There is this tension:
Christianity popularized an important opinion, already implicit in the teaching of the Stoics, but foreign to the general spirit of antiquity . . . the opinion that a man’s duty to God is more imperative than his duty to the State [Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1972), p. xvi].
Prescinding for a moment from the rancid controversies any mention of the Deity provokes, only the slenderest thread of cause and effect, beset from every quarter by historical contingency, has resulted in our present sensibility, which is to say, the disposition towards unmodulated Individualism of present-day citizens of the United States of America.
This opinion – that “we ought to obey God rather than Man,” as Socrates and the Apostles said – survived the conversion of Constantine because the early Christian emperors were Arians or inclined to Arianism. When the emperors became orthodox, it fell into abeyance. In the Byzantine Empire it remained latent, as also in the subsequent Russian Empire, which derived its Christianity from Constantinople. But in the West . . . the superiority of religious to political allegiance survived [ibid.]
What Russell – a militant atheist as it happens – proposes here is breathtaking: Had the Arian tendencies of the first string of Christian emperors prevailed, then the fusion of the State with religion would have been unstoppable! In that regard, note his observations on subsequent events in the Eastern Empire and Russia.
The actual details of the Arian “heresy” are monumentally unimportant. What does matter is that temporal power, for a not inconsiderable time, was opposed by spiritual power. The antagonism of Church and State was real and quite consequential. Thanks to argumentative Christian bishops such as St. Athanasius, the Church prevailed in the end. Emperor Theodosius the Great (d. AD 395) embraced orthodoxy, and relinquished what has been called “Caesaropapism”; in other words, he rejected Arianism and bowed to the Church’s opinion in matters spiritual. The unholy amalgamation of political and spiritual authority was avoided. That led to an enduring split between the State and the individual, which, by and by, led to the Reformation and the establishment of the United States of America.
Here is Calvin Coolidge (Ronald Reagan’s favorite president), speaking in Philadelphia on July 4, 1926, the sesquicentennial of the Declaration of Independence.
It is not here necessary to examine in detail the causes which led to the American Revolution. In their immediate occasion they were largely economic. The colonists objected to the navigation laws which interfered with their trade, they denied the power of Parliament to impose taxes which they were obliged to pay, and they therefore resisted the royal governors and the royal forces which were sent to secure obedience to these laws. But the conviction is inescapable that a new civilization had come, a new spirit had arisen on this side of the Atlantic more advanced and more developed in its regard for the rights of the individual than that which characterized the Old World. Life in a new and open country had aspirations which could not be realized in any subordinate position. A separate establishment was ultimately inevitable. It had been decreed by the very laws of human nature. Man everywhere has an unconquerable desire to be the master of his own destiny [emphases supplied].
Coolidge, it is worth mentioning, was born on the Fourth (1872). Of particular interest is the following excerpt:
The idea that the people have a right to choose their own rulers was not new in political history. It was the foundation of every popular attempt to depose an undesirable king. This right was set out with a good deal of detail by the Dutch when as early as July 26, 1581, they declared their independence of Philip of Spain. In their long struggle with the Stuarts the British people asserted the same principles, which finally culminated in the Bill of Rights deposing the last of that house and placing William and Mary on the throne. In each of these cases sovereignty through divine right was displaced by sovereignty through the consent of the people. Running through the same documents, though expressed in different terms, is the clear inference of inalienable rights. But we should search these charters in vain for an assertion of the doctrine of equality. This principle had not before appeared as an official political declaration of any nation. It was profoundly revolutionary. It is one of the corner stones of American institutions [emphasis supplied].
Coolidge arrives at the religious foundations of the Declaration and the Constitution:
The choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God’s own allowance.
This doctrine found wide acceptance among the nonconformist clergy who later made up the Congregational Church. The great apostle of this movement was the Rev. John Wise, of Massachusetts. . . . Wise published a treatise, entitled “The Church’s Quarrel Espoused,” in 1710, which was amplified in another publication in 1717. In it he dealt with the principles of civil government. His works were reprinted in 1772 and have been declared to have been nothing less than a textbook of liberty for our Revolutionary fathers.
