Back in the Provinces


It's been a while since I've written. Final exams--giving them and grading them--took up a bit of my time, but so did a job interview at school that, in many ways, I'd really set my heart on. Well, that interview didn't pan out, and so I'll remain at Arkansas State University for the time being. Dealing with the results of that interview, and assessing my present situation (and what it offers, and what I need to do to make more satisfying and fulfilling, both for myself and my students), have led me to do a fair amount of soul-searching of late, the bulk of which I won't bother to blog about. But there was one small exchange in the blogosphere, from late last week, which I want to write on, if only because it, to a small degree, threw into sharp relief some of what I am presently thinking about.


I refer to John Derbyshire's column "Confessions of a Metropolitan Conservative," in which he relates having dinner with some ardent conservative lady from Virginia, who proceded to expose him as a "milk and water conservative"--the sort of person who talked about and praised the values of the red-state, conservative heartland (in this case, specifically the state of Texas, where--until and unless the Supreme Court rules otherwise--laws prohibiting sodomy remain on the books), but who when it comes right down to it wouldn't, in fact, personally vote for such "authentically" conservative policies and doesn't, frankly, want to live in such "authentically" conservative environments. Derbyshire agrees with this woman's assessment of him, and is terribly honest about where his personal feelings about homosexuality and host of other hot-button conservative issues leave him:


"I have not the slightest doubt that I am a conservative by thought, feeling and instinct, yet on a lot of the issues that define American conservatism, I barely move the needle from the zero mark on the dial. I have guns but only fire them down at the range once a month, for the satisfaction of it, and to develop confidence in handling them. I have never hunted with guns. I am only feebly religious — feebly Episcopalian, in fact, which is feebleness squared! Homosexuality? I don't like it, and have got myself in a lot of trouble for saying so rather bluntly, but I wouldn't criminalize it. Abortion? Pretty much the same. Creationism? Sorry, I think it's pseudoscience. I'm fine with evolution. So — What kind of conservative am I?"


Derbyshire decides that he is a "metropolitan conservative," the sort of conservative who has spent "most of my adult life in big cities or their shadows" and has a "mostly metropolitan cast of mind"--which means that, as much as his political opinions may set him apart, he is "at ease in a roomful of New York liberals in a way that, to be truthful about it, I am not in a gathering of red-state evangelicals." In short, he is a conservative Bobo (much like his Weekly Standard counterpart David Brooks, who coined the term), a creature of the modern (postmodern?) capitalist (postcapitalist?) upper- or near-upper-class and all its "metropolitan" trappings who just happens to accept a sufficient number of libertarian and/or social conservative nostrums to make it reasonable to vote Republican. He is not, as he makes perfectly clear, really particularly comfortable with those provincial environments and worldviews which engender the greatest fervor in the American conservative movement, but he admirers those who do live in those environments or profess those worldviews from afar: "the red-state conservative with his Bible, his hunting rifle and his sodomy laws," Derbyshire writes, "is authentic, in a way I am not."


I neither consider myself a conservative (though there is a strong streak of social and moral conservatism in me), nor am I particularly troubled about how I would vote if given the opportunity to criminalize or de-criminalize sodomy (for the record: it shouldn't be against the law). So what is it about Derbyshire's comments which complicate my thinking? His willingness to own up to--and yet then blithely dismiss--a reality which undergirds so much of our society and our psychology, a reality which is often profoundly (and often purposefully) obscured and/or misused by those engaged in political conversation. What Derbyshire calls the "metropolitan-provincial divide" is reflected in matters pertaining to class, to region, to temperment. It is a divide rife with condescension, false judgments, and bitter resentments, fueled by everything from Hollywood's presentation of certain elite and scandalous social mores as "popular entertainment" to the Constitution's comparative over-representation (through the Electoral College and the Senate) of vast, underpopulated and by most economic measures "backward" parts of the nation. And it is a divide which I personally have never been able to fully or satisfyingly negotiate. Derbyshire may himself feel able to own up to and then set aside the strange mix of condescension and admiration he feels for the provincials out there in the heartland, but perhaps that's because he has a place on one side of the divide. But a great many people do not; I don't, for instance. I'm deeply religious Mormon (provincial!) who received his Ph.D. in political philosophy (metropolitan!) from a religious university (provincial!) in Washington D.C. (metropolitan!). I'm a professional academic (metropolitan!) who teaches at Arkansas State University (provincial? yes, mostly) in Jonesboro, AR, a conservative town in a conservative state which, just recently, followed the leadership of city clergy (mostly Southern Baptist and Church of Christ) to make sure it stayed alcohol-free (provincial, provincial, provincial!). It would be easy to fall into the cliche about "liberal college professors" making a home in some unenlightened backwoods at this point, and crank out all the predictable horror stories which academics like to share with one another at conferences about students who fly Confederate flags or pray in the classroom or haven't ever shopped anywhere besides Wal-Mart or actually like Lee Greenwood's music or some other metropolitan horror....but as sympathetic as I am to much of that, I don't think that represents the real tangle of issues here. It's not just living a divided life; it's recognizing and dealing with the social and psychological reality of the divide in forming one's life. Jacob Levy, to his credit, acknowledges some of this, reflecting that "everyone should sometimes wonder whether their preferred political order mightn't rest on cultural foundations that aren't to their liking." My ability to live the sort of life I do, and defend the sort of society I want, may very well depend upon distinctions I'm uncomfortable with. For example: as a professor who grades my students on the basis of their ability to read, understand and appreciate Kant, I am imposing a profoundly elite standard, one that will be--I cannot deny--of almost no use to the overwhelming majority of those who come through my classrooms. All academics are elitists, of course, but I am an elitist in Arkansas, which has to mean something different than being an elitist in Cambridge, MA. Does that mean I should change the way I do things? Or that I should expect (in vain, no doubt) Arkansas to? Maybe this would be easier if I were simply a philosophical liberal; then I could just measure communities and find them wanting (namely, when they didn't share my enlightened liberal ideals). But I'm a communitarian, and so I have to take--and I want to take--this provincial community as every bit as necessary to my own personal world as the community of ideas I come up with in my head and share (at too great length, no doubt) with my peers and on this blog (and indeed, as Derbyshire allows, the provincial community is probably even more necessary).


