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On the Natural History of Destruction

Thu, 01 May 2003 00:00:00 -0400

In the summer of 1943, the British Royal Air Force (with support from the Eighth Army Air Force of the United States) flew a series of raids on Hamburg, Germany. Dubbed “Operation Gomorrah,” the bombing missions did not target factories or fuel installations, railway junctions or transportation arteries. Their aim, in the words of acclaimed German novelist and essayist W. G. Sebald, “was to destroy the city and reduce it as completely as possible to ashes.”

On one such raid, early in the morning of July 27, ten thousand tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs were intentionally dropped on the city’s densely populated residential districts. Twenty minutes after the bombing commenced, the city was engulfed by flames rising a mile into the air. As Sebald writes in On the Natural History of Destruction , the inferno consumed so much oxygen so quickly that it stirred up hurricane-force winds that “lifted gables and roofs from buildings, flung rafters and entire advertising billboards through the air, tore trees from the ground, and drove human beings before it like living torches.” A few hours later, as smoke continued to pour from the smoldering ruins, survivors surveyed a scene of stunning desolation:

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Aliens in America: The Strange Truth about Our Souls

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 00:00:00 -0500

Conservatives face a daunting challenge today. On the most pressing moral issues confronting the country—many of them having to do with aspects of biotechnological research—the public is deeply divided, and the divisions are far from trivial. Take the issue of embryonic stem cells. Many conservatives contend that the union of complementary gametes (sperm and ovum) instantly produces a unique person who possesses the same rights as a mature human being; they thus conclude that embryonic stem cell research, which destroys this person, must be prohibited. But many others think differently. For them, the prospect of relieving the suffering of sentient human beings—especially when they are members of one’s own family or beloved celebrities such as Christopher Reeve and Michael J. Fox—should outweigh concern for the dignity of a microscopic clump of cells in a petri dish.

The former view is clearly based on the stronger argument. In the words of Robert P. George, blastocysts are indeed “capable of directing from within their own integral organic functioning and development into and through the fetal, infant, child, and adolescent stages of life, and ultimately into adulthood as, in each case, determinate, enduring, whole human beings.” And yet, the latter position is not obviously absurd. It is neither nihilism nor reflexive sentimentality, but rather an intuition embedded in moral common sense, that leads so many to conclude that decency requires us to do what we can to relieve the suffering of those we love. The conflict, then, arises from a tension within morality itself.

A similar dynamic plays itself out in debates over the ongoing pharmacological revolution, which promises to eliminate psychological pain, depression, and even unhappiness itself from human life. Many conservatives are troubled by the prospect of a world in which unhappiness has been banished through the chemical manipulation of the brain. But many others find little in the idea to object to. After all, doesn’t everyone believe that pain, depression, and unhappiness are evils? When they befall us, don’t we try to alleviate them? When we succeed in doing so, don’t we consider it a good thing? It would thus seem that the creation of a world without these afflictions would be a cause for rejoicing—perhaps even the fulfillment of a self-evident moral imperative. If conservatives hope to make headway in convincing their fellow citizens—and themselves—that this imperative should be resisted, they will have to do a better job of articulating what is really at stake in the drive to purge our lives of pain.

According to Peter Lawler, what is at stake is nothing less than our awareness of the truth about who we are. The title of Lawler’s new book, Aliens in America , is a reference to the Christian tradition, stretching back through St. Augustine and the Letter to Diognetus to 1 Peter, that portrays men and women as “pilgrims or aliens in this world.” The experience of “homelessness” that biotech companies hope to eliminate from our lives is, from this standpoint, “a fundamental human experience”—one that discloses to us that by nature human beings can only hope to “become ambiguously at home in this world by coming to terms” with it. Lawler maintains that this message has been obscured by modern habits of thinking that treat every unpleasant occurrence as a pathology to be isolated and expunged. It is ultimately these habits that have led to the biotechnical and pharmacological revolutions of our time—revolutions that seek to “make us completely at home” in the world.

