Wow!  Well, I’m sure there’s nothing I can say to turn of the spigot of comments on the Mormon question – both here and at our sister blog (First Thoughts), where they are up to 140+, I think.  (One thing I have learned, at least, is that there are really quite a few LDS readers of First Things blogs! I take this as good news, and I hope even the defenders of another orthodoxy can see it as such.) So there is no point trying to end what I seem to have begun (or re-begun), but let me articulate a kind of conclusion for my own part.

 I appreciate many discerning and temperate remarks on both or all sides of the question of where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stands in relation to a conception of mainstream or traditional Christianity.  It is undeniable that Mormons center their devotion on Jesus Christ, and equally undeniable that they hold a number of beliefs about the nature of the Godhead (with its three distinct persons) and about the relationship between divinity and humanity that are alien to official creeds shared by many Christian groups.   One question this difference raises, a kind of second-order question, is that of the relation between developed, more or less systematic and philosophically-informed theological positions and the less well-defined notions that more immediately inform the actual practices (prayer, sacraments, repentance, forgiveness – faith, love, hope…) of  — let’s just say “people who look to Christ for their salvation,” however different their theologies and even ontologies may be.  It occurs to me to suggest that we Pomocons might attend at least as much to these practices and experiences realize that the systematic theological formulations mean nothing if they do not help to make these practices sweeter and stronger for us.

“Jim” and Prof. Lawler take the discussion up a notch  — and this in a helpful way – when they raise the question of sin and atonement.  It is true that LDS have no taste for the language of “original sin,” and in fact embrace a teaching of Felix Culpa – the fortunate fall – that no doubt goes beyond anything Milton imagined.  Just to prove that I’m holding back none of my heresies, here’s a remarkable (for me, magnificently beautiful) exclamation by Eve (of all people!) from a Mormon scripture known as the Book of Moses (5:11) in The Pearl of Great Price:  “Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient.”  But perhaps the spirit of this exclamation is not so far from the old English praise that Benjamin Britten so wonderfully sets to music in his Ceremony of Carols:

                      Ne had the appil take ben, the appil take ben,
                      Ne hadde never our lady a ben hevene quene.
                      Blessed be the time that appil take was.
                      Therefore we moun singen.  Deo gracias!

To be sure, for Mormons, not only Mary, and not only Lewis’s Susan and Lucy, but all God’s daughters can look forward to being crowned “heavenly queens,” in a quite literal sense.  Note as well that, for Mormons, Satan’s offering to Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil as a temptation is the true part of a half-truth.  The moral knowledge necessary to agency is a legitimate aspiration.  But it would be wrong to conclude from this that  Mormons  (as Jim and Prof. Lawler seem to think) see human beings as capable of righteousness without the Atonement of Christ.  On the contrary:  it seems to me rather that for LDS agency and atonement are intimately associated.  (2 Nephi ch. 2 in the Book of Mormon is a key text on this point.)  The very mean of goodness and therefore the ground of agency  is not only exemplified but is in fact effectuated in Christ’s atoning sacrifice.  There is absolutely no question for Mormons of attaining righteousness without receiving the healing and strengthening power of the Atonement.  To become like Christ and therefore like God has nothing to do with making one’s way by some “natural” powers; indeed, “deification” has everything to do with entering into an economy of covenants that draws all its power from God’s gift of his Son, and from the Son’s submission to his Father, a submission that effects an infinite love that draws all mankind to him.  This drawing is the very power of the only real human agency.  The only real choice we can make is to accept this gift, a reception that enables us to have something ourselves to give.

This to me is “(the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart.  (–e.e. cummings – of all people!)

A neighbor at First Thoughts  has found occasion (someone was listening to Glenn Beck…) to issue yet another warning to any who might consider communing as Christians with members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Fair enough.  Since we Mormons (you may as well know) in fact regard our church as “the only true and living church,” we really don’t crave recognition by gatekeepers of another orthodoxy.  The somewhat quaint Vatican statement  our fellow blogger relies on reads like a puzzled anthropologist’s report on an exotic tribe of whom we have but fragmentary information.  It notes very correctly that, although Mormons baptize in the name of “the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,” they are not Trinitarians, and concludes from this that the Mormon concept of divinity has no “substance.”  Well, the Mormon “concept” (if that’s what it is) certainly has no Trinitarian “substance.” The Vatican document offers a rather odd account of Mormonism as a “sacred history” rewritten in America, in which what God revealed was the “latter-day saints” – whatever that would mean. But it suffices to open the Book of Mormon to its title page to learn that its own stated purpose is “the convincing of the Jew and Gentile that JESUS is the CHRIST, the ETERNAL GOD, manifesting himself to all nations…” (Caps in the original).