While the written word was the foundation, it is apparent that the spoken word was the vehicle for convincing the people. This came with great force and wide range from the successors of Hooker and Wise, It was carried on with a missionary spirit which did not fail to reach the Scotch-Irish of North Carolina, showing its influence by significantly making that Colony the first to give instructions to its delegates looking to independence. This preaching reached the neighborhood of Thomas Jefferson, who acknowledged that his “best ideas of democracy” had been secured at church meetings.
That these ideas were prevalent in Virginia is further revealed by the Declaration of Rights, which was prepared by George Mason and presented to the general assembly on May 27, 1776. This document asserted popular sovereignty and inherent natural rights, but confined the doctrine of equality to the assertion that “All men are created equally free and independent.” It can scarcely be imagined that Jefferson was unacquainted with what had been done in his own Commonwealth of Virginia when he took up the task of drafting the Declaration of Independence. But these thoughts can very largely be traced back to what John Wise was writing in 1710. He said, “Every man must be acknowledged equal to every man.” Again, “The end of all good government is to cultivate humanity and promote the happiness of all and the good of every man in all his rights, his life, liberty, estate, honor, and so forth . . . .” And again, “For as they have a power every man in his natural state, so upon combination they can and do bequeath this power to others and settle it according as their united discretion shall determine.” And still again, “Democracy is Christ’s government in church and state.” Here was the doctrine of equality, popular sovereignty, and the substance of the theory of inalienable rights clearly asserted by Wise at the opening of the eighteenth century. . . .
When we take all these circumstances into consideration, it is but natural that the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence should open with a reference to Nature’s God and should close in the final paragraphs with an appeal to the Supreme Judge of the world and an assertion of a firm reliance on Divine Providence. Coming from these sources, having as it did this background, it is no wonder that Samuel Adams could say “The people seem to recognize this resolution as though it were a decree promulgated from heaven.”
No one can examine this record and escape the conclusion that in the great outline of its principles the Declaration was the result of the religious teachings of the preceding period [emphasis supplied].
So then, our devotion to Individualism has an ancient pedigree – descending, from the humbling of the Caesars, through Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, and Samuel Wise, to Jefferson and Adams – which is the fruit of a peculiar tension between the claims of the State and the claims of God. That, I think, is undeniable as a matter of history.
Yet what has happened, in the 20th century and beyond, to those divine claims? Have they become merely rhetorical, matters of ”Ceremonial Deism,” as Justice William Brennan dismissively described them? That religiously inspired Individualism is now become a rampant secular Individualism, a radical Individualism. From abortion to the “right” of homosexuals, not simply to tolerance, but to out-and-out approval, those who most loudly announce such rights do not claim them under any other auspices – Do they not? – than the hallowed doctrine of Individualism. Such rights are claimed under the Constitution and its protections for the individual.
I sometimes wonder that the besetting sin of American politics is that we have a written constitution, which is to say, a legal document, in so many words, over which lawyers may litigate, where they may discover, by the lawyerly arts, the implications and “adumbrations” that have been legally upheld to protect infanticide and the right to sodomy (q.v., Dick the Butcher: “First thing, we kill all the lawyers,” Henry VI,” act 2).
Not one of those new-found rights – the discovery of which in the Constitution is as likely as discovering reserves of oil beneath Central Park, yet that seems not to matter – would have any purchase at all on popular assent were it not for the fetish of Individualism that Americans are prone to indulge more or less unthinkingly, a disposition best summed up in Franklin’s revolutionary motto: ”Don’t Tread on Me!” Take away the written text, the sense of which is always arguable, and one would be left with an “unwritten Constitution” in which appeals to custom and culture and, yes, to religious traditions, are permissible in deciding claims at law.
Of course, reverting to an unwritten Constitution is no longer feasible or even possible. Therefore we are stuck with this document, which has proven to be alarmingly malleable to the rather far-reaching purposes of unfettered Individualism. Yet, at the same time, the tenor of present-day Conservatism, especially when confronted with a monstrosity seemingly as alien as Barack Obama, is to repair to the defenses that Individualism – versus Collectivism, I mean to say – provides.
Can we, as Conservatives, remedy this dilemma, if dilemma it be, in a principled way without hiring better lawyers?
Comments 29
“Can we, as Conservatives remedy this dilemma, if dilemma it be, in a principled way without hiring better lawyers?”
Quite honestly, Joe NS, I don’t think we can — at least not through political measures analogous to those you cite from the modern left.