Those who create and market such psychotropic drugs as Ritalin and Prozac treat the human propensity “to be miserable in God’s absence” as having a merely “chemical, not a natural or divine, foundation.” While this is one possible interpretation of the human capacity to be “moved by love and death,” Lawler contends that it is a profoundly insufficient one. Following the novelist Walker Percy, Lawler argues that “we have a right to our anxiety.” Far from being “a symptom to be eradicated,” it is “a sign or a gateway to the truth about our purpose as human beings. To be born, to live . . . is to be alienated, to be lost or displaced in the cosmos.” Hence our pharmacological saviors can accomplish their goals only by cutting us off from the truth and persuading us to live a lie in its place.

None of these themes are new to Lawler, professor of government at Berry College in Georgia. In a series of thoughtful books and as the editor of our most consistently engaging academic journal of political philosophy ( Perspectives on Political Science ), Lawler has established himself as a provocative and original thinker. Influenced by his fellow Southerners, Percy and Flannery O’Connor, no less than the political ideas of Leo Strauss, Lawler has managed to carve out a distinctively Christian position in the field of political theory. In The Restless Mind (1993), he introduced us to a deeply Pascalian Tocqueville who was primarily concerned that liberty would be extinguished by the materialist pantheism that is “the most seductive and consistent democratic intellectual doctrine.” In Postmodernism Rightly Understood (1999), he argued that contemporary skepticism about modernity, far from issuing in antifoundationalist nihilism, actually makes possible a turn to Thomistic realism in American thought. And now, in Aliens in America , he gives us a glimpse of what such realism looks like.

In his opening chapters, Lawler takes very seriously an account of contemporary American life that can be found, with minor variations, in the writings of a diverse collection of authors: David Brooks, Alan Wolfe, Richard Rorty, Allan Bloom, Francis Fukuyama, Carl Sagan, and others. All of these writers portray America today as a “therapeutic democracy” and Americans themselves as easygoing, nonjudgmental moral libertarians who are primarily concerned with material comforts. They would gladly sell their souls for immortality, a “perfect baby,” and an end to sickness and suffering of any kind. Some of the authors (like Bloom and, in certain passages, Brooks and Fukuyama) lament this development, coming close to describing Americans as Nietzschean “last men” with “flat souls.” Others (like Wolfe, Rorty, Sagan, and, in different passages, Brooks and Fukuyama) celebrate it as a triumph of greater democracy and tolerance.

Lawler concedes that both groups of authors have put their fingers on something very important about American life today—and he clearly sides with the former group in concluding that “the post-Cold War threat to the human soul is in some respects unprecedented, and it is very real.” Yet he rejects the diagnosis proposed by most of these critics. He accuses Bloom and others of presenting “at best a reductionistic caricature of American souls today.” Americans have not been transformed into subhuman automatons hell-bent on hedonistic satisfaction. On the contrary, they still experience moments of “human greatness and misery.” What’s distinctive about our time is not that we’ve ceased to strive for anything higher than leisure and entertainment; it’s that various “experts” and “pragmatists” have “deprive[d] us of the words that allow us to understand, and so live well with, our experiences.” The desire to use scientific and medical expertise to redeem us from the most challenging of these experiences arises out of the inability to adequately describe and thus derive meaning from them.

Lawler maintains that conservative critics of current trends do little good by reinforcing the view that the souls of Americans have undergone some kind of fundamental degradation. Instead, they should be working to revive a vocabulary that can do justice to the full range of human experiences in all times and places, including the present. But description of such experiences is not enough. In Lawler’s view, “Human nature as a distinctive point of pride and as a good in itself must be defended as never before. We must show the goodness of Being and human beings in spite of human misery.” Against Bloom’s suggestions in The Closing of the American Mind for reviving liberal education, Lawler argues that “it is not enough to defend the rare and questionable experiences of the philosopher,” for “the philosophers have not done well in defending the goodness of ordinary human lives.” In fact, “the experience of the goodness of human being is characteristically and best articulated by religion,” and by the Judeo-Christian tradition in particular.

