Everything in Its Place

On December 9, 2008, as I read through the federal criminal complaint against the latest Illinois governor to be indicted for the merest portion of his crimes, I could not help but feel uneasy.  Sure, it was great fun to imagine Governor Hot Rod sweating it out in his holding cell, awaiting arraignment later in the day.  Even the most casual observer of Illinois politics knew that Milorad Blagojevich, our S.O.B., had to be corrupt.  After all, you don’t get elected governor of Illinois as a reformer if you actually are one.

The unease did not abate as Aaron Wolf and I watched a webcast later that morning of the press conference held by U.S. District Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.  The assembled reporters danced around the obvious questions, and Fitzgerald followed their lead.  What is the actual federal crime of which Blagojevich is accused?  Is there one?  Aren’t Blagojevich’s transgressions, both those named in the criminal complaint and those for which he will probably never be indicted, state matters?  Isn’t this a bit like prosecuting Al Capone for income-tax evasion, the main difference being that income-tax evasion was a federal crime, and Capone was guilty of it?

If there were an actual federal crime involved, that might be one thing; but the two counts leveled against Blagojevich stretch federal law so far as to make it meaningless.  Or, rather, they stretch it so far as to make it absolute—any crime committed by an elected official of a state, and virtually any crime committed by a mere citizen, could be covered under their penumbra.

The first count alleges that Blagojevich and John Harris, his chief of staff, “did, [sic] conspire with each other and with others to devise and participate in a scheme to defraud the State of Illinois and the people of the State of Illinois, of the honest services” of Blagojevich and Harris.  It is easy to see how this could be a state matter, but it only becomes a federal crime through a subordinate clause: “in furtherance of which the mails and interstate wire communications would be used,” in violation of various sections of Title 18 of the United States Code.

The second count alleges that the governor and his chief of staff “corruptly solicited and demanded a thing of value, namely, the firing of certain Chicago Tribune editorial members responsible for widely-circulated editorials critical of” the governor, in exchange for which they allegedly intended to provide

millions of dollars in financial assistance by the State of Illinois, including through the Illinois Finance Authority, an agency of the State of Illinois, to the Tribune Company involving the Wrigley Field baseball stadium.

This is certainly worthy of state prosecution, but why should it be considered a federal crime?  Because Blagojevich and Harris are

agents of the State of Illinois, a State government which during a one-year period, beginning January 1, 2008 and continuing to the present, received federal benefits in excess of $10,000.

In a line sure to send a chill down the spines of evangelical dispensationalists and rad-trad Catholics, this second count notes that these actions violate “Title 18, United States Code, Sections 666(a)(1)(B) and 2.”

In the end, though, the Blagojevich arrest and indictment present a more mundane, yet perhaps more far-reaching, concern than the coming of the end times and the rise of the Antichrist.  As contributing editor Clyde Wilson noted on the Chronicles website, “the idea of the FBI arresting a governor is disturbing” and “a very bad precedent.”  The U.S. Constitution has long been a dead letter; federalism exists today in name only; yet it is hard not to sense that a broader principle even than the traditions of the American political system has been violated here.

In the Catholic tradition, we call that principle subsidiarity—the idea that a larger, higher, or more centralized authority should not usurp the rightful duties and responsibilities of a smaller, lower, or decentralized one.  The framers of both the Articles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution did not use the term, but the systems of federalism established under both documents adhered to the principle, each in its own way.

Subsidiarity is poorly understood.  Many Catholics who claim to support the principle characterize it as the idea that higher authorities should never step in unless lower authorities fail to fulfill their responsibilities.  I once had a debate with a Catholic traditionalist who argued that, under subsidiarity, overturning Roe v. Wade was not good enough, because some states would fail to protect the unborn.  Therefore, nothing short of a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution was acceptable.  Similarly, leaving the regulation of marriage to the states was out of the question, now that some states have legalized “gay marriage.”  Their failure to exercise their responsibilities in accordance with Christian teaching on marriage meant that the federal government not only could step in, but must step in.