He who prefers small government is always at a disadvantage, if he allows the proposition to be defined solely in the terms of the means of government. Our Founders wrestled mightily with this, of course. Their “thing” was to set up a government that acted powerfully as a brake on itself.
The proper functioning of the mechanism begins to go awry, however, when too many of the people learn to see government action as a method of furthering “individualism.” In fact, however, that’s a false proposition. It’s the restraint of government that promotes individualism. Government is inherently antithetical to individualism: one of its handful of main functions is the punishment of aberrations.
This doesn’t mean there’s no role for government in giving security to individualism, but it does mean that the role of government is to provide security by negation. In the case of homosexuals, for example, government’s role is to enforce laws against assault. In all times and places, some men have assaulted others over gay behavior. (Yes, even in modern Iran.)
Government’s role is not to inquire into the opinions, prejudices, and predispositions to approval or rejection of homosexuals held by others. By definition, government taking a stand on that set of issues, in a moral sense, is government setting boundaries on individualism.
We do routinely accept boundaries on our individualism, and accept the role of the state in enforcing them. If we all executed contracts differently, and had differing ideas of what constituted fulfillment of them, no business would ever get done, and trust outside the family unit would be impossible.
Of course we accept — we want — enforced boundaries on the expression of individualism through violence. There’s a level of boundary-setting that we agree to charter the government with so that we don’t all have to post guards on our roofs with high-powered rifles, 24/7.
The reason we find ourselves having to decide which forms of individualism to tolerate and which not is that the idea of government as a positive promoter of individualism has got hold of our polity. A century ago virtually all Americans would have said a man’s beliefs about homosexuality were his own damn business, period, end of story.
And this is the key: in any argument about whether “that stuff” should be discussed more openly by the public, the universal agreement would have been that it was not the federal government’s place to either referee the discussion, or enter it at all. Homosexual behavior as a question of public decency belonged at the level of township or city government. The purpose of the American government — that shining constitutional city on the hill of political enterprise — was not to adopt an opinion on homosexuality, but to safeguard the liberty of all its citizens to hold their own, in peace.
As long as we concede the modern-day apostate principle that the purpose of federal government is to enforce specific and exclusionary ideas of “individualism” on the whole nation, conservatives will always lose this argument. This idea contains the error of imagining government, in general, to be a positive administrator of “rights” and “individualism” (separate concepts). But government can only punish to obtain outcomes; it is inherently a negative administrator. It has to restrict the “individuality” of some in order to enforce the unfettered “individualism” apportioned to others.
(The dichotomy of the realms of temporal and spiritual government turns on this hinge: it is the realm of spiritual government that has positive inducements in its kit bag. That’s why Jesus didn’t say “Don’t do to others what you wish they wouldn’t do to you.” He said: “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.” These are two very different statements. The first can be enforced, through punishment, by an armed state. The second can only spring from the individual human will, acting optimistically on an ideal; it cannot be induced through punishment.)
The conservative concept of government is that we must be exceedingly careful and choosy about what forms of “individualism” we elect to protect. Protecting them with government means threatening punishment — that is what government is, inherently, there for. It cannot have a transcendant spiritual purpose. Hence, the more forms of “individualism” being protected, the larger government’s charter over our lives, and the less liberty we have.
Our Founders went through all these discussions and arguments in the 1780s, when it became clear to them that they really would have the opportunity to charter a new kind of government. They purposely restrained government because they knew, as well as any other generation, how activism by government slowly and inevitably distorts the life of man, and how easily government could evolve from the servant of free men’s liberties to their master.
August 8th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Russell says that the “opinion… that `we ought to obey God rather than Man’… remained latent” in the Byzantine Empire, but survived in the West. Does he explain why? If not, one ought to wonder whether this cultural difference between the West and the regions that became the Byzantine empire is more than an accidental result of the politics surrounding the Arian heresy. For example, wasn’t the West dominated by Germanic and Celtic peoples who might have brought these individualistic tendencies from their ancestral cultures?
August 8th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
Pretty nice analysis, but seems devoid of any discussion of how government in the country has always used state power to enforce the belief that even absolutely non-public homosexual conduct is criminal.
August 8th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
By the way, that seems like an awful lot of words from Coolidge. Time to re-assess another caricature, I guess.
