As the winter nights come upon us early, descending on all around with chill and a darkness deepened by the cold, one thinks back to warmer days--especially those of the almost perfect autumn just past. Not just because of the vivid yellows and reds of the leaves, autumn was well-night perfect this year also because of news from Oslo that the Nobel Prize in literature had been awarded to the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa.
It was commonplace to decry last year's bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize upon Barack Obama, just as many had ridiculed the decision to give it to Al Gore in 2007, but it is well to remember that the Peace Prize occasionally goes to those who richly deserve it. One thinks, for instance, of Aung San Suu Kyii; and Liu Xiaobo, who won the award this year, certainly deserves the award if anyone does, since he, like Aung, has risked his life in his attempt to bring greater freedom to his countrymen (and thereby also to the world at large, which means, dear reader, to you and me). If the Peace Prize has has an ideologically spotty record, the Prize in Literature recently has been well bestowed. Despite what the fashionable critics say about the irrelevance of the writer's life to his work, it is good to see the occasional writer live out the principles he enjoins in his work--for this reason, it was gratifying that Orhan Pamuk, who has had to leave his native Turkey and beloved Istanbul because of remarks he has made about his countrymen's historic slaughter of Armenians, won the Prize in 2008. Not only does he write impressively, but he has had to pay a price for his views. And last year the prize went to Herta Mueller, a writer who suffered a great deal in her native Romania for speaking out, as much as was possible, against Nikolai Caucescu's brutal regime.
Although he has been to some extent ostracized for his lack of adherence to left-wing dogma, Vargas Llosa hasn't had to suffer as Mueller and perhaps Pamuk have. He does, however, certainly live his beliefs. Early on, he was a devoted Marxist, but as he has grown older his views have moved rightward, and while he is no George W. Bush or Sarah Palin (no one who thinks of himself as a citizen of the world can ever be that), he has felt the pressure because of his views from those among the international intelligentsia with whom he consorts. A number, particularly in Europe, have found his views so far beyond the pale that they have in very strong terms denounced his receiving the Nobel, but to show just how small their pale is, one need only remember that the supposedly reactionary Vargas Llosa espouses essentially unrestricted immigration from poor countries to wealthier ones. (See his essay "Los inmigrantes" in his volume of essays entitled El lenguaje de la pasion, an essay that begins, appropriately enough for so quixotic a thesis, by recounting an experience he had while visiting some friends in La Mancha.)
No, Vargas Llosa's conservativism, which he with reason calls neo-liberalism--in the old nineteenth-century British sense of open trade and general democracy--is a generous thing, born of a large spirit that seems to relish the physical delights of daily existence and move with a genuine concern for the good of his fellow human beings, particularly those in Latin America who because of corruption and kleptocracy have been cheated of a standard of life that might otherwise have been theirs. Over time he has seen again and again how the seductive promises of one Messianic leader after another have deceived the poorly-educated Latin American voter into thinking that there is a short and easy way to national prosperity, with the result that everyone suffers, everyone, that is, except for the Messianic leader. Anyone who thinks that the caricature is a thing of a dimly-remembered past inhabited by Speedy Gonzales and the Frito Bandito need look no further than Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez is hardly more sophisticated than the Caudillo in the 1970s film The In-Laws. But the cast of extras in Venezuela doesn't get to go home at the end of the day--they get to live the movie week after week, month after month, as their economy implodes, their institutions crack up, and foreign investment slips away with the tide. This conviction that real people suffer for the sins of egomaniacs paving their own success with the misery of their countrymen is what seems to have motivated Vargas Llosa's growing conviction, and it certifies his humanity along with his integrity, since it is based not on concern for himself but on concern for those whose potential is often squandered by others who take the easy way to their own material success.
I see, however, that this present essay does what Vargas Llosa's never do, and that is stry much beyond the concrete and particular, so herewith some specific observations. Perhaps his longest essay is his magical memoir El Pez en El Agua, in which he recounts his early life and education in the Peru of the 1950s and, in alternating chapters, his run for the presidency of that country in 1990. Although the campaign was unsuccessful, the early life and education was spectacularly fruitful. It contains a wonderfully rich experience of life in Bolivia and Peru, as a student, a denizen of the bars of Lima, an occasion patron of brothels, as a student of distinguished Peruvian historians, as a cub reporter, aspiring playwright, and, most colorfully of all, husband of a woman sufficiently older and closely enough related to him to be called his "Aunt Julia." He writes about all this with the what he elsewhere attributes to the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz--the language of passion, a writing that clearly delights in the remembrance of the rich fabric as he turns it over in the image-house of memory. This delight comes out very well in the ironic detachment and good humor with which he writes about his own naivete and false steps. And he manages it all in a Spanish whose clarity is such that the beginner in Spanish can relish the entire pageant.
But delightful as this romantic narrative is, the other narrative, the one in which he recounts the presidential campaign of 1990, contains the essential political vision. The narrative glistens with veins of ore like those in the fabled Peruvian silver mines. There are his observations on the dangers of Alain Garcia's nationalization of the private sector over the course of the 1980s: perhaps the greatest cautionary tale is about what happened when the government nationalized the banks. Over time it apparently became difficult for those who didn't support the government to take out the large loans necessary to start businesses. (This produced a particularly striking impression when I read it in the early days of the Obama presidency as the Federal government was bailing out the investment banks. If they government would eventually become a major partner in a major bank, would it--because of separation of Church and State--begin to deny funds for, say, the construction of a large downtown church building? Never mind that now: as we learn this week, the government of New York City is actively engaged in making the controversial case for the construction of the mosque close to Ground Zero.) Another rich insight comes in the chapter entitled "El intelectual barato" ("The cheap intellectual") about those who congratulate themselves on their liberal credentials while being bought off by precisely those corrupt politicos who destroy the very freedoms that these writers claim to cherish. It is the best meditation I know on the subject, one with obvious relevance in our own day when we hear--rather, do not hear--everywhere those who claim to be the boldest for women's rights say nothing, nothing at all, about the almost unimaginable suffering of women in some of the Islamic regimes around the world, nay, some of the Islamic enclaves in Western Europe.
But we are back to where we started. Although he is a first-rate novelist, essayist, and literary critic (his study of Les Miserables is one of the best pieces of criticism I know), he will live enduringly in part because all of this writing flows from the hand and mind of one who believes enough in what he says to have lived the ideals he presses, however self-effacingly, on others.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Don't Blame Us for the Culture Wars
The news is plain: the lame-duck Congress, far more ambitious after its historical chastisement by the voters than it ever seemed before, is on the verge of one of the greatest social innovations in living memory. It will shortly repeal the Clinton-era policy of Don't Ask Don't Tell, thereby allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the U.S. military. What social liberals hail as a great step forward for civil rights, however, may be seen as something else entirely.
