rome has come to be fully appreciative of the larger principle.) I mean that, in the course of defending its own au‐ tonomy against the secular power, the Roman Catholic Church as‐ serted the liberty of other corporate bodies and even, in some meas‐ ure, the liberty of individuals. To see what I have in mind one need only examine Magna Carta, which begins with King John’s pledge that

the English Church shall be free, and shall have her rights entire, and her liberties inviolate; and we will that it be thus observed; which is apparent from this that the freedom of elections, which is reckoned most important and very essential to the English Church, we, of our pure and unconstrained will, did grant, and did by our charter confirm and did obtain the ratification of the same from our lord, Pope Innocent III, before the quarrel arose between us and our barons: and this we will observe, and our will is that it be observed in good faith by our heirs forever.

Only after making this promise does the King go on to say, “We have also granted to all freemen of our kingdom, for us and our heirs forever, all the underwritten liberties, to be had and held by them and their heirs, of us and our heirs forever.” It is in this context that he affirms that “no scutage not aid shall be imposed on our kingdom, unless by common counsel of our kingdom, except for ransoming our person, for making our eldest son a knight, and for once marry‐ ing our eldest daughter; and for these there shall not be levied more than a reasonable aid.” It is in this context that he pledges that “the city of London shall have all its ancient liberties and free customs, as well by land as by water,” and grants that “all other cities, boroughs, towns, and ports shall have all their liberties and free customs.” It is 61

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in this document that he promises that “no freemen shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land” and that “to no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice.”

O

ne will not find such a document in eastern Christendom or in the sphere governed by Sunni Islam. It is peculiar to West‐ ern Christendom—and it was made possible by the fact that, in the Christian West, church and state were not co‐extensive and none of the various secular powers was able to establish its suzerain‐ ty over the Church. There was within each political community in the Christian West an imperium in imperio—a power independent of the state that had no desire to replace the state but was fiercely resistant to its own subordination and aware that it could not hope to retain its traditional liberties if it did not lend a hand in defending the tradi‐ tional liberties of others.

I am not arguing that the Church fostered limited government in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period. In principle, the government that it fostered was unlimited in its scope. I am arguing, however, that the Church worked assiduously to hem in the authori‐ ty of the Christian kings and that its success in this endeavor provid‐ ed the foundation for the emergence of a parliamentary order. In‐ deed, I would go further. It was the Church that promoted the principles underpinning the emergence of parliaments. It did so by fostering the quasi‐republican species of government that had emerged within the Church itself. Given that the Church in the West made clerical celibacy one of its principal practices (whether it was honored in the breach or not), the hereditary principle could play no role in its governance. Inevitably, it resorted to elections. Monks elected abbots, the canons of cathedrals elected bishops, the College of Cardinals elected the Pope.

The principle articulated in canon law—the only law common to all of Western Europe—to explain why these practices were proper was lifted from the Roman law dealing with the governance of water‐ ways: “Quod omnes tangit,” it read, “ab omnibus tractari debeat: That which touches all should be dealt with by all.” In pagan antiquity, this meant that those upstream could not take all of the water and that those downstream had a say in its allocation. It was this princi‐ 62

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ple that the clergymen who served as royal administrators insinuated into the laws of the kingdoms and petty republics of Europe. It was used to justify communal self‐government. It was used to justify the calling of parliaments. And it was used to justify the provisions for self‐governance contained within the corporate charters issued to cities, boroughs, and, in time, colonies. In the midst of the struggle occasioned by the ratification of the American Constitution, you will find it cited by John Dickinson in The Letters of Fabius.

The quod omnes tangit principle was not the foundation of modern liberty, but it was its antecedent. And had there been no such ante‐ cedent, had kings not been hemmed in by the Church and its allies in this fashion, I very much doubt that there ever would have been a regime of limited government. In fact, had there not been a distinc‐ tion both in theory and in fact between the secular and the spiritual authority, limited government would have been inconceivable.

The Reformation weakened the Church. In Protestant lands, it tended to strengthen the secular power and to promote a monar‐ chical absolutism unknown to the Middle Ages. Outside Geneva, Presbyterianism—with its republican propensities—had limited in‐ fluence, and Lutheranism and Anglicanism were, in effect, Caesaro‐ Papist. In Catholic lands, the Reformation caused the spiritual power to shelter itself behind the secular power and become, to a considera‐ ble degree, an appendage of that power. But the Reformation, the Counter‐Reformation, and the religious strife to which they gave rise also posed to the secular power an almost insuperable problem— how to secure peace and domestic tranquility in a world marked by sectarian rivalry and strife. Limited government—i. e., a government in principle limited in its scope—was the solution ultimately found.

In the nascent American republic, this principle was codified in its purest form in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But it had additional ramifications as well—for the government’s scope was limited also in other ways. There were other amendments that made up what we now call the Bill of Rights, and many of the states pref‐ aced their constitutions with bills of rights or added them as appen‐ dices. These were all intended to limit the scope of the government.

They were all designed to protect the right of individuals to life, lib‐ erty, the acquisition and possession of property, and the pursuit of happiness as these individuals understood happiness. Put simply, 63

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liberty of conscience was part of a larger package. It was the first freedom, but not the last.

This is what the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church forgot. In the 1930s, the majority of the bishops, priests, and nuns sold their souls to the devil, and (like many a Protestant both before and after) they did so with the best of intentions. In their concern for the suffer‐ ing of those out of work and destitute, they wholeheartedly em‐ braced the New Deal. They gloried in the fact that Franklin Delano Roosevelt made Frances Perkins—a devout Anglo‐Catholic laywom‐ an who belonged to the Episcopalian Church but retreated on occa‐ sion to a Catholic convent—Secretary of Labor and the first member of her sex to be awarded a cabinet post. And they welcomed Social Security, which was her handiwork. They did not stop to ponder whether public provision in this regard would subvert the moral principle that children are responsible for the well‐being of their par‐ ents. They did not stop to consider whether this measure would re‐ duce the incentives for procreation and nourish the temptation to think of sexual intercourse as an indoor sport. They did not stop to think.

In the process, the leaders of the American Catholic Church fell prey to a conceit that had long before ensnared a great many main‐ stream Protestants in the United States—the notion that public provi‐ sion is somehow akin to charity—and so they fostered state paternal‐ ism and undermined what they professed to teach: that charity is an individual responsibility and that it is appropriate that individuals fulfill that responsibility by joining together under the leadership of the Church to alleviate the suffering of the poor. In its place, they helped establish the Machiavellian principle that underpins modern liberalism—the notion that it is our Christian duty to confiscate other people’s money and redistribute it.

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t every turn in American politics since that time, you will find the hierarchy assisting the Democratic Party and pro‐ moting the growth of the administrative entitlements state.

At no point have its members evidenced any concern for sustaining limited government and protecting the rights of individuals. It did not cross the minds of these prelates that the liberty of conscience which they had grown to cherish is part of a larger package—that the paternalistic state, which recognizes no legitimate limits on its power 64

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and scope, that they had so passionately embraced would someday turn on the Church and seek to dictate whom it chose to teach its doctrines and how, more generally, it would conduct its affairs.

I would submit that the bishops, priests, and nuns now screaming bloody murder have gotten what they asked for. The weapon that Obama has directed at the Church was fashioned to a considerable degree by Catholic churchmen, who have pushed universal health care now for decades.

I do not mean to say that I would prefer that the bishops, nuns, and priests sit down and shut up. Obama has once again done the friends of liberty a favor by forcing the friends of the administrative entitle‐ ments state to contemplate what they have wrought. Whether those brought up on the heresy that public provision is akin to charity will prove capable of thinking through what they have done remains un‐ clear. But there is now a chance that this ephiphany will take place.

There was a time—long ago, to be sure, but for an institution with the longevity possessed by the Catholic Church long ago was just yester‐ day—when the Church played an honorable role in hemming in the authority of magistrates and in promoting not only its own liberty as an institution but that of others similarly intent on managing their own affairs as individuals and as members of sub‐political communi‐ ties.

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n the wake of the bishops’ initial protest, Obama offered them “a compromise.” Under its terms, insurance companies offering healthcare coverage would be required to provide contraception and abortifacients, but this would not be mentioned in the contracts signed by those who run Catholic institutions. This “compromise” was, of course, a farce. It embodied a distinction where there was, in fact, no difference. It was a snare and a delusion, and the Catholic Left embraced it immediately, thinking that it would allow the bish‐ ops, priests, and nuns to save face while, in fact, paying for the con‐ traception and abortifacients that the insurance companies would be required to provide. As if on cue, Sister Carol Keehan, a prominent Obamacare supporter who heads the Catholic Health Association, immediately issued a statement in which she announced that she is “pleased and grateful that the religious liberty and conscience protec‐ tion needs of so many ministries that serve our country were appre‐ 65

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ciated enough that an early resolution of this issue was accom‐ plished.”

The bishops did not, however, immediately fall in line. For once, they did not follow the lead of the Catholic Left. There is, in fact, rea‐ son to wonder whether Obama may not have shaken some members of the hierarchy from their dogmatic slumber. A few of them—and, among the younger priests, some of their likely successors—appear to have begun to recognize the logic inherent in the development of the administrative entitlements state. The proponents of Obamacare, with some consistency, pointed to Canada and to France as models.

As anyone who has attended mass in Montreal or Paris can testify, the Church in both of these places is filled with empty pews. There is, in fact, not a single country in the social democratic sphere where either the Catholic Church or a Protestant church is anything but moribund. This is by no means fortuitous. When faith and morals are no longer taught and when government‐financed entitlements stand in for charity and the Social Gospel is preached in place of the Word of God, heaven on earth becomes the end, the state replaces the Church, and genuine Christianity goes by the boards.

It took a terrible scandal and a host of lawsuits to persuade the American Church to rid itself of the pederast priests and clean up its seminaries. Perhaps the tyrannical agenda of Obama and his allies will have a comparable effect. Perhaps it will occasion on the part of the Catholic clergy a rethinking of the social‐justice agenda. The ball is now in the court of Timothy Dolan, Cardinal‐Archbishop of New York. He has refused the fig leaf that President Obama offered him.

He has chosen to fight, and the other bishops have rallied in his sup‐ port. We can only hope that he is not only cunning and resolute but also fully cognizant of the role played by the American Church in forging the weapons now being used against it.

The hour is late, and the stakes are high. Next time, the masters of the administrative entitlements state will not even bother to offer the hierarchy a fig leaf.

Paul Rahe holds The Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College, where he is Professor of History. He is the author most recently of Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect (Yale University Press, 2009).

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T EA W ITH R USSELL K IRK ]political0friendship} Tim Goeglein

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n Washington, D.C., relationships matter. These kinds of friendships are easily misunderstood. That’s because so many of them are formed and solidified through high‐pressure, high‐stress political situations. Those natural highs and lows of American politics burnish relationships. During all my years in Washington, I have been the beneficiary of some fortunate friendships—people who I came to know, love, and trust, and who have become among the most important friends of my life.

Some of these men and women were colleagues in the Senate, on various campaigns, in the White House, or in other perches in the administration. Still others were friends outside politics or public policy all together. But I was fortunate to have intellectual friend‐ ships of my life formed long before I came to the White House, with men who guided me in ways more important than I ever would have thought possible in the days when our friendships were new.

I met Russell Kirk, one of the founding fathers of the American conservative movement in the years after World War II and the au‐ thor of the magisterial The Conservative Mind, when I was a junior in high school in 1981. Russell, a fellow Midwesterner, developed a friendship with me through letters, all of his typed personally and neatly with nary an error, flowing as if each one was written for pub‐ lication—lucid and eloquent, word upon word. We exchanged letters on and off through the rest of his life, well into the 1990s, and we saw each other whenever he came to Washington, which was at least two times a year on average for lectures and speeches.

His remarkable wife Annette, whom he always referred to as “the beauteous,” became an equally cherished friend. After Russell’s 67

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death, she carried on his legacy in founding The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in Michigan with the help of the indispensable Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Delaware, where Russell and Annette’s son‐in‐law Jeffrey Nelson, also a friend, serves as a senior vice president.

Russell changed my life by seeding my intellectual curiosity. I came to see that his external life was much smaller than his internal world, which was large, deep, and wide. He taught me to be wary of ideo‐ logues because they got in the way of a good life. He famously said that “ideology is anathema.” Conservatism, I came to see, because of the influence of Russell, was not an ideology but instead a way of life.

There is no official or unofficial handbook for what constitutes con‐ servatism, and in fact the conservative life is various.

Through all our letters, through our many conversations, through reading his prodigious oeuvre—both fiction and nonfiction (his ghost stories are remarkable)—I came to see I was not exclusively a social conservative, an economic conservative, or a defense/foreign poli‐ cy/national security conservative. I was a conservative without prefix or suffix, one who believed, with Russell, that “the twentieth‐century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of spirit and character—with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is con‐ servatism at its highest.”

When I read those words for the first time in The Conservative Mind, I knew I had found a soul mate, even if we did not agree on all things. In fact, I once raised this point with Russell, and he noted he was pleased that in fact we did not agree in all matters. He told me disagreement is a key part of conservatism, that there is no single document or manifesto that guides the conservative but that there are precepts rooted in transcendence, custom, order, and tradition that guide the thinking and faith of those who find wisdom in pre‐ scription.

When William F. Buckley Jr. once visited Russell in Kirk’s small an‐ cestral Michigan village of Mecosta—Russell liked to refer to that part of Michigan as “the stump country”—and asked him what he did for intellectual companionship there, Russell pointed at the wall of books comprising his library. That is not an inapt description of 68

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how Russell’s friendship impacted my own public service in the Sen‐ ate and the White House.

Russell showed me it was important to live your ideas, that faith and action go together and not one without the other. He was a commanding public intellectual, deeply respected by men and wom‐ en of the Left as well as the Right. Even a liberal like Arthur Schle‐ singer Jr. also had great respect for Russell, and both men shared a mutually high regard for Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, among many other things. During my years in the White House, Schlesinger invited me to his Sutton Place apartment and office in New York City.

We spoke of Tocqueville, Emerson, FDR, and JFK. But when I told him of my friendship with Dr. Kirk, that is all Schlesinger wanted to talk about for the next half hour.