Much of Aliens in America is devoted to showing that religion was viewed by the American founders “primarily [as] an instrument for the preservation of liberal democracy,” and that present circumstances demand that it be defended far more robustly: “Liberal democracy now has to be justified perhaps more than ever by the truth and goodness of religion.” He finds some indications of how to undertake such a justification in the work of John Courtney Murray. According to Lawler, Murray rightly found the Christian notion of the dignity of the person implied in the First Amendment—an implication that “correct[s] the impression given by the unamended Constitution’s apparent indifference to the existence of God.” The Bill of Rights, combined with the ringing rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, shows that what the American founders built was shaped more “by what they were given by tradition or God” than by secular, Lockean principles. Moreover, Lawler follows Murray as well as the nineteenth-century American Catholic thinker Orestes Brownson in concluding that the founders “built well because they let themselves, to some extent unconsciously, be guided by the invincible facts about human nature and American tradition.” In other words, “their practice was better than their theory.” And Murray’s writings serve as a model of how to provide a better theory to “justify and so perpetuate their project—the constitutional order they created under God—in our time.”

But, for Lawler, even more useful than Murray’s works are the writings of Percy and Tocqueville. In his concluding chapter, Lawler contends that both thinkers deserve to be recognized as “Christian realists” because they remain open to the aristocratic as well as democratic—the hierarchical as well as egalitarian—dimensions of human life to an extent that is exceedingly rare in the tradition of Western thought. In the end, both of them clearly choose “justice over excellence,” but they also recognize the need to give human distinctiveness and virtue their due “against those who would, in the name of democracy, deny them.”

They thus also provide us with an account of human life capable of keeping alive the awareness that, although we ought to fight for fairness in this world, we must never confuse that struggle—especially when it tempts us to medicate ourselves into an ersatz happiness—with our ultimate and highest goal. The fact remains that “our true home lies elsewhere, and . . . this fact is the most reasonable explanation of our experiences of homelessness.” Far from being something to be treated as a defect, “our hopes and fears in this world” are, in words that Lawler quotes from Percy, “rooted in ‘the strange human creature himself,’ ‘an admixture’—of good and evil, grace and the demonic, . . . courage and cowardice.” As Lawler writes in his concluding sentence, which provides the subtitle to his book, our “inability to be more than ambiguously at home is the strange truth about our souls.”

This is Lawler’s simple lesson—timeless, but often forgotten in our time, as advances in biotechnology make the advent of Aldous Huxley’s “brave new world,” and thus C. S. Lewis’ “abolition of man,” more likely with each passing day. While his quirky style of writing—which combines long, occasionally tedious paraphrases of arguments by other authors with dense patches of original analysis and criticism—detracts at times from his argument, the power and importance of that argument is undeniable. As conservatives ponder why and how to resist the temptation to reach for all good things in this life, they would be well advised to do so with Lawler by their side.

Damon Linker is Associate Editor of First Things .

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Fatherhood, 2002

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 00:00:00 -0500

I’m a new man. I’ve just slept through the night for the first time in weeks because my newborn son has just slept through the night for the first time in his young life. Don’t get me wrong: most nights, he still cries for a feeding at 1:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. But last Monday he terrified his parents by sleeping straight through until 4:00. After bolting out of bed at 2:30 in a Sudden-Infant-Death-Syndrome-inspired panic to discover him sleeping (and breathing) soundly in his crib, my wife and I shuffled back to bed, dimly aware that the first, most physically and emotionally taxing era of parenting would soon be over. Sure enough, it happened again a few nights later—and this time, we allowed ourselves to luxuriate in the glorious expanse of six uninterrupted hours of rest.

