Clash of the Iconoclasts (Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie)

Was the murder of 11 members of the staff of a French “satirical” magazine a civilized act? To ask that question even rhetorically seems absurd.

Was the weekly output of the staff of that magazine a contribution to civilization? To ask that question seems brutish at best, and invites cries of “blaming the victim” and “moral equivalency” between “medieval barbarians” and “heroic defenders of freedom of speech.”

Yet the second question may be even more important than the first, if only because everyone outside of the confines of the putative “religion of peace” knows the proper answer to the first, but few understand why the proper answer to the second may very well be the same.

I do not wish to make too much of the rapid embrace of the phrase “Je suis Charlie” by good people horrified by the meticulously planned and surgically performed strike by militant Muslims on the Paris offices of the “irreverent” weekly. Few who posted those words on Twitter and Facebook and every other form of social media know much at all about the actual content of Charlie Hebdo, as the all-too-frequent use of the line “It’s the French version of The Onion” makes clear. (The world leaders who marched in Paris behind “Je suis Charlie” banners are a different matter altogether.)  Most would undoubtedly be horrified had they seen the viciously anti-Christian cartoons that Charlie Hebdo routinely ran alongside the anti-Muslim images that have been widely circulated. Few (I trust) would be willing to defend, for instance, the cover that depicted the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity sodomizing one another, as a show of support for homosexual “marriage.”

Yet even among those exposed to the truth about the vile content that Charlie Hebdo routinely published, many continue to stand behind the slogan, because as a society we have become so beguiled by the words “freedom of speech” that we regard the quotation routinely and wrongly attributed to Voltaire—“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”—as the very foundation of civilization.

Of course, we don’t act like we believe that. “Je suis Charlie,” cry those on the left, who normally spend their days screaming “Racist!” at those on the right. Would they defend to the death the right of someone to question affirmative action, much less the right to call someone the n-word? Of course not, nor should they; to die for the right of someone else to champion something you strongly oppose is surely one definition of insanity.

“Je suis Charlie,” shout those on the right, who routinely denounce the antisemitic ravings of Muslim clerics. Would they defend to the death the right of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to call Jews “swine,” or even the right of President Obama to call Islam a “religion of peace”? Of course not, nor should they.

The good news is that no one has to die to defend views that they disagree with, much less find abhorrent. Civilization, thankfully, does not depend on the right of freedom of speech, neither the concrete right guaranteed in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution nor the abstract version ripped from the historical circumstances of that amendment by activist jurists and honed to a weapon lethal to civilized discourse first by leftists in the 1960’s and 70’s and then by “conservatives” in the 1980’s and 90’s.

Indeed, in its abstract form, elevated above all other principles and above the complex realities of actual human society, “free speech,” rather than being the very foundation of civilization, has largely become cover for the behavior of those who either do not wish to conform to the norms of civilized society or who wish to undermine those norms with the ultimate intention of destroying civilization itself. It has become, in other words, an ideology, a distortion of reality.

The partisans of free speech and the evangelists of Allah are much closer together than they or we tend to think. A few years after the pseudonymous S.G. Tallentyre (Evelyn Beatrice Hall) inserted her high-sounding words into the mouth of Voltaire, another English writer pointed out the parallels between the beliefs of Islam and those of modern liberalism. In G.K. Chesterton’s The Flying Inn (1914), we see Islam not as the “medieval religion” of atheist and neoconservative screeds, but as a thoroughly modern ideology, sibling to liberalism in an iconoclasm that doesn’t simply ignore reality but tries to destroy it. Unlike the Triune God of Christianity Who deigned to send His Only Begotten Son to become man to save His Creation, Allah is an abstract principle—like “free speech”—to which all of human society must submit, by force if necessary, and through which it must be violently transformed. And those who oppose the followers of Allah, like those who raise questions about the supposed defenders of “free speech,” must be silenced.