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remember spending a winter weekend with the Kirks in Me‐ costa. I drove to their home, which was about five hours from Fort Wayne. When I arrived, I thought it was one of the bleakest days of the year: The skies were grey; the fields and forests were cropless and leafless; and the bitter wind seemed endless.

When I came into their village, I did not know precisely where their home was. Annette had said, “Just ask anyone when you ar‐ rive,” as it was a small village. So I stopped at the first place I found, a kind of combination gas station and gift shop. “Oh, the Kirks. Yes, they live in that haunted house down there,” pointing just down the street. I chuckled, but the woman gave me a lame grin as if to say, “Just wait. You’ll see what I mean.”

The Gothic house was indeed a landmark in Mecosta. The original Kirk homestead burned to the ground many years before on Good Friday, but Russell and Annette built a beautiful Italianate home in its place. It was not grandiose or luxurious; but it had a remarkable per‐ sonality, perfectly capturing its patriarch.

The highlight of my time with the Kirks was when Russell and I took a short walk down a snowy old lane to the former cigar factory that became his library. Thousands of volumes animated the place, but there were two focal points in the room: the desk where Russell did his writing, usually in the dead of night while his family slept, and a large, roaring, crackling fire in the fireplace that in those winter months was rarely extinguished. When we walked in, I felt a sense of 69

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serenity and warmth and even peace. So many of the books special in my life were written in that library.

The last time I saw Russell was on his final visit to Washington. We had tea on the rooftop of the old Hotel Washington where he stayed when he was in the city. It was a glorious afternoon, and the terrace where we sat overlooked the White House and the Department of the Treasury. I made a comment about the statue of Alexander Hamilton that stands just behind the Treasury, near to the East Gate of the White House. Russell began to expound on the key chapters of Ham‐ ilton’s life, the centrality of his role in the Federalist Papers, and was discussing the importance of Hamilton to America’s founding as if he, Russell, was literally sitting having tea in the eighteenth century.

He was not lecturing or moralizing but rather discussing and evok‐ ing in the most remarkable fashion, from his great mind, one of the central characters of all of American history. Russell’s comments had a learnedness and vastness of knowledge that astounded me, and yet there was not a scintilla of pedantry in his approach. When I was with him, I always felt a sense of calm which was irretrievable, never fictive. He was a gentle man. He died, surrounded by his wife and four daughters, April 29, 1994.

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ussell’s friendship, animated by the first postulates of the good life, guided me in practical ways time and again. His was a worldview animated by a realm of noble ideas, myste‐ rious splendor, and the ways God affronted confusion, doubt, and fear. Russell taught me to embrace justice, mystery, and an orderly and stable universe which was God‐ordained and true.

He showed that literature and civilization matter to the man or woman who chooses public life and that being guided by those cen‐ tral, exciting ideas—truth, beauty, justice, goodness—was a wonder‐ ful way to navigate a good and meaningful life. In all of my letters, lunches, dinners, and time with him, he never once raised a political idea or discussion. With Russell there was never a time of punditry or current events. If I made a comment about something in the news, he might express an opinion, but by and large we discussed history, biography, poetry, philosophy, theology, or shared a bit of humor.

Russell Kirk’s impact on me was indelible.

It’s important to understand the intersection of friendships like the one I had with Russell and those that typically exist in Washington.

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With politics comes the pressure to network and relate to people only in a tangential, selfish manner. This is a destructive approach and one that misses out on the relationships that give true meaning to life.

In my time working at the White House under George W. Bush, I was tasked with forming friendships as a liaison throughout the con‐ servative movement, at think tanks, activist organizations, and the media, including the authors, writers, scholars, wonks, and historians who propounded a right of center worldview that battled back against the liberal domination of the media.

But how to mesh these worlds? One relationship at a time, building a level of trust and friendship over weeks, months, and years, and always respecting the bright line between my role as liaison and my White House colleagues’ media and communications roles. It was a balance and ballast we achieved incrementally. The goal was not to get important people to agree with President Bush. The goal was to open a dialogue, earn the honor of being heard, and having the pres‐ ident’s viewpoint thoughtfully considered.

The glue of the American conservative movement is the Madisoni‐ an view that our framers created a government of strictly enumerat‐ ed and restricted powers that give most power to the states and to the American people, not Washington and its permanent, ever‐ expansive bureaucracy. It was a view Russell espoused in his way, and others in theirs. Despite their differences, the worlds are more complementary than you might think.

I came to see the conservative intellectual and journalistic world as a vibrant place, peopled by talented individuals whose own diversity of opinion, outlook, and styles destroyed the myth that there was anything like unanimity on the American Right. Yet there was a sin‐ gular devotion among all conservatives to first principles and to the idea of American exceptionalism best exemplified in adherence to and respect for our nation’s founding documents, none more so than the Constitution. That idea bound all American conservatism and was the foundation of some of the most fortunate, blessed friend‐ ships of my life.

Timothy Goeglein is Vice President of Focus on the Family and the author of The Man in the Middle (B&H Books, 2011), from which this piece is adapted.

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Books & Culture

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T HE M ORALITY OF D EMOCRATIC C APITALISM \how0to0help0the0poor| Ryan T. Anderson Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism, by Peter Wehner and Arthur Brooks, AEI Press 2010.

Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, by Martha Nussbaum, Harvard University Press 2011.

From Prophecy to Charity: How to Help the Poor, by Lawrence Mead, AEI Press 2011.

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arket economies, free enterprise, and private prop‐ erty are important, and so their defense is also important. But as important as these ideas and institutions are, they aren’t enough for a complete account of the rights and duties in the economic sphere of our lives. Nevertheless, many conservatives seem intent on downplaying social justice. For too long, those on the right have ne‐ glected to advance moral cases for free enterprise. The consequences are apparent everywhere you look in politics and the public square, particularly among younger Americans who perhaps have little memory of the negative effects of alternative approaches, and profes‐ sors with little interest in filling them in on the historical truth. But the problem cannot be ignored without ramifications. Consider just one measure, a poll released by GlobeScan in 2011—it found that public support in America for the proposition that “the free market economy is the best economic system for the future” had dropped 73

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from 80% in 2002 to a mere 59%, a percentage which placed support for the free market in America lower than it is in China.

This is a sad circumstance, particularly considering how many moral arguments can be marshaled in favor of free enterprise and democratic capitalism. For a generation wrestling with economic questions, conservatives need to provide a more thoughtful consid‐ eration and response to what worries people about capitalism. Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Peter Wehner and American Enter‐ prise Institute President Arthur Brooks provide a helpful example of how this is done in their new book in the AEI Values and Capitalism series, Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism.

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ehner and Brooks begin by arguing that democratic capi‐ talism is the political‐economic system that best corre‐ sponds to a human nature that is neither hopelessly flawed nor infinitely perfectible, but rather is a mix of beast and an‐ gel. The system allows citizens to pursue their self‐interest, rightly understood, in a way that need not be either selfish or selfless, but still contributes to the common good. It also avoids the coercion and corruption present in the more totalitarian alternative regime struc‐ tures while more satisfactorily helping the poor: “Markets, precisely because they are wealth‐generating, also end up being wealth‐ distributing.”

They go on to recount the economic achievements of capitalism, which are, quite simply, staggering. Regardless of how you measure standards of living—infant mortality, life expectancy, literacy, hun‐ ger, disease, violence—the spread of capitalism has benefited every‐ one, they argue, and particularly the poor. As they note: “If you were born in London before the dawn of modern capitalism, the norm was destitution and grinding poverty, widespread illiteracy, illness and disease, and early death. And, even worse, your children could ex‐ pect a similar fate. The possibility for progress was almost nonexist‐ ent for your progeny.” But with the rise of capitalism, all of this changed. Though they are careful to note the downsides of the Indus‐ trial Revolution, they argue that it needs to be measured against life prior to it, which was “bleak, cruel, and short.”

The attempts to fix the problems of industrialization proved to hurt the poor, not help them. Wehner and Brooks document the failures in worldviews that sought “a world with the benefits of capitalism, but 74

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without its costs.” So they tally the effects of communism, as it mis‐ read human nature and “shackled more people in more chains than any other political theory in history.” Concentrated power led to abuses, atheism devalued humanity, and a materialistic outlook viewed people as “merely economic units in the service of the state.”

In the end, 65 million died under Mao, 20 million under Stalin and Lenin, and 2 million (a quarter of the Cambodian population) under Pol Pot. And for those who survived, living standards were poor.

But in “places where capitalism has taken root and flowered, in‐ come and living standards have shot up.” In “capitalist nations, ex‐ treme economic poverty has been largely eliminated. There is an abundance of food. Literacy is commonplace; so are clean water, vac‐ cinations, and access to advanced medical care.” Wehner and Brooks note that where capitalism has not taken root, “people live under brutal tyrannies, political corruption, malnutrition, and even starva‐ tion; social and technological progress is stymied, economies are stagnant, and the quality of life is dismal.” They conclude that “Capi‐ talism has done more to lift people out of abject poverty than any other system in human history. All the other models—including col‐ lectivism, socialism, and communism—have proved to be deeply flawed, and their human effects are often calamitous.”

What about the impact capitalism has on culture, morality, and the human character? While claiming they have sympathy with some of these criticisms of capitalism, Wehner and Brooks explore none of them and “begin with an obvious counterpoint: The material pro‐ gress that flows from capitalism is no small matter. Lifting people out of poverty is a hugely impressive and important moral achieve‐ ment.” They continue in this vein by arguing that capitalism avoids the coercion of alternative political regimes and thus preserves a cru‐ cial human value: freedom. Not only that, economic liberty helps bolster and support other political goods, especially civil rights and religious liberty, and it helps foster peace between nations.

So what about the Bernie Madoffs of the world? Wehner and Brooks argue that Madoff isn’t the result of “free markets corroding moral character,” but rather of “poor moral character corroding free markets.” They conclude that “the answer is not less capitalism. It is better capitalists.” But we can’t expect the economic order to produce this. Nor can we expect the political order (the government) to pro‐ duce this: “A free economy, like a democratic political community, 75

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requires certain preconditions in order to best function, most espe‐ cially a strong civic and social order and a shared belief in an under‐ lying moral code.” In other words, the mediating institutions of soci‐ ety—families, churches, schools, voluntary associations—need to produce what the market and the state can’t—decent people—but without which neither can survive.

Wehner and Brooks conclude the book by asking, “Is capitalism unjust?” They claim that starting in the 1970s, academics in America “broke with previous political philosophers from the ancient Greeks to the American founding fathers in arguing that the fundamental task of the state is to end inequality.” And they claim that “the core of this belief is that inequality is intrinsically bad and even intolera‐ ble” and that government should do something about it. Their re‐ sponse is odd: “First, we note that jettisoning capitalism will not lead to greater equality.” But who is suggesting we jettison capitalism?

Still, they go on for several pages recounting, again, the ills of com‐ munism, and then move on to ask a string of rhetorical questions about how far liberals want us to go in addressing inequality:

What would proper redistribution of income look like? Should everyone have the same income, regardless of one’s occupation and station in life? … Should their income be set by the federal government? If not, should income equality be achieved by taxing at such a prohibitive rate that the gap between LeBron James and the hotdog vender is largely eliminated? And, if so, what would be the negative impact on the performance and output of people who now earn huge salaries? In short, what lengths are the new egalitarians willing to go in order to eliminate or reduce the gap? And at what cost?

They answer none of these questions, cite no egalitarian scholars who support such a worldview, and entertain no alternative concep‐ tions of social justice. Instead, they do their best to explain away many worries one might have about economic inequality and to ar‐ gue that government measures to fix them would be worse than the problem itself. They conclude: “Efforts to achieve level income have failed everywhere they have occurred because such efforts cut against the human grain. Yet even if it were achievable, we would still reject it on moral and philosophical grounds.” On their view, “forced egalitarianism is itself unjust.” They cite select Biblical verses and church teachers to conclude that redistribution of wealth, “if it is 76

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done at all, it is done voluntarily, as an act of charity, out of gratitude for what God has done, not as an action of the state, through coer‐ cion.”

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ealth and Justice highlights both the strengths and weak‐ nesses of the conservative case for democratic capitalism.

Yes, capitalism protects liberty and free enterprise, and it raises the standard of living as it creates and distributes wealth. But Wehner and Brooks say hardly a word about property duties or about what a just distribution of wealth on their view would look like (one fears that for them it is whatever the market produces). Al‐ so, in their rush to defend capitalism against critics, they fail to dis‐ cuss any of its downsides.

First, in the arena of capitalism and culture: Much of Wehner and Brooks’s defense of capitalism relies on the strength of the civic and social order. But while they want this sphere to influence the eco‐ nomic sphere, they have little to say about how the economic sphere also influences culture. For them, capitalism didn’t corrupt Madoff, Madoff corrupted capitalism. One need not be a Marxist, however, to note that our economic arrangements influence our culture and mor‐ als. Every notable political thinker has thought this; start the list with Plato and Aristotle. So saying that the answer is “better capitalists” doesn’t take seriously the effect that capitalism can have on charac‐ ter, especially given its reward structure. And while Wehner and Brooks mention the neoconservative Daniel Bell’s Cultural Contradic‐ tions of Capitalism (only to dismiss his worries), they have little to say about the consumerist and materialistic culture that capitalism can promote. Ditto on the debasement of popular culture with mass‐ produced, market‐driven “art.”

Second, social justice: Wehner and Brooks assert “that capitalism is best at doing what it is most often accused of doing worst: distrib‐ uting wealth to people at every social stratum rather than simply to elites. The evidence of history is clear on this point—the poor gain the most from capitalism.” Is this really true? It depends on how one reads the passage. Yes, considered historically, the poor gain the most from capitalism as compared to alternative economic regimes, especially where communism is presented as the only alternative regime. But do the poor benefit the most from capitalism, as com‐ pared to the rich? This is a concern that animates many, and not only 77

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those in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Wehner and Brooks are silent about it.

In fact, they make an unfortunate claim that “what fundamentally separates capitalists from those who want to redistribute income is a different concept of justice—‘distributive justice’ versus what has been called the ‘productive justice’ of capitalism.” So after claiming that the 1970s egalitarians broke with the tradition of philosophical thought, Wehner and Brooks reject a central theme in that tradition, first articulated by Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy: distribu‐ tive justice.