Since vocal Catholic “defenders” of subsidiarity make such arguments, it is not surprising that another common misconception, especially among those who are skeptical of the influence of the Catholic Church on politics, is that (in the recent words of one European journalist) subsidiarity means “that the power rests at the top . . . but the power at the top will let some of it trickle down as it sees fit.”

Both sides are wrong.  The most cogent summary of the principle of subsidiarity is found in Pope Pius XI’s 1931 social encyclical, Quadragesimo anno.  Building on the work of his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum novarum (1891), Pope Pius writes (paragraph 79):

As history abundantly proves, it is true that on account of changed conditions many things which were done by small associations in former times cannot be done now save by large associations. Still, that most weighty principle, which cannot be set aside or changed, remains fixed and unshaken in social philosophy: Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.

Phrases such as “fixed and unshaken,” “gravely wrong,” “injustice,” “grave evil,” and “disturbance of right order” do not allow for a whole lot of wiggle room.  Even more important, however, is the Holy Father’s choice of verb to describe the responsibilities of subsidiary organizations: He speaks of what they “can do,” without qualification.  He does not go on to say that if they deliberately fail to do that which they can do, it is no longer “a grave evil and disturbance of right order” for a larger, higher, or more centralized authority to usurp the power that rightly belongs to a smaller, lower, or decentralized one.

This isn’t sloppiness on Pius XI’s part, nor is it a deliberate attempt to hide some dark Catholic belief that power flows from the center and is held by families and local governments and other intermediary institutions only at the whim of the centralized state, which owes its power to the Supreme Pontiff.  Rather, it is a classic statement of the traditional Christian understanding of moral and social order: There is a place for everything, and everything in its place.

The proper authorities in the state of Illinois could have handled the Blagojevich problem, as the impeachment proceedings in the Illinois General Assembly prove.  They chose not to.  And the citizens of Illinois, who could have demanded that their elected officials fulfill their sworn responsibilities to uphold the Illinois constitution, chose to look the other way, too.  Neither failure represents an inability to carry out their responsibilities, and thus neither justifies the “grave evil and disturbance of right order” of a federal intervention.

Pius XI wrote Quadragesimo anno at a time of unprecedented centralization and destruction of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” that are “the first principle . . . of public affections . . . the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind.”  Today, to quote the typically pithy assessment of Burke’s latter-day disciple Russell Kirk, the situation is “much worse.”  Subsidiarity, Pius XI saw, was the key to the return to right order, which would mean the limitation rather than the expansion of the centralized state:

When we speak of the reform of institutions, the State comes chiefly to mind, not as if universal well-being were to be expected from its activity, but because things have come to such a pass through the evil of what we have termed “individualism” that, following upon the overthrow and near extinction of that rich social life which was once highly developed through associations of various kinds, there remain virtually only individuals and the State. This is to the great harm of the State itself; for, with a structure of social governance lost, and with the taking over of all the burdens which the wrecked associations once bore, the State has been overwhelmed and crushed by almost infinite tasks and duties.

Should Governor Hot Rod be convicted on federal charges, I won’t shed a tear for him—he deserves far worse than a few years lounging around a federal country club, with a weekly “Get Out of Jail Free” card to meet his family and political cronies on Saturday morning at a local restaurant for breakfast.  But the successful prosecution of a governor who was indicted while still in office would set, as Dr. Wilson rightly stated, a very bad precedent.

While the American constitutional order may have all but crumbled into dust, subsidiarity, as a broader principle, still stands—for the moment.  Defending it, even in—or perhaps, especially in—distasteful situations such as the strange case of Milorad Blagojevich, is the first step toward restoring a sane political order in the United States.

And think of the delicious irony if a reinvigorated federal system were to spring forth from the Land of Lincoln. 

First published in the March 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The Word Remains

“In the beginning was the Word. (Not the picture. Or the number.)”

— John Lukacs, “The Reality of Written Words,” Chronicles (January 1999)

The last time I visited John Lukacs at Pickering Close, his home just outside of Phoenixville, Penn., he greeted me in Hungarian. My knowledge of that language is confined to goulash and paprikash and the proper pronunciation of Budapest, so I was a bit unsettled as we made our way to his library, and John offered me a chair, still in Hungarian. He finally noticed my bewilderment and shook his head slightly. “Of course—you don’t know Hungarian,” he said, smiling, in his lugubrious cadence. “We’ll speak in English.” And we did for hours, except for moments when we simply sat and enjoyed each other’s company.