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Nietzsche’s Truth

Thu, 01 Aug 2002 00:00:00 -0400

In the months before his final descent into madness, Friedrich Nietzsche made the following declaration and prediction: “I know my destiny. Someday my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous, a crisis like no other on earth, the profoundest collision of conscience, a decision conjured up against everything that had been believed, required, and held sacred up to that time. I am not a man; I am dynamite.”

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The Antipolitical Temptation

Sat, 01 Jun 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Nothing is more human than discontent with the human condition. And few aspects of human life inspire more discontent than politics. The longing to withdraw from, escape, or transcend the vicissitudes of political life in favor of a more perfect world permeates Western culture from ancient times to our own, though the responses to it have taken many forms. For Plato, the philosophical life enables a man to leave behind the imperfections of politics—with its harsh necessities, imperatives of self-defense, worldly ambition, violence, and craving for power—to pursue the higher justice supposedly embodied in rational reflection. Similarly, the Stoics believed that heroic acts of virtue could protect the virtuous man from the nastiness that so often prevails in political life. Others, by contrast, have denied the possibility of transcendence altogether. For these Epicureans, sophists, and skeptics, our only option is reconciliation to worldly limitations.

Things are different still for believing Jews and Christians, who offer yet another interpretation of human discontent. On the one hand, the world is a “vale of tears.” On the other, there is a promise of redemption from, and even the redemption of, the world by a Messiah who will “wipe away every tear” from our eyes. Transcendence, then, is possible, but it awaits us in a future we lack the power to make present. The Judeo-Christian tradition thus synthesizes apocalyptic yearn ing with stark realism about the obstacles to its satis faction. If recurring Gnostic and messianic heresies testify to the precariousness of this synthesis, its relative stability and persistence over the millennia demonstrates, equally well, its remarkable resilience.

Not that the Judeo-Christian interpretation hasn’t faced its share of hostile challenges over the centuries. Among the most potent was the one launched by the mad sophists of the modern age—those radicals who promised, at long last, to make us at home in the world, not by reconciling us to its imperfections, as their ancient counterparts had proposed to do, but by transforming the world into a post-political paradise. In the act of total revolution we would, in the words of Karl Marx, purge ourselves of “all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” Whatever else might await us after the deluge, Marx made it abundantly clear that he expected his new world to be one in which “public power” had lost its “political character,” by which he meant the “organized power” of “oppression.” In the cataclysm of revolutionary violence, we would learn to wipe away our own tears, once and for all.

With the demise of communism as a viable anti political option, it sometimes seems that such eschatological hopes have been rejected by almost everyone. Yet the antipolitical temptation hasn’t disappeared. On the contrary, it has metastasized. The relentless drive to negate our political natures through revolutionary destruction has been displaced by the quieter, but far more widespread, call to redeem the world in slow motion, using the powers of supra national organizations and institutions. Ours is an age of antipolitical humanitarianism.

Some humanitarian organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have undoubtedly done good over the years, drawing needed attention to startling abuses of power in renegade regimes from Asia to the Americas. But more often than not, they have acted as gadflies on the backs of the world’s merely imperfect governments no less than its truly sinister ones. In the name of an abstract and otherworldly “humanity,” they claim the moral high ground by virtue of their lack of attachment to any actual human community. From this enlightened perspective, they then pronounce virtually all military actions, regardless of what provoked them and no matter their ultimate aims, to be “humanitarian disasters.” Thus do they reduce morals to the counting of corpses. It is precisely this kind of logic that leads to such trouble for Israel in the “international community,” where the fact that more Palestinians than Israelis have died in the past eighteen months has come to be seen as definitive proof that the latter are guilty of everything from recklessness to genocide.