August 8th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
A written constitution is a better defense against governmental overreaching than the political and cultural biases of judges or legislators. When liberals invoke a “living constitution” they are at least implicitly acknowledging the stiff-necked persistence of the “dead” one. Modern America does not have a common cultural consensus apart from endorsing that variation on La Rochefoucauld’s best known maxim.
August 8th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Britain, which to my knowledge lacks a written constitution, has managed to ‘discover’ the right to infanticide and sodomy. A written constitution may not prevent the contortions described, but a lack of one does not prevent them either.
August 8th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
fuster — that’s an inversion of reality. The reason there have been local and state laws prohibiting homosexual behavior (virtually all of which are off the books now) is that the people wanted to see that behavior prohibited, restricted, or punished.
The law was not imposing on the beliefs of a majority of the people, by accepting their charter to treat the behavior as criminal. This is not an argument that it was “right,” in an absolute sense, to have such laws. It’s simple reality: the law reflected the will of the people.
In my view, the small government argument is the best one against having laws prohibiting homosexual behavior between consenting adults. Government doesn’t exist to make gays and lesbians feel good about themselves, or require others to register positive approval of their conduct or personalities. Neither does it exist to apply societal sanctions to their sex lives. Either of those propositions gives government too big a charter.
But this posture has been one that evolved with societal mores, while adhering to an original principle. The Founders’ principle is valid: they just didn’t apply it, forcibly, to local government, in framing the Constitution. They deliberately avoided doing that, except on a very few topics. They did not see it as being in any way the role of the federal government to intersect with the sex lives of the people — but they accepted the longstanding, traditional role of local government in that realm, mainly by not seeking to overturn it.
Every complex society that has ever existed has had laws governing sex, and most of them have at one time or another prohibited homosexual behavior, particularly among men. We had to become very wealthy, and able to survive as we do today, with millions of people living beyond sheer subsistence and outside traditional family units, before the idea of homosexual behavior as a danger to societal cohesion and survival could start to fade.
Societal ideas about homosexuality have shifted, but that doesn’t mean that the Founders’ political principles were wrong, in that they didn’t root out local ordinances on sodomy back in 1789. Small government and federalism remain better principles than big government and centralization, in terms of guaranteeing liberties.
It is a liberty, and one to be protected, to do whatever you want with another consenting adult in your bedroom, and not have the police show up.
But it is not a “liberty,” or anything you are owed, to have others be required to approve of your behavior in a public forum, or to subsidize it, or have their children taught your perspective on it.
The Founders’ principles were compatible with the first idea of liberty, although some of the things we think fall in that category have changed since 1789.
The Founders’ principles are violated by the second idea of liberty.
August 8th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
JE, quite the understatement, that, but I agree entirely. You then go on to say:
Here, however, I am not sure what is being implied in the word “beliefs.” Certainly, as a matter of positive law, the beliefs of “virtually all Americans” showed up somehow in statutes criminalizing homosexual behavior. It’s true that such statutes were mostly precatory and often went unenforced. But, like similar laws on prostitution, they periodically were enforced. I have no problem with that, and I’m unashamed to admit it. But the decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which effectively overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, as well as the generally ho-hum reaction in the public at large, demonstrates just how far the legal warrant that Individualism extends to behavior has widened in less than 20 years.
Peter, Russell doesn’t explicitly answer your question, but an answer consistent with his “history of philosophy” is not difficult to educe. Islam. The Eastern Empire bore the awful brunt of the Islamic assault almost entirely on its own for the first 400 years after the death of Mohammed. Combined with the split between the Western and Eastern churches that commenced in the Ninth Century, the religious nature of the Muslim threat compounded the role of the Emperor as defender of and supreme authority over both State and Church, especially after the other eastern Patriarchates at Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria were overrun by the Crescent. The Church of Constantinople was left on its own – the start-and-stop incursions of Crusaders from the West notwithstanding (the Fourth Crusade actually wasted a good deal of energy conquering Constantinople!).
The Byzantines found themselves spiritually severed from the West, while in their own sphere they were in mortal peril. Caesaropapism might almost be seen as inevitable under those circumstances. As Russell points out, Russia, which took its brand of Christianity from Constantinople, similarly joined the head of the Church with the head of the State in the person of the Tsar. A culture of complete dependency by the Russian people on the State resulted, with no “higher authority” to appeal to, something which the Bolsheviks were shrewd enough to exploit.