In its place, they believe in “productive justice,” the view that “economic growth will create opportunity and wealth for those in every social stratum—and, in the end, generate the best of all worlds: allowing people to succeed without penalizing excellence and achievement and providing opportunity for those at the bottom rungs of the ladder to move up.” But this ignores the issue: Are the gains of economic growth distributed justly? Noting that capitalism creates the highest Gross Domestic Product, and the fastest GDP growth, says nothing about how that wealth is distributed. Wehner and Brooks offer no standard, no principles of justice on how to think about this question. And the idea that we always will be able to grow ourselves out of economic problems is wishful thinking, as thinkers as diverse as the libertarian entrepreneur Peter Thiel and the eco‐ nomic scholar Tyler Cowen have argued.

Perhaps most disconcerting, however, is that Wehner and Brooks offer no principles of justice on how individuals should deploy their wealth, and in a book titled Wealth and Justice this is disappointing.

Supporting free markets and limited government doesn’t even begin to address the question of how citizens should behave in the market: Can a citizen be guilty of injustice in how he uses his wealth? Do citizens have duties—in justice—to distribute their wealth? Wehner and Brooks are silent.

In framing their argument as a defense of capitalism against the al‐ ternatives of life pre‐Industrial Revolution and life under com‐ munism, Wehner and Brooks have made their task too easy. The real question facing developed capitalist countries now is what type of capitalism to have, and what type of wealth distribution. Among the most thoughtful thinkers on these questions, few are strict egalitari‐ ans, and so even here Wehner and Brooks have engaged a strawman.

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One might think current disparities in wealth are unjust, not because material equality is the goal, but because human flourishing is, and too many people lack the requisite material goods for that flourish‐ ing. Income and wealth equality isn’t the concern, but having suffi‐ cient goods to meet one’s needs and fulfill one’s vocation is. Like‐ wise, one might worry about the disparate political power that comes with gross material inequalities. Wehner and Brooks say nothing about these concerns.

When the godfather of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote Two Cheers for Capitalism, he intentionally held back from giving it a re‐ sounding three cheers. He knew there were downsides to capitalism, and that conservatives had to be honest about these in order to ad‐ dress them adequately. But the conservative message about capital‐ ism today glosses over these facts, proposes no principles of justice, and fails to engage—let alone persuade—our fellow citizens who worry about our economic order. Conservatives writing in defense of democratic capitalism need to spend less energy fighting off com‐ munism, and more energy developing a conservative vision of social justice, painting a picture of what a better capitalism could look like.

If conservatives don’t, the only alternatives will come from the Left.

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or a glimpse of what such an alternative looks like, consider Martha Nussbaum’s Creating Capabilities: The Human Develop‐ ment Approach. Published by Harvard University Press but in‐ tended for the general reader (and she notes specifically undergrad‐ uate audiences), the book presents the results of her collaboration with Harvard economist Amartya Sen on their “capabilities ap‐ proach.”

Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chi‐ cago and, along with Sen, a Founding President of the Human De‐ velopment and Capability Association, the publisher of the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, which works closely with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). In other words, this is an important, indeed consequential, body of scholarly litera‐ ture, and it challenges many reigning scholarly orthodoxies about “development” in hopes of changing public policy. As Nussbaum notes, “We need a counter‐theory to challenge these entrenched but misguided theories, if we want to move policy choice in the right direction.”

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What are these entrenched but misguided theories? Nussbaum ex‐ plores three approaches to development: GDP approaches, utilitarian approaches, and resource‐based approaches. A GDP approach tries to measure development in terms of GDP per capita, the average amount of wealth in a nation. But Nussbaum faults this approach for failing to pay attention to each individual, especially those at the bot‐ tom, who might not enjoy any of the benefits of increased average GDP if the distribution of benefits lies solely among those at the top.

Furthermore, this approach treats incommensurable aspects of hu‐ man lives—“health, longevity, education, bodily security, political rights,” and more—as if they could be measured by a single number.

Utilitarian approaches, measuring average utility (understood as preference‐satisfaction), face similar challenges, for they too aggre‐ gate across lives and components of lives. But more troubling is the subjective nature of the measure, falling prey to the “social malleabil‐ ity of preferences and satisfactions.” After all, “when society has put some things out of reach for some people, they typically learn not to want those things.” Resource‐based approaches make the mistake of assuming that material goods and wealth are adequate “proxies for what people are actually able to do and to be.”

This concern for the opportunities actually available to people drives Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. As she states repeatedly, the key questions to ask are: “What are people actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities for activity and choice has society given them?” We can’t measure this, even approximately, by looking to GDP, self‐reported satisfaction, or physical resources. Instead, Nussbaum argues that there are multiple irreducible factors neces‐ sary for human development, and that each of these has to be meas‐ ured individually, not with an eye to aggregate or average scores, but by taking each individual as a locus of value. Her measure is not ma‐ terialistic: social and legal policies and conventions play an im‐ portant role in shaping what opportunities really exist. In other words, culture counts.

Nussbaum’s approach focuses on each person as an end, with the ability for choice and freedom among a multiplicity of values. The capabilities approach is “evaluative and ethical from the start,” ask‐ ing “which [capabilities] are the really valuable ones, which are the ones that a minimally just society will endeavor to nurture and sup‐ port?” But while her conception is moral, Nussbaum insists that it is 80

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not moralistic: Governments should support the development of ca‐ pabilities, but not influence their functioning, leaving individuals free to choose how to exercise their capabilities, for “capabilities have value in and of themselves, as spheres of freedom and choice. To promote capabilities is to promote areas of freedom, and this is not the same as making people function in a certain way.” So, she con‐ cludes, “there is a huge moral difference between a policy that pro‐ motes health and one that promotes health capabilities—the latter, not the former, honors the person’s lifestyle choice.”

What are the central capabilities? Nussbaum’s list includes ten broad areas:

1. “Life.”

2. “Bodily health” (“including reproductive health”) 3. “Bodily integrity” (including “opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction”) 4. “Senses, imagination, and thought” (“being able to use the senses, to imagine, to think, and to reason”) 5. “Emotions” (“being able to have attachments to things and people outside of ourselves”) 6. “Practical reason” (“being able to form a conception of the good”) 7. “Affiliation” (“being able to live with and toward others”) 8. “Other species” (“being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature”) 9. “Play” (“being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities”) 10. “Control over one’s environment” (“being able to participate effectively in political choices” and “being able to hold property and having property rights”)

Nussbaum doesn’t offer much in defense of this list. She subscribes to John Rawls’s theory of political liberalism, by which we must offer citizens “public reasons” free from any particular “comprehensive doctrine” of the good or the right in framing our public policies. Nor does she explain why states have a duty, in justice, to immanentize the eschaton: “The basic claim of my account of social justice is this: respect for human dignity requires citizens be placed above an ample (specified) threshold of capability, in all ten of those areas.” Sadly, she neither specifies these thresholds nor provides any argument for why this is a valid principle of justice. Even if it is (and I’m inclined 81

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to think something like it is), she owes her readers an argument. In‐ stead she makes ungrounded appeals to human dignity and equality, and then claims that these are entitlements that a state must provide: “All people have some core entitlements just by virtue of their hu‐ manity, and it is a basic duty of society to respect and support these entitlements.”

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erhaps that’s the proper place to start highlighting the severe defects in Nussbaum’s Creating Capabilities. First, she never defends her conception of justice against competing concep‐ tions. F. A. Hayek and Robert Nozick leveled serious criticisms against the concept of “social” justice and defended alternative clas‐ sical‐liberal (libertarian) conceptions. Whether or not one thinks they got it right, their arguments demand a response. Nussbaum shows no awareness that not everyone is a welfare‐state liberal.

Instead, she asserts that the American Founders, and the Declara‐ tion of Independence, support her view. Citing the Declaration, she writes that governments are founded “to secure these rights,” and then concludes that if government doesn’t “secure basic entitle‐ ments” (her ten capabilities), then it is unjust. She adds some rhetori‐ cal bluster: “The idea that the American Framers were libertarians, or fans of ‘negative liberty,’ is extremely misleading,” and continues: “The very idea of ‘negative liberty,’ often heard in this connection, is an incoherent idea: all liberties are positive, meaning liberties to do or to be something.” She concludes that her capabilities approach “is no recent invention,” but is “a deep part of mainstream liberal en‐ lightenment thought.” Of course the American Founders, along with Hobbes, Locke, and Kant, as well as Hayek and Nozick, would have disagreed.

Second, regardless of the political justice of her account, Nussbaum puts remarkable—and remarkably naïve—faith in governmental in‐ stitutions. One of her bald assertions is that “governments of richer nations ought to give a minimum of 2 percent of GDP to poorer na‐ tions.” She then shows deep hostility to free enterprise, civil society, voluntary associations, and private charity as proper remedies for poverty: “Suppose a nation attempted to solve its distributional problems through private philanthropy. It doesn’t work, and we know that.” Tell that to the students trapped in our inner‐city gov‐ 82

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ernment‐run schools who yearn to attend the Catholic school across the street.

She continues in this vein. “However fine the [charitable] organiza‐ tions are,” she notes, “they are not accountable to people in the way that a democratic nation is accountable.” Really? Is a public school— beholden to the teachers’ union and city hall—more accountable to the people than a charitable charter school? Here Nussbaum does attempt to offer a reason: “if [charitable organizations] listen to any‐ one when setting strategy, it is, most often, to their big donors.” Un‐ like politicians, of course. Are our foreign aid programs really more responsive to “the people” than an Evangelical micro‐finance chari‐ ty?

Third, Nussbaum thinks that “equal respect for persons” requires that we “avoid taking a stand” on the controversial metaphysical issues that divide citizens, and instead base “political principles on some definite values, such as impartiality and equal respect for hu‐ man dignity.” But as has been shown repeatedly, the Rawlsian search for “public reason” that is distinct from “reason” is a fool’s errand.

Every time one rules out certain reasons as “non‐public” but sum‐ marily includes one’s own as “public,” one necessarily appeals to a controversial standard, and merely asserts one’s preference for one’s own view (as is evident in Nussbaum’s list). More importantly, what we owe our fellow citizens as a matter of equal respect, when making law, is the truth: to give them good reasons, sound reasoning thought all the way through. Why should we artificially disqualify a class of true reasons from being the basis of political action? Nussbaum gives no reason.

Her Rawlsian predilections help explain why her theory of justice is weak: “I argue that the entire world is under a collective obligation to secure the capabilities to all world citizens.” But she doesn’t argue this; she just asserts it. From within her Rawlsian confines, she can’t offer any reason for this “collective obligation.” She must realize her weakness, for she admits that “my view does need to rely on altru‐ ism,” and by the book’s closing she is seeking to develop a “political psychology” to promote “emotions of compassion and solidarity.”

When you can’t provide reasons to care for others, the only things left to do are to psychologize and to manipulate the emotions. A bet‐ ter philosophical approach would be able to appeal to our rational faculties.

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Not only can’t Nussbaum explain why we have these duties in jus‐ tice (or why we should be just in the first place), her account is inher‐ ently statist because of its Rawlsian “political, not metaphysical” framework. Since her approach only allows for reasoning about po‐ litical institutions, once she identifies her central capabilities, “we cannot move directly to the assignment of duties to individuals: key duties must be assigned to institutions.” But this gets the entire story wrong. As thinkers as diverse as Aquinas, Locke, and Kant have ar‐ gued, individuals have moral duties to assist those in need, and while the state should promote the common good, the state’s role in directly providing assistance to the poor is a secondary function, one where the state ought to assist individuals and voluntary associations in meeting their tasks before usurping that role from them.

(One must also ask how Nussbaum’s argument in favor of animal rights and animal entitlements meets the demands of “public reason” by avoiding controversial metaphysical claims: “That animals can suffer not just pain but also injustice seems, however, secure.” After all, “animals pursue not simply the avoidance of pain but lives . . . of honor or dignity.” She takes this bizarre anthropomorphism so seri‐ ously that she writes: “One form of intervention into nature that seems crucial is animal contraception. This will mean, for animals, modifying the capability list where reproductive choice is con‐ cerned.” Animals, as a matter of justice, don’t deserve reproductive choice.)

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ourth, and perhaps most crucial, Nussbaum never gives an argument for why we should care about capabilities rather than the exercise of those capabilities toward fulfilling ends.

While she is willing to make morally controversial claims about which capabilities are central, she refuses to say how they should be exercised, claiming that this agnosticism respects freedom. But properly understood, we best respect freedom by promoting a broad range of worthy ends for which to act, while also insisting that cer‐ tain ends are unworthy of choice precisely because they degrade those people who choose them.

Nussbaum’s failure to explain how capabilities should be exercised brings out a central problem in her talk of “human dignity.” Repeat‐ edly, she claims that all nations contain “struggles for lives worthy of human dignity.” That phrase occurs again and again: “some living 84

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conditions deliver to people a life that is worthy of the human digni‐ ty that they possess, and others do not.” Disregard the infelicitous usage of “lives worthy of dignity”—all lives are worthy of dignity.

What she ignores is that “some living conditions” aren’t the only qualifiers for human dignity—so are human choices. Some exercises of human capabilities, some choices, are in line with human dignity, and some are not. If we are to measure human development and think about its justice, we must think about how capacities are exer‐ cised.

In another effort to avoid talking about how capabilities are to be exercised, she declares that Aristotle “did not instruct politicians to make everyone perform desirable activities. Instead, they were to aim at producing capabilities or opportunities.” But Aristotle thought that the entire point of politics was promoting the good life—not promoting morally ambiguous capabilities, but directing them to their appropriate ends.

Nussbaum uncritically helps herself to an Aristotelian understand‐ ing of government—without arguing for it— and then distorts it to rush to her own conclusion: “Given a widely shared understanding of the task of government (namely, that government has the job of making people able to pursue a dignified and minimally flourishing life), it follows that a decent political order must secure to all citizens at least a threshold level of these ten central capacities.” Among her fellow liberals, this is not a “widely held” view of government. Nev‐ ertheless, she needs to explain why concern for a dignified and flour‐ ishing life should translate into a threshold of capacities without con‐ cern for their exercise. She’s wrong to think that we should promote “health capabilities” rather than health. Health is the human good, and we can promote it in a way that respects human freedom.