But such reasoning is morally obtuse. As military historian Victor Davis Hanson has noted, “Hitler, Tojo, Kim Il Sung, and Ho Chi Minh . . . all lost more soldiers—and civilians—in their wars against us than we did.” And yet no one with a functioning sense of moral proportion believes that this fact implies their ethical superiority to us. Likewise, the Palestinians “suffer more casualties than Israelis not because . . . they are somehow more moral” but because they are not as adept in fighting real soldiers in the full-fledged war that is growing out of their own intifada.” Looking down on the conflict from the transpolitical stratosphere staked out by humanitarian organizations, the motives, causes, and methods of warfare might appear to be irrelevant compared to brute quantities of human suffering. But for those concerned with rendering nuanced and informed—that is to say, accurate—moral judgments, considerations beyond mere numbers will always be at least as important.

As disconcerting as the influence of the non governmental human rights establishment might be, it possesses little power to do real harm, beyond in fluencing public opinion within free societies. Much more troubling are the supranational antipolitical institutions that now aspire to police the world, doling out punishment to moral transgressors. The UN has a long history of such pretensions, but its well-known incapacity to enforce its resolutions has rendered it largely impotent. Things might very well be different, however, with the International Criminal Court (ICC), which on April 11 was empowered, on a permanent basis and over strenuous American objections, to try individuals—including sitting heads-of-state—for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

While the ICC’s mandate might sound innocuous and even admirable”after all, whose heart bleeds for Slobodan Milosevic, currently on trial as a war criminal at an ad hoc Balkans tribunal?”many of those behind the Court are motivated by a far more ambitious agenda. As the Cato Institute’s Gary Dempsey has pointed out, some have advocated amendments to the Court that would empower it to prosecute environ mental crimes, cyber-crimes, and drug trafficking, while others have gone even further, to propose the criminalization of “aggression” as such. This ominously vague and open-ended crime could include “the bombardment of the armed forces of a state against the territory of another state” and ‘the blockade of the ports or coasts of a state by the armed forces of another state.”

The problems with such proposals are legion. If enacted and enforced, they would make military deterrence impossible, and preemptive actions, such as the blockade President Kennedy employed as a tactic during the Cuban Missile Crisis, illegal. They would treat all hostility between nations as unambiguously evil, despite the fact that, for all the pain they cause, wars are sometimes required by justice itself. Then there is the fact that, like so many UN programs, the ICC will almost certainly become a tool of Third World thugocracies. Lastly, and most absurdly, in order to put these or any other proposals into effect, the Court will have to rely on the use, or at least the threat of the use, of force. Which is, of course, precisely the political power it would deny to those over whom it presides.

Some of the ICC’s more sympathetic critics have warned of the danger of allowing it to become “politicized.” But that’s not the half of it. Such a Court cannot help but be, in its essence, a political institution. “Humanity” might be a useful transpolitical ideal, but as soon as it is transformed into an actually existing institution, it becomes, like all things concretely human, something partial, something partisan, something political.

But we were political animals already. Just as communism was supposed to redeem us from politics and wound up producing an unprecedentedly vicious form of political tyranny, so today’s prophets of global humanitarianism would trick us into believing that we can bureaucratize our way out of the human condition. And once again the results are liable to be pernicious. Superimposing a second layer of political institutions—run by lawyers and judges from Nowhere—onto those we already have will not save us from ourselves, like positive and negative integers canceling each other out, leaving behind only the equilibrium of universal peace and brotherhood. It will, more likely, increase our attachment to the ways of the City of Man, as well as enslave us to the rule of moralizing “experts” operating at multiple removes from popular accountability. This side of the Eschaton, there’ll be no crawling out of our political skins.

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The Uses of Anger

Fri, 01 Mar 2002 00:00:00 -0500

I’m angry, and I have been ever since I watched a 767 slam into the North Tower of the World Trade Center while walking to the office on a lovely late-summer morning last September. Sure, like most Americans, I’ve also experienced shock and profound sadness. But the anger came early, and it’s still there—even after the remarkable success of our country’s military campaign in Afghanistan. Though its intensity has diminished over the past five months, I suspect that the anger will persist until Osama bin Laden, Mohammed Omar, and every other would-be murderer of Americans is, in the words of President Bush, “brought to justice.” By which he means, no less than I do, killed in battle, imprisoned for life, or executed after a lawful but expeditious trial or military tribunal.