In the West the situation was much different. The Germanic tribes that overturned the Western Empire in the Fifth Century presented no religious threat to the Roman Church. Within a few centuries most were Christianized, for the most part voluntarily. Still, by the Eleventh Century, the Popes and the Holy Roman Emperors, who were Salic Germans, found themselves at loggerheads over these same questions in the famous Investiture Controversy. Where was the boundary between spiritual and temporal authority? To whom did the subjects of the Emperor, who were also Catholics, owe allegiance? Broadly speaking, two parties sprang up: the Guelphs by and large supported the Pope, the Ghibellines the Emperor. Under Innocent III (d. 1218), the papacy seemed for a while to have finally triumphed.
The important lesson here is that, regardless of who won through, the brief period of about 75 years in the Fourth Century, when the orthodox, i.e., the catholic, Church contended with heretical emperors and brought them to heel doctrinally, was of incalculable significance for the development of the West politically because men everywhere, but especially the Bishops of Rome, got it in their heads undislodgeably that there was a power above the State to which the temporal power was rightly subservient.
It is therefore all the more ironic when the Reformers, revolted by an all-too-temporally minded Church flung the same accusation in the face of Leo X, claiming they owed no fundamental allegiance to so quasi-imperial an entity as the Roman Catholic Church had by then (early 16th cent.) become. This principle, once established, was demonstratively fissiparous, leading to schism upon schism within Reform Protestantism itself. One obscure sect, the Pilgrim Brethren, brought this spirit of liberty of conscience with them to the English colonies in North America, to where they were soon followed by the Puritans, who had themselves broken with the Church of England over the exact same controversy. The rest is history, a portion of which only is the main subject of Calvin Coolidge’s astonishing Fourth of July Address. Can you imagine a president today delivering such a speech? (Coolidge wrote it himself!) Barack Obama on his best day isn’t a patch on Coolidge.
August 8th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
@J.E. Dyer – Thanks for the expansion I requested.
Perhaps we’re fated to argue about everything.
When I said “enforce the belief” I meant exactly that government was used to enforce the belief of the majority, your “the will of the people.”
Of course, you’re still omitting the role of federal law in enforcing same, but I’ve read some of your thoughts on some part of that subject elsewhere.
August 8th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Yes, I had considered that, but I think you’re only half correct. Consider this: Abortion laws in Britain are decidedly more restrictive than here. Nothing like “infanticide” is legal there or anywhere else in Europe, as I understand it, whereas our abortion regime is utterly radical, prohibiting infanticide in name only. The British position is, I would argue, drawn from unwritten and ageless custom, which carries a lot of weight in a country with an unwritten Constitution. American law on the subject, particularly Doe v. Bolton, derives from so-called Constitutional adjudication of the right to privacy, the blackest of black-letter law. Bolton, I maintain, is a decision that would have been impossible to arrive at in Britain. I could be wrong, however.
August 8th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
That “unwritten and ageless custom” could soon include sharia – and has already included hefty doses of socialism. Be careful what you wish for.
August 8th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
fuster — you’ll have to explain what you’re talking about when you speak of “the role of federal law in enforcing same.” We seem to be discussing sodomy laws — at least that’s what I have been discussing — and there has been no federal role in enforcing them. Local authorities and states have had sodomy laws. The federal government not intervening against that does not constitute the federal government having a role in enforcement of those laws.
That’s what the concept of “federalism” is all about. We’ve gotten away from it in some ways over time, but it was the original organizing principle of our system of unified states. Arguing from the principle of federalism is arguing from history and reality.
On the other hand, suggesting that the federal government should have intervened against state or local laws that clearly violated no element of the Constitution is to apply the thinking children are taught in school in 2009, to an America that was not intended to operate that way.
August 9th, 2009 at 11:28 am
@J.E. Dyer – Don’t ask, Dyer, and I won’t tell you.
How about no federal jobs with access to secret information for homosexuals because of the risk of blackmail. Wasn’t it one of the Hoover FBI’s tasks to vet for homosexuality?
August 9th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Joe NS — a clarification: when I spoke of the “beliefs” of people about homosexuality, I was referring to each individual’s moral code about it. Our tradition in the US has long been that law applies to actions, not beliefs.