This question of boundaries and expectations, of what compromises are necessary to ensure the survival of "metropolitan standards" or "provincial authenticity" in our ever-more interconnected world, is the defining question, the defining negotiation, of the modern (postmodern?) West. And I guess, even if I don't have any better answers, I just don't like it when anyone closes down that negotiation, even for the most prudent of reasons, because the reality itself still remains, continuing to fester. After his sympathetic assessment of what Derbyshire wrote, Levy still decided he had to make it clear that, of course, "it's simply indecent to even be in a broad-tent coalition with" some provincials (in this case, referring to some white kids in Georgia who decided to hold a whites-only prom). Though I don't know all the facts in this case, I basically agree with him. And yet....well, ok, they're indecent--what then? Rural Georgia is still there. These kids will still vote, still take jobs, still tune into talk radio, and a lot of them will still go college (maybe my university; maybe they'll take my class). We can say how they're beyond the pale, how backward, how limited we metropolitans are in our ability to enlighten them, and oh how we wish that other job (the one nearer to an IKEA and a Starbucks, dammit!) had worked out, etc., etc.--but that doesn't settle the issue of what to do when we live next door to one another. Derbyshire is going to be all right; he lives in New York City, and if he doesn't like the sort of "milk-and-water-conservative" bitch-slapping which started him off on the metropolitan conservative tangent in the first place, he just has to watch more carefully which dinner parties he goes to. That same option doesn't exist for most of us on the divide--and I suspect that all our efforts to resolve it (whether through the perfect set of arguments or finding the perfect job), until and unless something allows us to change the terms of the debate entirely, won't ultimately help us much either.

Intellectuals, Academics, and Talk

If you're an academic, or you want to be (in some sense, I fit into both of those categories), be sure to read this touching rumination by Timothy Burke on the many reasons why true, intellectually spirited conversation is, contrary to one's ideals and hopes, actually the exception in academia, rather than the rule. He talks about how the fact of tenure paralyzes intellectual talk (those without it don't want to possibly give offense, those with it don't want to have to know that much about their colleagues for life...), and even more importantly how the drive to publish--or at least, be "productive"--crowds out the sort of ambiguity and openness which real conversation (and, in some important ways, education itself) depends upon. I cannot agree more with his spirited final plea, "We should be more concerned with our quality of mind and less concerned with our production of scholarship, and place greater value by far on one good conversation about the nature of a good society than the publication of five journal articles." Of course (the cynic responds) as a tenured professor at an elite school (Swarthmore), Burke isn't risking much in making that statement. But then again, the Invisible Adjunct agrees with him as well, which is a good sign (though she acknowledges that Burke's hopes are countered by huge institutional obstacles). As for me....I'm currently waiting to hear back from a small liberal arts school, a place where maybe, just maybe, I might be able to live more in accordance with Burke's vision than I am presently. No one, if they really want to do be a professor, can turn their back on the tenure-track of course, no matter what form it comes in, and truthfully, I would be just as happy (and nervous) as I am right now if I happened to be waiting to hear about an offer from any decent school, of whatever size or mission. But at this moment, Burke's essay speaks to me strongly, because it asks exactly the questions which led to me to take a chance on the school I interviewed at in the first place.
Update: Kieran Healy plays devil's advocate and defends the sort of specialization which keeps people within their boundaries; in the comments which follow Kieran's post, Timothy Burke and the Invisible Adjunct both clarify their positions a bit: Timothy says that he's many talking about the strange absence of conversations within departments and disciplines, while IA says that for her, "it's not a question of abandoning specialization, but of recovering or recreating some larger framework which gives the pursuit of specialized studies relevance and meaning." Of course, any time you start talking about "larger frameworks" in any of the social sciences or humanities, people are going to call you a "romantic" or some other name which implies you have a very non-Weberian weakness for realism or meaning or community or metaphysics or history or what have you. IA realizes that, and bravely accepts "the charge of romanticism." As a profoundly romantic communitarian, I'm with her.

