Throne and Altar

Original on the Orthosphere

If I were to give a commencement address:

Graduating seniors, my message to you is simple:  do not try to make the world a better place.

I realize this contradicts everything you’ve been told since you arrived four years ago.  Since your freshman orientation, you have been encouraged to engage in activism, to join protests, to raise the consciousnesses of your benighted and bigoted elders.  But that’s strange in itself, isn’t it?  The presumption must be that you are wiser and more compassionate than the mass of men who make up the status quo.  After all, if you were uninformed or had an overly simplistic understanding of the world, it would be better if you didn’t change the world until after overcoming these defects, since there would be no reason to think your changes would be for the better.

Now, the prior speakers have already praised your passion, idealism, commitment to social justice and so forth, so let us grant for the moment that you are wiser than the men of previous generations who bequeathed to us the existing order.  When did you get this way?  To be really confident that other men’s group attachments or understandings of sex are mere bigotry, that other men’s religions and philosophies are mere superstition, that other men’s property is unjustly held, requires arduous prior study.  You must have sought out the strongest arguments of the other side and subjected your own to ruthless examination.  You must have approached those you would condemn and listened to them with sympathy to be sure there is no aspect of the case you have failed to consider.  A century ago, men like Planck and Einstein revolutionized physics, but even though they were certainly geniuses, they first had to have a very deep understanding of classical, Newtonian physics, its strengths (which their new theories had to reproduce) as well as its weaknesses.  Likewise, for you to condemn a society, you must have come to understand it better than its own defenders and participants.

When, exactly, did this happen?  Did it happen while you were here?  Even if so, it’s odd that you were encouraged to start inflicting your virtue on the world from your freshman year, before this process could be completed.  Do you regret any position you took prematurely as a freshman?  Have you found all your early positions ratified by further study?  What luck that would be!  I’m twice your age, and many of the things I said in my twenties, even with a bachelor’s degree to my name, now embarrass me.

But how could this process of rigorous critique have happened here, when you have demanded, and the administration has granted, that no beliefs of which you disapprove may be presented on campus, that aspects of Western and non-Western civilizations you deem “hateful” have “no place in our community”?  So, in fact, this detailed examination of our civilization, which you find so grievously wanting, must have happened before you even arrived here–or else it would have been foolish to have let you decide what ideas may and may not be given respectful consideration.  It must have been in high school that you gave all those “dead white men” their careful hearing and exposed their errors.

Or perhaps it didn’t happen at all.

To learn, one must at least suspect that one might be ignorant, and I hope I have planted a seed of suspicion in your minds.  Not that you are wrong, but that you cannot really be so confident that you are right.  Here, though, are two truths of which you can be certain.  First, it is easier to destroy than create; you’ve known this since you started playing with those legos for toddlers.  Second, simply maintaining a level of civilization–to say nothing of advancing in technology or “social justice”–is tremendous work, work that must be repeated each generation.  We often fail to show our ancestors sufficient gratitude for this work.  Yes, society is natural to man.  But just as it is natural to the predator to hunt its food and yet any day this may be exhausting work with uncertain outcome, so we humans must expend great effort to maintain a good that is natural to us.  Given this, it would be no small accomplishment to leave the world not worse than one found it.

Consider one more argument against trying to make the world a better place.  You will probably fail.  It is statistically certain that most of you are not destined for the history books.  By the time you reach middle age, your lack of world-historical importance will hopefully have become clear to you, and with it a growing acknowledgement of your own mortality.  How will you make sense of your life?  How can you find some meaning in your short time on Earth?  You may ask yourself how most men and woman have faced these questions throughout history, having realized at last that you are not different than them.  You will find that past generations drew solace from their very smallness, the fact that although they were unimportant and their time was brief, they participated in something larger:  a fixed and divinely-ordained order of nature, the multi-generational chain of memory of a particular culture, nation, or race.  These are the ideas that you, as an emancipated, rational citizen-of-the-world now want to undermine.

You might well ask me what an ambitious young man or woman should do, if not make the world a better place.  Well, you could try raising a family.  If you ask yourself what your parents’ main accomplishment was, most likely this would be it.  Why imagine you should do anything grander?  Remember my second truth.  Just carrying things forward–holding down a job, caring for children and teaching them well, maintaining a house and the friendship of neighbors–is a huge undertaking, the work of a lifetime.  Or how about this:  instead of trying to make the world a better place, why not let the world make you a better person?  After all, you are still very young, and the world still has much to teach you.