One notes, first, that the gain was not entirely honest. Like that other huge innovation in social change--Roe v. Wade--this action is not nearly so forthright as one would wish such sweeping change to be. Long after the fact, we learned that the central fact of Roe v. Wade was a lie: Ms "Roe" had not been raped, as she claimed, but at the time that claim was absolutely necessary to impart to the case a sense of emotional urgency and illustrate the gross injustice of anti-abortion laws. But the fact that the major claim turns out to have been a fabrication has left opponents of abortion bitterly dissatisfied with the ruling of the court and all the more sure of the rightness of their opposition to it.
Something similar will be true in the case of this repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. For the central fact of this case is that it is being enacted by a Congress whose partisan liberalism was soundly repudiated in the last election: the only decent thing to do would be for this Congress to do as little as possible in deference to the overwhelming decision to strip it of its power to do anything. It is as it were a technicality that the Congress has the power at this moment to do anything at all. As they showed yesterday in the matter of the Continuing Resolution, the defeat in November should leave them with very little room to legislate, which is why they abandoned their grandiose plans and left it to the next Congress to produce a budget to fuel our government. With social engineering, however, the stakes are so high that the liberals will take their gains any way they can, even if the gains are tainted by illegitimacy. And so, rather than wait for the slow but more solid progress that would almost certainly have come their way in the wake of changing social attitudes, the social revolutionaries have once again grasped the chance of the moment in order to cause a change that society just at the moment seems not to want.
What is worse, as we have seen again and again in the legal sphere, such change will have very large consequences, which may well be one reason for passing this bill. With repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, the pro-homosexual rights lobby has gained immense momentum for the cause of homosexual marriage. The cry will shortly go up that if homosexuals are able to serve--indeed, to die for--their country, the country cannot possibly deny them their right to marry. They will now have legal standing in the most visible, honorable, and effective branch of the Federal Government, and so there can be no logic to any other branch of government, Federal or local, denying them full legal right to marry. So, as with abortion, this enormous change in social policy will be effected by technical maneuvres, not by what would be far better for the nation--a hard won and organically developed social consensus.
The sense of alienation produced in conservatives will be strengthened by the sense that compomise with other side is impossible. We would do well to remember that Don't Ask Don't Tell was itself the grand compromise. Traditionalists did not want to change the long-standing ban on homosexuals in the military; homosexuals wanted to overturn it. Don't Ask Don't Tell was a compromise that allowed both sides to split the difference: homosexuals could serve, so long as they didn't flaunt their status. That was the compromise, but the compromise for the past few years has been denounced as immoral. The only alternative, then, is not to allow compromise--to let one camp have its way entirely while the other is left with nothing. Those liberals who decry the partisan spirit in Washington would do well to remember who it was that in this instance repudiated and destroyed the compromise. They now have the policy they wanted, but they have gained it at the cost of alienating very many people who in the past had shown themselves able to work toward shared solutions. On this issue at least, it is not the traditionalists who have shown inflexibility.
Years ago, when at the 1992 Republican National Convention Pat Buchanan called for sending the National Guard to help suppress the rioting in Los Angeles in the wake of the Rodny King verdict, I was stunned to hear the liberal news anchors say that Buchanan was calling for a culture war. In truth, Buchanan (with whom Meridian Heat disagrees on any number of issues) was firing one round in a war that had been declared by the social liberals back in the 1960s, when they began vigorously to pursue policies that they knew would provoke, upset, and incite bitter reaction in the majority of the American people. Once again we witness such a move. Months from now, however, the liberal elite in the media will point out that the fault lies with those who resent the ruse; and those who, in a thoroughly discredited Congress acting on a technicality decided to pass a highly controversial bill that will have very large social consequences will be spoken of as entirely blameless. Those who object to this manner of making sausages will be dismissed as the provocateurs, while the sausage makers will wonder how anyone could possibly object to the process. As always, irony abounds in democratic politics. Sometimes, however, it is well to point those ironies out.
One notes, first, that the gain was not entirely honest. Like that other huge innovation in social change--Roe v. Wade--this action is not nearly so forthright as one would wish such sweeping change to be. Long after the fact, we learned that the central fact of Roe v. Wade was a lie: Ms "Roe" had not been raped, as she claimed, but at the time that claim was absolutely necessary to impart to the case a sense of emotional urgency and illustrate the gross injustice of anti-abortion laws. But the fact that the major claim turns out to have been a fabrication has left opponents of abortion bitterly dissatisfied with the ruling of the court and all the more sure of the rightness of their opposition to it.
Something similar will be true in the case of this repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. For the central fact of this case is that it is being enacted by a Congress whose partisan liberalism was soundly repudiated in the last election: the only decent thing to do would be for this Congress to do as little as possible in deference to the overwhelming decision to strip it of its power to do anything. It is as it were a technicality that the Congress has the power at this moment to do anything at all. As they showed yesterday in the matter of the Continuing Resolution, the defeat in November should leave them with very little room to legislate, which is why they abandoned their grandiose plans and left it to the next Congress to produce a budget to fuel our government. With social engineering, however, the stakes are so high that the liberals will take their gains any way they can, even if the gains are tainted by illegitimacy. And so, rather than wait for the slow but more solid progress that would almost certainly have come their way in the wake of changing social attitudes, the social revolutionaries have once again grasped the chance of the moment in order to cause a change that society just at the moment seems not to want.
What is worse, as we have seen again and again in the legal sphere, such change will have very large consequences, which may well be one reason for passing this bill. With repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, the pro-homosexual rights lobby has gained immense momentum for the cause of homosexual marriage. The cry will shortly go up that if homosexuals are able to serve--indeed, to die for--their country, the country cannot possibly deny them their right to marry. They will now have legal standing in the most visible, honorable, and effective branch of the Federal Government, and so there can be no logic to any other branch of government, Federal or local, denying them full legal right to marry. So, as with abortion, this enormous change in social policy will be effected by technical maneuvres, not by what would be far better for the nation--a hard won and organically developed social consensus.