Santorum and the "We"


Well, you can't say that the blogosphere has lacked opinions (almost uniformally negative) about Senator Rick Santorum's recent comment, referring explicitly to homosexuality, that "[i]f the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery...[y]ou have the right to anything." Amy Sullivan has weighed in, and so has Matthew Yglesias (twice), and Jacob T. Levy, and Kevin Drum, and Eugene Volokh (three times now), and so have many, many others. Out of all this, I'd like to make one small point--not in Santorum's defense, necessarily, but definitely in opposition to the preferred (within the blogosphere at least) mode of those who are attacking him. Consider what Andrew Sullivan had to say. First, quoting Santorum: "The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire." Sullivan responds: "Wow. I've long heard of people talking about individual rights against the government. I have rarely heard about the government's rights against the individual. And from a Republican! Notice how Santorum uses the pronoun 'we' when referring to the state. He's been in power too long. Has Santorum heard of limited government? It was once a conservative idea, you know, Senator."


Why does Sullivan assume that the senator's "we" meant "the state"? Probably because, like so many other libertarians (whether they call themselves that or not) in the blogosphere, he really isn't conscious of the possibility that there can be any collectivity, any community, in between the individual (with all their rights) and the state (with all its powers). I don't know Santorum from Adam; for all I know, he really does dream fascist dreams at night. But I can't understand how an intelligent man (a man who makes a big deal about having done work on Michael Okeshott for heaven's sake!) can so quickly and automatically assume that Santorum's invocation of some group which is worried about "people liv[ing] out whatever wants or passions they desire" couldn't possibly refer to any actual body of citizens, any substantive portion of a real and living civil society (say, Pennsylvanians? or conservative Christians? or parents?). Well, actually, I can understand it. Santorum is talking about issues of right and wrong, of toleration and legality--in short, he is speaking normatively, about what ought to be and ought not be, and for most of these writers (who share, as Sullivan put it, "the very American notion of live-and-let-live") normative force can be justified only in two ways: through the free choice of the sovereign individual, and the actions of a properly and freely consented-to social contract-type state. To suggest that communal norms--the values of some as-yet undetermined "we"--might actually be normatively relevant to our decisions about sexuality is, generally speaking, dismissed without consideration.


This is not an argument in favor of Santorum's preferred "we"--whomever they may be--being empowered, on the basis of some communitarian argument, to enforce certain standards of sexual behavior in the face of America's complicated-yet-indisputably-real embrace of sexual tolerance and the "right to privacy." It is, however, an argument that dropping out the "we" in defining which "wants or passions" everyone has a "right" to and which may be limited and for what reason, is only to court further animosity and frustration, since it is as a "we" that most people actually live. Michael Sandel noted this long ago in his essay "Moral Argument and Liberal Toleration: Abortion and Homosexuality" (available in this volume). Sandel wrote: "The problem with the neutral [i.e., the "live-and-let-live"] case for toleration...[is that] it leaves wholly unchallenged the adverse views of homosexuality itself. Unless those views [again, the views of a "we"] can be plausibly addressed, even a [Supreme] Court ruling [in favor of homosexual privacy rights, overturning Bowers v. Hardwick]...is unlikely to win for homosexuals more than a thin and fragile toleration. A fuller respect would require, if not admiration, at least some appreciation of the lives that homosexuals live. Such appreciation, however, is unlikely to be cultivated by a legal and political discourse conducted in terms of autonomy...alone" (p. 86). This argument can, of course, be challenged (see here, for instance) by responding that in the modern world it is neither possible nor desirable to engage all the "we's" out there; autonomy, live-and-let-live, state toleration for the individual, is the best we can and should try to achieve. That's an important argument to make; I'd just like to see some of the fine minds in the blogosphere actually make it, rather than simply assuming that anyone (like Santorum) who is apparently troubled by an (arguably) emerging legal tradition which appears to forbid any restrictions on any sexual activities (completely apart from social, cultural, scientific or moral debates) simply on the basis of privacy alone can only be the worst sort of bigot.