That does make a difference. Enforcing sodomy laws on that principle requires finding actual gay behavior, and then applying a punishment. The law did not require citizens to, for example, undergo state inspections certifying that they personally opposed homosexuality, any more than it required them to be certified as mentally opposing train-robbing or cattle theft. Nor did it provide a basis for lawsuits to be brought against citizens who spoke surly or disparaging words against marriage, or straight couples.
It’s in the migration toward imposing the latter kinds of obligations on citizens that our idea of the law, qua law, has changed in the last century. Regardless of the subject of law, too many people have a tendency to expect it to be drafted and used on this model. This is a bad trend, and has taken us a long way toward intolerant collectivism. My contention is that any law administered by humans must, inevitably, trend in this direction over time — unless a conscious brake is perpetually applied on the scope and intrusiveness of the law, and on the idea of law held by the public. It is, in my view, an absolute evil that temporal law has been transformed in the eyes of the American public, in the space of 200 years, from a necessary evil, a servant of the public weal that requires being held in check by vigilance, to a tool of prophylaxis and therapy.
August 9th, 2009 at 11:48 am
fuster — whether one agrees with J. Edgar or not on that question, having a particular standard for federal employment is not tantamount to making something illegal. You’re gay, you don’t go to work for the FBI. Very different situation from: You’re gay, you get caught in flagrante, you go to jail (or pay a fine).
(Incidentally, at the time he was making such policy, Hoover was correct about the possibility of blackmail for in-the-closet gays. Of course, married men having affairs could also be subject to blackmail. Too high a priority can be assigned to any type of vulnerability, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t one.)
I note that there’s also a difference between ending sodomy laws, and requiring all employers, public and private, to accept gay employees. Requiring the latter implies, inexorably, that employers know their employees are gay. If they didn’t, the question of employer attitude toward the gay wouldn’t even arise.
August 9th, 2009 at 11:59 am
No, JED, it’s not you don’t go to work for the FBI, it’s the FBI vets for the entirety of the Federal government and you don’t go to work for the State Department, NASA, or anywhere else requiring a high level of security.
Anywhere else in Federal ranks…..?
August 9th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
fuster — the same principle still applies. Disqualifying you for employment is not the same thing as being a criminal act punishable by law.
What you’re speaking about here is an employment practice that regarded gays as particularly vulnerable to blackmail. The question relevant to this thread is whether that criminalized being gay. It did not. It disqualified gays for certain types of government employment.
In no way does this constitute the federal government playing a role in enforcing sodomy laws.
August 9th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
US CODE: Title 10,925. Art. 125 Sodomy
b) any person found guilty of sodomy shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
August 9th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
JED, I think that the larger difference you’re getting at, and that also lurks at the root of the phenomenon Joe’s original post addresses, touches upon how we view our national identity – a subject which, considering the large numbers of people who have fought, killed, and died in its name, can’t be seen as a mere abstraction.
The statist views the state itself, or in classic Communist formulations the leadership of the state standing for the people, as the primary actor in history. (One extreme case was the Soviet Union under Stalin: There was a wonderful, not very widely read book on Stalin – THE MIND OF STALIN – that took the position, quite convincingly, that Stalin himself could be psychoanalyzed through the actions of the Soviet Union, so complete was his control and so complete the identification of the two.) The life of a citizen of a totalitarian state gains meaning within that state through the state alone, just as the citizen’s life, property, children, even the citizen’s thoughts and aspirations all belong to and are to be controlled by the state.
It’s hard to call this understanding unnatural, since in a way it’s just an exaggerated or modernized version of how human beings have tended to understand themselves under many forms of social organization. In this sense, perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the American Revolution was its establishment of “the people” as the undisputed primary actor in national history – aspirationally and in another sense retroactively in all history.
It’s a testament to the stubbornness of the older idea, or to human nature, or to the difficulty of writing “people’s history,” that we still tend to view American history, especially revolutionary history and all our wars and emergencies, as dramatic narratives, big blockbuster hits, worked out between exemplary superstars. Yet our more effective leaders still remember to credit us and more crucially turn to us in times of need.
Much more could be said on this subject, but Obamaism is arguably “un-American” in this sense: It builds up the state at the expense of the people, the monological national blockbuster under the great superstar at the expense of the polyphonic mega-festival.
