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Friday, September 03, 2010
“Our Cultural Inheritance”
Rarely does a day pass that I am left uninspired by one or more of my Esteemed Co-Conspirators. Aaron Brenzel's piece, immediately prior to this one, is another example in a long and impressive series, especially as Aaron's predictions couple to this equally impressive insight into the core of feeling behind the August 28th Restoring Honor rally at the National Mall:
Beck gets that there is a deeply and urgently felt conviction emerging organically across a broad swath of the American populace that the spectacular economic and political collapses of recent years were made possible -- even inevitable -- by a much longer Great Moral Decline. Americans' commitment to Judeo-Christian principles, secured for most by a belief in biblical authority, long served to fuel the engine and fortify the rails of our government and economy. Yet now, it is feared, that commitment is no longer powerful and pervasive enough to propel the American marketplace and constrain the excesses and abuses in private and public sectors. In the words of Dr. Alveda King: "Our material gains seem to be going the way of our moral losses."......Americans for generations have passed down a set of values, principles, and practices that honor integrity over greed, frugality over conspicuous consumption, industry over dependency and liberty over coercion. There may be other cultures capable of sustaining a reasonably sound democratic government and free market economy, but the American Judeo-Christian culture undergirded a government and an economy that have arguably been the most successful in all of history.
The deep concern across the United States appears to be that we have squandered our cultural inheritance. We have exchanged the extraordinary treasury of Judeo-Christian stories, values, and wisdom that sustained us for generations in favor of the cheap culture of corruption, indolence, and dissolution that has swiftly bankrupted our economy and our government.
The values embedded in the "cultural inheritance" of which commentator Timothy Dalrymple speaks above are not utterly inseparable from America's Christian heritage. However, they have been transmitted down the generations overwhelmingly through our Christian faith. That transmission line has been seriously abraded.
Over the decades since World War I, religious faith in general and Christianity in particular have been attacked as no abstraction ever has, in all of recorded history. Though the attackers remain a minority among us, because of their control of our major channels of communication they have been remarkably successful at delegitimizing values born from religious faith and propagated through religious faith as political positions. In effect, Thou shalt not murder, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, and Thou shalt not covet have been excluded from political discourse.
A military man will tell you: The moral is to the material as a foundation is to the house built upon it.
Aaron's prognosis for the November elections, particularly as regards the low name recognition of the surging "outsider" candidates, illuminates an important aspect of Americans' current attitude toward Washington: the majority of energized voters will be going to the polls to vote against. The prevailing mood isn't so much anti-Democrat as anti-Establishment and anti-Washington. Party alignments are of secondary importance.
Why? Until recently, the grumbling about the federal government's intrusions and exactions was fairly moderate. Yes, we complained, especially those of us with personal priorities that were being neglected, or personal oxen being gored. But we haven't edged this close to outright rebellion since Daniel Shays and the Whiskey Rebels. Even specially passionate electoral rejections of the sitting hegemons have been rare: FDR's massive defeat of Herbert Hoover in 1932; Ronald Reagan's overturning of Jimmy Carter's skiff in 1980. Clearly, something big is afoot.
At such a time, it's well to look beyond the polls, and to address a wider field than the political prognosticators allow themselves.
I'm acquainted with several persons, not all of them politically like-minded, who sense a calamity approaching. It's possible to endorse government activism in principle without approving of the results of specific exertions thereof; thus, many a welfare-state liberal has taken exception to the excesses of the present administration and Congress. It only requires open eyes to read the writing on our wall.
The folks of whom I speak have been forting up. They're following the advice of the broker in the old gag: "Buy canned goods and ammunition." And they're not at all happy about it.
They sense that their retirements are dubious.
They sense that their livelihoods are threatened.
They sense danger for their children, and their friends...and their country.
And they have begun to sense, however inchoately, that the approaching storm was ignited, and continues to be fueled, in Washington.
A key concept for the analysis of our political devolution is that of agency. An agent is, of course, one who acts on another's behalf. Agent Smith is hired by principal Jones to do something Jones wants done. Perhaps it's something Smith is more skilled at than Jones; alternately, it might be a chore Jones finds arduous or distasteful. But whatever the character of the task or Jones's reasons for delegating it, it is fixed in the everlasting congruity of things, immovably embedded in the moral order of the Universe, that if Jones has no right to do it, then Smith has no greater right to do it on Jones's behalf.