"Promises to Keep"


I haven't been blogging much lately, with the end of the semester (and an important interview) now upon me, or nearly so. One of the results of this is that I never got around to writing any kind of overview of my feelings, hopes and fears with the end of the war. Not that there is any need for me to do so, not when Timothy Garton Ash continues to write like this. His basic point--that the United States must now act to fulfill the best and most liberal aims of this war, or else the justice of the whole endeavor must be challenged--is one I feel much sympathy for. Also, read Mark Kleinman's postmortem on the war, if you haven't yet.

More Theory and Philosophy


The story so far: Matthew Ygelsias has commented on Jacob Levy's original post and my response to it, and now Jacob has added some additional comments of his own. (Jacob is also, by the way, continuing to refine and update his original post, so read it through if you haven't yet; as I said below, I think it clarifies a lot of things very well.) Let me also throw out one follow-up observation.


Matthew suggests that the division I described between that group (the majority?) of political theorists who are trained as "political scientists," and those few (the proud?) trained in a more philosophical way, a division which I identified as arising from whether or not a particular program has opened itself up to the "continental" or "German" or "postmodern" body of philosophical ideas, actually reveals something pretty profound about how philosophy has come to be taught taught at English-language universities. He thinks, however, that what my distinction reveals can be stated more simply. He writes that this difference "is normally stated in terms of a division between Anglo-American and 'continental' philosophy, but that's misleading....Rather, I think what you're looking at is the anti-historicism that's been adopted by most English-speaking departments as part of the quest to put philosophy on the secure path of a science." I think Matthew's exactly right, only it's necessary to think carefully about what he's right about. What does it mean, for instance, to "put philosophy on the secure path of a science"? It means, I suspect, something very close to what I said before: that the philosophical truth which is aimed at via patterns of inquiry which aspire to "science" is a truth which requires "a certain unconsciousness about the broad and problematic historical and moral ontologies which [such] arguments...presuppose." Now, my personal philosophical biases lead me to look to what is (or at least what I think is) a real counter-point to that definition of truth, a "counter-Enlightenment"/romantic challenge that insisted, in one way or another, in thinking about the ontological and metaphysical dimension of moral and political matters. This particular challenge I (and many others, first and foremost Charles Taylor) see beginning with Rousseau and (some of) the German idealists, continued through Nietzsche and Heidegger, and in to 20th-century hermeneuticists, communitarians and postmodernists. Hence, when I speak of the "continental" tradition, I have something pretty specifically continental (i.e., German) in mind. But of course, there are also plenty of thinkers--many of whom consider themselves "political theorists"--who do this same sort of thing, only they go to medieval sources to rediscover "moral realism," or maybe (like Matthew suggested about Michael Sandel) they go all the way back to Aristotle. So really, as much as I like my position along this divide, it's broader than any single philosophical tradition. Matthew's point about "anti-historicism," fully understood, is probably closest to getting it right than any other possible description. The heart of the dispute, in the end, is whether or not you believe philosophical arguments should be (or can't avoid being) historically embedded. If you don't, than there's no reason to think about what might have been lost from this or that tradition, morally or otherwise, since of course you still have the argument right here. If, on the other had, you do believe arguments need a home if they are actually going to have a point, than one way or another, you're obliged to work out, historically, what your preferred argument's home is, or ought to be.


This leads me to two quick final points. First, this helps to underline what I said before about how religious (in particular Catholic) universities seem to often be more open teaching their doctoral students in politics along the latter route than other schools; after all, what could be a greater motivation for taking history seriously than the possibility that God might have had a hand in it? Second, Matthew's reframing of the issue also furthers Jacob's claim that the Straussians are odd ducks here; for of course, they follow the second route in the sense of wanting to appreciate the history of philosophy, yet they insist that they're doing is the real "anti-historicism."

Levy's Theory vs. Philosophy Opus


Jacob T. Levy's long promised essay on political theory and political philosophy is finally up. And it's great. To be sure, it is, as he says, "a little meandering, inductive rather than deductive, and impressionistic rather than precise"--but that just means it reads pretty much like everything I post here. The theoretically and philosophically-inclined inhabitants of the blogosphere (Matthew Yglesias, Micah Schwartzman, Chris Bertram, Lawrence Solum, and so forth) will no doubt soon be all over it, and rightly so; it's a really nice essay, full of great little observations. I take issue with a few of his claims, but let me do so by way of personally situating myself as best I can into his categories.


Generally speaking, what Jacob says about theory--that it aims for richness rather than rightness, that it willfully embraces its dependence upon and employment of various more-or-less unexplored ethical or political intuitions, that it does not prize definitiveness, that it appeals to a "lower" as opposed to a "higher" level of abstraction in its arguments (history rather than epistemology, for example), and so forth--all very much describe myself. My published work--ranging from the Anti-Federalists to Confucius to Charles Taylor to J.G. Herder to Mormonism--is clearly much more a product of breadth than depth; I truly do want to cast a "wider net in the history of ideas" rather than search for the "best-developed version of a philosopher's core arguments." The question which Jacob suggests theorists so often ask of the political philosophy they encounter ("What's the point?") is my question. So, according to Jacob I'm a theorist, right?