 Now, none of this is secret, and so, if you’re tempted to try survey research or to consult primary sources in addition to referring to Vatican reports of strange peoples, you might just (1) ask the Mormon next door or down the hall, who will no doubt willingly confess to not having a stake in the 3-in-1 doctrine, however elegant the venerable creedal statement may be, or (2) consult reliable information available at mormon.org – which, I can assure you, is not just an exoteric front.  What’s published there is really what we believe!  And indeed, you may note there both the prominence of Jesus Christ and the absence of Trinitarian sophistication, or, if you prefer, profundity. 

So, please, commune with whomever you believe you ought to commune with.  And if it helps to ease anyone’s mind, I can validate the following logic for you: All Christians are Trinitarians; No Mormons are Trinitarians; Ergo No Mormons are Christians.  Well argued!  But Mormons start with a different premise, and reach a different conclusion.  And of course there have been many believers, before and after 325 AD, who called themselves Christians, but who would not have recognized many theological formulations that are now considered “traditional.”  But to each his own definitions, if define we must.  There remains, however, the question whether our blogger’s dichotomy between “scripture and tradition” and “personal revelation” is adequate to frame the question of how to arrive at good definitions.

Whatever may be at stake in affirming that Mormons believe in a “different religion” from “traditional” Christians, maybe we can at least agree that the only important question is, finally, not what is traditional, but what is true.  That question seems a better starting point for “interfaith relations” than the pre-emptive deployment of definitions. In fact I have found discussions with Trinitarian friends (yes indeed, some of my best friends are Trinitarians), discussions not only of political and moral things, but indeed of the highest things – discussions, so it happens, that simply skipped over the stage of “definitions” –to be extremely rewarding, not only for reaching mutual understanding of differences and for forming practical alliances, but even for approaching and gaining glimpses of the meaning of truth, notably the truth of Jesus Christ’s infinite atonement (excuse the Mormon locution).  I won’t try to define that for you here.

In any case, it is curious that our First Thoughts blogger seems oblivious to much fuller discussions of these matters, discussions published not all so long ago, in the very pages of First Things.  Check out the Hancock-Peterson-Holland letter in particular.  You can be sure the authors indeed depart from Father Neuhaus’s “tradition,” respectfully but with no regrets.

David Walsh’s The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence, the magisterial concluding volume of a long-gestating trilogy, proposes a radical revaluation of modernity. Whereas Walsh began twenty years ago with the view that modern philosophy was complicit in “ideological madness” and nihilism, his intensive studies of the moderns has convinced him that “the death of metaphysics in thought has meant the return of metaphysics in life.” (xiii) “There is no crisis,” after all. (10) The “search for meaning” is “inexhaustible,” fortunately. (11) Modern philosophy progressively articulates, not a denial of authoritative moral standards, but an awareness of “the unsurpassable exigency of goodness … that is all the more powerful for our inability to contain … [it] within discursive limits.” (xiii) Moreover, at the deepest level, this insight represents not a rupture with classical and Christian thought but “a convergence with rational and revelatory tradition.” (xiv) Thus, the modern turn from “entities and concepts to an existential meditation on the horizon within which [philosophy] finds itself,” and thus to an appreciation of “the profoundly mysterious mode” in which alone “the transcendent can surface” (xv) fulfills the deepest meaning of both Socrates and of Christ – once the meaning of the Western tradition is emancipated from “the fixity of the categories we have inherited from the ancient thinkers,” or from the claim that “nature [can] furnish guidance.” (12) The modern philosophical revolution can teach us that the fact that “reason remains unknown to itself” (16) is good news, indeed a saving existential truth.