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Chivalry is a flower no less indigenous to the soil of Japan than its emblem, the cherry blossom; nor is it a dried-up specimen of an antique virtue preserved in the herbarium of our history.  It is still a living object of power and beauty among us, and if it assumes no tangible shape or form, it none the less scents the moral atmosphere and makes us aware that we are still under its potent spell…It is a pleasure for me to reflect upon this subject in the language of Burke, who uttered the well-known touching eulogy over the neglected bier of its European prototype.

…

Fair play in fight!  What fertile germs of morality lie in this primitive sense of savagery and childhood.  Is it not the root of all military and civic virtue?  We smile (as if we had outgrown it!) at the boyish desire of the small Britisher, Tom Brown, “to leave behind him the name of a fellow who never bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big one.”  And yet, who does not know that this desire is the cornerstone on which moral structures of mighty dimensions can be reared?  May I not go even so far as to say that the gentlest and most peace-loving of religions endorses this aspiration?  The desire of Tom is the basis on which the greatness of England is largely built, and it will not take us long to discover that Bushido does not stand on a lesser pedestal.  If fighting in itself, be it offensive or defensive, is, as the Quakers rightly testify, brutal and wrong, we can still say with Lessing, “We know from what failings our virtue springs.”

— Inazo Nitobe, from Bushido:  The Soul of Japan (1905)

Dr. Nitobe was a man of impressive broad-mindedness:  a Japanese convert to Quakerism who wrote this study to help Westerners appreciate the spiritual grandeur of a martial code that his adopted faith would not let him completely share.

Self-consciously modern people will not tolerate a good word for European chivalry, but they can sometimes be tricked into feeling some respect for the samurai.  I actually found this book at my university’s bookstore among the required reading for an “Asian Studies” course.  It may be one of the few books they read in college that leave them better (and more open to forbidden thoughts) than it found them.

Nitobe has a delightful trick of granting a modernist’s objection in a way that exposes its pettiness.  For example

I am not entirely ignorant of Mr. Spencer’s view according to which political obedience–loyalty–is accredited with only a transitional function.  It may be so.  Sufficient unto the day is the virtue thereof.

And I’m going to remember to use this one

Democracy may make self-confident retorts to such a statement and fling back the question–“When Adam delved and Eve span, where then was the gentleman?”  All the more pity that a gentleman was not present in Eden!  The first parents missed him sorely and paid a high price for his absence.  Had he been there, not only would the garden have been more tastefully dressed, but they would have learned without painful experience that disobedience to Jehovah was disloyalty and dishonor, treason, and rebellion.

One last quote

I have noticed a rather superficial notion prevailing among half-informed foreigners, that because the common Japanese expression for one’s wife is “my rustic wife” and the like, she is despised and held in little esteem.  When it is told that such phrases as “my foolish father”, “my swinish son”, and “my awkward self”, etc., are in current use, is not the answer clear enough?

To me it seems that our idea of marital unions goes in some ways farther than the so-called Christian.  “Man and woman shall be one flesh”.  The individualism of the Anglo-Saxon cannot let go of the idea that husband and wife are two persons–hence when they disagree, their separate rights are recognized, and when they agree, they exhaust their vocabulary in all sorts of silly pet-names and nonsensical blandishments.  It sounds highly irrational to our ears, when a husband or wife speaks to a third party of his or her other half–better or worse–as being lovely, bright, kind, and what not.  Is it good taste to speak of one’s self as “my bright self”, “my lovely disposition”, and so forth?  We think praising one’s own wife is praising a part of one’s own self, and self-praise is regarded, to say the least, as bad taste among us–and I hope, among Christian nations too!

Nitobe goes over the main facets of the samurai way:  loyalty, politeness, stoicism, suicide, the virtues appropriate to women.  He predicts that Bushido as an explicit code will not survive the modernization of Japan, that in the end materialism and Christianity will divide the world between them.  Nevertheless, his hope is that Bushido might live on as a moral sensibility in (presumably) Christian Japan as Stoicism does in Christian Europe.

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I value my Protestant conservative allies.  I notice they seem to get concerned when they hear that traditionalist Catholics object to the principle of religious freedom.  Presumably, they worry that, should Catholics ever again gain power, we will start persecuting Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists, and so forth.  I can sympathize; if I were a Lutheran, Anglican, or Methodist, I would prefer that people be willing to tolerate me.  However, they’re going about reassuring themselves in the wrong way.

