Freedom From Obligation

For many Americans at or near the mid-century mark of their lives, Frank Capra has shaped their understanding of the meaning of Christmas in a way that only Charles Dickens could possibly rival.  Of all of his films, It’s a Wonderful Life was Capra’s personal favorite, but even though it was nominated for Best Picture in 1947 (as well as four other Academy Awards), it owes its influence on my generation to a clerical error that let the copyright on the film lapse in 1974.  For almost 20 years, until Republic Pictures figured out a way to assert copyright once more, It’s a Wonderful Life was shown as frequently from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day as A Christmas Story is today.

It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol share roughly the same premise: Through supernatural intervention, a man’s heart is changed on Christmas Eve.  Yet there are significant differences.  George Bailey is seeking death, while Ebenezer Scrooge is deathly afraid of dying.  George has made the lives of those around him better, while Scrooge’s influence on others has been minimal at best, and more often negative.  And the endings of the two tales reflect these differences: George changes his mind and embraces the life he has been living because, well, it’s wonderful, while Scrooge discovers that the only way to cheat death is to begin to live life.

Before their respective Christmas Eve encounters, Scrooge and George could hardly have been more different.  Scrooge is the living paragon of Manchester School get-what-you-can-while-forsaking-all-others liberalism, while George Bailey repeatedly denies his own desires and wishes for the good of his community.  Small wonder that, every year, libertarians proffer tiresome essays on why pre-visitation Scrooge is the true hero of A Christmas Carol, while Mr. Potter is the only man in Bedford Falls worthy of emulation.

Yet how did Scrooge and Potter become the men they are, and why are they so different from George?  Most would probably answer “greed,” and both Dickens and Capra would likely agree with that assessment.  But there’s more here than meets the eye, as both tales transcend their Christmas settings and become broader lessons in the realities of human life.  Because modern man—no matter what his economic state—has shaped his life more in the mold of Scrooge and Potter than in that of George Bailey.

Bailey has spent his life living up to obligations—to his brother, his father, his uncle, his employer, his town, his friends, his wife, his family.  Scrooge and Potter have relentlessly shed those same obligations.  They have employees, but they have reduced their connection to them to the purely transactional.  This isn’t simply a function of greed; it’s possible to be greedy and yet still surround oneself with friends and family and treat employees with the respect they deserve.

What Scrooge and Potter have done is to retreat into themselves, to become individuals rather than full-fledged persons.  George Bailey is, in many ways, no less self-centered than they are; he has plans, big plans, that don’t involve Bedford Falls or anyone, with the eventual (and even then, somewhat reluctant) exception of Mary.  His despair on Christmas Eve has less to do with fear that he has let his family and community down than with his sudden realization that his impending arrest means he’s never going to leave his obligations behind and travel the world.  While Potter puts the thought of suicide in George’s mind by telling him he’s worth more dead than alive, George entertains the thought as a means of escaping his responsibilities rather than living up to them.

But George would have lived up to them, and if we pay close attention we know that, even before Clarence shows him what life in Bedford Falls would have been like if George hadn’t been born.  When Clarence jumps off the bridge, George shows his true character and dives in to save Clarence’s life.  No one would believe that Potter or Scrooge, sans-apparitions, would do likewise.  It’s far from clear that Scrooge would have done so even on Christmas Day, because, while the last two paragraphs of A Christmas Carol present a future Scrooge who has become much more like George Bailey, on Christmas Day itself the change is only beginning, and Scrooge’s initial attempts at turning his life around amount to throwing money at the problem.

What Clarence’s intervention shows George is not just that the people of Bedford Falls would be worse off for the lack of George, but that he would be worse off for the lack of each one of them.  George on the bridge is Scrooge in his bed and Potter in his wheelchair.  He’s modern man, seeking freedom from obligation, not realizing that true freedom comes from living up to our obligations—to spouses and to children, to family and to friends, to our communities and, ultimately, to our God.  Yet George comes through in the moment when he is most needed, because his character—unlike Scrooge’s, unlike Potter’s—has been formed by his embrace, however reluctant, of the people around him.

For George Bailey, it truly is a wonderful life, not because living up to his obligations has kept him from becoming the man that he wanted to be, but because doing so has made him the man that he is.