The sense of alienation produced in conservatives will be strengthened by the sense that compomise with other side is impossible. We would do well to remember that Don't Ask Don't Tell was itself the grand compromise. Traditionalists did not want to change the long-standing ban on homosexuals in the military; homosexuals wanted to overturn it. Don't Ask Don't Tell was a compromise that allowed both sides to split the difference: homosexuals could serve, so long as they didn't flaunt their status. That was the compromise, but the compromise for the past few years has been denounced as immoral. The only alternative, then, is not to allow compromise--to let one camp have its way entirely while the other is left with nothing. Those liberals who decry the partisan spirit in Washington would do well to remember who it was that in this instance repudiated and destroyed the compromise. They now have the policy they wanted, but they have gained it at the cost of alienating very many people who in the past had shown themselves able to work toward shared solutions. On this issue at least, it is not the traditionalists who have shown inflexibility.
Years ago, when at the 1992 Republican National Convention Pat Buchanan called for sending the National Guard to help suppress the rioting in Los Angeles in the wake of the Rodny King verdict, I was stunned to hear the liberal news anchors say that Buchanan was calling for a culture war. In truth, Buchanan (with whom Meridian Heat disagrees on any number of issues) was firing one round in a war that had been declared by the social liberals back in the 1960s, when they began vigorously to pursue policies that they knew would provoke, upset, and incite bitter reaction in the majority of the American people. Once again we witness such a move. Months from now, however, the liberal elite in the media will point out that the fault lies with those who resent the ruse; and those who, in a thoroughly discredited Congress acting on a technicality decided to pass a highly controversial bill that will have very large social consequences will be spoken of as entirely blameless. Those who object to this manner of making sausages will be dismissed as the provocateurs, while the sausage makers will wonder how anyone could possibly object to the process. As always, irony abounds in democratic politics. Sometimes, however, it is well to point those ironies out.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Islam and Pluralism
"The best lack all conviction while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."--W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"
A recent email controversy with a friend about the possibility of whether moderate Muslims in Western countries will truly accept the pluralism of democratic societies has set me wondering about what exactly pluralism is and whence it comes.
Pluralism seems to be an Enlightenment ideal, most obviously informing such late-eighteenth-century documents as the Constitution or the Universal Declaration of the Rights of man. In part, pluralism surely arises from the conviction that--as the Declaration of Independence states--all men are created equal and therefore, as the Declaration goes on to imply, any given person does not have the right to impose his beliefs on others. Strictly speaking, however, the Declaration enumerates in what ways we are equal: in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Here the Declaration does not speak so much of religious or philosophical pluralism, and even where the Constitution does address this matter, it does so only by limiting the power of the Federal government in this area.
One wonders, however, if that is the entire story. We allow a variety of faiths to exist in our society because we do not believe that a believer in one has greater legal standing than a believer in another, but perhaps we allow this variety for another, less positive, reason. In fact, I wonder whether pluralism does not also (and paradoxically) stem from skepticism. Skepticism as a mainstream philosophy arises in the West during the Renaissance, and two well-known skeptics will illustrate the point very well. Both the French essayist Montaigne and the English essayist and statesman Francis Bacon were skeptics, in that they believed that human reason was a flawed thing that tended often to misprision and error. They believed that much of the what in the Middle Ages had been accepted as certain had to be subjected to careful scrutiny and that since it is difficult for man to know things, he may well know less than he traditionally thought he did.
Such skepticism, of course, is essential for scientific progress, and it is no coincidence that Bacon is seen as one of the great Renaissance prophets of science in Europe. Skepticism grew in influence over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in England (at least) such writers as Hobbes, Locke, and Hume asserted that all knowledge comes to us through our senses, thereby practically denying Divine revelation as a means to knowledge. What skepticism gained for science, however, it began to lose for faith, and long before Matthew Arnold wrote "Dover Beach" in the early 1850s, the Sea of Faith had begun its "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar."
In just such a climate--in which enlightened opinion was losing the medieval certainty about religion--the modern nation-state was born. This nation-state was populated, to be sure, by passionate believers, but while most of these believers were Christians, they included also some Christians of a rather unorthodox variety, such as Quakers, and others, like Deists, who were not strictly speaking Christians at all. It seems entirely plausible that the system of pluralism that marks the American founding or the birth of the modern European nation state rests upon a skeptical foundation--i.e., since it was difficult to be certain of fundamental truth, we shouldn't privilege one conviction over another, and so all faiths were welcome that (whatever their internal claims to certainty) at least respected this climate of pluralism based on a certain intellectual humility.
Islam, however, has never doubted itself. While it has tolerated the existence of other faiths, it has relegated them to a clearly second-place position, the philosophical basis for which is that Islam is the one right path and that others are wrong, though Islam agrees that as a matter of historical fact some groups still cling to these erroneous faiths. The Islam that seems to be projecting itself around the world seems not to be infected with the skeptical self-doubt that has infected Western thought and has produced a climate in which since Western man is uncertain about matters of faith he will accept all as equally certain (or uncertain). Into this scheme Islam does not readily fit, since it seems not fundamentally to question itself.
From this, what follows? First, the skepticism of the West is both a good thing and a bad thing. It allows a plurality of philosophical belief, but it does in the end privilege skepticism itself. To the effect that skepticism is more closely allied to science, materialism, and agnosticism, the West tends to privilege these positions over Christian belief, as witness Supreme Court rulings on what may and may not be taught in the public schools. And the certainty of Islam is likewise good and bad. It is good in the sense that it animates Muslim faith and bad because so much of the energy inherent in Islam manifests itself by destroying those who oppose it. If, however, the narrative of West has for the past several centuries been in large part a narrative of skepticism, then Islam, by definition, will have great difficulty fitting in and may in fact pose an existential threat.
A recent email controversy with a friend about the possibility of whether moderate Muslims in Western countries will truly accept the pluralism of democratic societies has set me wondering about what exactly pluralism is and whence it comes.
Pluralism seems to be an Enlightenment ideal, most obviously informing such late-eighteenth-century documents as the Constitution or the Universal Declaration of the Rights of man. In part, pluralism surely arises from the conviction that--as the Declaration of Independence states--all men are created equal and therefore, as the Declaration goes on to imply, any given person does not have the right to impose his beliefs on others. Strictly speaking, however, the Declaration enumerates in what ways we are equal: in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Here the Declaration does not speak so much of religious or philosophical pluralism, and even where the Constitution does address this matter, it does so only by limiting the power of the Federal government in this area.
One wonders, however, if that is the entire story. We allow a variety of faiths to exist in our society because we do not believe that a believer in one has greater legal standing than a believer in another, but perhaps we allow this variety for another, less positive, reason. In fact, I wonder whether pluralism does not also (and paradoxically) stem from skepticism. Skepticism as a mainstream philosophy arises in the West during the Renaissance, and two well-known skeptics will illustrate the point very well. Both the French essayist Montaigne and the English essayist and statesman Francis Bacon were skeptics, in that they believed that human reason was a flawed thing that tended often to misprision and error. They believed that much of the what in the Middle Ages had been accepted as certain had to be subjected to careful scrutiny and that since it is difficult for man to know things, he may well know less than he traditionally thought he did.