That's easy enough to understand when put in terms of individuals. But what if the agent in the tableau is an organization...or a government?
Marshall Fritz, founder of the Advocates for Self-Government, liked to illuminate this critical moral truth with a sequence of stories about thieves and their unwilling victim. If the thieves outnumber the victim -- if they take a vote on whether or not to steal the victim's belongings -- if the victim is permitted to vote alongside them -- can that sanctify their subsequent theft?
Can wrong be made right by majority approval? Can it be made right by turning the proceeds to charitable ends? Can it be made right if the wrongdoer's intentions are sufficiently benign?
Hearken to the words of the foremost sociopolitical analyst of all time, the great Herbert Spencer:
I asked one of the members of Parliament whether a majority of the House could legitimize murder. He said no. I asked him whether it could sanctify robbery. He thought not. But I could not make him see that if murder and robbery are intrinsically wrong, and not to be made right by the decisions of statesmen, then similarly all actions must be either right or wrong, apart from the authority of the law; and that if the right and wrong the law are not in harmony with this intrinsic right and wrong, the law itself is criminal. [From "The Proper Sphere of Government," in The Man Versus the State]
Government is an agent. Except in an absolute monarchy whose founding principle is that God Himself has given the monarch unchallengeable authority over "his" people and lands, a government has no independent moral standing; it exists solely to act on others' behalf. It cannot make right what is intrinsically wrong. Yet every government known to Man, throughout all the millennia for which we have records, has arrogated to itself that very privilege.
If a people should grant the government over it that privilege, it will be used...and abused.
I wrote some time ago, in addressing another aspect of our political problems, that a class is defined by its privileges. Our political class is no exception.
When our rulers sit together to "make law" and "decree justice" -- yes, yes, those are "sneer quotes" -- their individual interests and agendas are conveniently concealed behind a committee's facade. That doesn't depend at all on the size of the committee; two consuls acting in concert are no more and no less a committee than the House of Representatives. Every individual member can deflect the odium for the decisions of the whole onto his fellows. In recent years, a member's rationales for doing so even if he's concurred in the committee's majority decision have become quite elaborate.
Note how the privilege of setting aside the moral law when our rulers sit in committee has been "informally delegated" to our rulers as individuals. The plethora of scandals, especially financial scandals, that have touched elected officials in recent years bears witness to their fondness for that privilege, and to their desire to exploit it to the fullest. Most notably, every attempt by Us the People to qualify or limit that privilege has been met with a resistance so multifarious and fierce as to defeat my powers of description.
I believe we have found the nerve nexus upon which the Restoring Honor rally, the Tea Party movement, and Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, the most visible representatives thereof, have pressed: the unassuaged, ever-growing ache Americans feel from having let our political class "get away with it."
The Commandments of Mount Sinai are ten in number, but there was an unspoken eleventh, implied by the enunciation of the others: Thou shalt not get away with it. God will have the final Word on our lawless lawgivers. Whether he will include all of us who hold ourselves individually blameless as their accessories before and after the fact, we cannot know.
I'd rather be safe than sorry.
When Timothy Dalrymple speaks of "our cultural inheritance" in the essay cited above, he speaks not only of the moral strictures that comprise the Judeo-Christian ethos, but also of the breadth of mechanisms by which they've been propagated down the centuries. And indeed, when we strain to explain our political maladies, the enervation of those mechanisms are more important than the ethos itself.
Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally was billed, organized, and operated as a non-partisan, even non-political event, despite the presence of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and several other political figures. Beck's personal focus was on the return to faith and trust in God and attention to His laws. To the dismay of Beck's many detractors (and no doubt our entire political class), that was the most brilliant stroke of the past two years, a game-changer in the exact sense.
God is non-partisan. His laws bind Democrats and Republicans alike.
The religious conduits through which Americans' moral educations have flowed have been most seriously obstructed by a cultural elite that dominates the education, communications, and entertainment industries. That elite has done its damnedest to efface the moral absolutes graven into the foundation of the Universe by trumpeting messages of relativism and nonjudgmentalism. To this they've coupled baseless yet thunderous denunciations of our "racism," "sexism", "homophobia," and "hard-heartedness." They've slandered the proponents of traditional moral standards as "Puritanical," and have aimed blistering accusations of "hypocrisy" at anyone who defends that standard yet occasionally fails to meet it perfectly. They've abjured God in favor of Cthulhu; they've rejected progress in favor of Congress. The indirectly expressed theme is that, since we are fallen, we might as well dismiss the possibility of rising and enjoy a thorough wallow.