Walsh’s project, however, seems to me to rest upon a notion of “practice” that proves to be fundamentally equivocal. There is a “practical” meaning of practice, which concerns the preservation or definite improvement of mundane human life, and which therefore is bound up with a more or less articulate understanding of the human condition and its limits. This view of practice, closer to the classical view, necessarily (if often only implicitly) associates practice with theory or “metaphysics,” even if it does not exactly subordinate one to the other. And then there is a more “spiritual” or theological or existential meaning of practice, which Walsh evokes as a living towards a mysterious meaning that utterly transcends ordinary experience, the practice of a “pure abnegation of self that draws the soul toward God.” (219) For Walsh, we have seen, this spiritual practice is essentially identical to the synthesis of freedom and universal humanist morality that Kant first evokes. Such an identity appears to be possible because, as Walsh claims (most clearly and emphatically in The Third Millennium: Reflections on Faith and Reason), following Heidegger and Voegelin, the transcendent must be utterly “differentiated” from our worldly or secular existence: the withdrawal of the divine into utterly transcendent mystery relieves existential-theological practice of any ends “higher” than humanity.

Walsh’s chosen task of articulating the continuity between Christianity and modernity clearly favors the theological-existential meaning of “practice” over the practical meaning, since the latter would seem to subordinate practice to a (pagan) “account of entities and concepts.” Modern philosophy shares with Christianity an emancipation from entities and concepts and thus an understanding of spirituality as “an existential meditation on the horizon within which it finds itself.” “The practice of faith has ever and always been the only available source of faith.” (xiv)

In sum, Walsh’s enthusiasm for a purely open and therefore purely formal understanding of practical existence, articulated through brilliant, original, and remarkably comprehensive readings of the greatest authors of the continental tradition, seems to me to draw him very far away indeed from actual moral and political practice, and thus from the reality of our human condition. A truer and more truly “performative” attention to “the nature of practice itself” (Growth of the Liberal Soul 289) would be less inclined to praise pure freedom or openness and more solicitous of the actual horizons of common worlds, including implicit metaphysical and hierarchical elements. If, as Walsh himself writes, “the great challenge is to find a means of bridging the gap between … personal growth of the soul and the common ethos,” (313) then the Christian and modern evocation of the mystery of personal existence must not lose touch with the insuperable bond between the good of the soul and the good of the city. A concern for this bond would lead us back, in turn, to Kant’s “fretting” over the link between the moral law within and the starry heavens above. And such fretting might, further, lead us to consider how “practical” it was of the ancients to praise the supremacy of “theory.”

(This is a sample from a contribution to a symposium on Walsh’s trilogy to be published in Perspectives on Political Science.)

Herewith some comparative remarks on Strauss and Oakshott prepared for last week’s meeting at Baylor University of the Michael Oakshott Association. (Later, if you’re interested, I’ll relate how the homosexual “marriage” issue — or, as I like to say, the advocacy of “sad marriage” — sprung up in this august gathering.)
We begin with the obvious observation that Oakshott seems simply not to be interested in “political philosophy” as Strauss understands it – that is, in philosophy as intrinsically attuned to a fundamental political concern, as inwardly conditioned by political necessities and questions. On the other hand, one might say there is at least a superficial similarity between Strauss’s praise of the serene autonomy of philosophy (in comparison with which all merely human concerns are “ephemeral and paltry,” and all that) and Oakshott’s understanding of philosophy as the (unattainable) wholeness of experience, “experience without presupposition, reservation, arrest or modification” (EM, 2). But of course I have argued that Strauss’s praise of the pure detachment of philosophy from practical concerns must be understood rhetorically, and that the deeper truth is that the detachment of philosophy from practical nobility must be understood as continuous with a pretension of such nobility to a detachment from ordinary, “vulgar” human concerns. Oakshott, for his part, seems to have little interest in continuities between philosophy, or absolute experience, and the world of practice, which is just one among a number of “modes” of experience.

Oakshott’s idea of philosophy is thus very austere, to say the least. Absolute experience seems to be a kind of sheer self-possession and unhindered self-identity. The question of the character of its goodness does not seem to be acknowledged as a pertinent question, and so the problem of the relation of some goodness of philosophy to the goods of practice does not even arise.

