It is reported that Douglas Kmiec has been nominated to be ambassador to Malta. For Malta? It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Malta?

In his post on Local Color, Jody includes the epiphanic observation that American literature has entailed a “substitution of geography for heroes in our moral vocabulary.”

In other words, we don’t have many heroic types in American literature. What we have instead is heroic geography. The Virginian, the Down Easterner, the Texas Ranger, the cowboy, the Hooiser, the hillbilly, the Okie. These are tropes that serve the moral function filled in other cultures and other literatures primarily by heroes. And these geographical tropes survive well into our own era of indistinguishable shopping malls from Maine to California.

Why did the collective literary imagination take this turn? I may be completely wrong about this  but I think it may have something to do with our country’s democratization of civic virtues.

Prior to the modern age most literary heroes exemplified the martial virtues of the warrior (courage, honor, duty) or the theological virtues of the saints (kindness, generosity, faithfulness). They were the virtues of the elite, whether militarily, politically, or spiritually. But in the post-Civil War era, America needed to reconnect with the virtues of the citizen. Not suprisingly, American literature appears to have revived (albeit unconsciously) the citizen virtues of ancient Rome.

The ideal virtues of the Via Romana—which included such characteristics as comitas (humor),  frugalitas (frugalness), industria (industriousness), severitas (sternness)—were qualities needed to conquer and civilize regional peoples under one Roman Republic. The ideal virtues of the Via Americana—qualities needed to conquer and civilize regional peoples under one American republic—are remarkably similar.

But whereas in Rome these virtues were embodied in mytho-theological constructs (e.g., Veritas, the goddess of truth), in America we associate them with the geographic regions (e.g., the frugality of the New Englanders). The individual Roman citizen could associate himself with the virtues of the gods—even gods they did not give their full allegiance—simply because they were Romans. Similarly, Americans can associate themselves with virtues of regions in which they do not live because they share a common connection of Americanness.

The Romans didn’t believe that all the virtues could be instantiated in one god, but had to be spread among numerous deities. Since even a god can’t express all the civic virtues, we shouldn’t be surprised that in American literature they cannot be exemplified by one region, but have to be spread across many geographic localities.

Which brings us back to localism and one of the inherent concerns: If we can’t even imagine the totality of civic virtues being associated within any specific geographic region, how can we expect them to be embodied in any specific locality? In other words, do we need strong associative ties and allegiances to larger communal groupings (either regional or federal) in order to live virtuously in our own local communities? Can Americans be good localists without first identifying with the disseminated virtues of Americana?

I recently came across the odd fact that one of the leading researchers on the brain in the twentieth century was—wait for it: Lord Brain. For real. His full name and title were Walter Russell Brain, 1st Baron Brain. What is even better, he was the longtime editor of the research journal Brain. There are actually important papers about the brain, written by Lord Brain, in the journal Brain.

This got me thinking: are there other people whose names are peculiarly appropriate to what they are or are famous for having done? I can only think of two other examples:

Bernie Madoff, who “made off” with billions.

Thomas Crapper, about which Wikipedia says: “Thomas Crapper (baptized 28 September 1836 – 27 January 1910) was a plumber who founded Thomas Crapper & Co. Ltd. in London. Contrary to widespread misconceptions, Crapper did not invent the toilet, nor is the word crap derived from his name. He did, however, do much to increase the popularity of the toilet, and did develop some important related inventions, such as the ballcock. He was noted for the quality of his products and received several Royal warrants.”

Are there others? The rules are (a) the name must be real, not a nickname, (b) the person must have had the name before he or she did whatever makes the name fit, and (c) the famous thing must not be named after the person.

Rusty, this has been a fun discussion of localism, particularly as I’m writing from a little town in South Dakota, back home for the summer in the one locale I really know.

A thing I discovered, thinking our way through this, is the extent to which the descriptive is often taken as the proscriptive: An attempt to describe the current situation, on the ground, is somehow assumed by some of our friends to be a declaration that that is the way the situation should be.

(An editorial note: Perched on my shoulder, the stern spirit of RJN urges me to edit out the “that that” in the previous sentence, but I guess, in context, that that “that that” that that sentence has is clear enough, isn’t it? Just as I suppose that that “that that ‘that that’ that that” that that next sentence has is also clear.)

Anyway, I wrote that “successful declarations of localism, by their success, are opened to the modern devices that must inevitably undo localisms,” and what I meant was a description of the problem of irony, not praise of it.

It strikes me that we can see that irony played out even in, say, Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1896 Country of the Pointed Firs. Do you know the novella, Rusty? It’s perhaps the classic of American Local Colorism.