I first met John Lukacs in 1992, two years after I had devoured The Passing of the Modern Age (1970), Confessions of an Original Sinner (1989), and his magnum opus, Historical Consciousness (1968). I brought him in to speak at The Catholic University of America, as part of a lecture series I had put together that also included Russell Kirk, and I used my connections with both men to convince Kirk to publish a third edition of Historical Consciousness, as much for my benefit as for the greater good. Back in those pre-Amazon days, it was much harder to locate copies of out-of-print books. In my remaining years at CUA, and then at Chronicles, John and I became correspondents, interlocutors, and finally friends.

In my column and in my reviews of his books for Chronicles, I have frequently noted how important John’s work was in my own intellectual development. I have written virtually nothing since 1990 that wasn’t influenced in some way by John’s writing. My own historical consciousness, and my understanding of philosophy and theology, flow from deep engagement with his work.

But it goes beyond that, to my very choice of words and the construction of my sentences. Because I learned from John that every action, no matter how small, is a moral choice, and that includes the words we use and our intentions in using them.

“[T]he purpose of the historian,” Lukacs wrote in Historical Consciousness, “should be the reduction of untruth.” But in that purpose the historian should be no different from the rest of us—or rather, we should be no different from him. The great tragedy here at the end of the modern age is the widespread loss of concern for the truth and the consequent degradation of language. According to Lukacs, if the words we choose aren’t consciously designed to reveal the truth as best we understand it, then they will conceal it—intentionally or unintentionally. One does not have to immerse oneself in our degraded political rhetoric to see the reality of Lukacs’s insight. In this age of social media, we float in a sea of words that are used, not to draw us closer to the truth, but to create alternate unrealities.

To say that John was obsessed with words gives the wrong impression. But he saw that, at the end of this age, “for large masses of people, verbal images and verbal imagination seem gradually to be replaced by pictorial images and pictorial imagination.” A picture, we are told, is worth a thousand words, but as Lukacs understood, that that says nothing about the relative ability of pictures and of words to express or conceal the truth:

[W]ords are not the symbols of things: They are symbols of meanings. And the meaning of meaning is that it carries our minds not only deeper, but further. Meaning is not mechanical or determined; it is spiritual and teleological. It is no longer sufficient for us to recall that the Greek word “logos” means both “word” and “reason.” We may have to understand that our recognition of the word as a symbol of meaning amounts to an enrichment of our reasoning.

As John and I talked in his library that morning late last July, he asked me a question that, at first, filled my heart with sorrow: “Tell me, Scott, is this the first time that we have met in person?” While we had continued our correspondence and phone calls, it had been 10 years since we had last seen each other, in that very space.

As I reminded him of our many meetings, it became clear that, while his visual memory had faded along with his eyesight, he remembered our words, repeating verbatim large portions of our conversations and correspondence. By the time I left John in his chair in the library he had designed and built and filled with 18,000 handpicked volumes over the course of a lifetime, my sorrow had turned to joy, even though I knew that we had spent our last day together.

In the beginning was the Word. And in the end, for John Lukacs, the Word remained.

First published in the July 2019 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Quod Scripsi, Scripsi

Reader: I wasn’t quoting you.  I was characterizing your analysis as such.

Me: You were mischaracterizing my analysis.  What I have written, I have written.  What you have written, I did not.

Reader: Says you.

Words have meaning.  We live our lives, for the most part, in a world in which, on a clear spring day, one can say, “The sky is blue,” and everyone else will cheerfully agree (or wonder why you’re bothering to state the obvious).  When we make plans to meet at five o’clock at the Rusty Dog for a drink, no one thinks that means a slice of pumpkin pie at Nick’s Kitchen at 7:30.  We routinely travel at our own pace on the highway, but we all understand how fast we’re supposed to be going when we see the words SPEED LIMIT 70.