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Off Center

Fri, 01 Feb 2002 00:00:00 -0500

Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity
By Darrin M. McMahon
Oxford University Press, 262 pages, $35

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Philosophy and Tyranny

Tue, 01 Jan 2002 00:00:00 -0500

Heidegger’s Children

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Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World

Thu, 01 Nov 2001 00:00:00 -0500

America’s culture war is not about culture. It is about religion”Christianity, in particular”and its role in the public life of the nation. On one side, secularists of various stripes insist that religion is the source of our greatest problems”prejudice and bigotry, ignorance and injustice”and thus ought to be relegated entirely to the private sphere of life, if not eliminated altogether. On the other side of the cultural divide, assorted religious intellectuals maintain that Christianity provides an essential moral foundation for liberal democratic government. Many go even further, to identify an essential connection between Christianity and democracy.

It is the great virtue of Robert P. Kraynak’s Christian Faith and Modern Democracy to question the assumptions of both sides in the culture war. Not that he feigns neutrality in these important matters. As a self-described believing and practicing Roman Catholic, Kraynak, who teaches political philosophy at Colgate University, strongly supports those who advocate a greater role for the church in American public life. In his early chapters, he powerfully defends the view that liberalism is incapable of vindicating the human dignity on which liberal rights are based. This is the case because it is impossible to defend dignity with doubt about the highest ends of life, as liberalism has sought to do from the time of its origins in early modern Europe. Hence, liberalism needs Christianity in order to ground its most elemental moral claims.

But the bulk of Kraynak’s book”well over four-fifths of it”is devoted to making a different, more controversial argument. Although liberalism requires a religious foundation, Christians, in Kraynak’s view, should resist the temptation to synthesize liberal democratic and Christian principles. Such a synthesis must be rejected because Christianity cannot be “connected in principle to any form of government and may even be incompatible in crucial respects with liberal democracy.”

The inevitable tension between the requirements of politics and faith is, of course, a very old theme in Christian thinking, going back at least as far as St. Augustine’s doctrine of the “Two Cities,” if not to Jesus Christ himself, who spoke of distinct duties to God and to Caesar. Unlike Judaism and Islam, which view the divine law in political terms as a civil or legal code, Christian divine law cannot, in Kraynak’s words, “be codified directly into civil law or translated into a specific political order.” The City of Man must inevitably fall short of the City of God. Christians should thus remain somewhat detached from the form of government that prevails at any given period of history. In the Middle Ages, when the dominant political arrangements were aristocracy and monarchy, the temptation was to overemphasize hierarchy and downplay the innate dignity of all human beings. Today, when our political assumptions are in many ways the reverse, Kraynak believes we need to be reminded that there is “something inherently hierarchical in the Christian religion.”

He finds evidence for such a hierarchy in the notion of the Apostolic Succession, which directly links contemporary church leaders to Jesus’ chosen disciples, as well as in the Platonic-Aristotelian and Scholastic conception of a hierarchy of being and substance. To be sure, Luther and Calvin raised fundamental questions about the legitimacy of these notions of rank. Each, however, left the authority of other temporal hierarchies intact. Kraynak points out that Luther, for example, advised Christians to “obey established powers as authorities ordained by God.” Even Calvin, whose political views have at times been interpreted democratically, defended a “limited theocracy governed by a moral elite who are not identical to the predestined elect but who may cooperate with them in governing.”