How can the question of the good be set aside? Of course Oakshott recognizes the pertinence of the question, but only within a “mode” of experience that is considered altogether distinct from that of the most adequate and comprehensive idea of experience, namely, philosophy. The leading questions of practice, the realm which concerns human agency and therefore the possibility of change from a worse to a better condition, are not considered relevant to the interest in absolute knowledge that governs the pure mode of philosophy. To be sure, the distinction between the realms of eternal and necessary truth and things that can be other than they are is an ancient one that structures Strauss’s philosophical rhetoric as much as it does Oakshott’s. And Strauss no more than Oakshott imagines that theory can dictate directly to practice; both may be said to follow Aristotle’s lead in endeavoring to protect the practical realm against philosophy’s imperialist tendencies. Nevertheless, philosophy emerges for Strauss as the answer to the most pressing practical question, the question how one should live. Even if, as Aristotle himself says (Nichomachean Ethics X), the purely philosophic life, as divine, remains beyond the reach of human faculties, the best humans are invited to strive towards and emulate such a contemplative life. Philosophy rules practice for Strauss, even if he cautions it not to rule directly. And the less salient implication, I have argued, is that practice deeply conditions philosophy. If the practice of the virtues is understood in the light of contemplative wholeness and self-sufficiency, it is no less true that the very good of self-sufficiency is implicitly modeled on an experience or a pretension sustained in practice.

In sum, Strauss’s thought, like Aristotle’s, is finally governed by an interest in sustaining what Tocqueville called a “moral analogy,” a linkage between the a sense of an orderly whole (a cosmic whole prefigured in practical order) of which the individual is a part and the individual’s awareness of his transcendence of any given whole. Philosophy rules, and the very character of philosophy is conditioned by its ruling responsibility. The question of the True never completely leaves the orbit of the Good.

Oakshott, for his part, is resolute in severing the True from the Good. Valuation is confined to the realm of practice, and practice is a mere “mode” of experience, an abstraction from the absolute encountered “without presupposition or arrest.” Is it not fair to ask, though, just where the “abstraction” lies, and what experience or region of human activity advances the strongest claim to standing “without presupposition, reservation, arrest or modification?” Strauss seems to argue that there is no more immediate and primordial and in that sense “natural” mode of existence than that in which we are interpellated by the question of the Good, a question that bridges practical and contemplative experience. This then becomes the ruling, integrating question for Strauss. Oakshott, for his part, begins with an idea of absolute experience inherited (indirectly) from Hegel, but severed from the ruling claims of a theory of History that aims to integrate the contemplative and the practical. Strauss might ask whether Oakshott’s idealism of pure experience and the radical separation of the practical from the philosophical that results are not themselves abstraction, even violent and uninterrogated abstractions from the natural springs of human questioning.

Oakshott’s approach can no doubt be understood and perhaps justified as a response to modern, predatory rationalism, which aims to master and possess reality for human convenience. But Strauss would of course interpret such an abstracting will to separation as part of a “strategy of separations” (of religion from politics, society from state, represented from representative, etc – the term is Pierre Manent’s) inherent in modern rationalism, and which is founded ultimately on the separation of the useful from the good, or, what amounts to the same thing, of the good from the true. And Strauss would thus regard such an abstraction as tending to aggravate the rationalistic disease it is meant to contain, if not to cure. In Strauss’s view, I think, any configuration of theory and practice that does not limit practice by situating it in effect under the (indirect) rule of theory (conceived as the good life of contemplating eternity) is bound to nourish the blind and destructive metaphysical passion of practice to create a world in which its contradictions are resolved – the passion of “technology.” Or, in my formula, adapted from Tocqueville: longings for transcendence that are not oriented vertically (aristocratically) and thus integrated into a scheme of “moral analogy” can only spill over into horizontal (democratic) projects that threaten the human soul.