Wrong, or at least partly wrong. Jacob's analysis is incomplete, which he admits right from the start, when he states that "I'm going to emphasize Anglo-American political theory and political philosophy...[since] adding the Anglo-American/Continental distinction to the mix makes matters more confused still." Why is that? Because, he continues, "political theorists are typically more open to Continental approaches than are political philosophers, sharpening the institutuional differentiation...[while] among Continental practitioners, the theory-philosophy distinction is less sharp than it is among Anglo-American types." I think there is a lot of truth to what he says--clearly, there are certain theorists (like myself, I guess) who talk and think in what can only be called a "philosophical" way--but it needs to be teased out a little, if only to figure out why I (and so many other theorists who employ hermeneutics and other elements of Continental philosophy in our writing) have turned out more "philosophical," in a particular sense, than our professional approach and attitude might otherwise suggest.


Jacob writes that "political theorists ordinarily receive their PhDs from, and ordinarily teach in, political science department," whereas so-called political philosophers receive their's from philosophy departments and teach in philosophy. He goes on: "Given the structure of American doctoral programs, this means that a political theorist and a political philosopher-- even if they have complete overlap in their core interests-- will be differently trained. The philosopher will almost certainly study formal logic, very likely study ethics and moral philosophy broadly....and study at least some topics from philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaethics....[while the] theorist may well take statistics and/or formal theory (i.e. rational choice and game theoretic mathematical models)....as well as study one or more of American politics, comparative politics, and international relations in some depth, and may also study American or comparative constitutional law." So far, so good. But Jacob's description doesn't hold very well from those American universities where the Continental philosophical tradition (particularly but not exclusively the aesthetic-metaphysical German tradition of Hegel, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, and so forth, as opposed to the Marxist and Frankfurt critical theory schools, though there are obviously a lot of deep--though contested--connections between the two), which its preoccupation with issues of being, intentionality, interpretation, nihilism, and modernity, have taken root. In such universities, the graduate student in political theory--like I was, at Catholic University of America--will likely get a fair dose of international, comparative and American politics, but along with that, rather than having various topics in methodology, analysis and statistics hammered into one's head, the Ph.D. student may well have been required to read Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Richard Rorty, Hannah Arendt, along with Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, and maybe Juergen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur too. With the exception of Arendt and Habermas, all of these people are obviously philosophers (Foucault and Ricoeur are difficult cases, but for their own complicated reasons); they are all asking deep questions about (or critiquing others' questions about) such traditional concerns as truth, reality, consciousness, history, morality and so forth. In this way, the aspiring "political theorist" will be obliged to familiarize herself with what Jacob described as the province of the philosopher: "some topics from philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaethics." But what one would not get from these particular philosophers is, as Jacob put it, the drive to be "parsimonious" in one's use of such topics. On the contrary, engaging with these philosophers (and their romantic, medieval and even ancient forebearers) is likely instead to lead one to the conclusion that the strict argumentation of the Anglo-American philosophical school depends to an unfortunate degree upon a certain unconsciousness about the broad and problematic historical and moral ontologies which their arguments must presuppose.


It might be easy to just say that Jacob left out "postmodernism," but that wouldn't exactly address the point. For one thing, I'm not talking about all "postmodernism" (fortunately, kooks like Jean Baudrillard are mostly absent from the programs I'm describing). For another thing, it doesn't explain the attraction. After all, why would any political thinker (or teacher of future political thinkers) bother with postmodern thought in the first place, if the aim of such ideas (as they are so often stereotypically depicted) is to compromise the ability to define and describe (much less argue about and change) political bodies, or any kind of collectivies, in the first place? Let postmodernism settle in the humanities where it can break up texts, not communities, right? Well, the reason, as Stephen K. White has I think amply demonstrated in a couple of wonderful books (see here and here), is that such ideas, properly understood, can turn political thinking to a different, deeper notion of "responsibility" and "care"--not the kind implied through a rigorous analytic argument which weighs duties and conditions, but the kind which situates ones acts to a sense of being itself. Of course, many postmodernists would dismiss such metaphysical talk, but it cannot be denied that even in trying to overcome traditional metaphysics, it is this body of ideas which enable real thinking about the point of metaphysics in the first place. Consequently, I'm not surprised to find that many of the political theory programs which have most internalized this tradition are at religious--perhaps especially Roman Catholic--universities, though of course that's a not an iron-clad rule (Stephen White, for what it is worth, now teaches at the University of Virginia). Even in those programs where Ph.D. candidates don't read Heidegger, there are many more where they teach graduate students about Kant and Hegel (and by extension, about Rousseau and Hobbes all the rest) through that prism, with the result that "justice" and "interpretation" or "plualism" and "objectivity" appear in the same sentences. As one member of my dissertation committee put it, this sort of concern goes back to the Continental tradition; whatever their faults, he said, at least "the German philosophers still cared about truth." So if you're religious enough or communitarian enough (another debatable, though I think in this case appropriate, term) or postmodern enough to want or to hope that or just wonder whether or not politics can be truthful as well as "normative," then this is the way to study political theory. (Of course, there is also still another side to this dynamic, affecting those who receive an explicitly religious education in political philosophy, often centering on themes like natural law, but that's pretty much separate from the role of Continental philosophy I'm considering here.) Even if all this only partially describes one's graduate training (for, of course, Rawlsians and Continentalists can and do work side by side), the result is going to be an approach to political theory which is distinctly "philosophical"--one which asks big moral and/or metaphysical questions about the history of ideas, about the possibility for action and meaning and so forth, as well as employing them for the sake of "richness."