If you put it all together, Nussbaum’s theory demands that a state coercively tax its citizens (ignoring negative‐liberty claims to private property rights) to create a government‐run program (disregarding subsidiarity) that will ensure that “opportunities for sexual satisfac‐ tion and for choice in matters of reproduction” are provided (regard‐ less of how those capabilities are exercised). In fact, she writes that “thinking about sexual orientation through the lens of the whole list of capabilities” makes us see that laws refusing to treat same‐sex rela‐ tions as if they were marriages are “unfair,” just like “antimiscegena‐ tion laws,” “conferring a message of stigma and inferiority.” But if 85

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we really want to measure human development, we should ask how our sexual capabilities can be exercised in accord with human digni‐ ty, in a truly ennobling way, and we should seek to promote a cul‐ ture (including a legal culture) that respects and promotes that ideal.

A sound theory of social justice would have to explore the constit‐ uent aspects of human flourishing—not just capabilities, but their truly perfective ends. It would have to investigate the moral norms that govern conduct with respect to these ends, particularly property rights and duties. Finally, it would have to ask what role the state plays in helping to secure human well‐being. In all these areas, Nussbaum’s Creating Capabilities falls short.

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o our detriment, most public policy discussions and national debates about political economy become shouting matches between two extremes. At the same time, we tend to conflate the policy issues facing our nation as if they were one and the same.

But consider the range of America’s political‐economic challenges: How to balance our budget; how to reform the major entitlements of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; how to get the economy growing again; how to increase employment; how to increase social mobility; how to help the poor.

Though related, these issues are profitably examined one at a time.

Poverty, for example, is undoubtedly linked to our debates about government regulation, taxes, and budgets. It is certainly tied to our debates about income inequality, social mobility, and unemploy‐ ment. But poverty in America is not primarily about any of these issues. And political commentators of all stripes perform a major disservice when they mesh them together.

Thankfully, Lawrence Mead knows this, and has been instructing all who will listen on issues of poverty and policy for the past thirty years. A professor of politics and public policy at NYU, Mead was the intellectual driving force behind the welfare reform act of 1996.

His latest work, From Prophecy to Charity: How to Help the Poor, is a concise statement of a lifetime of scholarship. It is a wonderful book that covers the causes of poverty, how we measure it, who the poor are, how government has tried to help, where it’s gone wrong and where it’s succeeded, and how competing ideologies have hindered or helped real policy reform. Though the book is short, it contains a wealth of information and wisdom.

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The critical questions for Mead are these: What do the poor really need? How can we effectively meet that need? Money comes second to what Mead argues the poor truly deserve: a lifestyle transfor‐ mation. “Progress against poverty,” he insists, “requires programs with the capacity to redirect lives, not just transfer resources.” In reaching that goal, he adds, “recent conservative policies are more effective than what came before, and it would be a mistake to aban‐ don them.”

Mead self‐consciously argues against those who “have contended that the poor are entitled to aid regardless of lifestyle or, alternative‐ ly, that they should get nothing at all from government.” He appeals instead to Biblical wisdom, where our duties to the poor are based “not on abstractions such as rights, freedom, or equality but on re‐ storing community.” The key, then, is to promote “right relation‐ ships”—with spouses, children, employers, and the broader commu‐ nity. To do this, Mead thinks, we need to understand better the causes of poverty.

While government measurements of poverty focus on economic factors, Mead stresses that behavioral dimensions play a larger causal role. Poverty would be simple to fix if it were just about economic need: then we would only have to give more money. But the long‐ term poor today are unlike the working poor of yesteryear. In an affluent society like ours, Mead argues, “poverty is not usually forced on people for very long by conditions.” Rather, “most have become poor, at least in part, due to not working, having children outside marriage, abusing drugs, or breaking the law.” Simply dol‐ ing out more money does not counter these underlying causes of poverty, which call for behavior changes that encourage law‐abiding, productive lives.

The World Bank classifies moderate poverty as living on less than $2 a day. By that standard, the U.S. has virtually no poverty. In the 1960s, our government’s official measure was set at three times the cost of a minimal food budget, which, adjusted for inflation, came to $17,285 in 2009 for a family of three (consisting of one parent and two children). Given this standard, the official poverty rate was 13.2 per‐ cent in 2008 and 14.3 percent in 2009. While these figures note any‐ one who fell beneath the poverty line in a given year, Mead asks us to focus on those who remain poor for multiple years, not those who hit a temporary rough patch. This long‐term group includes 6 to 7 87

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percent of the American population. And while the young, disabled, and elderly used to make up their majority, Mead notes that now they are outnumbered by healthy working‐aged people.

Why are people in the prime of their lives poor? Mead argues that “poor families typically arise when parents have children without marrying and then do not work regularly to support them.” This pattern provokes a vicious cycle: children reared in these circum‐ stances grow up to be poor themselves because they are more likely to drop out of school, get involved in crime and drugs, become sex‐ ually active at a young age, and never learn the value of an honest day’s work. “By these routes,” he says, “women end up early as sin‐ gle mothers on welfare while men go to prison. … Despite having children, neither men nor women usually attempt to marry or work regularly. That is the immediate reason they usually become poor.” If one graduates from high school, gets a job, marries, and then has kids—in that order—there is very little chance of falling into poverty.

Mead responds to a host of competing arguments about poverty, noting that “poverty is caused mostly by low working hours, not low wages.” Good middle‐class jobs may be hard to find right now, but there are ample low‐skilled jobs available: “In 2009, only 12 percent of poor adults who did not work blamed this on their inability to find work. In 2007, before the recession, the figure was only 5 percent.”

These jobs, Mead insists, “are still sufficient to avoid poverty and welfare for most families.” Our recent economic downturn isn’t to blame, for “in good times and bad, most poor adults are not even in the labor force, so the recession little affects them.” (In fact, the reces‐ sion has mainly hit the middle class, and, Mead helpfully reminds us, “inequality and poverty are largely separate problems.”) While he has a lot to say about employment, Mead has less to say about causes of and responses to the erosion of marriage, where 40 percent of all Americans are born out of wedlock, including 71 percent of blacks.

The welfare reforms of the 1990s worked precisely because they addressed both material and behavioral causes of poverty. While critics argue that welfare reform consisted of budget cuts, Mead notes that after the reform more money was spent helping the poor, not less. But the money came with strings attached—recipients had to work. According to Mead, “Most experts opposed reform, believ‐ ing that few poor could work, given the barriers they faced. But most welfare mothers successfully left the rolls for jobs, with most of the 88

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leavers emerging better off.” This confirmed Mead’s central insight that cultural (and political) expectations, not economic barriers, pre‐ vented employment. Mead admits that low‐skilled workers do not have an easy life, but he insists that working makes for a better life than not. And how to get people working is a separate question from how to get them moving up once in the job force.

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ead’s arguments partly counter some of those made by Charles Murray. While Murray’s work has focused on the rewards (and hence incentives) for bad behavior that wel‐ fare provisions provide, Mead argues that “the seriously poor are less calculating than economists suppose. If they were economically rational, they would never have engaged in the patterns that made most of them poor.” And yet, the way in which welfare was provid‐ ed did keep people from working. So, while research has “not shown that social problems like nonemployment or unwed pregnancy result chiefly from the economic incentives set up by welfare,” he writes, “It is indeed true that liberal social programs have been counterpro‐ ductive, but that is chiefly because they are permissive, giving no clear guidance about how recipients ought to behave.”

While the first wave of welfare reform largely affected poor wom‐ en—mothers with children receiving aid—a second round of welfare reform, Mead argues, should find effective programs that put non‐ working men into the workforce, and establish better academic and moral standards in schools. Mead unabashedly says that education and welfare need more paternalism. This paternalism is bemoaned by many for being judgmental (not being “value‐free”), but this is precisely what Mead thinks the poor need. And what we owe them.

Mead argues that the most effective welfare programs administered by the states “all set clearer rules for client behavior and back them up with oversight. Evaluations confirm that paternalistic programs generally perform better than nondirective ones.” Religious and oth‐ er non‐governmental partnerships can play an important role in this, Mead suggests.

While From Prophecy to Charity has certain limitations, it should be read by anyone who cares about government policy that helps the poor. I would like to have seen more discussion about prudential concerns: how to counter government‐provided welfare’s crowding out effect on private charity, how to best structure government part‐ 89

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nerships, and what is entailed by a precedent of attaching moral strings to welfare when government is run by the morally corrupt.

Mead’s discussion of competing perspectives on welfare also leaves much to be desired, as it consists largely of his own idiosyncratic interpretation of a handful of Biblical passages, and, in justified frus‐ tration with religious voices who have opposed welfare reform, he overstates his case against them and too quickly dismisses important voices. He is correct to say that a major problem with the prophetic tradition is its scarcity of guidance for what the rich can effectively do to help the poor, and of requirements for the poor themselves.

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s I see it, the two dominant political philosophies of our day are forms of liberalism, but neither deserves the title nor lives up to the merit of classical liberalism. Neither the Right’s form of libertarian liberalism nor the Left’s form of social welfare liberalism (both of which show strong streaks of lifestyle liberalism) can adequately form the basis of a governing philosophy, especially when it comes to the plight of the poor.

The libertarian argues that the sole purpose of government is the protection of rights, and that the only real rights are negative rights— freedom from force, fraud, and harm, whether perpetrated by other individuals or by governments. Taxing the non‐poor in order to as‐ sist the poor is robbery, a violation of property rights, and itself a form of injustice. Provided they do no harm to others, individuals should be free to live life as they please, the libertarian argues, even if this means ignoring the plight of the poor. Market forces and private charities, if left free from state interference, will sufficiently succor the needy.

The welfare state liberal champions a conception of government where every citizen solely in virtue of his humanity has rights to ad‐ equate material resources necessary for a dignified life. Whether it be John Rawls’s “primary goods” or Martha Nussbaum’s “central ca‐ pacities,” the state is supposed to equip people with a fair share of what they need in life—but it isn’t to influence how they use that share, nor to place moral conditions on how they receive it. At the heart is a positive right to materials coupled with a negative right from influence.

A sound political philosophy would hold that the state should be concerned about the welfare of all people. This means that our obli‐ 90

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gation to the poor has to be tied to their well‐being, and thus neces‐ sarily connected to influencing their behavior. This is best under‐ stood not in terms of rights—whether positive ones to welfare or negative ones of noninterference—but in terms of promoting their good, with its material and moral components. In essence, any legit‐ imate care for the poor has to be paternalistic. It has to teach true moral values: that one needs to be educated, that one needs to work, that one needs to marry before having children, that one needs to respect the law.

Classical liberal political philosophers understood this, because they knew that protecting natural rights also entailed promoting what Michael Zuckert has called a “natural rights infrastructure.”

This can’t simply be a physical infrastructure of highways and court‐ houses, but a moral and behavioral infrastructure as well. An earlier political philosophy simply termed this infrastructure the common good. Promoting this necessarily forces us into discussions about human well‐being and the moral norms that should govern our be‐ havior. Sound guidance on this is what we owe everyone, poor and rich alike.

Ryan T. Anderson is the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society at the Heritage Foundation and the Editor of Public Discourse: Ethics, Law, and the Common Good, found at thepublicdiscourse.com, from which this piece is adapted.

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RECLAIMING WENDELL BERRY ]agrarian0conservatism} Aaron Belz The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, edited by Mark T. Mitchell and Natahn Schlueter. ISI, 2011.

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his collection of essays is on a mission. That mission is to reclaim Wendell Berry, who is a Christian, as a member of the conservative right. Its editorial thesis is made ex‐ plicit in the introduction: “Although Berry is often asso‐ ciated with the political Left, it is our conviction that his work is profoundly conservative and that, as a consequence, con‐ servatives should attend carefully to what he writes.”

Why is such a corrective necessary or even desirable? Ostensibly it is because Berry has something new to offer American Conservatism that too often defines itself narrowly in terms of a blue‐blooded na‐ tionalism. Though Berry’s commitment to pacifism and environmen‐ talism, and his much‐discussed tendency to oppose big business and technology, represent values that “make many American conserva‐ tives uncomfortable,” this book argues that those values are integral to Berry’s holistic, essentially agrarian worldview that at its root is both conservative and Christian. These views complement and over‐ lap his more obviously conservative values—his zeal for monoga‐ mous marriage, intact families, and thriving neighborhoods, and his recognition of the importance of healthy entrepreneurship to society.

The essays themselves are topical, ranging from marriage to eco‐ nomics to art. Although it is tempting to dive right into them, many of which are rich with insight into Wendell Berry’s work, the opening salvoes warrant closer examination. The most striking aspect of the introduction and the first essay—which is not really an essay at all, but Wallace Stenger’s “open letter” to Berry, written in 1990 and re‐ 92

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published here—is their resistance toward categorizing Berry as a Jeffersonian, Romantic, or Thoreauvian. He is not, these Berry advo‐ cates argue, returning to a 19th‐century value set. “It is one of Berry’s signature achievements, then,” write the editors, “to reveal with sin‐ gular eloquence the implicit utopianism that often lurks at the very heart of liberal society, a utopianism all the more dangerous because it is hidden from our view.” As Stenger writes:

Some people have compared you with Thoreau, probably because you use your own head to think with and because you have a reverence for the natural earth. [...] Thoreau seems a far colder article than you have ever been or could ever be. He was a triumphant and somewhat chilly consummation of New England intellectualism and Emersonian self-reliance. [...]

You are something else. The nature you love is not wild but humanized, disciplined to the support of human families but not overused, not exploited. Your province is not the wilderness, where the individual makes contact with the universe, but the farm, the neighborhood, the community, the town, the memory of the past, and the hope of the future.

Stenger’s six‐page assessment seems not only accurate but im‐ portant in any ongoing discussion of Berry. In fact, it might be the finest piece of writing included in this collection.

If so, Anne Husted Burleigh’s “Marriage in the Membership” runs a close second. Berry’s view of marriage, explored through the people of his fictional town of Port William, his poems and other writings, is “a connection between two people that is not private.” As such, it is both supported by and supportive of the community in which it ex‐ ists—it is integral to the community’s survival. So, when marriage declines, the community deteriorates. Faithful marriage is also key to the survival of the meaningful language; it is a living witness to its participants’ ability to “stand by [their] words, doing what [they] say [they] will.” In that sense, it is incarnational. Burleigh, who lives next door to Berry in Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, has an added advantage of being able to support her essay with evidence from her personal in‐ teractions with him. “It’s a terrible thing to say those vows,” he told her as they sat around his kitchen table. “Something like that ought to be witnessed by people who will acknowledge that it happened and that these awe‐full things were said. And in my own experience the sense of having loved ones’ expectations directed toward me has been very influential, and it still is.” Finally, fidelity in marriage is the 93

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source of human memory. We gain a sense of our own pasts as time goes by. Such realities, concludes Burleigh, are tangible reflections of God’s love toward us and therefore of utmost importance.