As we discussed a while back, the Local Colorists were the literary school that dominated popular American fiction between Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Dean Howells. They have names like George Washington Cable, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, James Lane Allen, Edward Eggleston, Hamlin Garland, James Whitcomb Riley, and, of course, Sarah Orne Jewett.

Mark Twain and Bret Harte are sometimes listed in this group, and there’s no doubt that they could do local color, though they were, really, national authors who dabbled in the localism they knew was popular at the time.

And that points to one of the most curious facts about this whole American literary school: It served the counter-intuitive function of drawing the United States together after the Civil War by informing the whole country of its component parts. Out in Salt Lake City, as Utah became a state in 1896, they were reading about the Down Easterners of Maine in The Country of the Pointed Firs and feeling surprisingly American about it all.

In his well-known 1837 talk on “The American Scholar,” Emerson complained that Americans have “listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.” And, indeed, when we reject “the courtly muses of Europe,” one of the things we reject is the aristocracy of heroism—the throne as the fount of honor and the hierarchy of peers whose esteem rewards the hero’s virtues.

But the beginning of an answer is the development of place, of locale, as the primary system of rhetorical figures for American character and behavior. From Mark Twain to Stephen Vincent Benét, from Bret Harte to the Greenwich Village Bohemians—whether they were romantics or realists, they were often engaged in the same project: the substitution of geography for heroes in our moral vocabulary.

In other words, we don’t have many heroic types in American literature. What we have instead is heroic geography. The Virginian, the Down Easterner, the Texas Ranger, the cowboy, the Hooiser, the hillbilly, the Okie. These are tropes that serve the moral function filled in other cultures and other literatures primarily by heroes. And these geographical tropes survive well into our own era of indistinguishable shopping malls from Maine to California.

Interesting to think that Stephen Vincent Benét didn’t die until 1943. Once upon a time, his poem “American Names” was widely memorized by schoolchildren, but his love of American place-names is apparent not just in lines like “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee” (which survives now, I think, only in Dee Brown’s ironic inversion). Over and over again in “John Brown’s Body,” Benét carries the poetry with the rhythmic and onomatopoeic place-names; cities, counties, rivers, mountains: their names are almost palpable in his mouth.

Benét’s Pulitzer Prize shows his success—but it is success at taking local color and aiming it a non-local purpose: the use of locale to forge a nation that transcends its locales.

Enough. I promised my daughter we’d saddle the horses and go riding up in the forest today. You know that Black Hills forest, Rusty: the colorful locale, most famous now for Mt. Rushmore and the nationalism asserted by the carving of presidents’ faces on one of its mountains.

Just ran into this as I started my short vacation the other day.

So many questions. The first that comes to mind: Did some TSA worker have an experience with snow globes similar to The Anchoress’ experience with fruit?

We started this discussion of localism when I mentioned that I had been reading William Cobbett’s Rural Rides. I meant only to offer our literary friends a suggestion that the beginning of Rural Rides may have influenced the beginning of Dickens’ Bleak House, but, along the way, I referred back to Rusty Reno’s fun set of posts last year on “roots music”: the modern pop music of resurgent rural localism in England, Quebec, and South Africa.

And then we were off to the races—with thoughts from me, and Rusty, and me again, and Rusty again, and me yet again, and then David Goldman, and then Rusty yet again.

The ironies of self-conscious localism are many. In his first post on roots music, Rusty mentioned that wonderful old 1970s rock standard from the pre-plane-crash Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Sweet Home Alabama”. Turn it up . . .

Rusty remarked on the song’s power to stand as a localist anthem, as here in a concert in Nashville, complete with a snatch of “Dixie” and the Confederate flag wrapped around the microphone:

But its success at being such an anthem also opens it up to the usurping power of irony from the anti-localist hipster: for capitalism’s engine of postmodernity, in other words. As witness here, when a Finnish pseudo-group calling itself the Leningrad Cowboys hires the Red Army Choir to help sing “Sweet Home Alabama” for what was, at the time, one of the mostly widely watched television shows in European history. In Birmingham they love the governor, woo woo woo . . . :

I suppose this ought to make me tremble: the Red Army Choir, for mercy’s sake—songbirds of murder in the gulag days, somehow surviving the fall of the Soviet Union to wander out on the European music market and appear with a bunch of Finns in clown suits and wigs. But the irony is too old, been done too many times, to have much real effect.

Perhaps it does, however, set in clear focus—better than anything else I’ve seen—a problem of modern localism: Successful declarations of localism, by their success, are opened to the modern devices that must inevitably undo localisms.