Such skepticism, of course, is essential for scientific progress, and it is no coincidence that Bacon is seen as one of the great Renaissance prophets of science in Europe. Skepticism grew in influence over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in England (at least) such writers as Hobbes, Locke, and Hume asserted that all knowledge comes to us through our senses, thereby practically denying Divine revelation as a means to knowledge. What skepticism gained for science, however, it began to lose for faith, and long before Matthew Arnold wrote "Dover Beach" in the early 1850s, the Sea of Faith had begun its "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar."
In just such a climate--in which enlightened opinion was losing the medieval certainty about religion--the modern nation-state was born. This nation-state was populated, to be sure, by passionate believers, but while most of these believers were Christians, they included also some Christians of a rather unorthodox variety, such as Quakers, and others, like Deists, who were not strictly speaking Christians at all. It seems entirely plausible that the system of pluralism that marks the American founding or the birth of the modern European nation state rests upon a skeptical foundation--i.e., since it was difficult to be certain of fundamental truth, we shouldn't privilege one conviction over another, and so all faiths were welcome that (whatever their internal claims to certainty) at least respected this climate of pluralism based on a certain intellectual humility.
Islam, however, has never doubted itself. While it has tolerated the existence of other faiths, it has relegated them to a clearly second-place position, the philosophical basis for which is that Islam is the one right path and that others are wrong, though Islam agrees that as a matter of historical fact some groups still cling to these erroneous faiths. The Islam that seems to be projecting itself around the world seems not to be infected with the skeptical self-doubt that has infected Western thought and has produced a climate in which since Western man is uncertain about matters of faith he will accept all as equally certain (or uncertain). Into this scheme Islam does not readily fit, since it seems not fundamentally to question itself.
From this, what follows? First, the skepticism of the West is both a good thing and a bad thing. It allows a plurality of philosophical belief, but it does in the end privilege skepticism itself. To the effect that skepticism is more closely allied to science, materialism, and agnosticism, the West tends to privilege these positions over Christian belief, as witness Supreme Court rulings on what may and may not be taught in the public schools. And the certainty of Islam is likewise good and bad. It is good in the sense that it animates Muslim faith and bad because so much of the energy inherent in Islam manifests itself by destroying those who oppose it. If, however, the narrative of West has for the past several centuries been in large part a narrative of skepticism, then Islam, by definition, will have great difficulty fitting in and may in fact pose an existential threat.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Corruption
If one begins, as Aristotle recommends, with a definition, then we might define corruption as the a person in a group or organization making decisions (i.e., using his power) for his own benefit rather than for the benefit of the whole. Corrupt behavior, therefore, which sacrifices the good others to one's own interests, is considered craven and contemptible. The opposite of corruption is heroism, since the hero is almost defined as one who sacrifices his own good--sometimes to the point of his life--for the good of others. One need only look at the roots of our culture to see how much Western society values the heroic and despises the opportunistic: from the self-serving behavior of Agamemnon at the beginning of the Iliad, which causes a complicated skein of bitterness and tragedy, to the heroic, sacrificial love of Christ which resolves the central problem of humanity, Western society has always valued the hero and despised the corrupt. One might observe a paradox in this matter: Western society is indeed individualistic, but the individualism that we seem most to value is that which distinguishes the individual who gives the most to the most.
American society, more than perhaps any other, seems to disdain corruption. If the definition of corruption offered above is accurate, then the Declaration of Independence is not only primarily a denunciation of corruption--a long list of the tyrannical decisions made by King George for his own benefit rather than the benefit of the colonists--but also an assertion of heroic self-sacrifice since at the end despite all odds the signers pledge to give up all they personally value to the point of their lives in order to end this corruption. And if the Constitution, as has often been observed, is a document that prevents the accumulation of power in the hands of a few individuals by encouraging decentralization and at times conflict, then what is that document but a great plan to make corruption as difficult as possible?
Earlier in modern history, the accumulation of power that made corruption possible (nay, even likely, though not inevitable) was aided by a virtually monolithic news media that was relatively left wing. (I have often been amused by how very quickly those who told me in the 1980s that there was no such thing as media bias have claimed with horror that Fox News is biased.) But with increasing rapidity, the new media (this is such a commonplace that I yawn writing it) have decentralized the production and distribution of news, and the American people now have multiple sources of information, which allows them to make more informed decisions about politics--and in particular allows them to see when an individual, group, or organization is corrupt, i.e., acting primarily in their own interest, rather than in the interest of others.
And this ability to interrogate those in power has made corruption less possible in recent years. As the sheer power of the government grows and therefore the temptation to corruption increases, simultaneously the risk of corrupt behavior becomes more pronounced. It is now difficult to remember, but the elections of 1994, which swept Republicans into power in the House of Representatives for the first time in half a century, was a response to the massive corruption, epitomized by the House Post Office scandal. And people heard about this corruption through the new medium of talk radio, which mercilessly flogged the issue of Democrat corruption. Republicans themselves grew so used to Congressional power that they in turn grew corrupt. The practice of earmarks, for example, is a precise example of corruption--the spending of money primarily to further the career of the person casting the vote to spend the money--and such spending, along with other examples of corruption, such as the sexual misbehavior of powerful Republicans on Capitol Hill, met condign reproof in the elections of 2006.
Now, in 2010, we have many pundits and prognosticators who explain to us the various psychological reasons why voters are moving in droves towards the Republican Party. But it is not possible to believe that we have a massive ideological shift in two short years. The reasons are complex, of course, but surely a major (if not the major) reason for the current polls is that Americans have grown impatient with the corruption they see in Democratic Washington. When legislators routinely refused to listen to the expressed will of the people and voted for health-care reform in a patently corrupt process in which special favors were given to some representatives to secure their votes and assure victory, people saw it as an abuse of power. When people hear Candidate Obama decrying holding enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay and then see him continue the practice, or speak of the immorality of rendition and then continue (if not increase) the practice, they begin to get the feeling that this man who seemed during the campaign to use words to heal, transcend, inspire (in short to use language for the benefit of others) was in fact using words simply to increase his own power.