Though I dislike to say it, most Americans have been inhibited from contradicting those emissions, at least overtly. But the conviction that we've gone badly wrong has been swelling in us nevertheless. It could not remain unarticulated forever.
A personal note, which you might find relevant: regular readers of Eternity Road who've dipped into the Short Fiction section are aware that I write the occasional bit of erotica. Being a religious sort, I have a rather different approach to erotica, as you might have guessed. A dear friend has called my stuff "Catholic family-values porn," a phrase I've made my own and have employed in the promotion of my works.
I've included my erotica in my recent E-publishing efforts at Smashwords. Those three volumes have attracted thousands of readers, and have garnered quite a lot of email as well. The common message that runs through those emails has been Why can't I find more material like this?
My most recent offering in that vein is Farm Girl, an unabashed celebration of family life and family love. The response, measured by emailed reader reactions, has been nothing short of stupendous. There's an actual hunger abroad for a return to virtue that doesn't command asceticism or condemn pleasure. Thousands of people, judging solely from what they've written to me, are desperate for a path back to God that embraces life and joy and disdains sackcloth and ashes.
To me, that is quintessentially, even uniquely American. As P. J. O'Rourke says in Parliament of Whores, this is the Happy Kingdom. That's written into the birth certificate of the Republic, right there in the central paragraph, and cannot be excised.
But we cannot be enduringly happy while we reject our moral knowledge. Sociopaths excepted, our consciences cannot be permanently numbed. Nor can we accept the rule of an amoral and rapacious political elite, whose appetite grows with each passing year, while we strain to remain within the bounds of the laws God has written into our natures.
I've written on several occasions that the atheist who leads a blameless life -- Dante's "virtuous pagan" -- will be raised to eternal bliss at its end. But that way is far harder to travel than the Christian or Jewish path; it requires an insight into moral absolutes that few persons possess, and a firmness of conviction that few atheists can sustain.
For the great majority of Americans -- 74% at the last completed census -- Glenn Beck is pointing the proper way. To capitalize on his insight and direction, we must revitalize our "cultural inheritance:"
- The great moral fables of Aesop, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Grimms;
- The philosophical bequests of Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas;
- The literary patrimony of the Western Canon;
- Most important of all, the Gospels.
These things must be taken out of our cultural trunk and made vibrant in new stories, new poems, new songs and movies. We must relearn their lessons and proclaim them to our fellows and our children without embarrassment, and certainly without fear. Equally important, we must accept and admit that we are fallen: when we depart from virtue, we must acknowledge our failures, and resolve to do better next time.
We must hold our political class accountable by those standards, without exceptions, evasions, or excuses. We must exact the proper penalties for their betrayals and deceits.
And we must begin at once.
Comments
I think Esau got a better deal for his trade than we have.
Posted by Russell on 09/03/2010 at 12:58 PMOne way to keep them from getting away with it is to elect a majority Republican to either (or both) house(s). With majority comes control of the committees where investigations can be run. It would even be possible to get a special prosecutor. I would bet my last dollar that this administration has broken more laws in their short reign then any administration ever did in the past. And I am positive they think they are so smart and believed they would get away with it that that they didn’t even do a good job of covering it all up. Personally, I am looking forward to seeing some perp walks.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 09/04/2010 at 12:43 AMThe real problem we are facing right now is that we have an actual Muslim in the White House.
Don’t try to tell me Obama is not a Muslim!
Unfortunately, nobody in the public sphere - not even Glenn Beck - will come out and admit this.
Posted by 1389AD on 09/04/2010 at 04:30 PMRegarding President Obama as a Muslim. I am more convinced that he is a believer in liberation Theology. Which is Jeremiah Wright’s thought. I think it is more insidious than Islam.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 09/04/2010 at 09:38 PMThanks, Fran. Incisive as always.
Posted by Blackiswhite, Imperial Consigliere on 09/04/2010 at 10:14 PM
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