First published in the February 2018 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Get Big or Get Out

Most people think of E.F. Schumacher today (to the extent that they think of him at all) as some sort of vaguely leftist harbinger of the environmentalist movement.  His most famous work, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, is often reduced to “Buddhist Economics,” the title of one of the essays collected therein.  Though it is true that Schumacher developed an interest in Buddhism during a stint as an economic consultant in Burma in 1955, his fascination with Catholicism ran much deeper, and after 15 years of intellectual and spiritual study, he entered the Catholic Church in 1971, two years before he published Small Is Beautiful.

For those familiar with the Church’s social teaching, the concept of subsidiarity, and the distributism of G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Fr. Vincent McNabb, Schumacher’s work is as Catholic as Catholic can be, even if he never identified it as such.  And there’s no reason why he should have: Subsidiarity is a doctrine developed from natural law, not from revelation, which means that all men can arrive at its truth, regardless of their faith (or lack thereof) in Christ.

Oddly enough, though, one of the reasons Schumacher is usually dismissed by American conservatives is that those conservatives—including many (indeed most) Christian conservatives in the United States—have taken their stand with the universalizing forces of modernity, otherwise known as liberalism.  In both its economic and political forms, liberalism denies the truth of subsidiarity and the lessons derived from that truth.  What matters is not the natural order that begins with the family and extends outward (with power and authority rightly decreasing the further we get from the most fundamental social unit), but the relationship between the “individual” and the centralizing forces of government (“the state”) and economics (“business”).

And so the rallying cry of both the liberals who identify as liberals and the conservatives who don’t but actually are is not “Small is beautiful!” but “Get big or get out!”  Neither approaches economics (or politics, or culture) “as if people mattered” but as if all that matters is quantity, size, undifferentiated mass.  The focus on national politics to the exclusion of state and local political activity rarely stems from a desire to limit the damage that the federal government undoubtedly does but from a belief that the sheer scale of national politics makes it easier to bring about the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people.  Jeremy Bentham, not Edmund Burke, is the true model of most American conservatives.

People laughed at Doug Sohn, the founder and proprietor of Hot Doug’s, Chicago’s legendary “Sausage Superstore and Encased Meat Emporium,” because Sohn insisted on being on site whenever his restaurant was open for business.  For that reason, he refused to franchise his business or even to open a second location.  What kind of fool passes up the opportunity to make more money?  The answer would have been obvious to Schumacher: the kind who thinks that serving his customers as best he can is the right way to make a living.  Doug Sohn could live a comfortable life without opening a second location, but he couldn’t look each of his customers in the eye if he wasn’t physically there.  He acted as if the people who bought his products mattered, and his customers rewarded him for that choice by lining up around the block every day he was open.

After I joined the board of the Pregnancy Care Center of Rockford, I was shocked by the number of avowed pro-lifers who told me that it was all well and good to support such an organization, so long as I realized that the more important battles were being fought in Washington, D.C.  When I pointed out that this single pregnancy-care center had saved more babies (and thus also affected the lives of far more mothers and fathers) than the hard-won and much-hyped national ban on partial-birth abortion, the response was rarely disbelief (which might have been reasonable) but usually fury.  What mattered most was the potential impact, and that was simply a matter of numbers: At any given moment, there are more unborn babies nationwide than there are in the Rockford area.  That the actual impact of the Pregnancy Care Center of Rockford (and, for that matter, of every local pregnancy-care center in the country) was greater didn’t compute, because obviously bigger must be better.

With scale, though, comes anonymity, and the loss of a personal relationship that can change lives for the better and restore a culture.  Conservatives used to offer this as a critique of national welfare programs versus state ones, and state welfare programs versuslocally focused and administered charities, but we rarely hear such critiques today.  During his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump made a few noises about eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, but under his appointee, Betsy DeVos, the department will not return significant control over education to states and localities but almost certainly grow at rates approaching its growth under Bill Bennett, whose own boss, Ronald Reagan, had vowed to kill Jimmy Carter’s creation.

For years now, certain conservatives of a more traditional bent (such as Paul Gottfried) have lamented the “failure” of journals such as this one to establish a significant presence on FOX News.  If only Chronicles’ writers and editor could appear regularly on FOX, then . . . what?  The level of analysis and the devotion to the truth that characterizes those writers and editors could never have a home in the 24-hour “news cycle,” which is really just a 15-minute news brief that repeats 96 times a day.  To establish a beachhead inside FOX News would require being intellectually colonized by the medium.  The medium is the message—and the mass media, by definition, has no room for the message of Chronicles: that small is beautiful, that we should approach politics and economics and culture as if people matter.  The very structure of mass media is a rejection of the message our culture so desperately needs.