Community depends on our ability to communicate.  Language barriers don’t make community impossible, but they do make it much harder to achieve.  If you don’t know a word of French, you’re not likely to feel at home in the streets of Paris, much less in a village in Bretagne.  And if you don’t know that the cheese toastie listed on the menu is localspeak for a grilled-cheese sandwich or understand why the waitress is asking you if you’d like a sack for your leftovers, you might feel a bit out of sorts when you first move to Northeast Indiana.

As daunting as it is for most of us to learn a foreign language, we can do so if necessary, and coming to understand and eventually adopt regionalisms is a sign that you’re taking root in a community.  Stubbornly insisting on speaking only English in a café in Brest or asking a waitress in Fort Wayne to put the remains of your child’s grilled-cheese sandwich in a bag is a sign that, at best, you’re an outsider who wishes to remain that way, and more likely that you’re an ass.  We expect people to try to make themselves understood, and when they do, most of us, most of the time, will make an effort to try to understand them.

Or at least, once upon a time, we did.  Today, when discussing any subject that is in the least bit controversial, more and more Americans not only are unwilling to make any effort to understand others but seem to consider such willingness a weakness.  It is not necessary to understand what another person is saying; it is only necessary to decide where he stands in relation to you.  Once you have made that determination—rightly or wrongly—you can judge everything he says without actually hearing or reading, much less understanding, a word.

As late as 30 years ago, self-identified conservatives still prided themselves on their embrace of logic and reason and evidence.  By then, fewer and fewer of them were studying philosophy or reading history, but they continued to acknowledge the value of both.  Against the rise of an illiberal left that was increasingly embracing the irrationalism of deconstructionism and postmodernism, they continued to defend clarity of thought and expression.

Those days are long gone.  Today, when it comes to his attitudes toward the importance of language and logic and clarity of thought and expression, the average political conservative is just as much in thrall to deconstructionism and postmodernism as the average political liberal.  He would vociferously deny it, of course.  Conservatives don’t believe in such things, just as they didn’t use to believe in divorce or abortion or gay marriage—until, of course they did.  We are all good liberals now.

It may be tempting to blame this change in attitudes among conservatives on the rise of Donald Trump, but his inability to separate what is true from what he wishes to be true is more a symptom of this malady than a cause.

The true cause was what Russell Kirk called “the conservative rout” (the original title of what became The Conservative Mind).  The essence of the revolt of modernity against the classical and Christian world consisted in the subjugation of more and more of human life to politics.  The conservative counterrevolution, from Burke to Kirk, fought to contain politics within its proper—and limited—sphere, and to reassert the primacy of religion and culture.

The left’s Long March Through the Institutions didn’t begin with Antonio Gramsci and his disciples; they simply put a name, and brought a clear sense of purpose, to a movement that began in the Renaissance, achieved full force in the French Revolution, and reached its nadir when conservatives decided that President Reagan had it wrong in his First Inaugural Address: Government was the solution to the problem after all.  The triumph of politics over religion and culture was complete; everything since then has been nothing more than the logic of the revolution playing itself out.

And that includes the rise of scorn for clarity of thought and expression, both in one’s own utterances and in the words of others.  The lines that I quoted at the beginning of this column are repeated incessantly (though usually not quite so succinctly) by self-proclaimed conservatives on conservative (in this case, conservative Catholic) websites, and of course on social media.  We no longer take others’ words seriously, because we are no longer serious in the choice of our own words.  Language was once a tool for expressing truth; now, it is merely a weapon for winning arguments.  The ends justify the means, and the truth be damned.

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

A Generation in Need of Editing

Many years ago, as the luncheon speaker at a meeting of the John Randolph Club in Rockford, Illinois, Tom Sheeley gave a thought-provoking lecture interspersed with a splendid performance of classical guitar.  His main theme was the need for form in art; and all these years later, one line stands out in my memory: “What is creativity without editing?”

Later that afternoon, while introducing the founder, editor, and chief author of a certain Catholic magazine, I turned Tom’s question into a joke, with the title of the magazine as the punch line.  My use of his words was good for a quick laugh, but the question Tom raised is one I have returned to many times over the years in moments of serious reflection.