To back off from the fanciful metaphor, Obamaism doesn’t seem to understand that an ideal governance and an ideal national life are contradictory. The progressive liberal technocrat believes in an ever more expert, morally impervious, and powerful public administration as the primary actor: Because the nation and the state are the same thing, every identified problem needs to be reflected in a state-enabled solution. If “we” decide that homosexuality is to be not merely tolerated but approved of, and that homophobia is a defect in our national life, then the state must be called on to approve of homosexuality and root out homophobia: For the statist-collectivist, there is no real or fundamental approval of homosexuality until registered in and enacted by the state.
The American democratic ethos, as best described I believe by de Tocqueville, is completely counterposed to this view. America is not its government. The goal of our national life and government is not the best government, but the best national life, which in a fundamental way depends on not having the “best” government. In Alexis’s view, American democracy didn’t work as well as it did because its bureaucrats and politicians – its public administration – were the world’s most efficient, moral, honest, thoughtful, articulate, visionary, etc., but in a critical sense because they were prevented from being so. Americans learned a lot about the world from participating in government, from the local level up, widening their practical knowledge and extending their contacts, but the real fruit of democratic governance was borne outside of government.
In short, if you want great, visionary government projects and bureaucratic efficiency, then you want despotism. If you want rich and abundant, dynamic national life, then you want democracy. You probably can’t have both.
August 9th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
JE, thank you for the update, though, as it happened, by the time I asked you the question to which you responded in #14, you had already more than adequately answered it in your second comment above (#7). That sort of thing has happened to me more than once.
I think it is relevant that the very word “homosexual” was not even coined until around 1885, and then in a psychological context. (Etymologically, the word is a clumsy mixture of Greek and Latin roots, something generally avoided in neologisms.)
I may be mistaken here, but for most of history social attitudes toward homosexual behavior were pretty much the same as attitudes towards bestiality, namely, a strong belief that such behavior was “unnatural” or “perverse” or “against the natural law.” Biblical pronouncements on the subject formed only a background of rebuke, at most a theoretical basis for condemning it. The notion that someone was born obliged to behave homosexually would have been incomprehensible, especially when, from their own experiences, heterosexuals understood that, of course, release of sexual tension could be achieved in an astonishing number of unusual ways: from contact with animals ranging from chickens and geese to sheep, goats, and horses (any creature that wasn’t likely to bite, in fact); from friction with clothing and certain fabrics; from beating someone else or being beaten. The list could undoubtedly be extended in ways both amusing and not so amusing.
Obviously it’s been known from time out of mind that soldiers and convicts resorted to sex with other soldiers and convicts. Similarly, priests and nuns from time to time engaged in both heterosexual and homosexual acts. Finally, and here, you might disagree, all of these behaviors, seen as arising from acquiescing to mundane sexual impulse, but where “any old iron will do,” so to speak, were ordinarily thought of as relatively minor vices in the scale of offenses, even silly and comic ones.
Such is certainly the sense one gets from reading Boccaccio or Rabelais or Shakespeare or Jonson when the subject comes up, as it does not infrequently. In antiquity, an attitude of ridicule towards unusual sexual behavior is most marked, not one of moral horror. I write this knowing full well that a great deal of rubbish has been written about the approval of, say, homosexual sex in Greece and Rome, most of which is fantastically opportunistic special pleading, having little connection to what ancient authors actually had to say on the subject.
I would go further and say that it’s not until the appearance of certain varieties of ultra-Bible-centered Evangelicalism, for example, the successive “Great Awakenings” in America of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, and the influence of Methodism directed toward elevating the notoriously disordered lives of the lower classes of the British Isles – the reproach of drunkenness especially, but also of lewdness of all kinds – it is not until then, I say, that citations from the Old Testament and the New are resorted to first in condemning deviant behaviors, rather than as an afterthought.
For most of history such vices were scorned as unbecoming to human dignity and were not condemned as ungodly, but rather, along the lines of “You say you cannot overcome the urge to bed down with another man or with a fat hen, why then, get a grip on yourself, man! Take a cold shower! It will pass, trust me.”
The notion, which is central to the homosexual rights movement, that said urge would never pass because it proceeded from a homosexual’s very identity, reaching even his or her soul, would have been viewed as passing strange for most of history, so it’s unsurprising that a notion of homosexual orientation has been with us for less than 125 years. The modern homosexual rights movement might then be seen as a reaction to a rather late in the day entry of explicitly Biblical religion, as touching the soul, into the fray.