Thankfully, true reach—lasting influence—is a matter of quality rather than numbers.  The magazine you hold in your hands never had more than 19,000 readers at any one time in its more than 40 years of publication, and for many of those years, the number of subscribers hovered somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000.  That’s a pittance compared with the number of people that Sean Hannity reaches every night on FOX News.  Yet Chronicles has changed (and will continue to change) lives in ways that Sean Hannity never will, precisely because its audience is smaller, and the relationship between Chronicles’ writers and editors and its readers is more personal.  Hannity’s sound bites are aimed of necessity at the lowest common denominator, because that is how he attracts the largest possible audience.  Chronicles will never attract an audience the size of Hannity’s, because the number of people at any given time who are ready and willing to hear the truth is always smaller than the number of people who desire a comforting lie.  But those who are ready and willing to hear the truth are precisely the people who are most likely, in the long run, to change American culture for the better.

Still, we must give both liberal liberals and conservative liberals some credit where credit is due.  If you’re not willing to do what’s necessary to get big, to cut the corners that will make you more money and tell the lies that will attract the largest audience, then it’s time to get out: out of the mindset that influence (and the potential for profit, for that matter) is always a matter of numbers.  Small can indeed be beautiful—and like all beauty, it’s also good and true.

First published in the January 2018 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Chronicles of Culture

“Culture does not exist autonomously,” wrote Robert Nisbet in The Quest for Community; “it is set always in the context of social relationships.”  The implications of Nisbet’s statement should be obvious, but in the age of “social” media, when we speak of “long-distance relationships” with “friends” we have never met, the obvious too often gets lost in a cloud of abstraction.

For there to be a “context of social relationships,” there must be at least two people.  And those people must be part of a society, because that is what social, as an adjective, not only implies but demands, the fantasy worlds constructed by Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Williams notwithstanding.  And a society is a community, and a particular type thereof: not simply a random collection of people thrown together in time and bound by geography, but one ordered to the common good, and sharing a common history and customs.  Those customs, deriving from and informed by that history, form the barest skeleton of what we call culture.

Culture, then, is built from the ground up, and from the basic human community—the family—outward.  A culture is resilient to the extent that the society which gave rise to it is healthy, and that health implies a certain stability.  Too much mobility, in the form of either immigration or emigration, disrupts the social relationships that make it possible to order a community to the common good.  Shared history is lost; shared customs break down.  The common culture collapses.

Culture develops organically; it cannot be imposed from the top down.  Anything that we call a culture that does not arise “in the context of social relationships” is at best an ideology.  It takes years, even generations, of social stability to develop the common history and customs that make a true culture possible.

Thus, a true culture has an upper limit as well as a lower one.  Just as an individual cannot a culture make, so too a mass of men among whom any social relationships are tenuous at best cannot truly share a common culture.  Most people would probably recognize that to speak of a “global culture” is abstraction at its worst; but to speak of, say, “Christian culture” is not much better.  There are cultures that are Christian, but each arises from a shared faith in Christ among a people who share a common history and customs within a true community bound by space and time.  Two Christians from different Christian cultures obviously share much; but a single common culture is not one of the things that they share.

I once wrote in these pages that,

The subtitle of this magazine notwithstanding, there can be no single, deep, and lasting “American culture,” but there have been and still are many American cultures, local and regional, and the stronger they are, the more likely it is that the country as a whole will manage to survive.

Furthermore, in a country that spans a continent, there can be no single nation, since a nation is bound together not only by common descent and geography but by a common culture.  That does not mean that there cannot be a governmental confederation (or, more strictly speaking, an empire) that extends over such a large span of territory, nor that the many American cultures do not have more in common with one another than they do with other cultures beyond the physical boundaries of the North American continent.  But unless the word culture is to become the kind of abstraction that Robert Nisbet abhorred, it must always be bound by the limits of a true society—limits imposed by geography, shared history and customs, and social relationships.

In our continental empire, anything that pretends to the title of a national culture is by its very nature a threat to the real cultures that continue to exist (and sometimes even to thrive) in such places as Spring Lake, Michigan; Rockford, Illinois; Huntington, Indiana; and thousands of other villages, towns, and small-to-medium-sized cities across the United States, as well as in neighborhoods within cities that are too large to sustain a true culture of their own. Such cultures are dismissed as backward and parochial not only by liberals, for whom culture must give way to abstract universalism, but by putative conservatives whose nationalist abhorrence of cultural patriotism is less universal but no less abstract.