Continue reading →

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Like J.S. Mill, I stipulate that I am speaking of political liberty, not the philosophical problem of free will.

The plain meaning of freedom is being able to do what you want, but there is no way to maximize this.  Power is conserved; distributing it is a zero-sum game; any decision means more freedom for some set of people and less for some other set.  See Zippy.

One way liberals get around this by introducing the idea of a private realm that is one’s own concern.  “Freedom” means few restrictions in the private realm while in the public realm that affects everybody decisions are made impersonally so no one oppresses anyone else.  Freedom requires structuring society a certain way.  If my right to move my arm ends where my neighbor’s body begins, than freedom means giving everyone as much elbow room as possible.  This atomization process destroys communal goods that many would rather keep, but liberals are getting very comfortable about telling these people that their desires are evil and not true exercises of freedom.  And if power only over your private realm seems a paltry thing, you can participate in the impersonal public decision making machine (voting, jury duty), just as long as you only invoke motives that liberals approve as “public reason”.  Such is the price of freedom.

Conservatives have long noted that this model of expanding freedom in fact leaves everyone isolated and powerless before an impersonal government.  A better model of freedom, we have sometimes said, is provided by subsidiarity.  Don’t strip all authority from people and concentrate it at the top in an impersonal bureaucracy.  A better model of freedom is power distributed to as small units as possible.

There is some truth to this, but we should be careful about basing our case for the authority of fathers, bishops, and local governments on subsidiarity concerns, as if the only thing that mattered were spreading power and not who in particular gets it.  We insist that God has granted authority to these categories of people in particular (meaning both that He affirms the right to self-rule of the institutions these people represent and lead, and He endorses a particular hierarchical constitution of these institutions).  Defending the authority of fathers on the grounds of freedom from the state is playing on dangerous territory, because the state will invoke the liberal understanding of freedom to “liberate” the children.

Dissenting Sociologist has made an ingenious suggestion that we invert the liberal scheme of “freedom as no power of one person over another, rather power held impersonally” with “freedom as power held by responsible persons within an explicit hierarchy”, which would indeed mean a much more livable world, one that resembles less than the liberal one what we intuitively recognize as tyranny.

In my Defense of Tradition, I offer another way that conservatives might acknowledge the desire for freedom.

Cultures also have established standards of courtesy which recognizes persons as dignified by an accepted place in society…As Montesquieu noted, each people also has its own conception of freedom, the dignity we accord persons as beings with free will addressed by the moral law.  This culturally conditioned freedom can be quite different from liberal autonomy.  For example, a soldier is a free man rather than a slave—even if he was conscripted, even though his life is minutely regulated, even though he may be ordered to risk his life.  What makes him free is, ironically, his duty to obey.  To command someone over whom one has recognized authority is to appeal to him as a moral agent.  An animal could only be conditioned, and a slave could only be threatened.  The distinctive mark of freedom is also seen in the treatment of criminals.  A free society does not excuse or condition them; it punishes them.  Punishment appeals to a belief in free will and a common standard of justice.

Each of the above behavior codes varies from culture to culture.  In some aboriginal cultures women bare their breasts, while in some Arab cultures women cover their faces.  This doesn’t scandalize the traditionalist, any more than one would worry that different languages have different words for the same thing.

Freedom means not being treated like a child, which can mean completely different things in different cultures.

Other attempts to save the quest for freedom from incoherence exist.  For Hegel, true freedom is rationality, and the state exists, to speak very roughly, to make things make sense and to make us fully self-aware.  Virtue ethicists distinguish mere license from “freedom for excellence” which involves actualizing one’s own nature.  This seems to be what Tolkien meant by the “free peoples of Middle Earth”.  These definitions come close to replacing freedom as a distinctly political category with a fully actualized free will–self-control, understanding, “freedom from sin”.

Sure, there are definitions of “freedom” for which pursuing freedom is a good thing, but in all these cases, isn’t there a better, clearer word for what we are really pursuing?  If we want subsidiarity, personal (i.e. responsible) rule, culturally-conditioned expressions of respect for subjects, rationality, or virtue, wouldn’t it just be better to say that instead?

But we are conservatives, which means validating common sense categories.  If people value “freedom” and abhor “tyranny” so much, there must be something to it.  Even if the good of “freedom” is identical with some other good, the word “freedom” must be capturing some particular aspect of that good.  Maybe one of the above illiberal views of freedom is adequate, maybe not.  The intellectual work on the Right shall continue.

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From the Catechism:

2241 The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.

Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.