The fitting end to such corruption is that power be taken away from the corrupt who use it for their own benefit. This is the real meaning of the Tea Party. It is a manifestly anticorrupt movement. It has no individual or group of individuals who benefit from its power: it elects unlikely people who are expected to govern not in their own interest but for the good of those who elected them. This is why the Tea Partiers prefer candidates who pledge to eschew earmarks. This is why the ancestors of the Tea Partiers liked term limits: because those too prevent the accumulation of too much power in the hands of the few. And, finally, this is why the watchword of the season is "the Constitution." That is short-hand for promoting a system that limits corruption and encourages genuine, heroic statesmanship that sacrifices personal advantage to the good of the governed.
American society, more than perhaps any other, seems to disdain corruption. If the definition of corruption offered above is accurate, then the Declaration of Independence is not only primarily a denunciation of corruption--a long list of the tyrannical decisions made by King George for his own benefit rather than the benefit of the colonists--but also an assertion of heroic self-sacrifice since at the end despite all odds the signers pledge to give up all they personally value to the point of their lives in order to end this corruption. And if the Constitution, as has often been observed, is a document that prevents the accumulation of power in the hands of a few individuals by encouraging decentralization and at times conflict, then what is that document but a great plan to make corruption as difficult as possible?
Earlier in modern history, the accumulation of power that made corruption possible (nay, even likely, though not inevitable) was aided by a virtually monolithic news media that was relatively left wing. (I have often been amused by how very quickly those who told me in the 1980s that there was no such thing as media bias have claimed with horror that Fox News is biased.) But with increasing rapidity, the new media (this is such a commonplace that I yawn writing it) have decentralized the production and distribution of news, and the American people now have multiple sources of information, which allows them to make more informed decisions about politics--and in particular allows them to see when an individual, group, or organization is corrupt, i.e., acting primarily in their own interest, rather than in the interest of others.
And this ability to interrogate those in power has made corruption less possible in recent years. As the sheer power of the government grows and therefore the temptation to corruption increases, simultaneously the risk of corrupt behavior becomes more pronounced. It is now difficult to remember, but the elections of 1994, which swept Republicans into power in the House of Representatives for the first time in half a century, was a response to the massive corruption, epitomized by the House Post Office scandal. And people heard about this corruption through the new medium of talk radio, which mercilessly flogged the issue of Democrat corruption. Republicans themselves grew so used to Congressional power that they in turn grew corrupt. The practice of earmarks, for example, is a precise example of corruption--the spending of money primarily to further the career of the person casting the vote to spend the money--and such spending, along with other examples of corruption, such as the sexual misbehavior of powerful Republicans on Capitol Hill, met condign reproof in the elections of 2006.
Now, in 2010, we have many pundits and prognosticators who explain to us the various psychological reasons why voters are moving in droves towards the Republican Party. But it is not possible to believe that we have a massive ideological shift in two short years. The reasons are complex, of course, but surely a major (if not the major) reason for the current polls is that Americans have grown impatient with the corruption they see in Democratic Washington. When legislators routinely refused to listen to the expressed will of the people and voted for health-care reform in a patently corrupt process in which special favors were given to some representatives to secure their votes and assure victory, people saw it as an abuse of power. When people hear Candidate Obama decrying holding enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay and then see him continue the practice, or speak of the immorality of rendition and then continue (if not increase) the practice, they begin to get the feeling that this man who seemed during the campaign to use words to heal, transcend, inspire (in short to use language for the benefit of others) was in fact using words simply to increase his own power.
The fitting end to such corruption is that power be taken away from the corrupt who use it for their own benefit. This is the real meaning of the Tea Party. It is a manifestly anticorrupt movement. It has no individual or group of individuals who benefit from its power: it elects unlikely people who are expected to govern not in their own interest but for the good of those who elected them. This is why the Tea Partiers prefer candidates who pledge to eschew earmarks. This is why the ancestors of the Tea Partiers liked term limits: because those too prevent the accumulation of too much power in the hands of the few. And, finally, this is why the watchword of the season is "the Constitution." That is short-hand for promoting a system that limits corruption and encourages genuine, heroic statesmanship that sacrifices personal advantage to the good of the governed.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
I'm Back
After almost two months of lassitude--induced no doubt by this (blasted) Meridian heat--I have returned. Not because it's any cooler (it isn't: it might as well be mid-July around here) but because conscience has pricked me into action. That and the withering example of the early Rudyard Kipling, whose correspondence I have been reading in the excellent edition of Thomas Pinney, recently published. So when he worked in what is now Lahore, Pakistan in the 1880s, Kipling would regularly complain to his correspondents that on such and such a summer's day he would have plied his trade as a journalist for 10 or 12 hours that day, when temperatures were 115 degrees, with a low the previous evening of 90. So if he can do that without ice or airconditioning, a far lesser mortal with all the comfortable advantages of technology can, well, do far less but at the very least do something.
And so, rather than merely thinking about such matters as the success of Sara Palin in picking winners in Republican primaries across the country or President Obama telling us that Muslims have the Constitutional right to build a mosque at Ground Zero without telling us also that Molly Norris, the Seattle journalist now in hiding because of death threats stemming from her asking readers to draw cartoons of Mohammed, has the Constitutional right to live free from such molestation--rather, I say, than merely thinking about such things, I have resolved once again to think about these things with fingertips on keys, as it were, and inform the desperately waiting world just what I think about these matters.
But first things first. Since I have been a sluggard, and since too quick exercise after a lull is bad for the body, I will conclude today with a poem by the later Kipling. Although he wrote it when some say he was past his prime, it is a poem that bears very careful reading, not least because so many of the sentiments it contains can profitably be applied to our own elitists who decry the achievements of the United States in securing liberty for others around the globe. Enjoy.
Memories
1930
"The eradication of memories of the Great War. -SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT ORGAN
The Socialist Government speaks:
THOUGH all the Dead were all forgot
And razed were every tomb,
The Worm-the Worm that dieth not
Compels Us to our doom.
Though all which once was England stands
Subservient to Our will,
The Dead of whom we washed Our hands,
They have observance still.
We laid no finger to Their load.
We multiplied Their woes.
We used Their dearly-opened road
To traffic with Their foes:
And yet to Them men turn their eyes,
To Them are vows renewed
Of Faith, Obedience, Sacrifice,
Honour and Fortitude!
Which things must perish. But Our hour
Comes not by staves or swords
So much as, subtly, through the power
Of small corroding words.
No need to make the plot more plain
By any open thrust;
But-see Their memory is slain
Long ere Their bones are dust!
Wisely, but yearly, filch some wreath-
Lay some proud rite aside-
And daily tarnish with Our breath
The ends for which They died.
Distract, deride, decry, confuse-
(Or-if it serves Us-pray!)
So presently We break the use
And meaning of Their day!