Now it must be said that such a Straussian diagnosis seems utterly to miss the mark in the case of Oakshott, who never seems to betray any taste for technological projects of any kind. To be sure, Oakshott’s separations seem to lead to a certain constructivism at the individual level, in which a “poetic” conception of the best way of life is associated with a kind of pure (but somehow not aggressive) willfulness. And Strauss would no doubt find his prognosis justified by Oakshott’s insistence that “culture” and “values” are absolutely prior to politics and by no means a matter of or product of political deliberation. This after all quite radical historicism takes a characteristically benign form in Oakshott’s thought, but (as has been noted, for example, by such a discerning and friendly critic Andrew Sullivan, Intimations Pursued) it would seem to leave Oakshott as a political thinker defenseless before the ugliest cultural and ideological assertions. In this sense Strauss would argue that Oakshott’s failure to appreciate the classical rule of reason causes him to throw out reason itself along with modern rationalism and leaves him vulnerable to the leveling, homogenizing power of democracy-technology.

Notwithstanding these Straussian questions that it seems to me Oakshott would have difficulty answering, it is time to grant that there is something attractive, even compelling in Oakshott’s aesthetic or “poetic” appreciation of the immediacy of ordinary life. There is truth in the separation of life from the rule of teleological reflection, because there is a beautiful mystery in the givenness of existence that cannot be referred to “higher” plan of reflection. This attunement to what Charles Taylor calls the sacredness of the ordinary surely points to some truth, and one to which Leo Strauss might seem to be utterly tone deaf. Strauss quite assiduously ignores this truth, because it is ultimately a Christian truth, and because, for Strauss, Christianity, in its appeal to the longings of ordinary human beings, its sanctification of a goodness irreducible to the resigned elevation of classical “reason,” is the real “first wave” of modernity.

Charles Kesler has recently provided another of his brilliant and bracing synopses of the American political scene, with a view to summoning conservatives to “another epic struggle, a battle for America’s soul, a battle that will determine whether free government will survive.” I am not sure there is in it a single word I disagree with, as far as the essay goes, and heaven knows I appreciate a good call to arms. But as I ponder the dire situation with which Mr. Kesler confronts us, a few questions seem to stand between me and full readiness for combat. I invite my friend Charles, as well as Pomocon comrades, to resolves the perplexity that stifles my alacrity.

Kesler’s characterization of the pathological allure of “the Higher Lawlessness” of the Progressive-Liberal faith and of its success in addicting Americans to an unlimited government that shades imperceptibly into socialism could not be more apt. And he is right that limitless government under a “living Constitution” was sold and is being sold to the American people on the basis of a virtually limitless understanding of “rights.” To recover the “free, honorable, independent” spirit of “old American democracy” would require a return to an earlier constitutionalism grounded in an earlier and sounder understanding of rights, that of the Declaration of Independence, in which rights originated “in God or nature,” not in the State. The Reagan Revolution failed to create a lasting majority based upon such a return, and Republicans in the era of “Compassionate Conservatism” persuaded themselves that a principled commitment to constitutionally limited government was no longer necessary, since the other side, under Clinton, had itself given up on the “era of Big Government.” Hello!!

Kesler’s call for a return to “founding principles” grounded in “our capacity for self-government” is admirable, but his own diagnosis fosters some doubt as to whether this capacity still exists. Any reader inclined to accuse the author of a simplistic or doctrinaire commitment to rights (even old-fashioned ones) should first ponder his last section, in which he invites reflection on the dilemma of statesmanship before “the deeply intractable problem of what to do about the liberal state,” a state that “has entwined itself so tightly around the organs of American government that it seems impossible to remove it completely without risking fatal harm to the patient.”

The difficult challenge to which Mr. Kesler summons us is thus at once “a battle for America’s soul” and the painstaking and incremental task of a gradually extricating ourselves from a myriad of statist addictions. Surely he is right that we should not despise the relatively humble work of preventing “further damage.”

But does not even this humble work involve a spiritual and intellectual task higher and deeper than the one to which Charles Kesler calls us? For a limitless liberalism has entwined itself, not only around “the organs of American government” but around the American soul itself, raising grave questions concerning “our capacity for self-government.” When Kesler addresses “virtue,” he limits himself to “public virtue” or to the rule of reason and justice as alternatives to limitless public “compassion.” But can we would-be counselors to statesmen hope to begin to disentangle the American soul from a thousand cords of limitless liberalism without first taking up reason’s responsibility for goods that reason cannot found by itself, goods that our Founders had the luxury of taking, mostly, for granted?