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nother fine essay appears fourth in the collection, Richard Gamble’s “Education for Membership: Wendell Berry on Schools and Communities.” Using as his focus text Berry’s short novel Remembering (1988) and excerpts from Life is a Miracle (2000), Gamble positions the notion of “homecoming” at the center of Berry’s beliefs about education, which tends to lead away from home, interrupting the “pattern of succession” necessary to the sustenance of community life. Universities, which create “worlds unto them‐ selves,” tempt people away from their own real communities and, ultimately, away from reality itself. Good education, by contrast, cen‐ ters a person and is the “task of the whole community,” by which he means the whole family and their physical neighbors. Education’s value lies not in increasing an individual’s knowledge but in familiar‐ izing him with the “right stories”—the truth—about his own life and the lives of others within his local community. This, which Gamble refers to as “the old norm,” vitiates against “scientific materialism” and corrects its disorienting outcomes. Berry’s value here is essential‐ ly naturalistic—if not Thoreauvian, perhaps a variety of theistic natu‐ ralism, though that is an observation Gamble fails to make.

Matt Bonzo’s “And for This Food, We Give Thanks” explains Ber‐ ry’s objection to Americans “thinking of our food as having its origin in the aisle of a grocery store” when, in fact, we ought to be more connected to food’s origin in the land upon which we “trod.” We must avoid a “reductionist” attitude toward food as well as “cycling between high‐calorie, high‐sugar, high‐fat food and dieting.” Bonzo locates these principles primarily in Berry’s essay “The Gift of the Good Land” and then looks to The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays for larger context, ending his discussion with a couple of small ex‐ amples from Berry’s fiction. This seems to be an important oppor‐ tunity for insight into Berry’s thinking, but Bonzo provides a weaker incorporation of Berry’s literature, so it seems less helpful. The sev‐ enth essay in the collection, Patrick Deneen’s “Wendell Berry and Democratic Self‐Governance,” is more deeply flawed, as it begins with eight full pages of political theory, from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Locke and beyond, without a mention of Wendell Berry.

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Such a primer would be relevant if it presented a view uniquely Deneen’s own, but it bears too much in common with a day one Polit‐ ical Science lecture.

But this collection’s unevenness is, thankfully, not its defining fea‐ ture. Other fine entries, such as Jason Peters’ “The Third Landscape,” which convincingly argues that Wendell Berry is both a social con‐ servative and an environmentalist more authentic and thoughtful than his secular peers, and Caleb Stegall’s “First They Came for the Horses,” which scours Berry’s fiction and nonfiction for his views on technological advancement, make this anthology a necessary acquisi‐ tion for any library, public or private. Mark Mitchell’s 22‐page essay, “Wendell Berry’s Defense of a Truly Free Market,” reveals just how profoundly Berry has considered economic issues and does an excel‐ lent job of examining his “Great Economy” notion as well as his posi‐ tion on private property. Berry is no communist; he is a moral, agrar‐ ian capitalist.

The final four essays are less topical and more transcendent in their discussion of Berry as an author and a literary figure, highlighting many of the distinctive traits of his imagination and work. Reading them it is easy to conclude that Berry is indeed a sui generis and one worthy of continuing discussion among all Americans, be they con‐ servative or liberal, Christian or not. Yet these final four essays also call to mind a concern regarding The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry as a whole, and that is that this collection, for all its lucid exposition, might verge on festschrift. There is nary a negative word, none of the riptide of second guessing vital to critical writing. On what grounds might Berry’s way of thinking be questioned? If the reader’s answer after reading this book is “none, of course,” then that points to a larg‐ er problem. We fail to consider, for example, Berry’s possible debt to 19th‐century naturalism. But even the prospect of this larger problem does not ruin the book, for what it is: a chorus of voices explicating Wendell Berry’s writing to show how a conservative Christian can— and perhaps ought to—embrace many political and social values typically regarded as “liberal.”

Aaron Belz holds a Ph.D. in English from Saint Louis University and is the author of two books of poetry. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

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T HE WAR ON F OOTBALL [teddy0and0the0game{ Burwell Stark The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football, by John J. Miller, HarperCollins, 2011.

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n 1953, the then little known humorist Andy Griffith recorded a comedy routine in Raleigh. Delivered as a first‐person mono‐ logue, it was of a backwoods preacher who arrives in a college town to lead a tent revival. Prior to the revival, the preacher decides he wants something to eat. After finding food, he gets caught up in a crowd and follows them to a “cow pasture” with “white lines all over it.” The preacher witnesses a sporting contest involving two teams and a “funny looking little punkin” but, since he doesn’t have a ticket, he is asked to leave before he can figure out what is being played.

Griffith concludes the routine in character: “I don’t know, friends, to this day what it was that they was a‐doing down there, but I have studied about it. And I think that it’s some kindly of a contest where they see which bunchfull of them men can take that punkin and run from one end of that cow pasture to the other ‘un without either get‐ ting knocked down or stepping in something.”

That comedy routine was titled “What it Was, Was Football,” and it sold over 800,000 copies, launching Griffith’s television, film and stage career. To this day it remains one of the biggest selling comedy recordings of all time.

What football was, and how it became what it is, is the subject of John J. Miller’s The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football.

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Miller is the national political reporter for the National Review and occasional contributor to the Wall Street Journal. Immersed in the world of politics and political maneuvering and a long‐time football fan and graduate of the University of Michigan, Miller is well‐suited to write a book that combines these two subjects.

According to Miller, football has become a part of our national identity, so much so that if “we didn’t have football, a lot of us wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.” Yet there was a time when “football was almost taken away from us – a time when its very existence was in mortal peril as a collection of Progressive Era prohibitionists tried to ban the sport.”

Why? In its beginning, football was extremely violent, and many progressive leaders thought it was too violent for people to be al‐ lowed to play.

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merican football has its roots in rugby football and associa‐ tion football, which is known on this side of the Atlantic as soccer. For centuries there have been games that involve kicking a ball, but the modern versions of rugby and soccer devel‐ oped in England in the mid‐19th century; American football began to take shape soon afterwards in the post‐Civil War era.

Most present‐day Americans, like the preacher in Griffith’s routine, would not recognize the sport in its infancy. Miller states that during the early years, the teams would meet on game day to establish the rules of the game. “There was no common agreement about many of its most basic elements. What number of men would participate?

What would count for a score? How long would the game last?”

Since there were no standard rules, many games became a massive scrum, often resulting in blood loss, broken limbs, and occasionally death. However, in spite of the violence, or perhaps because of it, football gained in popularity year after year.

Miller centers the story of football on three central characters: The‐ odore Roosevelt, Walter Camp and Charles W. Eliot.

The late 1800s and early 1900s were, in many ways, America’s se‐ cond birth with the Civil War serving as a surrogate revolution. The nation accelerated its shift from an agricultural based economy to an industrial based economy. Urban centers such as New York, Chicago and St. Louis experienced explosive growth, and immigration began to skyrocket as people flocked to America to better their lives.

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Education, too, was undergoing a metamorphosis in both theory and practice. John Dewey began to teach that schools were the best avenue for social reform, and universities, due in large part to the efforts of the aforementioned Charles Eliot, abandoned classical cur‐ ricula and adopted European style research methods.

Politics were not immune from the changing post‐Enlightenment zeitgeist, either. Progressive reform, largely birthed in response to the darker side of un‐checked industrialization, began to take hold and led to the development and spread of progressivism; as a result, poli‐ ticians and educators began to eschew practices or pastimes they considered un‐enlightened and beneath the dignity of modern man.

That is, pastimes such as football.

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ootball, with its emphasis on combat and physical ability, quickly found itself in the crosshairs of the progressive move‐ ment. Or, more appropriately, it found itself on the bascule under the progressives’ guillotine. In Eliot’s words, the “mental quali‐ ties of the big, brawny athlete are almost certain to be inferior to those of slighter, quicker‐witted men whose moral ideals are at least as high as his.”

Due to Eliot’s efforts, the progressives were almost victorious in eliminating football from America, especially during its darkest hours of the 1905‐1906 season; the violence of the sport was its own worst enemy. Truly, in order for football to be saved, it would take someone with the credibility to bridge the gap between the progres‐ sives and the athletes. Someone who would later found the Progres‐ sive Party and describe himself “as fit as a bull moose.” Someone like Theodore Roosevelt.

Growing up, Roosevelt suffered from many debilitating health im‐ pairments. As a result, he never played football, but he valued physi‐ cal fitness more so than any of his presidential predecessors. As pres‐ ident, he did not have the authority to protect football or to force it to change. However, he was the man who coined the term “bully pul‐ pit” as it applies to the presidency, and he used that pulpit to save football. Such was his influence that Bill Reid, Harvard coach and Roosevelt ally, would later say: “You asked me if President Theodore Roosevelt helped save the game. I can tell you that he did.”

Truly, during football’s infancy, the nation was locked in a big scrum between progressives and non‐progressives politically, educa‐ 98

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tionally, and socially. In many ways, that scrum still continues to this day. Fortunately, however, for those of us who love the game, football is no longer in danger of being sidelined permanently.

The Big Scrum is not only a book about the development of football; it is also about the development of the progressive movement. Miller combines his ability to analyze politics with his love for American football and delivers a story that simultaneously recounts the near death experience of the sport, all the while illustrating the dangers of unchecked progressivism. Dare I say that Miller is using football as a metaphor for American political history? Yes, and I am glad he did.

However, readers don’t have to be interested in political science to enjoy the book. I found Miller’s account of the sport’s beginning, the personalities that shaped it, and the way the game has changed to be fascinating and well researched. As a fan, I am glad to know that whether there are 30 men on the field for each team or only 11, whether touchdowns count as a score or only the PAT, or whether forward passes are allowed or not, the spirit of the game is still the same. At its heart, the sport still is what it was; and what it was, was football.

Burwell Stark is a columnist for The Wake Weekly and a former policy analyst. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Daily Caller, The Biblical Recorder and The American Thinker.

Read more of his work at burwellstark.com.

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T HE B IG E ASY ’ S U NFORTUNATE S ON ,toole0and0the0dunces< Micah Mattix Rev. of Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Short, Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces, by Cory MacLauchlin, Da Capo Press, 2012.

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ext to J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, John Ken‐ nedy Toole is surely one of the most enigmatic fig‐ ures of twentieth‐century American literature. Born in New Orleans in late 1937 to the Creole Ducoings and the Irish Tooles, John Kennedy would write what is still the best work set in New Orleans, The Confederacy of Dunces. Toole wrote the work while on active duty in Puerto Rico in 1963 and submitted it to Robert Gottlieb at Simon and Schuster in 1964. Gottlieb expressed interest in the novel but requested revisions.

Toole tried once to revise the work but was unable to do so satisfacto‐ rily. He put the manuscript in a box and killed himself next to a field outside Biloxi in the spring of 1969. He was 31.

Drawing on new interviews with friends and acquaintances, as well as the archival materials in the John Kennedy Toole Papers at Tulane, Cory MacLauchlin’s Butterfly in the Typewriter provides a wonderfully balanced life of John Kennedy Toole. Precocious and witty with a real talent for impersonations, Toole entertained others his whole life. His mother, Thelma, who taught piano, elocution and drama, raised Toole to be “important.” He was, it seemed to her, des‐ tined for fame. When the Travelling Theatre Troupers, for example, 100

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did not cast her son in the starring role for a play, she started her own theatre troupe. Toole entered Tulane at 16 and was known among classmates and friends for his intelligence, humor, good manners and sharp dress. While he originally majored in Engineering, Toole loved English and would change majors after his first semester. Early on he had the sense that his path to fame was either that of scholarly or literary greatness.

et those plans did not pan out. He was accepted into Colum‐ bia and completed an M.A. but struggled to write his doctoral dissertation. New York was both a source of great wonder‐ ment to him and, during the winter months, deep depression. Toole was a far cry from a Beatnik—he was gentlemanly Southerner with a quick wit who loved good conversations, dancing, and Marilyn Mon‐ roe, and who often poked fun at the sometimes childish egotism of the 1960s protest movements. (He once wrote to a friend that he found “the aggressive, pseudo‐intellectual ‘liberal’ girl students [at Hunter] continuously amusing.”) Yet, he also bristled (like the Beats) at what he thought to be the lifeless and seemingly arbitrary musings of the established critics of the day. After twice attempting to finish the Ph.D., Toole dropped out of Columbia for good, turning as chance would have it to fiction, which, unfortunately for us ended in tragedy.

Thankfully, the novel was taken up by his mother following his death. While Toole only sent the manuscript to one press, Thelma, it seems, sent it to every publishing house in New York, but without success. Desperate to get the novel published, she read that Walker Percy was teaching a course at Loyola. She cornered him one evening as he was leaving for his home in Covington, told him the story of her son and placed the unpublished manuscript in his hands. Percy, ever the gentleman, took the manuscript, but knowing how rare good writing was, expected the worst. He asked his wife, Bunt, to read it and tell him “what to do with it.” She did, and when she had finished, she told him, “It’s ready for you.” Percy read it with increas‐ ing amazement and pleasure. He determined it had to be published and worked hard to help Thelma find a home for the novel. With Percy’s help, Confederacy of Dunces was published in 1980 by the new‐ ly founded Louisiana State University Press and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the next year.

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The perennial question for many Confederacy aficionados is why Toole would kill himself following what would be for most aspiring writers a minor setback in the effort to land a book contract. As MacLauchlin shows, Gottlieb expressed great interest in the book from the outset and was careful to express what he felt was wrong with the book. In an early letter to Toole (the two would correspond over two years on the manuscript), Gottlieb lauds Toole’s humor—he is “wildly funny, funnier than anyone around, and our kind of fun‐ ny”—and praises almost every character in the book. However, he states directly, as was his wont, “With all its wonderfulness… the book does not have a reason… it is a wonderful exercise in invention, but… it isn’t really about anything.”