And so, rather than merely thinking about such matters as the success of Sara Palin in picking winners in Republican primaries across the country or President Obama telling us that Muslims have the Constitutional right to build a mosque at Ground Zero without telling us also that Molly Norris, the Seattle journalist now in hiding because of death threats stemming from her asking readers to draw cartoons of Mohammed, has the Constitutional right to live free from such molestation--rather, I say, than merely thinking about such things, I have resolved once again to think about these things with fingertips on keys, as it were, and inform the desperately waiting world just what I think about these matters.
But first things first. Since I have been a sluggard, and since too quick exercise after a lull is bad for the body, I will conclude today with a poem by the later Kipling. Although he wrote it when some say he was past his prime, it is a poem that bears very careful reading, not least because so many of the sentiments it contains can profitably be applied to our own elitists who decry the achievements of the United States in securing liberty for others around the globe. Enjoy.
Memories
1930
"The eradication of memories of the Great War. -SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT ORGAN
The Socialist Government speaks:
THOUGH all the Dead were all forgot
And razed were every tomb,
The Worm-the Worm that dieth not
Compels Us to our doom.
Though all which once was England stands
Subservient to Our will,
The Dead of whom we washed Our hands,
They have observance still.
We laid no finger to Their load.
We multiplied Their woes.
We used Their dearly-opened road
To traffic with Their foes:
And yet to Them men turn their eyes,
To Them are vows renewed
Of Faith, Obedience, Sacrifice,
Honour and Fortitude!
Which things must perish. But Our hour
Comes not by staves or swords
So much as, subtly, through the power
Of small corroding words.
No need to make the plot more plain
By any open thrust;
But-see Their memory is slain
Long ere Their bones are dust!
Wisely, but yearly, filch some wreath-
Lay some proud rite aside-
And daily tarnish with Our breath
The ends for which They died.
Distract, deride, decry, confuse-
(Or-if it serves Us-pray!)
So presently We break the use
And meaning of Their day!
Monday, July 26, 2010
Narrative Freedom
After a summertime hiatus, I return to annoy, vex, or stultify.
Having recently seen the new movie Salt, I have been musing lately on stories and narrative, with which we are beset. Virtually all movies tell stories; so do the television shows that we watch every night. And then there are the novels--whether on the page or on the electronic device--which are apparently still thriving. What is thriving most strongly, however, are the popular novels, meant almost purely for entertainment. Literature exists to instruct and delight, Horace said just a few years B.C. in his Ars Poetica; as if to prove his point, Christ often taught in parables, which do just what Horace enjoined--teach by telling an entertaining story. And this is one major reason that popular novels aren't nearly so good as more artistically-designed works of literature, for while novels like Twilight entertain wonderfully, they fail to teach people much. If they teach anything, they simply recycle bromides that any sensitive reader will have known long since. This I take it is the basis for Harold Bloom's critique of the Harry Potter books: while many praise the books because they at least get children to read, Bloom argues that what they prompt children to read is Stephen King.
No, truly good fiction engages the mind and brings it to ideas that it had not previously considered. And herein lies a perennial gift of the truly good novel: that it is often uneasy with the status quo, which is a valuable gift in an authoritarian country. In The Curtain, Milan Kundera makes this point at some length, and it is as sound a point of criticism as one can find. The good and great novel is often at odds with the ruling orthodoxy, and that is usually a very good thing. Obvious examples come readily to mind: it was fiction that began to peel the lid back from the evil Soviet regime, among them Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, and Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The powerful effect of such work in freeing the mind caught in the totalitarian trap is wonderfully described in Zhengguo Kang's memoir Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China (Norton: 2007), in which one of Kang's great steps toward disillusionment with Mao's regime comes when he is penalized precisely for ordering a copy of Dr. Zhivago from a library in Moscow. And that freedom of mind is a great gift to all of us, for the world is better off with Kang's book than without it; the logical extension of this insight is that the world would be a much, much better place if Mao's 70 million victims had been allowed to live and all Chinese had been free over the past 60 years to pursue medicine, science, and the arts.
It is not entirely clear what lies behind the power of the novel to resist authoritarian regimes. Perhaps it is the way in which, as Aristotle points out, art imitates reality, and the frank discussion of reality is precisely what the authoritarian regime, with its reliance on lies and disinformation, cannot abide. I wonder if its power might also derive from what Ian McEwan's fictional novelist Briony Tallis asserts is the novelist's God-like power to arrange the fictional world as (s)he wishes (though her use of that power in McEwan's Atonementis--on my reading--far from beneficial). And, as God is Truth and authoritarian governments cannot stand Truth, so they have shown over the past century that they also cannot abide God. Inded, as Dostoevski, another revolutionary novelist ill at ease in the society of his day, puts it, "Where there is no God, anything is permitted." The totalitarian state must remove God's presence before it can act on its most inhumane desires.
But the authoritarianism challenged by the novel does not always have to be hard to be threatened by the good work of fiction. One reason (among many) that McEwan is so commanding a writer is that he does not acquiesce easily in the current attitudes of the Western intellectual elite. In his novel Saturday, set in the first third of this decade, the invasion of Iraq has recently occurred, and McEwan allows two of his main characters to make cogent arguments both against the invasion and for it. One can imagine how the evenhandedness of his treatment, so true to the complextity of opinion in a liberal democracy, must have offended the intellectuals most likely to read his book. So also in Atonement, the fact that the great sin of the novel is a false accusation of rape flies in the face of much of the sanctimonious attitudes of the present day, according to which the male is always the aggressor and the female always the victim. In a culture regularly fed such ideas, McEwan's plot serves to remind us that reality is more complex than those in power (whether politically or culturally) find it convenient to say.
This isn't to say that the hostility of the good novel to current assumptions doesn't at times grow tiresome. For one who holds dear much of that attacked so ponderously in Samuel Butler's Way of All Flesh, I find the book tiresome in the extreme, though it certainly played a role, as did Strachey's Eminent Victorians in helping modern culture sharply deride a society which, for all its flaws, produced much that was very good indeed. On the other hand, the novels of Dickens generally (and Hard Times and The Old Curiosity Shop particularly) must have been enormously educational for those who read them in the mid-Victorian era and must have helped to further some of the great reform movements of the period. The same is true of a book like Uncle Tom's Cabin here in America. And it certainly is true of such European masterpieces as Gogol's Dead Souls, which movingly ridicules the very corrupt system of serfdom as practiced in nineteenth-century Russia, or Hugo's Les Miserables, which, like all of Hugo's novels, is animated in part by his indignation against accepted social practices of his time.