That Islam does not merely prohibit images of Allah or images of Muhammad but all images of creation is telling, because through this prohibition it reveals a fundamental hatred of the created world, and not simply a fear of blasphemy (in the case of images of Allah) or sacrilege (in the case of images of Allah’s “prophet” Muhammad). But the iconoclasm of modern liberalism is the same. The promotion of vile obscenity à la Charlie Hebdo isn’t “courageous”; it is a rage against reality, a desire not only to destroy the norms of civilized life but to strike at the very roots of the created order that gives rise to those norms and makes civilization possible.

This desire for destruction explains a seeming contradiction that some commentators have noted. As unwise as it is to poke a bear, it would seem insane to go a step further and set out bait so that you have more bears around to poke. Yet at the very time that the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were routinely attacking Islam and Muslims, the editorial policy of Charlie Hebdo supported continued Islamic immigration to France—even after the magazine’s offices were bombed in 2011 by militant Muslims.

The staff of Charlie Hebdo, however, were not insane. They had a purpose in baiting the bears: Their ultimate target was not Islam and its adherents, but the Catholic Church and Hers. A truly Christian society can—within limits—tolerate both atheists and adherents of non-Christian religions, recognizing them as icons, however tarnished, of their Creator; but the iconoclasm of both modern liberalism and Islam cannot tolerate the incarnationalism of Christianity. The staff of Charlie Hebdo did not make the mistake of believing that the enemy of their enemy was their friend, but they were perfectly willing to let Muslims assist them in attacking the Catholic Church, in much the same way that Israeli leaders once did everything they could to elevate Muslim Palestinian leaders at the expense of Christian ones. For any monolithic principle to triumph in the long run, Trinitarian incarnationalism—the source of true, lasting, humane diversity—must be destroyed. Christ is a greater threat to both Allah and modern liberalism than either one of the latter is to the other. The followers of Allah and the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo share a vision of a world united under a single, indivisible principle; they just call that principle by different names.

That is the reality which all of those waving “Je suis Charlie” placards missed when the first postmassacre issue of Charlie Hebdo was released. The cartoon on the cover was almost invariably described as “poignant” and “courageous,” but it would be more correct to say that, for a change, it is truthful: Under the headline “Tout est pardonné” (“All is forgiven”), Muhammad, a tear falling from his eye, holds a “Je suis Charlie” placard. Yes, indeed—at a fundamental level, Muhammad is Charlie Hebdo, and the remaining staff are happy to claim him.

Not so the Catholic Church, as the editorial in that same issue makes perfectly clear. Speaking of the reaction to the massacre of their colleagues, the remaining staff declare, “What made us laugh the most is that the bells of Notre Dame rang in our honour. We would like to send a message to Pope Francis, who, too, was ‘Charlie’ this week: we only accept the bells of Notre Dame ringing in our honour when it is Femen who make them tinkle”—a reference to the February 12, 2013, desecration of the cathedral by topless “activists” who attempted to damage Notre Dame’s historic bells.

The iconoclasm of the Muslim murderers of the staff of Charlie Hebdo knows no bounds; but so, too, the iconoclasm of Charlie’s editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, who in 2012 proudly pointed out his renunciation of normal human life in pursuit of a devotion to the abstract principle of “free speech”: “I have no kids, no wife, no car, no credit.” His iconoclasm did not stop there, but extended to his very self: “It perhaps sounds a bit pompous, but I prefer to die standing than living on my knees.”

On January 7, two devotees of a different abstract principle granted him his wish. But as horrifying as the act of the jihadists was, the proper response of Christians and of civilized men generally to the ultimate form of Muslim iconoclasm should not be the explicit or even implicit embrace of Charlie Hebdo’s version of iconoclasm. Both have stepped outside the bounds of civilization; they are the two sides of the same debased coin.

The proper response of all civilized men is to uphold the norms of civilization, to condemn both murder and blasphemy and sacrilege; to refuse to countenance the latter (much less to exalt it) just because the former has occurred.