America, such conservatives say, is not a “proposition nation”—except when the proposition in question is not that “All men are created equal” but that a culture does not need a specific soil and a particular people to give it birth.  But this, too, is a type of abstract equality that denies the importance of the actual social relationships that give rise to and sustain true cultures.  The person—a word that always implies a relationship to another—is replaced by the individual, whose only relationship (tenuous as it is) is to the mass known as the nation.

And thus does culture die, at the hands of those who should be its protectors.

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

Breeding Mosquitos

“Where there’s no solution,” James Burnham used to remark, “there’s no problem.”

That’s easy for him to say, the modern populist conservative replies.  Burnham died while Reagan was still in office!  What did he know about problems?

Ah, the Golden Age of the 1980’s, when life was good.  At least until we compare it with the Golden Age of the 1950’s, which is darn near perfect until we compare it with the Golden Age of the 1920’s, not to mention . . . Hey, you kids!  Get the hell off my lawn!

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”  The writer of Ecclesiastes, it is true, was divinely inspired, but Burnham’s saying channels the same spirit (and perhaps the same Spirit).  Time and tide rise and fall together, and dust returns to dust; and our vanity of vanities leads us to suppose that our problems are uniquely ours, not to mention that we are uniquely qualified to discover solutions that men for millennia have failed to find.

Empires rise, and empires fall, as they have since man left Eden.  Men grasp for the One Ring, confident that they will be able to resist its temptations, and use it only for good, because no one else in the history of mankind has understood quite so well this particular problem, nor conceived of this particular solution.  That the problem always lies out there, among other men, and not in here, in our own heart and soul, is obvious; so the obvious solution is to deprive other men of power, to consolidate it in ourselves, and to impose the One Right Answer from above.  When the One Right Answer fails—as it always does—the fault, we know, is always to be found in the peculiar evil of the Other Side, unmatched in the history of mankind, and not in the human condition, which can be healed (if at all) only in the personal conversion of hearts and minds to a love of truth (and ultimately the Truth).  That such healing will never be complete in this life should call us back to the wisdom of Ecclesiastes and even that of James Burnham; that it never does is, in its own way, confirmation of that wisdom.

In the spring of 1986, I spent a week in Washington, D.C., in the Close Up program.  A year before James Burnham died, that really was a different time.  D.C. was still closer to the sleepy Southern town described by David Brinkley in Washington Goes to War than to the post-Clinton/Bush, Jr. imperial capital of today, but the signs were already there for those who had eyes to see.  Even though I could not fail to note the changes that had come in the wake of the Iran hostage crisis (after my family’s last visit to D.C.), I was not among those who had such eyes.  Though I was heading that fall to Russell Kirk’s Behemoth U. to study physics, I stood on the rooftop of a hotel in Arlington, Virginia, enthralled by the lights of the Capitol, the monuments, and the Mall, and vowed one day to return.

I did, earlier than I thought I would, in the summer of 1989.  As an intern at Accuracy in Media, I attended every public lecture at every conservative think tank in town, and a few that were meant to be private.  I had my picture taken with Jack Kemp and Duncan Hunter and Alan Keyes, hobnobbed with exiled leaders of the Nicaraguan Contras, met Pat Buchanan for the first time, engaged Robert Bork in an argument over the Establishment Clause, and got Newt Gingrich to sign a copy of a program from a Democratic Women’s Club luncheon that I had been assigned to cover for AIM’s weekly newspaper.  At the reception following a lecture by Russell Kirk to the monthly meeting of the Third Generation at the Heritage Foundation, I drank Coors—back then, the beer of every smart young conservative—while wondering why so few of the members had bothered to show up to listen to the wisdom of the man who not only wrote The Conservative Mind but embodied it.

And then, a month or two later, at a meeting of that same group, I discovered why.  While they hadn’t turned out for Kirk, the members descended in droves to hear a young man named Chris Manion, from a conservative think tank in North Carolina, because they thought that he understood The Problem, and would offer The Solution.

Chris did indeed understand The Problem, but those young men and women left disappointed, because they could not countenance The Solution—one with which Kirk would thoroughly agree.  If you want to make a difference, Manion told them, you must first Go Home.

There are no solutions to be found in Washington, D.C., and thus there are no problems.  But there are very real problems with very real solutions right in our own backyards (not to mention our own souls)—problems that we are morally bound to solve, no matter how much we wish to avoid them.  And yet: Drain the Swamp! we cry, though the rainwater in the bucket we can’t bring ourselves to empty is breeding mosquitos in our own backyard.

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

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.