The cheap, best-selling novels (of which there were plenty when Dickens, Gogol, Stowe, and Hugo were writing) don't engage the mind in this way. They spark the adrenalin, or they address the heart; they do not, however, teach us much about life, and when we put them down, we remain unchanged, except in the most superficial ways. And so I offer as my review of Salt that while it always engages the eyes, which are preoccupied with Angelina Jolie and with Angelina Jolie performing feats of derring do that pin the viewer's eyes to the screen, it doesn't teach us anything that we didn't learn from watching Jason Bourne or James Bond.
Having recently seen the new movie Salt, I have been musing lately on stories and narrative, with which we are beset. Virtually all movies tell stories; so do the television shows that we watch every night. And then there are the novels--whether on the page or on the electronic device--which are apparently still thriving. What is thriving most strongly, however, are the popular novels, meant almost purely for entertainment. Literature exists to instruct and delight, Horace said just a few years B.C. in his Ars Poetica; as if to prove his point, Christ often taught in parables, which do just what Horace enjoined--teach by telling an entertaining story. And this is one major reason that popular novels aren't nearly so good as more artistically-designed works of literature, for while novels like Twilight entertain wonderfully, they fail to teach people much. If they teach anything, they simply recycle bromides that any sensitive reader will have known long since. This I take it is the basis for Harold Bloom's critique of the Harry Potter books: while many praise the books because they at least get children to read, Bloom argues that what they prompt children to read is Stephen King.
No, truly good fiction engages the mind and brings it to ideas that it had not previously considered. And herein lies a perennial gift of the truly good novel: that it is often uneasy with the status quo, which is a valuable gift in an authoritarian country. In The Curtain, Milan Kundera makes this point at some length, and it is as sound a point of criticism as one can find. The good and great novel is often at odds with the ruling orthodoxy, and that is usually a very good thing. Obvious examples come readily to mind: it was fiction that began to peel the lid back from the evil Soviet regime, among them Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, and Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The powerful effect of such work in freeing the mind caught in the totalitarian trap is wonderfully described in Zhengguo Kang's memoir Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China (Norton: 2007), in which one of Kang's great steps toward disillusionment with Mao's regime comes when he is penalized precisely for ordering a copy of Dr. Zhivago from a library in Moscow. And that freedom of mind is a great gift to all of us, for the world is better off with Kang's book than without it; the logical extension of this insight is that the world would be a much, much better place if Mao's 70 million victims had been allowed to live and all Chinese had been free over the past 60 years to pursue medicine, science, and the arts.
It is not entirely clear what lies behind the power of the novel to resist authoritarian regimes. Perhaps it is the way in which, as Aristotle points out, art imitates reality, and the frank discussion of reality is precisely what the authoritarian regime, with its reliance on lies and disinformation, cannot abide. I wonder if its power might also derive from what Ian McEwan's fictional novelist Briony Tallis asserts is the novelist's God-like power to arrange the fictional world as (s)he wishes (though her use of that power in McEwan's Atonementis--on my reading--far from beneficial). And, as God is Truth and authoritarian governments cannot stand Truth, so they have shown over the past century that they also cannot abide God. Inded, as Dostoevski, another revolutionary novelist ill at ease in the society of his day, puts it, "Where there is no God, anything is permitted." The totalitarian state must remove God's presence before it can act on its most inhumane desires.
But the authoritarianism challenged by the novel does not always have to be hard to be threatened by the good work of fiction. One reason (among many) that McEwan is so commanding a writer is that he does not acquiesce easily in the current attitudes of the Western intellectual elite. In his novel Saturday, set in the first third of this decade, the invasion of Iraq has recently occurred, and McEwan allows two of his main characters to make cogent arguments both against the invasion and for it. One can imagine how the evenhandedness of his treatment, so true to the complextity of opinion in a liberal democracy, must have offended the intellectuals most likely to read his book. So also in Atonement, the fact that the great sin of the novel is a false accusation of rape flies in the face of much of the sanctimonious attitudes of the present day, according to which the male is always the aggressor and the female always the victim. In a culture regularly fed such ideas, McEwan's plot serves to remind us that reality is more complex than those in power (whether politically or culturally) find it convenient to say.
This isn't to say that the hostility of the good novel to current assumptions doesn't at times grow tiresome. For one who holds dear much of that attacked so ponderously in Samuel Butler's Way of All Flesh, I find the book tiresome in the extreme, though it certainly played a role, as did Strachey's Eminent Victorians in helping modern culture sharply deride a society which, for all its flaws, produced much that was very good indeed. On the other hand, the novels of Dickens generally (and Hard Times and The Old Curiosity Shop particularly) must have been enormously educational for those who read them in the mid-Victorian era and must have helped to further some of the great reform movements of the period. The same is true of a book like Uncle Tom's Cabin here in America. And it certainly is true of such European masterpieces as Gogol's Dead Souls, which movingly ridicules the very corrupt system of serfdom as practiced in nineteenth-century Russia, or Hugo's Les Miserables, which, like all of Hugo's novels, is animated in part by his indignation against accepted social practices of his time.
The cheap, best-selling novels (of which there were plenty when Dickens, Gogol, Stowe, and Hugo were writing) don't engage the mind in this way. They spark the adrenalin, or they address the heart; they do not, however, teach us much about life, and when we put them down, we remain unchanged, except in the most superficial ways. And so I offer as my review of Salt that while it always engages the eyes, which are preoccupied with Angelina Jolie and with Angelina Jolie performing feats of derring do that pin the viewer's eyes to the screen, it doesn't teach us anything that we didn't learn from watching Jason Bourne or James Bond.
Monday, June 28, 2010
The Technology of Terror
I began life as a conservative, a happy inheritance from my father, who was an instinctive conservative brought up in rural Oklahoma and a career officer and combat veteran in the U.S. Army. I cut my intellectual teeth on William F. Buckley, Jr., a stray reference from whom sent me off to read Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France," which has rightly been called the foundational text of modern conservatism. So enchanted was I with Burke--and the way in which he enlisted the arguments of Shakespeare's Duke of York against Richard II's seizure of private property and those of Dryden on the importance of the monarchy in "Absalom and Achitophel"--that I wrote about Burke in college and graduate school, thereby establishing an intellectual basis for my political convictions. All of which is to say that from early days I was in what is now called the paleo-conservative camp. But that camp, I now see, emphasizes the unchanging elements of human existence and says in effect that an understanding of human nature as it has always been furnishes us with a sufficient basis for political principles. In this way, the paleo-conservatives, invaluable as are their contributions to political thought, overlook the importance of technology, which, if it isn't slowly altering human nature is at least so powerfully and ineradicably changing our environment as to suggest important refinements in the way we think about politics.