And for Christians, the proper response includes, as it always does, striving to be an icon of Christ in this fallen world, to shine the light of His grace into creation in order to strengthen it rather than to tear it down, to build up civilization rather than to reject it. It means the renunciation of ideology and the iconoclasm of both Islam and abstract “free speech”—and the embrace of reality in its fullness. And finally, it means recognizing the truth about Stéphane Charbonnier that he, not wanting to live on his knees, refused to acknowledge about himself—that he was a man created in the image and likeness of God, which is why his murder by the devotees of the ideology of Allah is wrong, no matter what vile obscenities he published.

First published in the March 2015 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Returning to Reality

And Jesus answering said unto them,
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,
and to God the things that are God’s.

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost . . .

On February 28, 2013, as Pope Benedict XVI was leaving office, the magician Penn Jillette was interviewed on CNN by Piers Morgan, a nominal Catholic. Morgan, a critic of Benedict, thought he would have a sympathetic ear in Jillette, an outspoken atheist, but the interview quickly took an amusing turn as Jillette began lecturing Morgan on the teachings of the Catholic Church, which Jillette got (mostly) right. Morgan pushed back, but in the process only revealed his own ignorance of why the Church teaches what She teaches. Jillette made short work of him, as would anyone even modestly versed in Catholic theology.

Catholic commentators, especially those who are politically conservative and thus despised Piers Morgan for other reasons, enjoyed a bit of Schadenfreude at Morgan’s expense. One obvious lesson—which many of the commentators drew—is that Catholics of Morgan’s generation (he is 48) were poorly catechized.  If an atheist can beat a reasonably intelligent Catholic not just in technique but in the substance of a debate over Catholic theology, something is wrong.

There were less obvious lessons to be learned. The first is that American Catholics are just as enamored of celebrities as Americans of other stripes are. Not a few of the Catholic commentariat jumped to the conclusion that Jillette was ripe for conversion. (Many of the same commentators had declared Christopher Hitchens another Augustine or Saint Paul in the making, and had not only hoped for—a good thing—but expected his deathbed conversion, no matter how often Hitchens assured them it would never come. Which it didn’t.) Just as Kourtney Kardashian was lauded as a pro-life hero back in 2009 when she revealed in an interview that she could not bring herself to abort her unborn child, conceived out of wedlock, so Jillette became, for a moment, the potential new face of the Catholic Church in America. And as prolifers had made excuses for Kardashian, when in that same interview she had made it clear that she thought it perfectly fine for other mothers to kill their unborn children even if she could not personally do so, Jillette’s admirers tried to explain away the actions of this militant atheist who has used his stage act and his television show, Bullsh-t!, to launch a series of nasty attacks on the Catholic Church, the Eucharist, and the priesthood.

Which brings us to a second, less obvious lesson: The Devil knows not only Latin but Christian theology. And he can use that knowledge in more than one way: to try to undermine the faith of those who are weak, by instilling doubts in their minds; but also to mislead others through a form of spiritual pride, by convincing them that saying the right thing is necessarily the same thing as believing the right thing. If the Devil can convince people that the Faith is simply a checklist of propositions to which we must give assent rather than a lived relationship with the Risen Christ from which those doctrines flow, his work is mostly done.

Faith is, among other things, the perfection of reason, but that does not mean that reason alone can lead us to faith. Penn Jillette may know all the right things to say, but Morgan, despite his dissent from Church teaching, has the benefit of baptism and membership in the Church, while Jillette not only rejects both for himself but has made it perfectly clear that he despises those who choose them for themselves (and even more so for their children). Jillette was not, as so many seemed to assume, urging Morgan on to deepen his faith (or even simply “keeping him honest”); he was ridiculing him for being less knowledgeable than a man who rejects Jesus Christ, and all His works, and all of His salvific promises.