To those who find such historical arguments unpersuasive and appeal instead to the gospel’s message of universal dignity and brotherhood as a foundation for democratic politics, Kraynak points out that Scripture contains its own antidemocratic tendencies. Whereas modern democratic activists treat dignity as something “absolute,” human dignity in the Bible is “selective.” That is, while all human beings do partake in the spiritual dignity that persists from our creation in the image of God prior to the Fall, the Bible also “permits and even requires different degrees of dignity in the created and fallen world based on God’s election of special people and the institution of human authorities.” Dignity is at once “given and therefore ‘inalienable’ (as we would say today)” as well as being “something to be won or lost, merited or forfeited, augmented or diminished.” According to Kraynak, it is this fundamental and ineradicable tension within the City of Man”between what might be called democratic and aristocratic principles of distinction”that explains Christianity’s historic refusal to grant automatic legitimacy to any one form of government, including democracy.

Until, that is, the last few decades of the twentieth century. As Kraynak writes, “from both a historical and a theological perspective,” it is quite extraordinary that within the past generation “almost all Christian churches and theologians (Protestant, Catholic, and, most recently, Eastern Orthodox) have embraced democracy and human rights as the core of their political teachings.” To explain this remarkable development, Kraynak analyzes six movements that are commonly cited as causes of change in Christian politics. They range from medieval Conciliarism and the Protestant Reformation (with its emphasis on individual conscience) to the struggles of Christian churches against colonialism, slavery, industrial exploitation of workers, and, above all, totalitarianism. While he admits that all of these factors played a role in the Church’s gradual acceptance of democracy, Kraynak chooses to focus on one (somewhat surprising) cause in particular: the influence of Immanuel Kant’s theological and political ideas.

Kraynak claims that Kant’s influence can be detected throughout contemporary religious and political culture. “On a superficial level, one can see the impact of . . . Kantian ideas on the ethical discourse of modern Christians who now speak as much or more about ‘persons,’ ‘dignity,’ ‘rights,’ and ‘respect’ than about sin, redemption, compassion, heaven, and hell.” But Kant’s influence is, he claims, even more apparent in the conception of the Imago Dei that prevails among Christians today. It is a conception that leaves no room for hierarchical distinctions among human beings and instead emphasizes that each of us is a “human person” possessing reason and free will as well as inalienable human rights. These assumptions led Kant to conclude that “the one and only legitimate constitution is a pure republic,” just as they have led modern theologians and popes to declare that (in Kraynak’s words) “setting up a democratic political system that protects human rights” is an “unconditional political imperative that demands universal implementation.”

Liberal democracies are unquestionably preferable to the monstrous totalitarian tyrannies of the twentieth century. Likewise, there is no denying that, by adopting the rhetoric of rights and a universal democratic imperative, Christian leaders (such as John Paul II) have been able to wage an effective war of words against these forces of evil. Yet Kraynak worries that the very decency of liberal democratic principles will blind us to the “ subversive power of rights.” While some (such as, once again, John Paul II) manage to keep “Kant in a box” by teaching that “the rights of the person are clearly directed to higher ends,” many modern theologians and members of the clergy are less cautious. They believe that rights can simply be “detached from their subversive premises” and made compatible with “a sense of gratitude and duty to God.”

In Kraynak’s view, such a position is naive. It fails to recognize that rights tend to put authorities of all kinds (political as well as religious and paternal) on the defensive. Although rights can be used to further justice”as when the politically oppressed assert them in order to undermine the authority of despotic governments”it is exceedingly difficult to prevent them from being directed against such nonpolitical and socially necessary hierarchies as “the family, the church, traditional educational institutions, . . . or the military chain of command.” This is because the “concept of human rights lacks an inherent principle of self-denial or self-limitation.”