This realization, I think, is one of the most important insights of the neo-conservatives, who helped formulate, for instance, the Bush doctrine of preemptive war, an innovation which is justifiable only because technology has so radically altered the conditions of life. When leaving office, George Washington could well enjoin the nation to a kind of isolationism; now, however, in a world of ICBMs and international suicide attacks, such isolationism and so strictly defensive a military posture is almost impossible. Hence it is no surprise that Robert Byrd, who passed away today, was so proud of his vote opposing the invasion of Iraq (an invasion, it is well to remember, supported at the time by virtually all the main Democratic players currently in Washington, DC). Byrd was a very old man, whose attitude toward life was well set before many of the technological advances which have led to what Raymond Aron called "universal history": the condition in which what happens in, say, the Soviet Union matters greatly in the far-flung corners of the globe because the Soviet Union is, through technology, able to project its power to those remote locations. Byrd's speech against the war resolution was an admirable appeal to essentially nineteenth-century conditions of life. He gave a beautifully nostalgic speech, but it was not a speech notable for its clear assessment of life in a world with cruise missiles.
The past century presents a wonderful test case for both the paleo- and neo-conservatives. Pose the question as to why the past century was the bloodiest in recorded human history--with 6 million murdered in Germany, 30 million in the Soviet Union, 70 million, by the estimate of Jung Chang, in Mao's China, to say nothing of the horrors of Cambodia and the smaller terrors of Uganda--and the neos and paleos will very likely give very different answers. For the paleos, the problem lies with the deadly turn toward atheism combined with totalitarianism, essentially a philosophical or spiritual problem, the results of which were so clearly predicted by Nietzsche and Dostoevski in such different idioms. The neos wouldn't disagree, but they would be more willing to emphasize the rise of technology, which allowed unparalleled surveillance, control, and destruction of such vast populations as occurred in the twentieth century.
For this reason, while the paleos are more likely to emphasize what the pundits call the social issues, the neos are more likely to emphasize the libertarian commitment to freedom for all and limitation of government. Not that paleos don't support these values as well, but the energy that they bring to the cause is often less intense than the energy that they devote to the social issues. For this reason, it seems to me, Orwell is perhaps more the patron saint of the neo-conservatives, because of his horror of the fear that can be induced by technology once the people have ceded their liberty to the state; for the paleos, Burke, with his emphasis on the organic nature of society and the proper relation between government and human nature, is the fons et origo of conservative philosophy.
I suppose that I am meandering to a conclusion along the lines of this: while I had for many years viewed myself as the very model of a modern paleo-conservative, I now find myself with an increasing sympathy for the neo-conservative tribe. I don't think that the two approaches are at all incompatible, but I think that we are very ill served by the suspicion (not to say vituperation) with which the paleos sometimes speak of the neos. I think that often the neos and paleos take the views they do less because of a careful reflection upon first principles than because of intuitions or lines of influence and inheritance (as I once did). We would all do well, however, to reflect clearly on the extent to which the neo-conservative weltanschauung is governed by a consciousness of the importance of technology and the very great dangers it poses for tyranny when evil people apply that technology to bad ends. In a more colloquial idiom--we can all be libertarians and then focus on the social conditions that we would like to see uppermost in a society that has been secured from external threats and soft tyrannies at home.
This realization, I think, is one of the most important insights of the neo-conservatives, who helped formulate, for instance, the Bush doctrine of preemptive war, an innovation which is justifiable only because technology has so radically altered the conditions of life. When leaving office, George Washington could well enjoin the nation to a kind of isolationism; now, however, in a world of ICBMs and international suicide attacks, such isolationism and so strictly defensive a military posture is almost impossible. Hence it is no surprise that Robert Byrd, who passed away today, was so proud of his vote opposing the invasion of Iraq (an invasion, it is well to remember, supported at the time by virtually all the main Democratic players currently in Washington, DC). Byrd was a very old man, whose attitude toward life was well set before many of the technological advances which have led to what Raymond Aron called "universal history": the condition in which what happens in, say, the Soviet Union matters greatly in the far-flung corners of the globe because the Soviet Union is, through technology, able to project its power to those remote locations. Byrd's speech against the war resolution was an admirable appeal to essentially nineteenth-century conditions of life. He gave a beautifully nostalgic speech, but it was not a speech notable for its clear assessment of life in a world with cruise missiles.
The past century presents a wonderful test case for both the paleo- and neo-conservatives. Pose the question as to why the past century was the bloodiest in recorded human history--with 6 million murdered in Germany, 30 million in the Soviet Union, 70 million, by the estimate of Jung Chang, in Mao's China, to say nothing of the horrors of Cambodia and the smaller terrors of Uganda--and the neos and paleos will very likely give very different answers. For the paleos, the problem lies with the deadly turn toward atheism combined with totalitarianism, essentially a philosophical or spiritual problem, the results of which were so clearly predicted by Nietzsche and Dostoevski in such different idioms. The neos wouldn't disagree, but they would be more willing to emphasize the rise of technology, which allowed unparalleled surveillance, control, and destruction of such vast populations as occurred in the twentieth century.
For this reason, while the paleos are more likely to emphasize what the pundits call the social issues, the neos are more likely to emphasize the libertarian commitment to freedom for all and limitation of government. Not that paleos don't support these values as well, but the energy that they bring to the cause is often less intense than the energy that they devote to the social issues. For this reason, it seems to me, Orwell is perhaps more the patron saint of the neo-conservatives, because of his horror of the fear that can be induced by technology once the people have ceded their liberty to the state; for the paleos, Burke, with his emphasis on the organic nature of society and the proper relation between government and human nature, is the fons et origo of conservative philosophy.
I suppose that I am meandering to a conclusion along the lines of this: while I had for many years viewed myself as the very model of a modern paleo-conservative, I now find myself with an increasing sympathy for the neo-conservative tribe. I don't think that the two approaches are at all incompatible, but I think that we are very ill served by the suspicion (not to say vituperation) with which the paleos sometimes speak of the neos. I think that often the neos and paleos take the views they do less because of a careful reflection upon first principles than because of intuitions or lines of influence and inheritance (as I once did). We would all do well, however, to reflect clearly on the extent to which the neo-conservative weltanschauung is governed by a consciousness of the importance of technology and the very great dangers it poses for tyranny when evil people apply that technology to bad ends. In a more colloquial idiom--we can all be libertarians and then focus on the social conditions that we would like to see uppermost in a society that has been secured from external threats and soft tyrannies at home.
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