Put this way, this all seems rather obvious; so why did so many miss what Jillette was up to? Part of the problem is that, in the United States, Christianity has all too often become a surface phenomenon. Doctrine has become a substitute for the substance of the Faith, rather than a catechetical tool that is meant to help us understand what we, as Christians, experience. To put it in stark terms: Which came first, the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Christ, or the dogmatic councils? As Harold O.J. Brown, the longtime religion editor for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, explained in his greatest work, Heresies: The Image of Christ in the Mirror of Heresy and Orthodoxy From the Apostles to the Present, Christian doctrine developed from the lived experience of the Church, the Body of Christ, not the other way around. A credo is a distillation of what Christians believe because they know it to be true, rather than a list of propositions to which they give assent, and thus come to believe. The convert recites the Creed at his baptism not as a test of his orthodoxy but to affirm what he already knows, through his experience, to be true.

Many factors have contributed to the distortion of Christian doctrine from a distillation of the Christian experience into an abstraction, even an ideology. In the United States in the 20th century, a certain neo-Thomism played an important role, beginning in the Catholic Church but with its effects spilling out into other Christian denominations. Thomistic theology is not the problem; the problem, as Owen Barfield demonstrated in Saving the Appearances, comes when that theology is treated as an end in itself, and the experience that underlies it and which it encapsulates becomes attenuated or even lost. Recover that experience, and Christian doctrine takes on a new life that can deepen our faith; the works of Thomas become as fresh as if they were written yesterday. But without that experience, we become caricatures of Penn Jillette—functional atheists who, unlike Jillette, are convinced that we have the fullness of the Faith.

The problem, though, runs much deeper than modern neo-Thomism. It extends back to the beginning of the modern age and the rise of the modern state, as the realm of politics, previously limited, began to encroach upon more and more areas of everyday life.  And it has reached its apotheosis in 21st-century America, where even so-called conservatives no longer believe that there are no political solutions to cultural problems, but that all cultural problems are at base political and can only be solved through elections and legislation and court decisions.

In a society with a strong common culture, the encroachment of politics into more and more areas of human life may not initially seem to pose a problem. Indeed, to the extent that legislation, for instance, is seen as supporting what is good in human life against external threats to the common culture, such encroachment may even be welcomed. But as the common culture breaks down, the increased power of the state over culture becomes a battering ram that accelerates that destruction.

So, for instance, state laws against abortion before 1973 largely represented the common moral sense of the people. But Roe v. Wade, while imposed from the top down, did not come out of nowhere. The moral consensus on abortion had been eroding for decades, and it reflected a more advanced erosion within the Christian churches on contraception, which itself reflected a loss within those churches not simply of the Christian understanding of the sacredness of life but, more importantly, of the experience that gave life to that understanding.

Jump forward to today, and for any person under the age of 40 in the United States, abortion has always been a part of the fabric of his or her life, and the battle over abortion, while framed in moral terms, has always been a political one. Those who believe that abortion is wrong wish to see Roe v. Wade overturned and new laws passed banning abortion; those who think otherwise work hard to maintain a pro-Roe majority on the Supreme Court.

The latter are winning, and will keep winning, until the former recognize that the only way to win the battle is to reassert the primacy of culture over politics. To put it in explicitly Christian terms, in order to save the lives of unborn children, Christians must first set about saving the souls of their fathers and mothers. And that means not simply preaching to those mothers and fathers about the Christian moral tradition concerning the sacredness of human life but leading them to the salvific relationship with Christ that underlies and gives life to that tradition. Disconnected from that experience, especially in a society in which politics claims for itself the ultimate moral authority, the Christian moral tradition becomes ossified, at best, and at worst takes on the character of an ideology, both adversary to, and counterpart of, the ideology of individualistic liberalism.