The grounding of rights in “God or nature” cannot remain an abstraction, understood only negatively as a basis for attacking limitless progressive liberalism. The appeal of “Progress” can only be countered by a substantive understanding of the good of the soul. However politically inconvenient this may be, the question of the soul of self-government can no longer be deferred.

1. We want to be at home, and we want to be free. We want to fit into something larger than ourselves, something real and meaningful and permanent; and we want to control our destiny, to create something meaningful and to express our unique personality. We want to be a part, and we want to be a whole.

1.a. We are parts, and we are wholes. This statement must not be a simple contradiction, because we human beings, aware of being parts and wholes – we are real and we exist. This apparent contradiction certainly names a tension, a problem that lies at the heart of our humanity, and therefore (I would say), at the heart of reality itself, at least as far as we humans can know.

2. Moreover, our desires for home and for freedom, since both lie at the heart of our humanity, cannot be completely extricated from each other.
(The longing for freedom, or the desire to realize oneself as an autonomous whole, is another way of saying the desire to be divine and thus to belong to or be identified with what is real, with what is beyond human construction and human domination. Let us say that in its most radical form the longing for freedom is the blasphemous longing to be God, which is perhaps the nearest and furthest desire from the pious longing to be with God. But even the greatest possible impiety of longing to be God, the self-sufficient source of all reality, cannot avoid a Divine longing for a world to love and be loved by. Even the freedom of divine wholeness cannot be disentangled, as far as we can know, from the longing to be a part.)

3. But some few are more articulate, imaginative, intense than most in their desire for home/freedom: thinkers, poets, founders/statesmen (i.e., ambitious, movers & shakers).

3.a. This decisive fact of human inequality constitutes the political dimension of reality. It complicates everything: “home” is in some measure a human (historical) construction; some play a bigger role in this than others. Thinkers, poets, founders build our homes — and destroy them or undermine them. But where do they live?

4. In the ordering of human existence with respect to home and freedom, everything depends on the relation between the ordinary desire for home and for freedom, and the extraordinary longings and productions of thinkers, poets, founders. For these are inextricably connected. The ordinary is certainly conditioned by the extraordinary: those who would be happy just to be left alone will not be, and if they are, this can only be because of some arrangement of the affairs of the extraordinary, “ambition counteracting ambition,” or whatever. Less obvious to the extraordinary, they also depend upon the ordinary: the meaning of their thinking, the possibilities of imagination and of founding – these may soar far above the common, but they are launched from the common earth and never leave its orbit. The creator of every new possibility begins helpless, in some womb and some home.

Recent, appalling local news involving sexual abuse of youth (in a school setting) and abuse of religious and moral authority, as well as published “charitable” responses to these crimes, prompts the following distressed thoughts on “applying” Christianity. Shockingly to me, some students (presumably non-abused) have expressed support for the now terminated teacher, arguing Christian forgiveness of the “nobody’s perfect” variety. In a similar case, a prosecutor and judge have dealt mildly with an offender, partly in response to the offended family’s forgiving disposition.

Isn’t there something wrong with this picture? Should the miracle of forgiveness displace the natural response of retributive justice? Shouldn’t Christian charity rather respect a moderate natural response and take its place alongside it? “What you have done is shameful and outrageous, and you must be punished according to the full extent of the law. At the same time, I recognize that Christ has atoned for your sins as well as mine, and I pray for you.” Or something to that effect.

Another kind of case: the harsh regime that not long ago excluded unwed mothers from respectable society has now been softened considerably, as was no doubt necessary. But now (even in very conservative religious circles) we are so “understanding” and “forgiving,” concerned to continue to fellowship the offender, that all natural shame is removed, and a pregnant teenager might expect to continue socializing with the good girls as if nothing were the matter.

Very kind and compassionate, no doubt — but is it really, in the long run, a service to the community to remove the stigma from selfish and irresponsible acts.

The deeper problem: how do the obligations of Christian charity stand in relation to the claims of natural justice and shame? Or, what happens when we try to make the exception (forgiveness) the rule (justice)? Are not both perverted?