I’m glad Jody drew attention to Caleb Stegall’s intervention. Stegall is surely right that love is the “existential engine” of localism. Indeed, by my reckoning, love is the existential engine of any thick and substantial cultural identity. Yes, of course love is jealous. The Old Testament is clear about that. But the essential dynamic is affirmative, not negative. It’s about loyalty, not about fighting. On this point I think Carl Schmitt was wrong. First and foremost we need things worthy of our love and loyalty, not enemies.

Stegall also raises the question of self-consciousness and identity, a point related to Jody’s observation that a tradition chosen is not the same as a tradition inherited. Here I am not convinced. The human will possesses a mysterious power to bind us (and blind us) over time. Aristotle (and Aquinas) recognized that if we submit ourselves to habituation, then over time what first seems alien and exterior to the self becomes intimate and interior.

Yes, as Stegall points out, a certain kind of stylized, overwrought, prettified traditionalism is a sign of decay. A person truly inside a tradition lives it. He doesn’t memorialize it. But I don’t see conscious intentions and refection as necessarily corruptive. The whole premise of Christianity is that the believer can chose the church as his homeland. OK, maybe that’s too Pelagian. But at minimum, the believer enters into a new, supernatural inheritance in Christ, not a natural birthright. When it comes to abstraction, the great theologians clearly show that a high degree of self-consciousness and intellectual abstraction is consistent with inhabiting tradition.

As I understand him, Jody doesn’t deny the way in which this or that person can choose Catholicism—me, for example. What he is worried about, I think, is the density of the Catholicism, whether inherited or chosen. There is something organic about any living community, including the Church. It doesn’t admit of engineering—or re-engineering, as the post-Vatican II radicals imagined. That’s my way of saying that “rebellion against rebellion doesn’t escape rebellion.”

Living communities lay down sediment over time. The constant pressure of repetition solidifies the layers. Intellectual reflection can display the beauty and integrity of a living tradition (or the ugliness and inconsistencies), but it contributes little to the density, and only indirectly to the durability. That’s why prayer and worship are so much more central to the life of the Church than academic theology.

Finally, I want to head off an objection. The loyalty of faith should not be directly equated with localism. Love of homeland, love of clan, love of local tradition—all these are natural loves. A love for and submission to the Church is a supernatural love. What is of men and what is of God may conflict. They did for Abraham. But they need not. Moreover, in our loveless age of endless suspicion and critique, the natural love of localism can prepare the heart for the supernatural love of faith. It is easier in our day and age to correct misguided loyalties than to combat the faux universalism and all too real cynicism of postmodern culture.

Since the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Republicans have been wondering how to challenge her without it backfiring on them. Hadley Arkes proposes a novel solution: Let Sotomayor talk—and get on the record what the Democrats don’t want explained about the law:

There is no need to ask Judge Sotomayor how she would rule in any of these cases. She could simply display her learning by explaining the state of the law as she understands it, and reveal in that way the furnishings of her mind. For example, Iowa’s supreme court recently invoked the concept of “equal protection of the laws” to strike down the traditional laws concerning marriage. Ted Olson, solicitor general in the first George W. Bush administration, has invoked the same concept in support of a right to same-sex marriage, without exactly filling out the reasoning.

How would that reasoning go? Olson has made a plea on behalf of the same-sex couple who earnestly love each other. Judge Sotomayor might well be asked why the same principle would not work on behalf of ensembles of three or four people who profess their love in the same way. Is there something in that principle of “equal protection” that works to confine the claim of marriage to two people? She might be asked, not how she would decide a case, but how judges would reason about a problem when it is presented in that way.

Read the whole thing . . .

Rusty, I don’t think it is quite accurate to explain German anti-Semitism as a localist reaction to Jewish assimilation. You commented yesterday that Germans didn’t think assimilation “was possible, not because they denied that a stranger’s children and grand-children could take on local identity, but because they suspected Jews of maintaining a deeper, more profound, and more permanent identity—even against their conscious intentions.” In fact, Jews manufactured a great deal of “local” German culture as their means of assimilating. In the land of music and poetry during the 1830s, the leading musician (Felix Mendelssohn) and the leading poet (Heinrich Heine) were both Jewish, albeit converts. Heine is the most interesting case: as he says in his memoirs, his was “the last free forest-song of German Romanticism.” His Buch der Lieder was for a generation the bestselling book of poetry in Germany; Friedrich Wilhelm IV wept over it even while signing an arrest order for Heine, then living in French exile. Heine’s Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Elementargeister still are among the best guides to German paganism. Richard Wagner stole the entire plot for “Flying Dutchman” from a sketch in Heine’s novella The Memoirs of Schnabelowopski and then wrote Das Judentum in der Musik to demonstrate that Jews couldn’t be creative. In some respects, 19th century German culture–the core of it, not the avante-garde–had as much Jewish influence as did American culture in the golden era of Hollywood. Jewish assimilation was brilliantly successful. The Nazis had to label any number of songs and poems “author unknown” because every German knew them, and they couldn’t admit to Heine’s authorship.

Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy, a German-Jewish convert to Protestantanism, had an interestingtake (in Out of Revolution):

The anti-Semitic hatred of the Jew, in all its simplicity and straightforwardness, has always and necessarily been the hatred of the Beginning of things for the End. The outlook from the beginning is impossible once you have looked at the same thing from the end: yet that was the permanent conflict or tension forced upon paganism by the existence of the Hebrews … God’s Alpha was lived by the Gentiles, and God’s Omega is embodied in the Jews. This antithesis brought Pagans and Jews into a conflict of principle. The Jewish community, as a community was created by God to be his witness against the blindnesses of the Alpha-nations … 

Whenever an old form is reluctant to go to its doom, like the church in the fifteenth century, or like Czarism before 1914, it defends its own obsolete and dying institutions by persecuting the Jew, the eternal symbol of a life beyond any existing form of government. Whenever a young generation tries to relive the first day of creation, it attacks the Jew because he smiles at this passionate belief in fugitive forms. In Germany during the orgies of Hitlerism a certain Jewish journalist was asked to correct the book of a Nazi authoress; and in return for the favor she agreed to take him to see Goebbels and Goering. After tea with them he came back as though enlightened and told his friends: “They cannot help persecuting us; they are playing Red Indians, and they know that we cannot take their game seriously”. 

Rosenstock-Huessy has a point. Despite their success at assimilating and often re-inventing what later passes for local cultures, the Jews never quite take them seriously. Why should we? We have seen so many of them come and go over the past four thousand years. 

I never tire of quoting Rosenzweig’s uncanny dictum: 

Just as every individual must reckon with his eventual death, the peoples of the world foresee their eventual extinction, be it however distant in time. Indeed, the love of the peoples for their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death. Thus the peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customers have lost their living power.

That is true even in places like Germany, where Jews played a key role in the creation of the “local culture.” That is the origin of the Viennese wisecrack quoted by Paul Johnson in his History of the Jews: “Anti-Semitism wasn’t getting anywhere until the Jews got behind it.”

You’re right, Rusty, when you speak of the multiple ironies of the appearances and disappearances of localist claims in the modern world. As I said, my problem with your localism is the Jews—by which I meant the way the Jews, perceived somehow as a threat for both their lack of group identity and their possession of group identity, have often been elected as the cause of cultural decline.

It needn’t be the Jews, of course. Nearly any group can potentially stand in for this, and sometimes it’s even true: The Europeans really did ruin the tightly knit African culture that Chinua Achebe describes in Things Fall Apart. But Achebe’s attempt to describe that culture as something over against the Europeans also wrecks the end of his novel, for it leaves him with no path except heavy-handed and angry irony, phrased in a disconcerting change of voice, with which to conclude the book. We’re hardly the first, Rusty, to note that Things Fall Apart, considered not for its political correctness but for its literary integrity, has a disaster of a conclusion, but this thinking we’ve been doing about localism may give an explanation.

Is it possible to define a localism that doesn’t set itself in that over against mode? For Catholics in the United States today, this is a serious and important question—if we’re willing to say that what we mean by localism can be a localism of being, rather than a localism of place. My first thought is that this is only an analogy rather than an identity: We are, after all, called out from the nations, and Catholics are not a local group the way, say, Southerners or Little Englanders imagine themselves a local group. Still, it’s a potentially helpful analogy, for the problems faced by Catholic culture today seem quite similar to the problems faced by encircled and embattled local cultures.

Epistemologically, since we define by genus and difference, it’s impossible to achieve a definition that doesn’t differentiate. And psychologically, we’ve seen what follows from that epistemological fact over and over again in the anger and the violence of cultures that understand themselves as threatened by the over against.

A very conservative blogger named Caleb Stegall has noted the discussion we’ve been having here, Rusty, and he points to some interesting thoughts he’s had on the topic over the years. He doesn’t seem to like me very much, but that’s okay. There are days I don’t like me very much, either, and his notion of the dangers of articulation looks helpful.

As I understand it, Stegall claims that a culture is in trouble precisely when, from outside pressure or internal dilemma, it has to start articulating—in our terms, defining by difference—exactly what it is. There’s built into this, if I have it right, a praise for unself-consciousness and unreflective devotion to the ideals that a healthy culture leaves only vaguely articulated.