No doubt, this criticism would be difficult to take for any writer.

Toole, however, took it particularly hard. Toole’s mother blamed Gottlieb for her son’s suicide, sometimes slipping into an anti‐Semitic rant. In an interview for Horizon Magazine, for example, she said of Gottlieb: “He’s a creature…a Jewish creature…Not a man…Not a human being.” But, as MacLauchlin demonstrates, Gottlieb was mostly encouraging to Toole, and showed great patience with some of Toole’s eccentricities.

he other commonly proposed explanation of Toole’s suicide is that it was the result of repressed homosexual feelings. René Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy first suggested that Toole may have been a homosexual in the first biography of Toole, Ignatius Rising, and this suggestion has been entertained and ex‐ plored by a number of critics since the 2001 work. In 2004 Raymond‐ Jean Frontain states unequivocally that Toole was a homosexual in an encyclopedia entry for a gay and lesbian publication, and in a 2007 article for the Southern Literary Journal, Michael Hardin finds homoe‐ rotic symbols everywhere in Confederacy.

MacLauchlin puts paid to these unfounded suggestions. Toole’s closest friends—some of them homosexuals—have always rejected that he had homosexual tendencies, and there is little in Toole’s life to suggest that he was a homosexual. He often flirted with the wives at faculty gatherings at Lafayette, and seemed to have a deep attraction and affection for Patricia Rickels in particular. He was involved with a number of women over the years, though not seriously, it seems, because of his single‐minded pursuit of fame. “Without his own ad‐

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mission or substantial evidence to support the point,” MacLauchlin writes, “such suggestions remain conjecture.”

Toole’s death, like his life, cannot be pinned down to one cause. Ra‐ ther, it was the result of a number of factors, including, in Toole’s case, a family history of mental illness. Once Toole stopped working on the novel, he became more insular, erratic and fearful of the world around him. “Despite our best efforts to understand the ghastly hu‐ man potential for self‐destruction,” MacLauchlin writes, “it cannot be explained by a series of events like some kind of formula.”

While MacLauchlin’s enthusiasm for Toole in Butterfly in the Type‐ writer can make him sound overly enamored with his subject at times, the work is, in fact, a solid, wonderfully evenhanded assess‐ ment of Toole’s life and work. With few formulas and no clear ideo‐ logical ax to grind, MachLauchlin offers us a faithful portrait of a tragic figure. If you want to know more about John Kennedy Toole, this is your book.

Micah Mattix is Assistant Professor of Literature at Houston Baptist University and Books Editor for The City.

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Mine John Poch Hungry, you call me by your name. Under barbed wire and up arroyos I come crawling, crowbarring old boards from your mouth and wonder.

I have the ancient map, a torch, a calling

to disinter a treasure. At the surface, before I take my last white breath, I call in like a bat relinquishing its purchase.

I follow hunger’s swallow, my fortunate fall

through black to gold, my narrow way through myriad prospects of living in the world, when (save for one ascended) even the buried and resurrected man must die again.

From darkness, you call me yours, for words, worth earth.

You call me in: Lazarus come forth.

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A R EPUBLIC OF L ET TERS ]thoughts0on0the0age} Hunter Baker

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s a college professor, I find myself frequently thinking about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Though the absolute numbers of participants are not large, it is clear that the general sentiment of disillusionment and anger has tendrils which spread into the general population of young people. I would like to explore the question of whether they have a point and how we should think about it.

There are many good reasons for the young to be frustrated. First, they are coming to adulthood at a time when older generations have taken a course of action that damaged their own prospects. Large corporations have been severely hindered by old agreements to pro‐ vide for workers after retirement. The CEO of General Motors, prior to his dismissal, complained that he felt he was running a health in‐ surance company rather than a car company. Many of the great old corporations have struggled against massive legacy costs of this type.

Who gained? The old management gained because they were able to reduce wages in exchange for costs they could put off well into the future. The old workers gained because they have secured a right to benefits which run for decades beyond their last day of labor. Old labor gained. Old management gained. Who is left with the check?

Later generations must pay the bill in terms of reduced competitive capability for the enterprises and less money to invest on growth.

Resources which flow to those who ran things decades ago are un‐ available to the rising cohort. The more pensions, the more health insurance legacies, the less which can be used for building strong companies today. Labor and management conspired to make the fu‐ ture pay.

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Our elected officials have done the same thing, ultimately. We have financed government at a level beyond our willingness to pay for it and thus have racked up debt which grows prodigiously. The young realize that while entitlement after entitlement accrued to their el‐ ders, they will be expected to pay for those programs while suffering great pessimism over whether they will ever enjoy the fruits of them.

Just as with corporations, the government officials and their constitu‐ ents (the management and labor, so to speak) have conspired to postpone costs into the future. The young are supposed to look hope‐ fully into the future. But how can they do so when it has been loaded with debt like some ill‐fated corporate spin‐off?

One of the great difficulties of being a young person just out of col‐ lege like many of the Occupy protesters is that one’s personal future is very much in doubt. Right up until the end of college, the young person has been on an escalator that is going somewhere. Preschool to kindergarten to elementary school to middle school to high school and then to college. It is all easy to understand and the next steps are clear. But what to do at the end of the escalator? There are some pro‐ grams which seem to feed people right along into another series of escalators, such as teaching, nursing, medical school, maybe account‐ ing, but many others lead to a more open future with widely variable outcomes. What of the English major or the student of history who does not go into graduate study? What does an art major do? How about the dramatic pupil, the communication arts scholar? For these students, there is no continuing escalator.

When I got out of college in 1992, I could not simply enter an acad‐ emy of government service and get an assignment. Interestingly, I tried to do something like that. I obtained a master’s degree in public administration with the sole goal of getting into the Presidential Management Internship which would feed me right into a govern‐ ment agency. Despite being at the top of my class, I did not get the appointment. The uncertainty of my future terrified me. I spent the next several years of my life trying to figure out what to do and where to go. I earned a law degree and a Ph.D. Only then did I find my own path. During those years of confusion and wilderness, how I envied those with sure paths. I raged at the way my own life circum‐ stances had left me without the kind of parental connections or other favorable breaks which could start me in a career. I am sure that many young people in the Occupy movement share those feelings.

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I went through all of that in the era of relatively inexpensive tui‐ tion. Thanks to scholarships and help from the parents, I escaped with very little debt. For the average Occupy protester, student debt is a very substantial part of the grievance.

There is an indictment to be delivered on those of us in the college game. Generally speaking, we don’t prepare students mentally for the end of the escalator. We need to impress upon them that getting the credential of a bachelor’s degree and completing a program of study is just the base level in the process of getting a job. Very few people come out of college ready to do the jobs they plan to get. Col‐ lege does not train most students for a job in the way a trade school might. Instead, college signals employers that a particular student has a certain degree of competence, can receive and complete as‐ signments, and is used to showing up at a given place at a given time in some kind of routine way. The college program is a foundation.

But during college, the student needs to be looking well beyond just passing classes.

Throughout, a young person should be thinking in the manner of the old Evangelism Explosion which queried individuals as to what they would say when God asked them, “Why should I let you in my heaven?” Except, in our scenario, the question from the employer is, “Why should I give you a job with my company?” If your only an‐ swer is that you have completed a course of study at a university and have no experience or no special skill to offer, then you are not a very attractive candidate. You need to have completed your course of study and know how to write really well and be able to analyze prob‐ lems and come up with good solutions and have some basic quantita‐ tive skills and be computer literate and have cultivated habits of life‐ time learning and have reasonably good social skills and be opportunistic about finding work and delivering results.

Until a young person starts to understand just how steep the wall is that they face before they become attractive to an employer, they will mostly be bewildered as to why things aren’t working out. But think about it from the employer’s side of things. They can either pay you a salary or spend that money on facilities, technology, profit for inves‐ tors, making a product better for customers, or any number of other items other than hiring an inexperienced young person. Being a warm body with a nice credential doesn’t work well unless the econ‐ omy is smoking hot, as with the dot‐com boom.

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The economy is not smoking hot, nor does it show signs of being smoking hot any time in the near future. As to why, please see the first section on getting the bill for the six parties ahead of you. The solution to the fiscal problem is not to make sure that the government increases its budget to spend a lot more on young people to go along with the very large (and unsustainable) amount we spend on older people. Rather, the solution is to reverse the bad habits.

Corporations have been hard at work for years getting younger employees on the 401k train rather than on pensions. Governments will need to do the same thing. Pensions are not a sustainable model for a population like ours that barely replaces itself. Neither do they make much sense when people may live as many decades after work‐ ing as they spent working.

The solution to the problem of being young and uncertain is to do a better job of preparing young people for the end of the escalator. The old join a corporation and spend forty years there and then get a pension model is finished. Whoever embraces it will be defeated economically by those who do not. Everyone must be an entrepre‐ neur of their own skills and abilities. If you aren’t prepared to do that, then find one of the few remaining escalators left which run all the way to retirement.

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was a teenager in the 1980′s when many secular Americans (in‐ cluding me) formed their view of Christianity on the basis of what was happening with Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. Two men who had become rich through ministry ended up making mis‐ takes that severely damaged their reputations and organizations. The trashy, deceptive, scoundrel, flashy preacher character is part of the stock of American literature.

If you want to see the type in action, there are places you can go via cable or satellite to get your fill. You can stuff yourself with shameful judgment and delight as you watch them with their sparkling, color‐ ful clothing, jewelry, and architectural hairstyles. They model wealth because their appeal to the viewer is that if you will call a number and give a gift very quickly, you, too, will be blessed. You will have planted a seed against your need. The unexpected life‐changing check will surely appear on your doorstop very soon.

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Truly, I do not know any of these people. At age 41, I have been a Christian now for about 23 years. I have yet to meet anyone who en‐ dorses the theology broadcast by the prosperity gospel industry. Nor have I found any Christians who run around in rhinestones and pur‐ ple hair. But to those of you who are unchurched, who think very little of Jesus Christ and Christianity, and who take your cues from someone like Jon Stewart, I have an antidote to offer to the poisonous view of the faith you may hold. The antidote is the Christian scholar.

The first person to really get my attention with regard to Christian‐ ity was Robbie Castleman. She had been doing graduate work and would eventually obtain her doctorate. She is a professor at John Brown University now. Robbie was never interested in spending lots of time shopping or in the salon. She was the first person I ever met who didn’t run after a ringing phone. Robbie and her husband, Breck, were (and are) generous with their time and money. She didn’t preach AT people. She had relationships with people. And the energy behind all of it was Jesus. She put up with an egotistical, exasperat‐ ing, and lazy kid like me without losing patience. Robbie is a Chris‐ tian scholar. Such a different creature than that Brother Love charac‐ ter you all know and despise.

I won’t name names of other people to whom I’m close (because I don’t want to embarrass them), but I don’t mind describing them to you. The Christian scholar is the man with a rather unkempt beard and the pants and sleeves with frayed cuffs. The tie often clashes or is a couple of decades out of date. If you know men like these you probably find them somewhat eccentric and uninterested in many of the passing things the rest of us chase after. They don’t know which buttons to fasten on a sportcoat or how to properly coordinate belts and shoes. And the reason why is not because they are ignorant, but rather because they are setting their powerful minds to other tasks.

They are, as a friend in Texas who had some impressive life experi‐ ence said to me, deep rivers. They are otherworldly.

I regret (a little) to say that I do know about the belts and shoes, the right buttons to button, which colors can go together, and other mat‐ ters of concern to people of fashion. But I admire those who have no need at all to care about those things. And when my wife, no great follower of trends herself, happens to note that I am wearing pants that seem to be falling apart a little or the seat is wearing out, I’m 109

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almost sorry to notice. Because I was just a little closer to being like those men and women I so admire.

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recently had lunch with a friend working in the United King‐ dom. When I asked him about the electoral politics, he reported the following conversation:

Friend: (Speaking to British citizen) Who are you voting for?

Brit: My parents were Tories, but I’m voting for the Lib‐Dems (the Liber‐ al Democrats).

Friend: Really? Why are you voting for them?

Brit: They’re for social justice!

Friend: That’s interesting. What is social justice?

Brit: Let me put my mind to that and I’ll get back to you.

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hen I was a graduate student in public administration about twenty years ago, one of my professors was the much‐published, much‐decorated Robert Golembiewski.

He was almost as wide as he was tall, had a terrific head of white hair with accompanying white beard and mustache, and proudly dis‐ played a large poster for Polish Solidarity (SOLIDARNOSC!) on the door to his office.

He and I spoke many times as I took every advantage of opportuni‐ ties to learn from him. I still recall a framed letter he had from anoth‐ er very famous social scientist, Aaron Wildavsky. The letter opened by congratulating Golembiewski on some photograph that had been taken of him and subsequently appeared somewhere notable. ”What an excellent likeness, Bob.” In the second paragraph, Wildavsky an‐ nounced that he had cancer and would not live very long.

On the occasion of one of my visits, I was excitedly discussing the book Reinventing Government by Osborne and Gaebler and the corre‐ sponding Clinton reform initiative, the National Performance Re‐ view. I was surprised to hear Golembiewski dismiss the initiative as “just another management sheep dip.” The conversation didn’t go much further because I had no idea what sheep dip was. I have since 110

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figured out that he was referring to a veterinary treatment for sheep similar to the bath dogs get to keep fleas and other pests at bay.

Today, I was thinking about Golembiewski and “management sheep dip.” I think his critique was that most managerial reforms are like a coating that appears to work for a while, but doesn’t change the essence underneath. The conversation came home to me as I took my class through a case study about education reform in Denver during the last decade. Michael Bennet managed to become a U.S. Senator after his purported turnaround of the schools in Denver. It is clear that he worked hard. I am less sure whether his reforms were suc‐ cessful. It mostly seems that the force of his personality was im‐ portant, but now he is gone.

We frequently hear about new plans for big reforms. People make much of them, although those of us who understand PR appreciate that the gains get pumped up larger than they really are and the problems are minimized. We get catchy labels such as Scientific Management, Total Quality Management, Lean Six Sigma, Reinvent‐ ing Government (which is my favorite for what it’s worth), and oth‐ ers. A number of people make a lot of money promoting these ideas, writing, consulting, etc. But what it really comes down to is a few things. Do political leaders, administrators, and employees care about their work? Are they honest? Do they have integrity? Are they competent? I would submit to you that if those things are true, then it not so much the managerial sheep dip that we are proposing that matters so much as it is the soul with which we approach the work.