The problem, as I have made clear, is nothing new, finding its roots in the rise of the modern world five centuries ago; and it was accurately diagnosed almost half a century ago by Josef Pieper, who also pointed toward its only possible solution in his short but indispensable work Tradition: Concept and Claim (translated from the German in 2008 by E. Christian Kopff and published that same year by ISI Books). Tradition, in both the secular usage and the capital-T of Christian Sacred Tradition, is not merely a collection of things worth preserving, as both political and religious “conservatives” today treat it, but the means by which the most important of all experiences is handed down. As Pieper writes,

There is really nothing praiseworthy in the mere fact that something which has been thought, said, or done “since forever” will continue to be thought, said, and done. The praise due the act of tradition only makes sense when what is preserved and will continue to be preserved through the generations is what is truly worth preserving. That is the point of young people’s doubting question. Why is it, they ask, that a duty has been violated, if we simply let what has been handed down rest on its laurels, so that we can say, think, and do something totally different? We can only hope that someone hears this radical question and gives an existentially believable and equally radical answer, “the” answer that goes to the heart of things: that among the many things that are more or less worth preserving and may have been accumulated as “tradition,” there is in the last analysis only one traditional good that it is absolutely necessary to preserve unchanged, namely the gift that is received and handed on in the sacred tradition. I say “necessary” because this tradition comes from a divine source; because each generation needs it for a truly human existence; because no people and no brilliant individual can replace it on their own or even add anything valid to it.

It should be obvious that Pieper is speaking here not of external forms, but of that which gave them life, and which may require those external forms to change over time so that what is truly worth preserving may continue to be passed on. This is the problem faced by modern conservatives, who primarily seek to defend what they respected and loved when they were young, rather than what is necessarily worth preserving. Pieper contrasts “Tradition (singular)” with these “traditions,” which may start out supporting a healthy culture but ultimately have the potential to do more harm than good:

Genuine consciousness of tradition makes one positively free and independent in the face of conservatisms, which worry obsessively about the cultivation of the “traditions.” Certainly, a “cultivation of tradition” that attaches itself to a historically accidental external image of what has been handed down becomes a positive hindrance to a real transmission of what is truly worth conserving, which perhaps can occur only under changed historical forms. It is possible to imagine a real transmission of what is in the last analysis worth handing down, which a dogmatic conservatism could not even recognize.

This is the problem faced also by the Church, and here I speak broadly, and not just of the Catholic Church of which I am a member. Even under the best of circumstances, in a healthy culture in which the structures of society and of politics are not antagonistic toward the Christian Faith, the Church must be a countercultural institution.  That is the only way in which She can be certain to be able to hand down the ultimate Truth of the Faith, and not let it become obscured or deformed by an “historically accidental external image” that may have arisen from that Truth but has since become abstracted from it.

We are always in danger of turning the traditions of Christianity—the rituals and doctrines, the moral teachings and institutions—into ends in themselves, rather than means to the true end, “the gift that is received and handed on.” Or rather, we should use the Gift (singular), Who gave Himself to save our souls, and Who continues, in every age until the end of time, to give man what he needs “for a truly human existence.”

American conservatives of a certain generation summed up the insight of a different German philosopher in the catchphrase “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!” And yet, while warning against the dangers of trying to bring about heaven on earth, they themselves, through their obsession with elections and legislation, did much to subjugate culture to politics and to make Christian moral teaching a means to a political end, rather than a means of transmitting the Truth of the Faith. The fruit of their efforts can be seen today in the lost battles of the Culture War, and in entire generations that have sought salvation not in the sacraments of Christian churches but in the squabbles of “the public square.”

All is not lost, however, so long as “the gift that is received and handed on” continues to be received and handed on. But the locus of that transmission—that “Tradition (singular)”—has never been the polling place, but the Church, which guards that gift.

When we get that straight—when we recognize once again that the duty we owe to God is to pass on the Good News to our fellow man—only then shall we begin the process of returning to reality, revitalizing our culture, and putting politics back in its proper, limited space.

First published in the December 2013 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

A New Teleology

That which will be is to some extent the cause of that which is. What is going to happen tomorrow is already to some extent the cause of what is happening today; indeed, of what has happened yesterday. We are not merely the products of the past; we are also the creators of the future . . .