The advantage to this kind of move is that it admits the violent problems of definition by difference, and it points to the moment that cultures awake to their decline and become dangerous. What it doesn’t do is give us much help in our desire to rebuild culture now, after the fact. As I keep repeating, “rebellion against rebellion doesn’t escape the problems of rebellion, and a chosen tradition is never quite the same as an inherited one.”

Of course, that’s no knock on Stegall. The problem of culture has no easy answer today. The most we may be able to do is build something sufficient that our children are able to have a culture.

In an earlier blog post on global warming, I mentioned Prof. Will Happer of Princeton. I just read the testimony that Will Happer gave to the Senate back in February of this year on global warming.  It is a very clear and reasonable statement of the case for skepticism on global warming. I recommend it highly.  Courage and clear thinking, a rare combination.

As I mentioned yesterday, when it comes to issues of bioethics the “degradation of language only leads to linguistic confusion and muddy thinking.” A prime example can be found in the BBC article that Ryan cites. The term design means to intend for a definite purpose—and the gene mapping test is intended for the very definite purpose of culling embryos that do not meet the parent’s concept of quality.

The term reproductive technology is no longer just a metaphor of the factory. Now we are applying the actual methods of the factory, specifically the process of quality assurance—throwing out the products that do not fit our standard.

Such reliance on questionable or unethical reproductive technologies strips away the sense of mystery that surrounds the creation of new life. Instead of accepting children as created in the image of God, we are producing them in our own image.

The most troubling aspect may be in what it says about our expression of love toward children. In his book Faith, Hope, Love, the Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper explores the various meanings and connections between the concepts we refer to as love. What, he asks, is the “recurrent identity underlying the countless forms of love?”

My tentative answer to this question runs as follows: In every conceivable case love signifies much the same as approval. This is first of all to be taken in the literal sense of the word’s root: loving someone or something means finding him or its probes, the Latin word for “good.” It is a way of turning to him or it and saying, “It’s good that you exist; it’s good that you are in the world!”

Parent’s who design their child—choosing an embryo based on a standard of quality—are expressing a contingent form of love: “It’s good that you exist if you are free from defect.” The very process of embryo selection makes the parent’s love conditional. Children that do not meet the criteria simply are not chosen; they are discarded, thrown in the trash. In essence, they are being told that since they cannot be created in the way the parents’ desire, it’s not good that you exist; it’s good that you are not in the world!

Every child, though, deserves to be loved in the way that God intended parental love to be given, the way he gives it to his own children—unconditionally. Even if technology provides the means we should not usurp God’s role in the process of designing babies.

The Guardian thinks so. I hope to be one someday, so I’m not going to disagree.

Or something like that.

“Pope Greets Hope”? Apparently, Pope Benedict only thought he knew something about hope. Then he met the very embodiment of that particular theological virtue.

“We’re not mad Frankensteins working away in our laboratories to create designer babies.

We are only allowed to look for major diseases which cause handicaps.”

That is, until they realize how much money could be made creating designer babies. I have a suspicious feeling that, as soon as that happens, the moral objections to embryonic eugenics would magically disappear.

There are several interesting posts up at the blog The American Catholic on the Declaration of Indepenence and the American Revolution.

Buried within the comments are some expressions of displeasure with the supposedly liberal, post-Enlightenment origins of the American Revolution. This is a fairly common and not altogether incorrect view of this era in American history. No one could possibly deny the influence of Enlightenment thinking on the men who spearheaded the revolution and then wrote the Constitution. But it is not really accurate, and for two reasons.

First of all, to say that the Framers were influenced by the Enlightenment is meaningless without indicating which Enlightenment you’re talking about. Yes, I am a student of the Himmelfarb/O’Brien school that sees quite a divergence between different forms of Enlightenment thinking, particularly the French and British Enlightenments. While Thomas Jefferson may have been at home with the philosophes, the bulk of the Framers were more at home with the much more moderate Brits. There were common threads within all sects of the Enlightenment, especially as regards the role of reason, but the French school was vastly more sweeping and utopian-leaning in scope.

More importantly, it’s a mistake to over-emphasize the role of ideology on the Framers. Yes, they were learned men who studied  a great many different philosophers, but the Revolution was in many ways a gut reaction to the perceived slights perpetrated by the British Parliament. Did the revolutionaries need to read up on John Trenchard in order to come to the conclusion that the home government had usurped its rightful authority? Were they simply trying to live out the principles of Hutcheson or Home or Hume, or were they basing their clarion call for independence on their real world experiences?