PS, JE, may I recommend your going to the First Things website (firstthings.com), and look under Blogs, where Spengler has a post on the prospects for an Iran-Pakistan War you might find useful for discussion on your own site. Just a suggestion.
August 9th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Colin, thank you for that. You write:
What you are describing here is Paganism. I began by quoting Russell: “Christianity popularized an important opinion . . . that a man’s duty to God is more imperative than his duty to the State.” Paganism is that religious system that arises solely under influence of the locality one lives in. The very geography of one’s habitation, its trees, mountains, and streams, becomes spiritual, i.e., is inhabited by spirits. Participating in antique religion was a political duty more than a religious one. The Antigone of Sophocles illustrates this perfectly.
In incarnating, as it were, divinity in rocks or trees or the local fauna or even the vast sky above, Paganism, in its origins, renders the idea of a higher deity not embodied in anything visible very strange and even threatening. Socrates was tried, condemned, and executed for impiety, for “preaching strange new gods.” What was truly strange about Socrates’ god in the eyes of his accusers was that it was a transcendent god, one that had nothing at all to do with Athens or the gods of Athens. Being a good citizen of the Athenian state, in other words, was all that was required to be acceptably religious. Nazism and Soviet Communism resurrected these archaic notions, the former rather explicitly. When Ignazio Silone, a prominent Italian Communist who knew and worked with both Lenin and Stalin, broke with the Party, his most vicious accusation was that they had returned society “to the days of the Pharaohs,” the pagan state nonpareil.
You go on to write, quite astutely, that:
Again, referring to my original posting, President Coolidge, remarkably to my mind, takes some pains to distinguish the progress toward self-government made by the English in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1689, from what had been accomplished by the Founders. The English Bill of Rights does not mention equality, he stresses, as how should it in a nation as socially stratified by blood as Seventeenth Century England. It was left to the Declaration of Independence to make the case for equality.
The distinction is essential to the point that Coolidge was laboring at. The English Bill of Rights was a Lockean document, by which I mean an exercise in secular rationalism, a proclamation of the Enlightenment avant la lettre. The idea of individual human equality, Coolidge is saying, is a religious notion for which there was and still is scant evidence (of equality) in the affairs of men. Do not look for it in the Second Treatise of Government. It’s not there. Even the slave owner Jefferson realized that.
August 9th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
fuster #18 — are you subject to the UCMJ? Have you ever been? In periods when there has been a draft, you might have had a marginal case that the federal government was taking an unwarranted interest in people’s sexual activities. But even then, the fact remained that unless you were wearing a military uniform, the federal government was not going to administer a punishment for homosexual behavior.
Contrast this with the states of Texas and Virginia, where all you had to have was a pulse to be charged, convicted, and punished. Different situations. The federal government, unlike states and local governments, has never had a law that applied to all the people against homosexual behavior.
Joe NS — thanks for the tip. I’ll be bowing out shortly to head for a month away from home, and will be pretty scarce around ZC, but wanted to get that in.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:35 am
JED, I admire you usual refusal to admit to error.
Before I answer your questions, why not try to admit that your contention that there were no Federal statutes against sodomy was just wrong.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:49 am
Now why would you want her to go away on bad terms, cluck?
Have a good trip, JED, and word to your mother (whatever that means) – feel free to surprise us by popping in more often than expected!
August 10th, 2009 at 1:12 am
@CK MacLeod – Not only don’t I want JED to leave on bad terms, if she admits she’s wrong, I might even tell her the almost-funny story about why my girlfriend and I were evicted from federal park land in the misty past.
August 10th, 2009 at 1:27 am
fuster, your Froggy avatar really does look eager to tell an almost-funny story to the boys and girls.
August 10th, 2009 at 1:43 am
@Peter Shalen – The little guy has always been a bit too eager he has, he has.
August 10th, 2009 at 1:46 am
I think you are reaching fuster. That is the military code – not a law per se. That is like an employment handbook.
August 10th, 2009 at 8:50 am
@JEM – If I was some unnamed people,wink wink, I would never admit it, (but for the next month) I might almost say that it’s a little bit of a reach.
On the other hand, I’ve not seen an employment handbook where they say that if
you run out of a big meeting you get executed.
August 10th, 2009 at 10:50 am
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