Here’s the really terrible side of that truth. If you have political leaders who just care about moving up to the next job, administrators and other employees who are primarily worried about getting more money and better benefits and having an easy life, then whatever sheep dip you apply will make things look and smell better for a short while, but you’ll go right back into mediocrity or worse, decay.

Fundamentally, if you have competent, conscientious people work‐ ing in good faith, then the system you have is a matter of secondary importance. This is an awful thing to understand, because it means if you have a bad culture, if your people lack character, if families aren’t raising children well ... then you don’t have a great chance of turning things around.

We basically have two hopes for making things better. One is that technology improves so much that we can afford our many social 111

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pathologies. (Of course, that road may lead to the kind of human existence we see portrayed in WALL‐E.) The other lies with spiritual renewal. And that road is the tougher one by far. In fact, you have to die first. And then you have to live again.

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he public schools are going all out to stop bullying these days.

My children both attend a public elementary school, so I hear a lot about it. Yesterday, though, my six year old daughter put together what she is hearing in school with what she has learned about the Christian faith. I was astonished and touched by the truth and clarity of it. Sitting across the kitchen table while I read and she did her homework, she said, “You shouldn’t be a bully because God didn’t make you to be mean to people. He made you so people wouldn’t be lonely.”

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hen I was a child (probably around the year 1979), I once asked my father to tell me who was the most beautiful woman in the world. He instantly replied that it was my mother. I then asked him to tell me who was the most beautiful woman other than my mother. He replied nearly as quickly that the answer to my question was Raquel Welch.

I clipped the following section from a very interesting interview be‐ tween Raquel Welch and Men’s Health magazine. Her comments are worth carving into the face of a mountain somewhere. Take special note of how her interviewer goes from flip to serious as she makes herself clear.

MH: You once said that you think sex is overrated. Could you elaborate?

Raquel Welch: I mean just the sex act itself.

MH: Really? Are you sure you’ve been doing it right?

Raquel Welch: I think we’ve gotten to the point in our culture where we’re all sex addicts, literally. We have equated happiness in life with as many orgasms as you can possibly pack in, regardless of where it is that you depos‐ it your love interest.

MH: Okay, admittedly that doesn’t make sex sound very appealing at all.

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Raquel Welch: It’s just dehumanizing. And I have to honestly say, I think this era of porn is at least partially responsible for it. Where is the anticipa‐ tion and the personalization? It’s all pre‐fab now. You have these images coming at you unannounced and unsolicited. It just gets to be so plastic and phony to me. Maybe men respond to that. But is it really better than an experience with a real life girl that he cares about? It’s an exploitation of the poor male’s libidos. Poor babies, they can’t control themselves.

MH: I cannot dispute any of what you’re saying.

Raquel Welch: I just imagine them sitting in front of their computers, completely annihilated. They haven’t done anything, they don’t have a job, they barely have ambition anymore. And it makes for laziness and a not very good sex partner. Do they know how to negotiate something that isn’t pre‐ fab and injected directly into their brain?

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he primary point of my first book, The End of Secularism, was to demonstrate that secularism doesn’t do what it claims to do, which is to solve the problem of religious difference. As I look at the Obama administration’s attempt to mandate that religious em‐ ployers pay for contraceptive products, I see that they have con‐ firmed one of my charges in the book.

I wrote that secularists claim that they are occupying a neutral po‐ sition in the public square, but in reality they are simply another group of contenders working to implement a vision of community life with which they are comfortable. And guess what? They are not comfortable with many of the fundamental beliefs of Christians. Re‐ grettably, many secularists are also statists. Thus, their discomfort with Christian beliefs results in direct challenges to them in the form of mandatory public policy.

Collectivism is often very appealing to Christians who want to do good for their neighbors. Unfortunately, collectivism is frequently a fellow‐traveler of aggressive secularism with little respect for reli‐ gious liberty. The veil has slipped. I hope we do not too quickly for‐ get what was revealed in that moment. Collectivism gives. But it also takes. And what it takes is very often precious and irreplaceable.

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ost readers will recognize Peter Drucker’s name as the au‐ thor of many books about management. The Austrian im‐ migrant was revered in that field and sold millions of books. Few realize, though, that his academic training was actually in international law and that he moved toward business out of his con‐ viction that management is a liberal art. I have embarked upon a re‐ search project to read and understand his social thought. In the pro‐ cess of reading his first book, The End of Economic Man, I have run into many gems, including this one:

Realization of freedom and equality was first sought in the spiritual sphere. The creed that all mean are equal in the world beyond and free to decide their fate in the other world by their actions and thoughts in this one, which, accordingly, is but a preparation for the real life, may have been only an attempt to keep the masses down, as the eighteenth century and the Marxists assert. But to the people in the eleventh or in the thirteenth centu‐ ry the promise was real. That every Last Judgment at a church door shows popes, bishops, and kings in damnation was not just the romantic fantasy of a rebellious stonemason. It was a real and truthful expression of that epoch of our history which projected freedom and equality into the spiritual sphere.

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was recently standing on a covered porch talking to a man who is legitimately psychotic. He explained to me that he has won several major literary prizes, holds a number of important pa‐ tents, and traveled around the world in a dirigible for years. Trying to find a way to make conversation, I confided to him that I am afraid of flying. His mania seemed to subside as he looked at me, took my measure, and said, “You know, flying is a lot safer than other meth‐ ods of transportation.”

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e are hearing a great deal at the moment about govern‐ ment austerity, especially in Europe, as various states at‐ tempt to deal with massive budget crises resulting from a combination of low growth, bad demographics, and overly rich wel‐ fare programs. European Central Bank president Mario Draghi re‐ 114

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cently gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal in which he made things quite clear:

WSJ: Austerity means different things, what’s good and what’s bad aus‐ terity?

Draghi: In the European context tax rates are high and government ex‐ penditure is focused on current expenditure. A “good” consolidation is one where taxes are lower and the lower government expenditure is on infra‐ structures and other investments.

WSJ: Bad austerity?

Draghi: The bad consolidation is actually the easier one to get, because one could produce good numbers by raising taxes and cutting capital ex‐ penditure, which is much easier to do than cutting current expenditure.

That’s the easy way in a sense, but it’s not a good way. It depresses potential growth.

Draghi’s insight is one American policymakers need to understand.

If the government is spending a great deal of money simply to put dollars in people’s pockets, pay salaries, etc., then we are not getting nearly the good we could obtain with better government spending and we go bust trying to afford it. The superior situation is one in which you can keep taxes low and government spending is on items that last and have the potential to spur growth into the future.

For example, consider the difference between a government paying for things like the interstate highway system or the Tennessee Valley Authority mechanisms of energy generation versus a government that sends out a lot of entitlement checks. The first government will see substantial returns over the long run. The second one is mostly just poorer at the end of the year.

In America, we used to have a government of the first type, but we increasingly have a government of the second type. I opposed the president’s nearly $1 trillion stimulus package, but it would have been a lot easier to swallow if it had been aimed at some truly valua‐ ble investment such as reinforcing America’s physical infrastructure (highways, electrical grid, etc.) rather than simply trying to push out cash as quickly as possible.

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t is interesting to note that religious people, of a variety of per‐ suasions, tend to naturally understand how serious a problem the HHS mandate presents. What the department did, deliberately and with full knowledge of the consequences, was to create a very real and urgent crisis for institutions with a religious identity (espe‐ cially the Catholic ones). We could call this kind of crisis a “God and Caesar crisis” in which an individual or a community must choose between obeying God or obeying the coercive force of government. ”Rape” is not an absurd metaphor to employ when we are talking about the use of raw power to force an action against conviction.

Now, it is obvious that religious belief cannot command a blank check, but the old standard was essentially that religious belief (and action) would remain undisturbed as long as it did not pose a threat to the peace and safety of the community. It should be obvious that declining to fund contraceptives in an insurance policy is far from an affirmative threat to either peace or safety. After all, there are many low cost ways to obtain contraceptives and no one is forced to work for a religious employer. The coercion being employed is what is hy‐ perbolic. No one should be forced into a God and Caesar crisis with so little regard for the alternatives and so little regard for conscience.

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s many of you know, I worked for Robert Sloan as a writer while I was doing my doctoral work at Baylor and then as a director of strategic planning and associate provost at Hou‐ ston Baptist University. Those jobs changed my life. They gave me a vocation. I have not doubted my calling since it came to me so clearly during those years.

I felt that I had to leave HBU in order to be closer to my parents (for a variety of reasons, mostly a debilitating health condition which has troubled my mother) and found an opportunity at Union Univer‐ sity. Though it was extraordinarily difficult to leave (and I struggled with an outpouring of emotion almost daily), I looked forward with anticipation to learning from David Dockery just as I did from Robert Sloan. God has been gracious. Union has been a good place for me.

The years at HBU were tremendously satisfying. In God’s provi‐ dence, we put together a strong ten year plan for the university, re‐ formed the core curriculum (in a rigorous, traditional sense), estab‐ 116

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lished an honors college, and brought about substantial growth in both the physical aspect of the campus and in the student body.

Change happens. I left for Union. Paul Bonicelli (once a key part of establishing Patrick Henry College, too) moved on to an executive vice presidency at Regent University (where he is already doing good things). And now John Mark Reynolds assumes the title of provost at HBU. He has exactly the right sensibility about academic content for an institution that seeks to be a truly classical Christian liberal arts university. I look forward with great anticipation to seeing him establish the same kind of loving and scholarly association at HBU that he brought into being at Biola in the form of the Torrey Institute.

I should add that I hope John Mark does not merely take his gifts to HBU, while Biola loses them. Rather, I echo his hope that the work at Biola goes on while a new one takes root at HBU. Let the good work multiply rather than simply transferring.

HBU has dared much these past several years. It is my prayer that God will bring greater things of it than any of us have dreamed or intended.

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y daughter Grace (age 6) saw me looking at Europe on Google Maps. She noticed the United Kingdom and was excited to see it, but then said, “That’s not a real place.”

“Yes, it is,” I insisted. “And it has a queen and princes.”

“I don’t believe it,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you should never believe anything on the internet.”

Hunter Baker is Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of Political Science at Union University. He is the author of The End of Secularism (Crossway Books).

You can read more at his website, endofsecularism.com.

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4THE`WORD`SPOKEN$ G.K. Chesterton In each volume of T HE C I T Y , we reprint a passage or remarks from great leaders of the faith. In 1916, G.K. Chesterton penned an essay to be used as the introduction to The Book of Job. Chesterton (18741936) put, as always, a bracing tone to the lessons of the book and unpacking the “philosophical riddle” within it. Here is his essay.

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he Book of Job is among the other Old Testament Books both a philosophical riddle and a historical riddle. It is the philosophical riddle that concerns us in such an in‐ troduction as this; so we may dismiss first the few words of general explanation or warning which should be said about the historical aspect. Controversy has long raged about which parts of this epic belong to its original scheme and which are interpo‐ lations of considerably later date. The doctors disagree, as it is the business of doctors to do; but upon the whole the trend of investiga‐ tion has always been in the direction of maintaining that the parts interpolated, if any, were the prose prologue and epilogue and possi‐ bly the speech of the young man who comes in with an apology at the end. I do not profess to be competent to decide such questions.

But whatever decision the reader may come to concerning them, there is a general truth to be remembered in this connection.

When you deal with any ancient artistic creation do not suppose that it is anything against it that it grew gradually. The Book of Job may have grown gradually just as Westminster Abbey grew gradual‐ ly. But the people who made the old folk poetry, like the people who made Westminster Abbey, did not attach that importance to the actu‐ al date and the actual author, that importance which is entirely the creation of the almost insane individualism of modern times. We may put aside the case of Job, as one complicated with religious diffi‐ culties, and take any other, say the case of The Iliad. Many people have maintained the characteristic formula of modern scepticism, that Homer was not written by Homer, but by another person of the same name. Just in the same way many have maintained that Moses was not Moses but another person called Moses. But the thing really to be remembered in the matter of The Iliad is that if other people did interpolate the passages, the thing did not create the same sense of 119

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shock as would be created by such proceedings in these individualis‐ tic times. The creation of the tribal epic was to some extent regarded as a tribal work, like the building of the tribal temple. Believe then, if you will, that the prologue of Job and the epilogue and the speech of Elihu are things inserted after the original work was composed. But do not suppose that such insertions have that obvious and spurious character which would belong to any insertions in a modern individ‐ ualistic book. Do not regard the insertions as you would regard a chapter in George Meredith which you afterwards found had not been written by George Meredith, or half a scene in Ibsen which you found had been cunningly sneaked in by Mr. William Archer. Re‐ member that this old world which made these old poems like the Iliad and Job, always kept the tradition of what it was making. A man could almost leave a poem to his son to be finished as he would have finished it, just as a man could leave a field to his son, to be reaped as he would have reaped it. What is called Homeric unity may be a fact or not. The Iliad may have been written by one man. It may have been written by a hundred men. But let us remember that there was more unity in those times in a hundred men than there is unity now in one man. Then a city was like one man. Now one man is like a city in civil war.

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ithout going, therefore, into questions of unity as under‐ stood by the scholars, we may say of the scholarly riddle that the book has unity in the sense that all great tradi‐ tional creations have unity; in the sense that Canterbury Cathedral has unity. And the same is broadly true of what I have called the philosophical riddle. There is a real sense in which the Book of Job stands apart from most of the books included in the canon of the Old Testament. But here again those are wrong who insist on the entire absence of unity.

Those are wrong who maintain that the Old Testament is a mere loose library; that it has no consistency or aim. Whether the result was achieved by some supernal spiritual truth, or by a steady nation‐ al tradition, or merely by an ingenious selection in after times, the books of the Old Testament have a quite perceptible unity. To attempt to understand the Old Testament without realizing this main idea is as absurd as it would be to study one of Shakespeare’s plays without realizing that the author of them had any philosophical object at all.

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It is as if a man were to read the history of Hamlet, Prince of Den‐ mark, thinking all the time that he was reading what really purport‐ ed to be the history of an old Danish pirate prince. Such a reader would not realize at all that Hamlet’s procrastination was on the part of the poet intentional. He would merely say, “How long Shake‐ speare’s hero does take to kill his enemy.” So speak the Bible smash‐ ers, who are unfortunately always at bottom Bible worshippers. They do not understand the special tone and intention of the Old Testa‐ ment; they do not understand its main idea, which is the idea of all men being merely the instruments of a higher power.