As someone whose academic specialty is essentially American political theory, it’s a bit difficult for me to downplay the significance of these various philosophies on the Framers. And I would never totally discount the role of, ahem, secularist liberal forces on the men who voted for independence. But I think we need to recognize that for most of the people who decided to pick up arms it was less about upholding the ideals of philosophers living north of the mother country than it was simply about defending their rights as Englishmen. Naturally many of the ideas of these philosophers seeped into their consciousness on some level and inspired the drive for revolution, and it would be foolish to completely discount the role of ideology in the revolution. But I think we would do well to remember that the impetus for revolution was not found in the abstract philosophical musings that so many of the Framers cited.

It is worth keeping this in mind because America remains, as Tocqueville noted so many years ago, a country that is not entirely fond of abstract ideas. Again, it may seem odd that a person with my kind of academic pedigree writing on this particular blog is deriding to some extent the role of philosophy in American life. But it’s useful for those of us up here in the clouds to recognize the non-ideological (for lack of a better word) tendencies of this country—tendencies which date back to our very birth as a Nation.

Unfortunately, not a parody.

Last month, Alan Potash, the Midwestern regional director of the ADL, wrote the Omaha World-Herald to declare that “freedom of speech does not extend to racist groups.”

As Eugene Volokh points out, this is particularly dangerous for a Jewish organization to hold, given the decades-long willingness of leftists to name Israel a racist state. Beyond that, however, it is yet another marker of what appears a growing willingness to place some people beyond the pale of Free Speech protections. Note that Potash didn’t just say that racist speech ought to be banned, bad as that would be; he said that certain people ought to have their speech-rights removed.

We’ve seen this kind of thing building in the kangaroo courts of the Canadian human-rights commissions, and I am growing more and more worried about its application to those who dissenters on same-sex marriage. The media’s dominant metaphor of racism surely puts this in play. Does Alan Potash really want to see what will happen to Orthodox Jews when freedom of speech is removed from disfavored groups?

Yes, Jody rightly draws attention to the role of anti-Semitism in the sort of modern conservatism that sees history, tradition, and place as anchors of sanity. By my reading, however, that role is complicated and full of ironies.

One irony comes from the Stalinist era. “Rootless cosmopolitans” was formulated as a term of abuse in the late 1940s as part of a campaign against Jews in the Soviet Union. When you think of it, the anathema is odd. Isn’t communism the destiny of all humanity? Doesn’t the revolutionary vanguard serve all humanity? Aren’t true Marxists cosmopolitans, those who have thrown off the false consciousness of nationalism and who are loyal to Universal History?

It turns out that Jews were a problem in the Christian West, not because they were vaporous, ethereal, airy cosmopolitans, but instead because they had thick identities that seemed endlessly resistant to absorption and assimilation. It was the rootedness that grated, not the rootlessness. That’s why Germans (and other Europeans as well) in the nineteenth and early twentieth were so unsettled by the efforts of modern Jews to assimilate. They didn’t believe it was possible, not because they denied that a stranger’s children and grand-children could take on local identity, but because they suspected Jews of maintaining a deeper, more profound, and more permanent identity—even against their conscious intentions. The same was true of many nineteenth century philo-Semites, as Gertrude Himmelfarb’s recent book, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, illustrates.

Anti-Semitism is a concoction of different ingredients, and it’s always seemed to me to be a secret recipe. Jewish rootedness could manifest itself as rootlessness, at least in the eyes of some. I think secular Jews were existentially frightening to many nineteenth century Germans, whose own sense of national (and religious) identity was quite fragile. How could such people deny their heritage—and still survive emotionally, psychologically, intellectually? Of course, time passed, and the notion of the secular Jew devoted to progressive causes became a cliche. In retrospect it is now obvious that for more than one hundred years, supposedly secular Jews were reconstituting their identities around a new, modernist Torah.

Jews had lots of good reasons to embrace various forms of modernity. The universalism promised the end of persecution. But as modern anti-Semites intuited, secular Jews were uniquely capable of becoming vanguard modernists. Denied a stable place and role in European culture, Jews found rootedness in the mobile domain of law. This created a place for new laws to quickly take root—the ethical laws of Kant, the historical laws of Marx, the scientific laws of Comte, the psychological laws of Freud.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Now Jews are a problem in post-Christian Western culture because they refuse to become rootless cosmopolitans. Zionism is the new Nazism. The State of Israel an Apartheid regime. The God of Abraham the patriarchal oppressor without peer. Jews can’t win for losing. This time, however, conservative Christians are on their side. The same often holds for conservative traditionalists whose cherished traditions were not so long ago besmirched with anti-Semitism.