Without any exception that I know of, the episcopacy takes this to mean that Western countries are obliged to admit an essentially unlimited number of immigrants from everywhere in the world, and that any concern for the host nation’s cultural and genetic continuity is “racist” and therefore to be condemned.

The actual words of the Catechism don’t directly say that, fortunately.  An immigration restrictionist might put special emphasis on the provisos “to the extent they are able” and ” for the sake of the common good”.  Note, though, that the latter only allows the host country to impose “juridicial conditions” on the immigrants; it’s not clear if the host nation may ever just say “no” to anyone.  Let’s read the Catechism as laxly as possible, attending only to the words rather than the spirit (while lamenting this practice in general).  Let’s say we can sneak into the above phrases about ability and the common good the idea that a nation can be concerned with its spiritual common good, and that furthermore this might include the preservation of its particular cultural inheritance.  Let’s interpret the “juridicial conditions” to include the right of a nation to refuse to take in large numbers of incompatible foreigners (not even offering them conditional admittance) simply because of their incompatibility.  Aren’t we good little sons and daughters of the Church!

Of course, the bishops would say not.  We have tortured the Catechism beyond recognition by introducing racist concerns entirely foreign to the text.  This is true, but it is the Church’s fault that we were able to do this.  In order for the bishops or the pope to declare our concerns illegitimate and heretical, they would have to first acknowledge them.  This is something they refuse to do, dismissing all opposition as selfish concern for the material welfare of our own native working class (in any case, a kind of selfishness I would think we could use more of).  I believe some of John Paul II’s addresses make it pretty clear that he did demand Western nations embrace their own cultural extinction, but I don’t believe we have a binding magisterial statement to that effect.

The real problem with the Catholic position is that it is entirely individualistic and materialistic.  Yes, we can sneak in concerns about communal cohesion, but only because this whole dimension of concern is entirely absent from the Church’s thinking.  On this matter, the Church speaks in the liberal language of individual rights considered outside of any social context.  Each immigrant has a natural right to move to a Western country; the Western country of his choice can only deny him welcome only for the direst reasons.  There is no room here for charity or generosity; the immigrant has his right, and we have our duty.

This is a serious failure of the Church’s teachers.  In these times of liberal dominance, the most useful role for the Church’s social witness is to remind people of communal and spiritual goods, even if the goods in question are ones that we must sacrifice.  And if it really is true that the people of Europe are morally obliged to become strangers in their countries and denizens of the Dar al-Islam, this should be acknowledged forthrightly, and the peoples of Europe offered spiritual resources for the great sacrifice required of them.  Pope Francis is always saying we need to help people and not just insult them.  Here is a case where the Church really is being grossly insensitive.

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Conservatives defend common sense distinctions against ideologically-driven over-simplification.  It is commonly thought that, by taking our stand on common sense, we are being intellectually lazy.  This is the reverse of the truth.  It’s the simplest thing in the world to take an established ideology with a clear established vocabulary–or even just an established slogan–and follow it to its insane conclusions.  It’s even easier to congratulate oneself on being more rational than those who notice the insanity.  Much more subtle is the process of understanding why one’s rational conclusions offend one’s more complete but less articulate general moral sense.

It’s so very easy to prove that all sins are mortal.  Doesn’t Anselm lay out the proof nicely in Cur Deus Homo?  Even the smallest infraction offends against God, who is infinitely good.  Can we not say that the slightest sin is an implicit denial of God’s sovereignty, of His claim on our obedience and love?  Is this not the rebellion of Satan himself?

Obviously, something must be wrong with this argument.  It would be exactly the same to say that the slightest legal infraction (e.g. violating a speed limit) is insurrection and treason against the established government, because disobedience implicitly denies the legislator’s legitimacy.  But this is not how we understand minor crimes at all (except, perhaps, for a minor disobedience performed ostentatiously before the sovereign specifically to carry this meaning; similarly, the smallest sin would be very grave if the sinner deliberately wished to express apostasy thereby–but then the serious sin would be apostasy, not the choice of signifier).  And yet, the argument that all sins are mortal has plausible premises, and it is a “holy-sounding” argument.  The one making it gives the impression of having greater remorse for his sins, greater reverence for God.  The one making the counter-argument is bound to sound lax by comparison.

Modern men would find it hard to believe, but throughout her history, the Church has more often than not come down on the side of “laxity”.  Heresies often impress with the uncompromising logical and moral rigor of their oversimplifications.  By dividing sins by their gravity, the Church took the more conservative and intellectually challenging path of endorsing common sense.