There's a lot more which could be said here; obviously hauling the Continental philosophical tradition into the discussion results in something more multifaceted than simply an additional, more ontologically sensitive approach to theorizing about government and community. But if nothing else, it perhaps provides a kind of supplement to Jacob's fine post. Would that more of us political theorists and philosophers had as good and confident a grip on what we're doing as he.

Kinsley on Bush


I hope this piece gets a wide readership. Kinsley is often just bitter or snarky, but I've long found him capable of producing, on occasion, just about as intelligent and thoughtful a piece of writing as the op-ed format allows. This short essay, on Bush as a mover of history, is certainly one of his best; familiar subject + different perspective = a very reflective take. Here's the best bit:


"Bush's decision to make war on Iraq may have been visionary and courageous or reckless and tragic or anything in between, but one thing it wasn't was urgently necessary. For Bush, this war was optional. Events did not impose it on him. Few public voices were egging him on. He hadn't made an issue of the need for "regime change" during the presidential campaign or made it a priority in the early months of his Administration. If he had completely ignored Iraq through the 2004 election, the price would have been a few disappointed Administration hawks and one or two grumpy op-eds. But something or someone put this bee in his bonnet, and from a standing start, history took off. Thousands died, millions were freed from tyranny (we hope), billions were spent, a region was shaken to its core, alliances ruptured, and the entire world watched it all on TV."


As always, read it all.

Intervention and Responsibility


David Remnick continues to be right about nearly everything. Another superb piece from the New Yorker editor, defending the principled liberal goals of the war in Iraq, casting all sorts of doubts on neoconservative imperialist, revolutionary aspirations, and most of all, emphasizing our immediate responsibilities. This is from the concluding paragraphs:


"Tens of thousands of soldiers will need to remain in Iraq long enough to prevent civil unrest or even civil war, while being vigilant against snipers, terror attacks, and guerrilla reprisals like last Thursday’s suicide bombing in Baghdad. Food, water, electricity, medicine, and other resources will need to be rapidly distributed. The production and flow of oil, the source of Iraqi wealth, will need to be maintained in a way that does not imply an occupier’s exploitation. And then there is the question of helping to build a free state on the rubble of tyranny. To stage-manage a hasty election of surrogates and then beat a fast retreat would confirm suspicions of American inconstancy no less than the rapid elevation of Halliburton, Bechtel, and Exxon Mobil as the titans of Iraqi industry....To help create a liberal state following a military invasion is an enormously radical, and delicate, project. Here the prize is not power but something more elusive—legitimacy. There are many ways for the United States to press the case for peace and political reform in the Middle East. A doctrine of permanent revolution, however, brings to mind no analogies in history to comfort us. The phrase is Trotsky’s, and the precedent is catastrophe."


As always, read the whole thing.

Mormonism and War


Caveat: the following post is by a Mormon (namely, me), and speaks of Mormon things (namely, doctrines of war and peace), but isn't necessarily for Mormons alone. For much of the past week, I've been involved in following (and contributing to) a couple of different e-mail discussions between several fellow members of the church about the war in Iraq; I'm going to try to summarize a couple of tentative observations and conclusions that I've drawn out of these debates, for whomever may be interested. If you're not, well, hopefully my posting on more traditional topics will resume tomorrow.