In making this highly contentious claim, Kraynak draws heavily on the arguments of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as he also does in the final chapters of the book, where he sketches a “prudential” theory of government that, given the current historical and political situation, he believes could temper the rights-based form of democracy that dominates the world today. Described alternately as “constitutionalism without liberalism” and “constitutionalism under God,” Kraynak’s ideal arrangement for the contemporary City of Man would conceive of the “goods of the temporal realm” in terms of “a hierarchy of ends rather than in terms of consent or human rights.” Which is to say that Kraynak’s state, in addition to securing “civil peace and stability,” as ours does, would go further, to foster “moral virtue and civic piety or the creation of an atmosphere that nurtures virtue and piety in a comprehensive ‘high culture’ that elevates rather than degrades the human soul.” The people would be given a say in political matters through political representation, but various corporate hierarchies (in the family, the church, and the military) would dominate their private lives, acting “as a bulwark against the leveling tendencies of democracy.”

Of course none of these proposals has even the slightest chance of coming to pass in modern-day America. Kraynak is certainly aware of this. Yet he maintains that they are worthy of our consideration because they “give us the true perspective on politics by indicating that liberal democracy is a second or third choice compared to more hierarchically arranged regimes.” That Kraynak largely succeeds at pulling off what amounts to being a purely theoretical exercise is a tribute to his command of Western political theory as well as the power of his arguments.

Not that those arguments are entirely unproblematic. On the contrary, Kraynak’s project is plagued throughout by a tendency”common to many political theorists”to simplify and exaggerate the influence of philosophical ideas in political and social life. Take, as a relatively minor illustration, Kraynak’s treatment of Kant and his role in promulgating egalitarian liberalism. The Prussian philosopher has certainly exercised an extraordinary influence on the development of modern religious ideas, especially on the German tradition of liberal theology. But that influence has by no means been universal within Christianity, where (to cite but one example) Karl Barth’s antiliberal neo-orthodoxy has left a powerful mark on twentieth-century thinking.

Similarly, Catholicism’s conditional endorsement of liberal modernity since Vatican II is far less a sign that the Church has been taken over by Kantians than it is a result of its recognition, in the wake of two world wars and the Holocaust, that liberal democracy is, on the whole, more compatible with Christian teaching than any political alternative currently available. While Kraynak may well be right to be concerned that this measured acceptance of democracy has become for some an enthusiastic embrace, the proximate cause of this development cannot be found in the ideas of an eighteenth-century philosopher few contemporary Christians have read.

More troubling is the effect of Kraynak’s preoccupation with theory on his understanding of America. Liberal political philosophy has indeed exercised a significant and substantial influence on American life, but it has hardly been the only such influence. The United States has developed in the way it has through a complex combination of philosophic intentions with religious, political, social, economic, and scientific ideas and events beyond the control of any one man or group of philosophers. Kraynak’s analysis would have been strengthened”and his radical proposals for reform somewhat moderated”by a bit of Tocquevillean circumspection about the limited influence of political theory and the continued vitality of religious and political practice in America.

Still, these are relatively minor reservations. Kraynak has performed a valuable service by teaching us that, although democratic America is a decidedly decent country and thus worthy of our devotion, we ought to be cautious about loving it”or, for that matter, any earthly city”too much. Only when we remain somewhat detached from our country do we attain the distance needed to evaluate it wisely. In the words of Pierre Manent, “To love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.”

But a measure of detachment is also liable to be a good thing for the faithful themselves. Aristotle points out that only in the best city is it possible for the good citizen to be a good man. And the Church tells us that no City of Man can attain the perfection of the Kingdom of God. Kraynak rightly reminds us that the fate of Christianity”let alone that of individual Christians”cannot be the same as that of democracy in America.

Damon Linker is Associate Editor of First Things.

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Going to Pot?

Thu, 01 Nov 2001 00:00:00 -0500

It is safe to say that at some point in the not-too-distant future, America will confront the question of whether or not to legalize the use and cultivation of marijuana. A recent poll shows that support for legalization has reached its highest level since the question was first asked thirty years ago, with 34 percent supporting a liberalization of policy. Among political elites there is a growing consensus that the harsh penalties imposed on those who grow, use, and sell marijuana are disproportionate to its harmful effects. Even among conservatives, opinion seems to be shifting. Whether the change should be welcomed is another matter.

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