— John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past

Richard M. Weaver famously declared that “ideas have consequences.” His book of that title presents an argument that is somewhat more nuanced than the way in which the phrase has been used by decades of conservatives since; but both Weaver and those he inspired have largely seen the role of ideas in history as linear, a matter of cause and effect. Hold a certain set of ideas (an ideology), and you will act—or, at least, be more likely to act—a certain way. Ideas, in this view, are motives, pushing us along; change the dominant ideas of a culture, and you will change the future.

There’s something attractive, even comforting, in this understanding of the grand, sweeping role that ideas play, even though—or perhaps, to some extent, because—it denies personal moral agency. At its worst, it’s the conservative equivalent of the most simplistic form of Darwinism. If everything that has happened and is happening can be reduced to broad historical trends tied to one particular cause, then none of us can be held personally accountable for being carried away in that stream; and conversely, if we can spread the right ideas far and wide, that stream not only can but will be diverted.

But the role that ideas play in shaping human action and the course of history is more complex and more personal than the popular understanding of the phrase “ideas have consequences.” As John Lukacs often wrote, “Men do not have ideas; they choose them.” There’s nothing deterministic or mechanical about those choices. As Lukacs writes in Historical Consciousness, “in historical life events are not only ‘pushed’ by the past but ‘pulled,’ too, by the future; desires, aspirations, expectations, perceptions, premonitions, purposes, all play their parts . . . ”

Desires, aspirations, expectations, perceptions, premonitions, purposes: These words aren’t the language of mechanical causality, nor words that would normally remind us of the phrase “ideas have consequences”; they are, instead, words that we associate with free will, with moral agency, with personal beliefs and actions rather than impersonal historical trends.

Every action is a moral action; and that includes our choice of ideas. The elevation of opinion—“that’s just your opinion; it’s not what I believe”—as the chief currency of intellectual life is, at root, an avoidance of our duty to conform our lives to what is true.

“[W]e are products, and creators, of the past,” Lukacs writes, “and also creators, and products, of the future.” The central word here is we: With respect to both the past and the future, we remain—both mankind as a whole, and each of us personally—at the center of history.

Such a recognition is not only liberating, freeing us from the grip that determinism holds on the mind of modern man, but also profoundly Christian, returning free will to its central role in the life of every person. And that brings with it a deep responsibility to choose our ideas, and to act on them, with care.

Every action is a moral action; and that includes our choice of ideas. The elevation of opinion—“that’s just your opinion; it’s not what I believe”—as the chief currency of intellectual life is, at root, an avoidance of our duty to conform our lives to what is true. Pope Benedict XVI called this the “dictatorship of relativism”; but it is a dictatorship imposed not from without but embraced from within, because conforming our lives to the truth is harder than not doing so. “You shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free”; but freedom comes with moral responsibilities that bondage allows us to shirk.

Weaver believed that the great intellectual break in the history of mankind was the rise of nominalism and the abandonment of the classical and Christian insistence that everything that exists takes part in a reality beyond this world. There are only things we call horses; there is no essential horse-ness. Yet from the standpoint of epistemology, our understanding of how we know what we know, the world of the forms was always an abstraction, a conclusion we reached through our empirical study of the world around us rather than a realm we accessed directly. The nominalists insisted that there were only horses because we can never directly experience horse-ness.

Yet, pace Weaver, the more important intellectual shift occurred somewhat later, when we began to apply the concept of mechanical causality in science to human thought and action. When men longed for heaven, their desires and aspirations could pull them forward; when they cast their eyes down to earth, they made themselves no better than the animals, acting on base instinct and physical necessity—yet seeing in this slavery to the material a kind of freedom from the need to seek the truth and to act on it.

What we need today is a new teleology, a recognition of the end for which man was created, and a desire to live our lives with that end in sight.