As I noted last month, conservatives in the United States have long ceded the realms of literature and art (here broadly construed to include all forms of imaginative media, including music, theater, and film) to the forces of the left.  First neoconservatives and, now, increasingly self-identified paleoconservatives have dismissed or even ridiculed Russell Kirk’s emphasis on the moral imagination.  The time is too late, they argue; the stakes are too high; if we spend our time on the long, hard work of creating a culture that can properly form the moral imagination of the rising generation, the left will dominate national politics, increase its hold on the U.S. Supreme Court, and everything we care about will be in danger of being outlawed or worse.  In such dire straits, politics—especially national politics—is all that matters.

The reality, of course, is that the left already dominates national politics, even in the age of Donald Trump.  And the left dominates national politics precisely because those who not only should have conserved what was best in what we call (for lack of better terms) Western and Christian culture but should have continued to add to that cultural patrimony in new and creative ways ceded the battleground at the very moment when the left began to embrace the power of the culture to form the imaginations of future generations.

In the left’s Long March Through the Institutions, the transformation of politics and law is the last step, not the first.  Every major “revolutionary” Supreme Court decision that has eroded traditional social order and morality was itself a product of cultural changes that preceded it.  Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges, to name just two, were much more the judicial rewriting of laws to reflect cultural changes that had already occurred than they were the cause of those changes.  In both cases, the imagination of the American people had been formed (or rather deformed, in a literal sense), by film and television especially, to accept as normal the horrifying reality of infanticide by the people directly charged with the safety of those children—mothers and fathers and doctors who had sworn first to do no harm—and the elevation of deliberately nonproductive sexual acts to the level of a lifelong commitment to love, honor, and cherish one’s spouse and to protect and rear any children who may result from that union.

To put it another way, Harry Blackmun and Anthony Kennedy were less the authors of Roe and Obergefell, respectively, than Norman Lear and the creators of Modern Family.

Which brings us back to Tom Sheeley and his question.  We are in dire need of stories good, beautiful, and true to help form the imagination of a generation for whom things that would not only have been unthinkable to previous generations, but are untenable as the basis of a lasting culture and society, are the norm.  We have an opportunity, because there is among that rising generation an increasing appreciation for art of a higher level than the cultural equivalent of McDonald’s that previous generations of conservatives have been all too happy to consume.  And among some of that younger generation, there is both the desire and the creativity to produce such works of art—especially in the realm of narrative nonfiction writing, and film and shorter narrative video.

All of that is a very good thing, which could help to turn the cultural tide.  As the rubric of this column implies, if we wish to reverse the Long March Through the Institutions, political action isn’t enough: There must be a Countermarch.  And the sooner we start moving, the better.

But the danger that we face is obvious.  Even the best imaginations of this rising generation have been formed, at least in part, by the forces of cultural deformation.  They are looking to create works of art that are good and true and beautiful, but the lens through which they judge goodness and truth and beauty is cloudy and flawed.  Their imaginations may be wellsprings of creativity, but their works are in need of editing.

And that’s where the efforts of older generations must come in.  It’s all too easy to dismiss the tattooed millennial, drinking his craft beer and eating his kale and quinoa salad while agonizing over his struggle to remain independent in order to realize his own vision.  But my grandparents raised kale (though not quinoa), and there was a time when even the movement conservatives who regarded Coors Light as the height of taste claimed to value independence.

A recent study by University of Maryland sociology professor Philip Cohen has found that the divorce rate in the United States dropped by 18 percent between 2008 and 2016, and—surprise—those tattooed millennials are the cause.  Their craft beer and their kale and their desire to stay married are all signs of an innate conservatism manifesting itself in new and creative ways.  But their creativity is in need of editing.  They can be a force for the right kind of cultural change, if we help them.

Or, if we continue to insist that the hour is too late and national politics is the only answer, we can let them fall into the cultural morass of the left for lack of leadership from our generation.  The choice is ours.  Will we be their editors?

First published in the November 2018 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.