Those, for instance, who complain of the atrocities and treacheries of the judges and prophets of Israel have really got a notion in their head that has nothing to do with the subject. They are too Christian.

They are reading back into the pre‐Christian scriptures a purely Christian idea—the idea of saints, the idea that the chief instruments of God are very particularly good men. This is a deeper, a more dar‐ ing, and a more interesting idea than the old Jewish one. It is the idea that innocence has about it something terrible which in the long run makes and re‐makes empires and the world.

But the Old Testament idea was much more what may be called the common‐sense idea, that strength is strength, that cunning is cun‐ ning, that worldly success is worldly success, and that Jehovah uses these things for His own ultimate purpose, just as He uses natural forces or physical elements. He uses the strength of a hero as He uses that of a Mammoth without any particular respect for the Mammoth.

I cannot comprehend how it is that so many simple‐minded sceptics have read such stories as the fraud of Jacob and supposed that the man who wrote it (whoever he was) did not know that Jacob was a sneak just as well as we do. The primeval human sense of honour does not change so much as that. But these simple‐minded sceptics are, like the majority of modern sceptics, Christians. They fancy that the patriarchs must be meant for patterns; they fancy that Jacob was being set up as some kind of saint; and in that case I do not wonder that they are a little startled. That is not the atmosphere of the Old Testament at all. The heroes of the Old Testament are not the sons of God, but the slaves of God, gigantic and terrible slaves, like the genii, who were the slaves of Aladdin.

The central idea of the great part of the Old Testament may be called the idea of the loneliness of God. God is not the only chief 121

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character of the Old Testament; God is properly the only character in the Old Testament. Compared with His clearness of purpose all the other wills are heavy and automatic, like those of animals; compared with His actuality all the sons of flesh are shadows. Again and again the note is struck, “With whom hath he taken counsel?” “I have trodden the wine press alone, and of the peoples there was no man with me.” All the patriarchs and prophets are merely His tools or weapons; for the Lord is a man of war. He uses Joshua like an axe or Moses like a measuring‐rod. For Him Samson is only a sword and Isaiah a trumpet. The saints of Christianity are supposed to be like God, to be, as it were, little statuettes of Him. The Old Testament he‐ ro is no more supposed to be of the same nature as God than a saw or a hammer is supposed to be of the same shape as the carpenter.

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his is the main key and characteristic of the Hebrew scriptures as a whole. There are, indeed, in those scriptures innumerable instances of the sort of rugged humour, keen emotion, and powerful individuality which is never wanting in great primitive prose and poetry. Nevertheless the main characteristic remains; the sense not merely that God is stronger than man, not merely that God is more secret than man, but that He means more, that He knows better what He is doing, that compared with Him we have something of the vagueness, the unreason, and the vagrancy of the beasts that perish. “It is he that sitteth above the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers.” We might almost put it thus. The book is so intent upon asserting the personality of God that it almost as‐ serts the impersonality of man. Unless this gigantic cosmic brain has conceived a thing, that thing is insecure and void; man has not enough tenacity to ensure its continuance. “Except the Lord build the house their labour is but lost that build it. Except the Lord keep the city the watchman watcheth but in vain.”

Everywhere else, then, the Old Testament positively rejoices in the obliteration of man in comparison with the divine purpose. The Book of Job stands definitely alone because the Book of Job definitely asks, “But what is the purpose of God? Is it worth the sacrifice even of our miserable humanity? Of course it is easy enough to wipe out our own paltry wills for the sake of a will that is grander and kinder? But is it grander and kinder? Let God use His tools; let God break His tools. But what is He doing and what are they being broken for?” It is 122

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because of this question that we have to attack as a philosophical riddle the riddle of the Book of Job. The present importance of the Book of Job cannot be expressed ad‐ equately even by saying that it is the most interesting of ancient books. We may almost say of the Book of Job that it is the most inter‐ esting of modern books. In truth, of course, neither of the two phrases covers the matter, because fundamental human religion and fundamental human irreligion are both at once old and new; philos‐ ophy is either eternal or it is not philosophy. The modern habit of saying, “This is my opinion, but I may be wrong,” is entirely irra‐ tional. If I say that it may be wrong I say that is not my opinion. The modern habit of saying “Every man has a different philosophy; this is my philosophy and its suits me”; the habit of saying this is mere weak‐mindedness. A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon. The first of the intellectual beauties of the Book of Job is that it is all concerned with this desire to know the actuality; the de‐ sire to know what is, and not merely what seems. If moderns were writing the book we should probably find that Job and his comforters got on quite well together by the simple operation of referring their differences to what is called the temperament, saying that the com‐ forters were by nature “optimists” and Job by nature a “pessimist.”

And they would be quite comfortable, as people can often be, for some time at least, by agreeing to say what is obviously untrue. For if the word “pessimist” means anything at all, then emphatically Job is not a pessimist. His case alone is sufficient to refute the modern ab‐ surdity of referring everything to physical temperament. Job does not in any sense look at life in a gloomy way. If wishing to be happy and being quite ready to be happy constitute an optimist, Job is an opti‐ mist. He is a perplexed optimist; he is an exasperated optimist; he is an outraged and insulted optimist. He wishes the universe to justify itself, not because he wishes it to be caught out, but because he really wishes it to be justified. He demands an explanation from God, but he does not do it at all in the spirit in which Hampden might demand an explanation from Charles I. He does it in the spirit in which a wife might demand an explanation from her husband whom she really respected. He remonstrates with his Maker because he is proud of his Maker. He even speaks of the Almighty as his enemy, but he never 123

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doubts, at the back of his mind, that his enemy has some kind of a case which he does not understand. In a fine and famous blasphemy he says, “Oh, that mine adversary had written a book!” It never real‐ ly occurs to him that it could possibly be a bad book. He is anxious to be convinced, that is, he thinks that God could convince him. In short, we may say again that if the word optimist means any thing (which I doubt) Job is an optimist. He shakes the pillars of the world and strikes insanely at the heavens; he lashes the stars, but it is not to silence them; it is to make them speak. In the same way we may speak of the official optimists, the Comforters of Job. Again, if the word pessimist means anything (which I doubt) the comforters of Job may be called pessimists rather than optimists. All that they really believe is not that God is good but that God is so strong that it is much more judicious to call Him good. It would be the exaggeration of censure to call them evolutionists; but they have something of the vital error of the evolutionary optimist. They will keep on saying that everything in the universe fits into everything else: as if there were anything comforting about a number of nasty things all fitting into each other. We shall see later how God in the great climax of the po‐ em turns this particular argument altogether upside down.

When, at the end of the poem, God enters (somewhat abruptly), is struck the sudden and splendid note which makes the thing as great as it is. All the human beings through the story, and Job especially, have been asking questions of God. A more trivial poet would have made God enter in some sense or other in order to answer the ques‐ tions. By a touch truly to be called inspired, when God enters, it is to ask a number more questions on His own account. In this drama of scepticism God Himself takes up the role of sceptic. He does what all the great voices defending religion have always done. He does, for instance, what Socrates did. He turns rationalism against itself. He seems to say that if it comes to asking questions, He can ask some questions which will fling down and flatten out all conceivable hu‐ man questioners. The poet by an exquisite intuition has made God ironically accept a kind of controversial equality with His accusers.

He is willing to regard it as if it were a fair intellectual duel: “Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.” The everlasting adopts an enormous and sardonic humility. He is quite willing to be prosecuted. He only asks for the right which every prosecuted person possesses; He asks to be allowed to cross‐ 124

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examine the witness for the prosecution. And He carries yet further the correctness of the legal parallel. For the first question, essentially speaking, which He asks of Job is the question that any criminal ac‐ cused by Job would be most entitled to ask. He asks Job who he is.

And Job, being a man of candid intellect, takes a little time to consid‐ er, and comes to the conclusion that he does not know.

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his is the first great fact to notice about the speech of God, which is the culmination of the inquiry. It represents all hu‐ man sceptics routed by a higher scepticism. It is this method, used sometimes by supreme and sometimes by mediocre minds, that has ever since been the logical weapon of the true mystic. Socrates, as I have said, used it when he showed that if you only allowed him enough sophistry he could destroy all the sophists. Jesus Christ used it when He reminded the Sadducees, who could not imagine the na‐ ture of marriage in heaven, that if it came to that they had not really imagined the nature of marriage at all. In the break up of Christian theology in the eighteenth century, Butler used it, when he pointed out that rationalistic arguments could be used as much against vague religion as against doctrinal religion, as much against rationalist eth‐ ics as against Christian ethics. It is the root and reason of the fact that men who have religious faith have also philosophic doubt, like Car‐ dinal Newman, Mr. Balfour, or Mr. Mallock. These are the small streams of the delta; the Book of Job is the first great cataract that creates the river. In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself. This, I say, is the first fact touching the speech; the fine inspiration by which God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles, but to propound them. The other great fact which, taken together with this one, makes the whole work religious instead of merely philosophical, is that oth‐ er great surprise which makes Job suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told.

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The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man. Thirdly, of course, it is one of the splendid strokes that God rebukes alike the man who accused, and the men who defended Him; that He knocks down pessimists and optimists with the same hammer. And it is in connection with the mechanical and supercili‐ ous comforters of Job that there occurs the still deeper and finer in‐ version of which I have spoken. The mechanical optimist endeavours to justify the universe avowedly upon the ground that it is a rational and consecutive pattern. He points out that the fine thing about the world is that it can all be explained. That is the one point, if I may put it so, on which God in return, is explicit to the point of violence. God says, in effect, that if there is one fine thing about the world, as far as men are concerned, it is that it cannot be explained. He insists on the inexplicableness of everything; “Hath the rain a father? ... Out of whose womb came the ice?” He goes farther, and insists on the posi‐ tive and palpable unreason of things; “Hast thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is, and upon the wilderness wherein there is no man?”

God will make man see things, if it is only against the black back‐ ground of nonentity. God will make Job see a startling universe if He can only do it by making Job see an idiotic universe. To startle man God becomes for an instant a blasphemer; one might almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist. He unrolls before Job a long panorama of created things, the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild ass, the peacock, the ostrich, the crocodile. He so describes each of them that it sounds like a monster walking in the sun. The whole is a sort of psalm or rhapsody of the sense of wonder. The maker of all things is astonished at the things He has Himself made. This we may call the third point. Job puts forward a note of interrogation; God answers with a note of exclamation. Instead of proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He insists that it is a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was. Lastly, the poet has achieved in this speech, with that unconscious artistic accuracy found in so many of the simpler epics, another and much more delicate thing. Without once relaxing the rigid impenetrability of Jehovah in His deliberate declaration, he has contrived to let fall here and therein the meta‐ phors, in the parenthetical imagery, sudden and splendid suggestions that the secret of God is a bright and not a sad one semi‐accidental 126

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suggestions, like light seen for an instant through the cracks of a closed door. It would be difficult to praise too highly, in a purely po‐ etical sense, the instinctive exactitude and ease with which these more optimistic insinuations are let fall in other connections, as if the Almighty Himself were scarcely aware that He was letting them out.

For instance, there is that famous passage where Jehovah with devas‐ tating sarcasm, asks Job where he was when the foundations of the world were laid, and then (as if merely fixing a date) mentions the time when the sons of God shouted for joy. One cannot help feeling, even upon this meagre information, that they must have had some‐ thing to shout about. Or again, when God is speaking of snow and hail in the mere catalogue of the physical cosmos, He speaks of them as a treasury that He has laid up against the day of battle–a hint of some huge Armageddon in which evil shall be at last overthrown.

Nothing could be better, artistically speaking, than this optimism breaking through agnosticism like fiery gold round the edges of a black cloud. Those who look superficially at the barbaric origin of the epic may think it fanciful to read so much artistic significance into its casual similes or accidental phrases. But no one who is well ac‐ quainted with great examples of semi‐barbaric poetry, as in The Song of Roland or the old ballads, will fall into this mistake. No one who knows what primitive poetry is, can fail to realize that while its con‐ scious form is simple some of its finer effects are subtle. The Iliad con‐ trives to express the idea that Hector and Sarpedon have a certain tone or tint of sad and chivalrous resignation, not bitter enough to be called pessimism and not jovial enough to be called optimism; Homer could never have said this in elaborate words. But somehow he contrives to say it in simple words. The Song of Roland contrives to express the idea that Christianity imposes upon its heroes a paradox: a paradox of great humility in the matter of their sins combined with great ferocity in the matter of their ideas. Of course the Song of Roland could not say this; but it conveys this. In the same way the Book of Job must be credited with many subtle effects which were in the au‐ thor’s soul without being, perhaps, in the author’s mind. And of these by far the most important remains even yet to be stated. I do not know, and I doubt whether even scholars know, if the Book of Job had a great effect or had any effect upon the after development of Jewish thought. But if it did have any effect it may have saved them from an enormous collapse and decay. Here in this Book the question 127

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is really asked whether God invariably punishes vice with terrestrial punishment and rewards virtue with terrestrial prosperity. If the Jews had answered that question wrongly they might have lost all their after influence in human history. They might have sunk even down to the level of modern well educated society. For when once people have begun to believe that prosperity is the reward of virtue their next calamity is obvious. If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men successful. They will adopt the easier task of making out successful men good. This, which has happened throughout modern commerce and journalism, is the ulti‐ mate Nemesis of the wicked optimism of the comforters of Job. If the Jews could be saved from it, the Book of Job saved them. The Book of Job is chiefly remarkable, as I have insisted throughout, for the fact that it does not end in a way that is conventionally satisfactory. Job is not told that his misfortunes were due to his sins or a part of any plan for his improvement.

But in the prologue we see Job tormented not because he was the worst of men, but because he was the best. It is the lesson of the whole work that man is most comforted by paradoxes. Here is the very darkest and strangest of the paradoxes; and it is by all human testimony the most reassuring. I need not suggest what a high and strange history awaited this paradox of the best man in the worst fortune. I need not say that in the freest and most philosophical sense there is one Old Testament figure who is truly a type; or say what is prefigured in the wounds of Job.

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