I think this alliance will grow. As I look into my crystal ball, I do not see localists fighting against localists, rooted Christians persecuting rooted Jews, patriotic Americans rattling sabers against patriotic Germans. Instead, I see an emerging conflict between the Kantians and the Aristotelians, between postmoderns who imagine humanity flourishing under a regime of global commerce and human rights, and those who defend the inevitably particular (and, as Jody points out, negating and judgmental) visions of human flourishing.

A fully orbed life of virtue is necessarily ethnocentric. A modern conservative intellectual must see this necessity—and in a double way. First, we should recognize that the necessity of ethnocentrism for human flourishing puts faith and loyalty above critical self-consciousness (or better, it makes faith and loyalty the final fruit of critical self-consciousness). This same recognition of the necessity of ethnocentrism also underwrites a sympathy for—even an envious appreciation of—the loyalties of strangers and outsiders.

My problem with your localism, Rusty, is the Jews.

But, then, it’s always the Jews, isn’t it? Or the blacks, or the foreigners, or the diseased. The problem usually comes down to the Jews, though. In the experience of Western civilization, the Jews have proved for a long time the stone against which the practice and the various political theories of localism have stumbled.

That, as an aside, points toward a defense, or at least a semi-defense, I’d be willing to make against the charge that G.K. Chesterton was anti-Semitic. Hilaire Belloc, I think, genuinely was an anti-Semite; when he said, “rootless cosmopolitans,” what he really meant were the Jews. Chesterton was, instead, struggling with the fundamental dilemma of localism, and when he said, “the Jews,” what he really meant were rootless cosmopolitans. In other words, Belloc bought the idea that the Jews were the problem, while Chesterton bought the trope that Jew was a handy word to use to describe the problem. They’re both bad, but it’s possible to argue that one is less murderous than the other.

So what is this problem at the root of localism? Part of it involves the simple philosophical point that all definitions—even self-definitions—require, at some point, an assertion of what the defined thing is not. There is no such thing as an entirely positive definition. We define by genus and difference, as Aristotle put it, and the point extends as far as Spinoza’s famous metaphysical formula: “All determination is negation.”

It was philosophically naive of, say, the Southern Agrarians to imagine that they could get a self-understanding that didn’t involve marking themselves off from the Negroes and the Yankees. She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb, as your home state song once declared, Rusty. Huzza! She spurns the Northern scum! / She breaths! She burns! She’ll come! / Maryland! My Maryland!

Meanwhile, the practical part of localism’s dilemma involves, first, the fact that successful localisms attract immigrants, and the presence of immigrants undermines the localism.

It involves, second, the historical truth that people seem only to praise and defend a localism when it’s already in decline. And sometimes, as now, when its communal aspects have already gone completely except as a romantic memory—which makes those who now argue for it as much outsiders as those who argued against it. As a writer we know once put it, “rebellion against rebellion doesn’t escape the problems of rebellion, and a chosen tradition is never quite the same as an inherited one.”

Canon lawyer Ed Peters takes apart L’Osservatore Romano’s recent tribute to Michael Jackson:

For most of my life L’Osservatore Romano has been a sleepy Roman rag that arrived weeks after its publication date, printed in cheap ink that soiled the fingers of those who felt the need to read page after page of boilerplate remarks on the latest ambassador from anywhere shown in his tuxedo presenting diplomatic credentials. Aside, I suppose, from an occasionally interesting book review, L’OR has for decades carried nothing of serious interest that could not be found much more quickly in a half-dozen other venues, ones, moreover, that didn’t compel readers to wash their hands before handling anything beige or white.

But lately, L’OR has decided to become relevant. God help us.

Having just emerged, battered, but, I thought, moderately chastened after its embarrassingly naive and harmful editorial in praise of Pres. Obama, L’OR treats the world to a high-schoolish tribute to the highly talented and utterly pathetic entertainer Michael Jackson.

Jackson might not be fully responsible for the swirling chaos that was his life and death, but for L’OR even to mention his death—without simultaneously urging Catholics to pray for his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed—astounds me.

Worse, the L’OR report leaves Catholics little sense that much of Jackson’s work was sexually exploitative, at times quasi-obscene; it dismisses as insignificant the terrible example that Jackson’s chronic pursuit of superficial “beauty” gave to millions of young people; and, worst of all, it trivializes the serious, and in some cases unresolved, allegations of child sexual abuse made against him. L’OR need not assume the worst about Jackson’s conduct in these cases, but it should never have implied that such allegations, even if they are true, cannot tarnish the world-wide esteem in which he is held! Good grief. Has L’OR completely lost its reason

Read the rest.