The immediate origin of this past week's discussions was the 173rd Annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (which is the actual name of the Mormon church). Twice each year the ecclesiastical leaders of the whole church--referred to as "general authorities"--gather in Salt Lake City, Utah, where they present various messages of moral and spiritual counsel and exhortation, as well as lay out new or changing policies or positions in the worldwide church. The most important of all these sermons are those give by the president of the church, whom members believe to be a prophet (a term which can be defined in several different ways, I grant), and therefore capable of speaking authoritatively (again, the meaning of which depends on how one defines the "prophetic authority") about God's will for the church, and indeed the whole of humanity. This past session, on Sunday morning, the current church president, Gordon B. Hinckley, gave a talk titled "War and Peace," with explicit reference to Iraq. Since the church president doesn't often speak on topical matters, and even more rarely on ones which are profoundly divisive with the church as a whole, this was a closely watched--and subsequently much discussed--address.


I won't address his complete sermon here. The majority of it made use of powerful, traditional themes of spiritual consolation which, I would hope, resonate with the longings of any Christian. "Even when the armaments of war ring out in deathly serenade and darkness and hatred reign in the hearts of some," Hinckley said at the conclusion of his sermon, "there stands immovable, reassuring, comforting, and with great outreaching love the quiet figure of the Son of God, the Redeemer of the world. We can proclaim with Paul: 'For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord' (Romans 8:38–39)." As that is one of my favorite lines of scripture, I took particular comfort from hearing the man I accept as a prophet of God to end his counsel to a world at war with it. But most of the debate which I mentioned above hasn't dealt with Hinckley's use of such themes; rather, it has focused on his statements on Iraq in particular, and what Mormons should or may think of a war such as this one. I want to focus on two passages from his sermon which are especially relevant to topics I have written a great deal about here; namely, the idea of intervening--that is, making war--on behalf of liberal ideals, while at the same time doing so anti-imperialistically. But first, a little background.


Mormonism has never been a clearly pacifist movement, though there are threads of Christian pacifism which can discerned throughout our scriptures (particularly in certain passages of the Book of Mormon, such as right here) and history. When the church began in the 1830s in New York and Ohio it fairly quickly encountered a good deal of sectarian hostility and violence, culminating in the murder of the first leader of the church, Joseph Smith, in 1844. Even after departing to the Utah Territory the church continued to suffer abuse and harassment, this time mostly at the hands of federal authorities committed to stamping out the Mormon practice of polygamy (and, more broadly, to challenge the church's theocratic authority over a large tract of mostly empty land, which in itself arguably led in at least a few tragic cases to a fair amount of internal violence). There are, of course, numerous possible explanations for this opposition, many of which place a significant portion of the fault at the feet of the church itself. Regardless of how one feels about the Mormon church, its past (and now mostly repudiated) practice of polygamy, or the relationship of its various teachings to traditional Christianity, it cannot be denied that all this conflict left a mark on the church (and the country: a few authors have argued that anti-Mormonism is an essential, as-yet mostly unconsidered, element in any good history of 19th-century American society or constitutional jurisprudence). So, rather than pacifist, what you find throughout early Mormon documents is a fair amount of antinomian thought: a waiting for the end of the world, in which the wicked oppressors would (of course) receive their just reward at the hands of God. Until that day, members of the church were to defend themselves against their enemies, but according to God's laws, not civil ones (for both theological and practical reasons, the church for many years looked askance at availing itself of the secular, civil order). And so, for instance, one can find in the Doctrine and Covenants, a collection of revelations to Joseph Smith, a passage which apparently binds the church to renouncing war and bearing patiently any violence against ourselves or our families, at least up until the third offense; after that, if one's enemy has been properly warned and comes yet once more against you, then "thine enemy is in thine hands." This passage, and other similar to it, have been used to argue for the existence of a kind of revelatory "just war" doctrine in the Mormon tradition; one which conditions going to war on God's explicit command, on having made peace overtures, and having already suffered violence without making a response, so as to make certain that we are not the aggressors (aggressive war is even more emphatically denounced throughout Mormon scriptures). At least one Mormon organization (Mormons for Equality and Social Justice, a group which espouses many ideals I agree with) has made this argument explicitly, denouncing the war in Iraq as unjust and "grossly immoral" exactly because it fails to meet this scriptural standard.