A recent visit to my Southern, rural paternal roots could not help but nourish reflection related to recent discussions here. Raised a suburban Westerner, I fondly remember childhood visits to what was in effect very much a “front porch” village, where anyone swaying in a suspended swing-chair with his grandma on a warm summer evening could be expected to receive multiple visits from neighbors, most of whom would probably be some kind of relatives. Unsurprisingly, little of that particular custom survives now. While many front porches still exist, and the hospitality quotient is still surely far above what you would be likely to find in places that modernized earlier, TV and air conditioning have taken their irresistible toll, and today you’ll probably arrive in a car (rather than strolling the immediate neighborhood) and have to knock on a door and perhaps talk over a TV in order to pay your visit.

A loss, surely, but also a tradeoff. Maybe the world we have lost was better, but who has the strength to choose it over air conditioning and television? More to the point, who is this “who” who might be the subject of such a choice, who might have the power to make such a choice? You or I might have the capacity rationally to survey the costs and benefits of entire communities characterized either by front-porch swinging or air-conditioned TV watching, but not by both — but how is a whole community going to “choose” one or the other? Such choices are impossible, very nearly unthinkable, precisely because of the reign of individual “choice.” Why shouldn’t I have air-conditioning? My foregoing it won’t prevent others from retreating from their porches to their cool TV chambers. And so I it might seem I really have no choice concerning the basic character of my way of life. We cannot make any wholesale choices because we are free to make a thousand retail choices, or a million consumer responses, the systemic consequences of which are constantly escaping our control. Choice is the great enemy of choice; it is because we are free that nothing important seems to be within our grasp. Politics succumbs to the “market,” to the Spirit of Technology, and everything that seemed solid melts, evaporates.

The conservative sensibility that appeals to “culture” tends to distrust politics even more than the market, Choice even more than choice, and so risks being left with only an impotent aesthetic response to the juggernaut of Technology, this “great machine of pleasure and happiness” (Rousseau) we think we have created and that rules us. But if we are really impotent to oppose this machine, then, truly, all honor to aesthetics, which at least has the chance to open our souls to worlds we have lost and every day are losing, in fact actively rejecting, even we tasteful ones, with every consumer “choice” we go on making, since we really have no Choice. If we cannot really integrate older, larger possibilities into our practical lives and therefore our souls, if it is not really open to us actually to take responsibility for them and thus truly to know what they mean, we cannot be blamed for taking delight in imagining other worlds, science-fiction like. God knows we need some Other.

Or, do we really want to try to re-create a world with more front porches with people actually swinging on them with their neighbors? This of course would require a Grosspolitik that might tempt an eccentric Nietzschean Straussian but that I trust any self-respecting “cultural conservative” would find simply Gross. In fact such a Choice would require command of the whole world, wouldn’t it? — which might even disqualify my Nietzschean Straussian. Only a god can save us? That is, no one or nothing can save us.

No one, perhaps, but God. Returning to what is left of my rural, Southern roots, I find families living to a surprising degree (if you will allow the cliché) “in the world but not of it.” Living perilously so, I venture, but still so living. Life in a conservative-religious, modern technological family is driven almost as much as any by the million choices we never really choose. On the very large, flat-screen TV there is a dance-competition show featuring costumes and gestures that would have made respectable strippers blush not long ago. But look! That girl with the skirt split up to the waist and the vigorous pelvic thrusts is a member of my church, isn’t she pretty, isn’t she talented, I hope she wins! Thus morality has been severed from taste, the “laws of moral analogy abolished” (Tocqueville), and so morals left without any grounding in mores, without, one would think, any real, durable purchase on practical existence. But – cultural conservatives take note — the family watching this lurid exhibition – or allowing it to be seen, as they are mostly busy playing games or checking their Facebook on the various computers in the room – this family has already raised six chaste sons and daughters to become pious husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, raising their own “traditional” families. It is the grandchildren who are most interested in the dancing. This suggests a very depressing possibility: maybe the exhaustion of decent mores that my children’s generation of traditional religious believers has more or less survived will have its full, debilitating, bewildering, morally devastating effect on my grandchildren’s.