In light of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and Utah Senator John Ensign’s recent scandals, Christopher O. Tollefsen takes a philosophical look at the problem of hypocrisy:

La Rochefoucauld famously said that “hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.” This is often understood to mean that the hypocrite who says one thing but does another, says what he says because he knows it is right. The hypocrite possesses the knowledge that his behavior is wrong or sinful, and so speaks the truth, even while not living it.

There is something to this. A person’s failure to live up to his stated moral code need not call either the validity of that code nor his belief in the code in question. In fact, given the inevitability of moral failure in our lives, it is similarly inevitable that those with strong moral convictions will sometimes fail to act in the way they publicly identify as morally appropriate.

But is hypocrisy really nothing more than the inability of persons to live up to their own moral code? No. Hypocrisy does not just involve disconnect between word and deed; it involves dissimulation, falsity in how one acts. The hypocrite does not merely make assertions he believes to be true about morality while failing to abide by them. He also makes false assertions, often by his deeds. He deceives others by creating the appearance of virtue while succumbing to vice. Creating this appearance may, of course, take a great deal of work; consider what is involved in maintaining the illusion—to one’s spouse, one’s children, and others—that one is being faithful in marriage, if one is actually having an affair

Read the rest.

Stanford neuroscientist Lera Boroditsky has an interesting article on how the languages we speak shape the way we think. She notes that the consensus in her field is that “people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world.” This idea isn’t new (though the wide acceptance of it may be). In 1929, the American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf introduced the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which popularized the idea that language is used not only to express our thoughts but help to shape them too. As Sapir wrote in The Status of Linguistics as a Science:

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.

In linguistics, this explanation for the way that language relates to thought is known as a mould theory since it “represents language as a mould in terms of which thought categories are cast.” In his book Toward a More Natural Science, Leon Kass, former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, provides a striking example:

Consider the views of life and the world reflected in the following different expressions to describe the process of generating new life. Ancient Israel, impressed with the phenomenon of transmission of life from father to son, used a word we translate as ‘begetting’ or ’siring.’ The Greeks, impressed with the springing forth of new life in the cyclical processes of generation and decay, called it genesis, from a root meaning ‘to come into being.’ . . . The premodern Christian English-speaking world, impressed with the world as a given by a Creator, used the term ‘pro-creation.’ We, impressed with the machine and the gross national product (our own work of creation), employ a metaphor of the factory, ‘re-production.’

When you stop to consider the differences between such phrases as “methods of procreation” and “reproductive technology” it begins to become clear why social conservatives are losing ground in the fight to preserve the concept of human dignity. Any attempt to argue that embryonic human life is deserving of a particular moral status is undercut when we are using such phrases as ‘blastocysts produced by the technological advances of in vitro fertilization.” The language of the factory and of human dignity is as incompatible as would be the interchangeability of machine and life. Such degradation of language only leads to linguistic confusion and muddy thinking.

We are, of course, aware of the inherent power—particularly the political power—of words. For decades, both sides of the culture war over have abortion have attempted to ensure that their preferred terms— pro-life, abortion rights, etc.—seep into the media’s vernacular. While they are certainly overvalued, these words still retain their political usefulness as the struggle over their usages attest. But we cannot stop there. The preservation of human dignity requires us to fight for the hearts and souls of our fellow man and in order to do so, we must first reclaim the linguistic high ground. As the Southern conservative Richard Weaver famously expressed, ideas have consequences. If we are to have a significant impact on our culture we would do well to recognize that words have consequences too.

First Things readers in the greater Chicagoland area may be interested in an upcoming conference on Global Bioethics sponsored by the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity.  It will be held July 16-18, 2009 on the campus of Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois.  Among the featured speakers are yours truly, O. Carter Snead (Notre Dame Law School), and David P. Gushee (Mercer University).  You can find out more about the conference here.

Not much, if at all, argues Jim Manzi at The American Scene:

The total net expected benefits of the best-imaginable program to combat global warming are about $3.4 trillion. This is about 0.17% of the expected present value of total global income.

Compare the current Waxman-Markey bill to “an optimally-designed and optimally-implemented” carbon tax. Consider what it would be like, in the real world, to cut a global deal. Now consider what it would be like to enforce this for more than a century, not only in Sweden, Japan and Australia, but in China, India and Brazil. Compare this to “a globally-harmonized, optimally-designed and optimally-executed emissions mitigation program.” Do you think the economic drag the real-world deal would create might cause the planet to lose more than 0.17% (or for that matter, 1.7%) of the present value of future income as compared to the case without such a deal? It is extremely likely, in my view.