East of Eden

Russell Kirk frequently warned those who read his essays and books and attended his lectures not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  Even at the most mundane level of everyday life, the Sage of Mecosta offered good advice.  If we spend all of our days dreaming about what might be—let alone what might have been—we’re liable to end up like Miniver Cheevy (or even Richard Cory).  Insisting that everything be perfect is a great way to ensure that your house suffers irreparable water damage from the minor leak in your roof while you try to decide between the six colors and four shapes of architectural shingles that Home Depot has to offer.

But there are greater depths to Dr. Kirk’s advice than the surface level of pragmatism.  His words of wisdom flowed from the same place as his opposition to ideology.  Leo Strauss argued that the classical and Christian worlds had set the bar too high for man to be able to reach it, and his students declared that the genius of the philosophers of the modern era (starting with Machiavelli) can be found in their embrace of a sort of “idealistic realism”—aiming for a standard that’s just high enough to give men something to strive for, but low enough that the goal is actually possible to reach.

As usual, Strauss was wrong, and his students (perhaps deliberately) more so.  The evidence can be found all around us—or rather, in what’s not around us.  Where are the modern Parthenons and Pantheons?  The Chartreses and Notre Dames of the 20th and 21st centuries?  The Homers and Dantes and Thomas Aquinases?  The various Trump towers may be marvels of engineering, but a mathematical problem solved in steel is different from a monument in word or in stone to the human spirit.

Men of earlier ages aimed high, but they met their aims, in large part because they recognized the limitations of man.  They didn’t demand that everything be planned out in advance.  There was no blueprint for Notre-Dame de Paris; no outline for the Commedia.  They placed stone upon stone, word after word, and from their efforts something glorious took shape.

The fundamental failure of the modern age stems from the refusal to accept the inherent limitations of a fallen world, and the consequent insistence on making the perfect the enemy of the good.  The great successes of the modern world—advances in technology and medicine, for example—are the exceptions that prove the rule, because they were made by men who were willing to experiment, to try something they weren’t sure would succeed, to accept something good (say, a moderate extension of life) rather than to insist on the perfect (the elimination of death).  That the basic techniques of modern science and medicine were established in the late medieval world and only refined since then is more significant than 21st-century man is willing to admit.

Nowhere is the modern tendency to make the perfect the enemy of the good more obvious than in the political demand that reality conform to ideology.  Kirk found in Edmund Burke, the prototypical conservative, the source of his pragmatic advice, but “conservatives” today are much more the descendants of Thomas Paine, an atheist radical and Burke’s bête noire on the subject of the French Revolution, than they are of Burke.  Paine is typical of the modern ideologue in his insistence that changes in external social and political institutions are more likely to better the lot of mankind than the conversion of hearts and minds, much less the literal conversion of fallen man to membership in the Body of Christ.  If we can conceive of the perfect world, we can build it, even if that may mean that those whose vision doesn’t match up with ours might need to be sacrificed—literally—for the sake of the glorious future in which they will not share.

As late as 30 years ago, American conservatives still cited Kirk on the dangers of ideology, even as they, in the final days of the Cold War, had fallen prey (as Kirk saw with perfect clarity) to the siren song of ideology themselves.  Today, most self-identified conservatives who remember his name reject Russell Kirk precisely because he wasn’t an ideologue, because he believed that true diversity (rather than the fake diversity that goes under the name of multiculturalism) is a Christian principle that flows from the nature of the Godhead Itself, because he insisted that there are no political solutions to cultural problems (which is why he joined the masthead of Chronicles), because he was a patriot of Mecosta, Michigan, rather than a nationalist of the American empire based in the fever swamps of Washington, D.C.

Whatever their failings, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had read Russell Kirk, and both presidents honored him with invitations to visit the White House.  The thought of a Kirk being invited to an audience with an American president post-1992 is, in the immortal word of Wallace Shawn, “inconceivable!”  There is no left and right anymore, no Burke-Paine debate to speak of in contemporary politics.  There is only ideology, the sword of the revolution—the enemy of the good, in relentless pursuit of a perfection unobtainable here, east of Eden.

First published in the October 2017 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.