Of course we should just turn off the television, if not the air conditioner. I recommend it (more than I do it), and my children, on behalf of their children, seem in fact to be doing it. I also recommend reading Wendell Berry’s novels, I really do, and I really, profoundly long for a day in which we would not need great literature to be reminded of even minimal standards of taste and decency. But I do not see us taking command of the billions of “cultural” and consumer choices that expose us to schlock and even to degradation. I think there are bad things about mass-manufactured globally transported foods, and I stand ready to support any practical projects for not subsidizing such massification. But I agree with my daughter-in-law’s priorities. She has no compunction about shopping at Walmart, but she and my son have excluded TV from their home, though they will watch the big game with me on my TV. Mostly she fears entrusting her children to a public education system increasingly governed by the liberationist idols of the age, if only in the apparently anodyne form, for now, of a mild ideology of “tolerance” for diverse sexual lifestyles. And she fears an impending legal regime that would elevate perversion to official respectability and effectively marginalize those who choose the hard sacrifices of traditional parenthood. (Fifty years ago, in my Southern village, a “fairy” was mildly, even affectionately mocked and marginalized, yet at the same time truly “tolerated” and allowed to go on with his life at the margins. Exceptions were known to be exceptions; no one imagined they could rule.)

And so, while the massification and perversion of the “culture” inspire in me a religious and ontological horror, I find some hope in the fact that religious families seem to be able to keep their bearings, to create moral islands just above the floodwaters. In some ways these religious-familial islands may be more deeply and authentically religious than would have been possible for any but the strongest and most literate souls in a strong front-porch community where taste and piety were mutually reinforcing (hat-tip to Mr. Lawler’s existentialism). It is these ordinary, culturally undistinguished, Walmart-shopping families on their moral and religious islands (where they may or may not watching sexy dancing on TV) may now have the best sense of what Choice is still available to us. They care most about assaults on God and sexual morality. And are they wrong to see this axis as defining the front lines? As far as I can tell, the best job definition now for us learned and cultivated ones might be to help to define and crystallize this Choice as early as possible, before it is too late. So I propose an alliance between high-cultural conservatives, traditionalists, even non-Nietzschean Straussians or post-Straussians, and vulgar religious conservatives, on whatever ground appeals to the last group. They’re the ones in the trenches, and they may see the enemy as clearly as anyone. Culture needs God and Politics. If we can be saved, only God can save us, and, as has been said, (one more cliché, sorry) God helps those who help themselves.

As I awoke this morning I was treated to a most light-hearted remembrance of Bastille day on NPR. Nothing is so merry, it seems, as stringing up a few “aristocrats” from light poles. Not that the jovial announcers at NPR are particularly to blame; their casual notice of what could be considered the political beginning of radical modernity is thoroughly typical of the complacency of our late modernity: an unquestioned secular rationalism, but without bearing any of the weight of reason’s responsibility. At least Lenin, a very conscious heir of the Jacobins, had some sense of the gravity of the decision by human beings to take over the sovereignty that had belonged to God. Now, however, reason rules with unbearable lightness.

Here are some thoughts I framed long ago, for the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the taking of the Bastille:

…The disconcerting suggestion that arises from a comparative reflection on the theoretical cores of the two Revolutions is the idea of human rights that informs the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 cannot be altogether severed from the logic of the Terror. The potential for unlimited radicalization seems to exist from the moment the rights of man are extracted from a framework defined by the laws of nature and nature’s God and made to stand on their own as assertions of human autonomy. The germ of the Terror, the dream of the regeneration of humanity by political means, may already be present in the radically modern idea of sovereignty that informs the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. The political denial of an authoritative realm of meaning beyond politics appears barely separable from the absorption of all meaning into the political realm. Hobbes’ radical materialism, which accompanies his rejection of the priority of natural law to human rights, invites Rousseau’s idealism, or his craving for a comprehensive moral order not grounded in nature but created by human beings. If politics is all there is, then politics must be everything, it must hold the key to fulfilling not only the ordinary needs but even the deepest longings of humanity.

Those who propose to liberate human beings by reducing them to their naked individuality and destroying the bonds that connect them with principles understood to reside beyond human power risk arrogating to themselves the right to forge new and tighter chains. If there is no Truth above the People, then the People are led to create their own truth – in effect, of course, some revolutionary elite must create it in the name of the People, whatever the human cost. The violence of the Terror appears thus to spring from a theoretical violence to human nature…

On this 220th anniversary, I can still ask, is this violence still at work beneath the surface of our merry, easy-going late modern rationalism?