Didn’t Jesus Himself equate anger with murder and lust with adultery?  This might count as evidence that all sins are mortal, but it doesn’t have to.  Our common sense is that being angry at a sibling isn’t nearly as bad as killing him, and lusting after another man’s wife isn’t nearly as bad as actually sleeping with her.  One might try to explain away Jesus’ words by imagining that looking lustfully at a woman is a peculiar and monstrous state entirely distinct from what most of us do regularly, e.g. that lust really means actively plotting to seduce and anger really means actively plotting to kill.  This would strip the meaning from Jesus’ words.  He is denying that the sins we abhor are things that lurk only in exceptionally bad people.  The same spiritual deformities are in us.  If we nevertheless insist, as we should, that checking out a girl isn’t as bad as sleeping with her, we must conclude that some acts of adultery are more grave than others–a difference of degree rather than kind, one might almost say.

Gravity would seem to be a continuum, so how do we get from there to a binary distinction of mortal vs. venial?  This is a difficult question, but difficult because reality really is complicated in that way.  To return to the analogy above, we don’t treat every petty criminal as an enemy of the state, but we do treat some criminals that way, and it tends to be a pretty binary thing.

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Seven years ago, I wrote

The fact that this expression exists, and that to accuse someone of “trying to be more Catholic than the pope” is to make that person sound silly, is a sign of everything that’s wrong in the Catholic Church today.  That we’re not supposed to try to be “more Catholic than the pope” usually means three things

1. One should not take a stricter view on moral matters–especially matters of sexual morality–than the pope.  (E.g.:  “How can you say that there’s something wrong with natural family planning?  Even the pope is okay with that!”)
2. One should not express concerns over matters of doctrinal orthodoxy or liturgical orthopraxis if the pope himself has not expressed these concerns.  (E.g. “How can you call Tielhard de Chardin a heretic?  Even the pope thinks he’s great!”)
3. One should not express a higher opinion of the Catholic clergy or the historical record of the Catholic Chruch than the pope does.  (E.g. “How can you say the media is exaggerating the prevalence of clergy sexual abuse?  Even the pope has admitted that it’s really bad!”  or “How can you defend the crusades?  Even the pope has apologized for them!”)

Each of these claims is not only wrong but harmful.  #1 and #2 make it inevitable that the Church will continue to drift Leftward, closer and closer to heresy and immoralism, because it means that the Vatican only ever feels pressure to move in a Leftward direction.  No one is pushing the other way.  At best, the pope has defenders who will take the same positions as him, but the Holy Father can be confident that he won’t alienate these loyalists by moving to the Left; they would be sure to follow, for fear of seeming more Catholic than the pope.

Now,

Pope Francis spoke critically again of the faithful who have a strong embrace of Catholic doctrine, resorting to pejorative terms he has often used such as hypocritical and phariseeism.

“You cannot be more restrictive than the Church herself,” he told a lay association gathered Thursday morning at the Vatican, “nor more Papist than the Pope.”

Addressing the Congress of the International Forum of Catholic Action in the Synod Hall, the pope told participants he wanted them to be out among the people and that there is a need for “active mercy.”

The theme for the association’s three-day gathering was “Catholic Action is mission, with all and for all.”

“Do not be border police,” he told the conference.

“Please, open the doors,” Pope Francis stated, “don’t administer Christian perfection tests because you will only promote a hypocritical phariseeism.”

Pope Francis leaves it open whether we are allowed to be less restrictive than the Church herself.  Would that perhaps be “active mercy”?

Perhaps I’m a better Catholic than I thought, being less restrictive than the Church on many matters.  I don’t condemn people for preferring their own race or for wanting a low level of immigration into their countries.  I regard the manufacture for sale of weapons as an honorable profession, and I don’t condemn countries for accumulating arms for purposes of deterrence.  I approve of wifely submission in marriage (condemned by the pope in Amoris laetitia).  I have no objection to my fellow Catholics engaging in “proselytism”, as I generally think that trying to convince others to share beliefs one regards as true to be an innocent, even generous, activity, so long as those beliefs are in fact true and profitable.  All of these activities are censured by the Church to varying degrees, and my refusal to condemn racism and national border control in particular make me an unorthodox Catholic, given the unanimity with which the Church speaks on these things.  However, as a the pope says, administering “Christian perfection tests” is unhelpful.  We would not want a Church of hypocritical anti-racist pharisees.

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