President Hinckley did not mention any of the aforementioned scriptures in his sermon. Some members of the church have taken that to be plain evidence that he did not intend to expound doctrine, but rather was only giving his personal opinion. I won't even attempt to go into that debate, for the hermeneutical and procedural question(s) of exactly when a Mormon prophet is speaking prophetically, and thus should be understood as making statements which are binding upon the faithful, is at least as complicated as the long Roman Catholic tradition which guides attempts at distinguishing ex cathedra statements from other papal declarations, if not more so. What I can say is that, opinion or otherwise, Hinckley presented clear, if qualified, support for the war in Iraq, recognizing at the same time that there are and will continue to be broad disagreements, both within and between the various national bodies which members worldwide reside in, over the war; this is to be expected, since as he put it, "as citizens we are all under the direction of our respective national leaders." (This, of course, may well be the reason that Hinckley found little guidance from the 19th-century revelations cited above; they clearly address the Mormon church as a more or less sovereign people, which to a certain degree was certainly Joseph Smith's--and his successor Brigham Young's--intention: like the ancient tribe of Israel, the church was to be a polity as well as an ecclesiastical body. Since, for good or ill, that hasn't been even metaphorically true for over a century, perhaps it is reasonable that those statements should be ignored, though again there could be a long and fruitful debate about that.) Furthermore, Hinckley was especially careful to emphasize that those members of the church who support the war do not (and must not) assume that the policies presently being pursued by the coalition forces endorse a general war against Islam or any particular Muslim people; also, he clearly stated that dissent was both a right and a privilege in democratic societies and should be exercised (though he drew the line at "legal" dissent, however one chooses to interpret that). The crucial political passage, however, was when he spoke of an "overriding responsibility" we have, as a "freedom-loving people" (referring presumably to members of the church, though it would be duplicitous to deny that Hinckley obviously had his own life experience as an American in mind here) to "fight for family, for liberty, and against tyranny, threat, and oppression." The scriptures he cited at this point are notorious ones in the church (or at least notorious for those of us who dislike the often mindlessly patriotic spin put on them by the mostly conservative American church membership): passages from the Book of Mormon which speak of rallying to the cause of the "title of liberty," and of God lending His blessing to those who go to war "inspired by a better cause" rather than simply fighting on behalf of "power." If this sounds like something not unlike the humble, Gladstonian, liberal interventionist position I have been describing....well, good, it sounds like that to me as well. Not that Hinckley ever described such wars as "good" causes--only that "there are times and circumstances when nations are justified, in fact have an obligation, to fight." (The existence of an obligation, it should go without saying, does not in itself transform an act into something good.) The fact that he spoke of this moral cause as necessarily qualified by "times and circumstances" allows a tremendous amount of debate into this "doctrine," if it is such. Indeed, this is not, by any means, a complete Mormon just war theory, for the matter of "cause" may be easily and often subject to abuse--especially given that "liberty" need not and should not always mean the same thing to all people, thus requiring any such announced "cause" itself, and not merely the circumstances of making war on its behalf, be subject to consideration and critique. But nonetheless, President Hinckley's (arguably) prophetic statements last Sunday do give us Mormons, I think, an entrance to productive thinking about just war principles, something which, as the church spreads, I believe we will increasingly have to engage in.


One last point. President Hinckley, in a fascinating passage near the beginning of his sermon, after describing war as one of Satan's tools, mourned the way we "are prone to glorify the great empires of the past," including "the vast British empire." That rhetorical choice didn't seem to make sense to me at first: if he wanted to talk about the evils of war, he could have easily talked about how we glorify armies, soldiers, weapons; how we make a big deal out of military heroism and get our blood up when we see scenes of war. But he didn't; instead, he spoke of how imperial ambitions lead to "brutal conquest," "subjugation," "repression, and an astronomical cost in life and treasure." (That "life and treasure" bit in particular has an almost 19th-century, anti-imperialist ring to it.) So clearly he didn't simply want to condemn warfare; instead, he wanted to rebuke certain causes to which warfare is put. I don't know how well-read a man President Hinckley is, but there's no way any halfway informed American citizen (and by this I mean someone who reads Time magazine) can still by this point be unaware of the vaguely imperial language which has surrounded much of the planning and execution of this war: the neoconservative "democratic imperialism" which I have written about, and so forth. I can't help but feel that President Hinckley included this passage in his sermon because he wanted to underscore the care which must attend any attempt to tease out a Mormon position on war on the simple basis of "cause." That he believes we sometimes "obliged" to do so is apparent; that it is also a dangerous thing to do, a thing which invites triumphalism, is equally apparent. I don't know what Hinckley imagines should or must happen in Iraq, but I come away from nearly a week's worth of constant thought and discussion about his sermon with two convictions. First, that it is justifiable, sometimes, with full consciousness of the sin invariably involved, to fight even a faraway war for a good (i.e., liberal, freedom-loving, rights-defending) cause. And second, that those who let the cause go to their heads, who flirt even distantly with the idea of using power to remake the world, have in fact left the cause behind: they have become advocates of empire, and the prophet of the Mormon church has little sympathy, historical or otherwise, with them. I am grateful that in my writings on the war I have always made it clear that I don't think being willing to fight on behalf of liberal causes need be the same thing as defending a kind of "liberal imperialism"; still, I feel the sting of Hinckley's reproach. What the prophet has to say to all Mormons, I think, is that we're playing with fire here--indeed, we're all in the fire, all us mortals--and just because we may not see our way clear to transcending it doesn't mean we are free from watching carefully how we use it, or how it may be used (or abused) in a good cause's name.