America and Its Dead

You can see them at many grave sites where the War of Independence was fought, and the battlefields of 1812, and the Civil War. You can see them at the Alamo. You can see them arrayed now in rows of crosses and Stars of David below the purpled hills of Anzio, and on the long sweeps of the green fields of Normandy. You may find them still at Flanders field, and all across the Pacific islands and atolls. This nation is thought to be entirely future-oriented. In fact, we look backwards very often, like a rotating wheel upon a stagecoach turning down again and again to fundamentals. We ride the revolutions up and away, and then ride back to first principles.

Memorial Day is one of many annual occasions to do so, publicly and liturgically, with prayers and patriotic discourses.

I have always loved to learn the basic facts about our dead. Age, hometown, names of spouse and children. I try to imagine what their lives, untethered from early death, might have become. Insurance salesmen like my father? Harried doctors in rural or urban clinics? Teachers? Pharmacists, lawyers, engineers, truckers, pilots? I wonder, Would they ever think that their years spent at war were wasted? Or would they think that these had been the most meaningful of all the things they ever did? Or would they have wanted not to think back on the sufferings and horrors of those difficult war years?

In any case, their deaths put me in mind of a Marine Lieutenant Colonel these very days in Anbar Province, Iraq, on his second tour of duty there (the first having been in 2004-2005). Very much alive, and very much committed to his mission, this brave man explains that he faces what he faces today, on behalf of his eleven-year-old son. The Marine father has seen up close the cruelty, barbarity, and ceaseless ferocity of the enemy of free Western peoples. He believes his job now is to defeat them there. And to defeat them soundly enough so that another generation of Americans will not have to return to do the job again. He says he does it so that he can look in his mirror in the morning, and see a man faithful to his principles no matter what the cost to himself. If not him, then who? If not now, when? If not here, where?

Such a day as this is not a day to argue politics, above all the politics of the present much-disputed war. The sunlit point this Marine officer’s life does bring out, however, is the connection between Memorial Days and first principles.

As Lincoln said at Gettysburg in 1863, not long after some 49,000 Americans lay dead, wounded or missing in just three days of fighting, the war dragged on:

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. ... But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who fought here have consecrated far above our poor power to add or detract. The world ... can never forget what they did here. ... We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Death, remembrance, resolve, and a new birth of still living, still beloved first principles. That is what Memorial Day is about.

The words “under God” which Lincoln inserted into his Gettysburg address, one of the greatest of his public prayers, he almost certainly picked up from his perusal of the General Orders that General George Washington issued almost daily to his troops, which Lincoln had studied, in order to learn how to give such orders himself.

On July 2, 1776, the day Independence was first voted into effect, and on July 9, 1776, when copies of the Declaration were finally in print and distributed to all the men of Washington’s command, for public reading with the armies drawn up in serried order, Washington addressed his troops with the exclamation that now they, alone, “under God,” stood between the cause of freedom and its extinction. So they should hear the Declaration with close attention, throbbing hearts, and steely resolve to do their duty.

Back to first principles. It is always good for nations, as well as for individuals, to go back to first principles – to take fire again from the fire that plainly burned in so many brave others, who cast their lives upon the flames of patriotic duty.

God bless such men and women. God bless the people – and the principles – of the United States. And God bless the cause of freedom in every darkened quarter of the world.

Published in First Things Online May 29, 2007

The Imperial Catholics

More and more often on Catholic campuses, left-wing Catholics are hiding their own ideological preferences behind the mantra “Catholic social thought.” To listen to them, you would think that the Catholic social ethic has four main emphatic tenets and five great silences. The four emphases are: (1) pacifism and nonviolence; (2) legal limits on the income of the rich; (3) the extension of the social welfare state for the poorest 12 percent of the American population (about forty million people), until all are lifted by government grants above the poverty line; and (4) the elimination of the death penalty in the thirty-some states that still allow it. Merely on the terrain of social ethics, this creed is notable for (a) its silence about ending abortion (forty-eight million since 1973); (b) its silence about federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and cloning; (c) its silence about the fourfold increase in violent crime since 1965—committed disproportionately against the poor; (d) its silence about the sixfold increase in father-abandoned families (chiefly among the poor); and (e) its silence about the horrific oppression of Muslim peoples around the world, including the daily assaults on their dignity by secret police, and the normal, regular abuse of their individual rights. We might call these the five silences. But there are others, too.

Don’t believe me? Take up, for example, the article published in the May 2 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by the former president of St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, near my own hometown of Johnstown. Former president Maynard Brennan, who during his own term in the presidency invited on campus Herbert Aptheker, a leader of the Communist Party U.S.A., wrote angrily—and untruthfully—against the recent invitation of President Bush, by the archabbot of the Benedictine monastery, Douglas Nowicki, to give the 2007 Commencement Address on May 11. Bush, he writes, is out of step with Catholic social doctrine.

The current president of St. Vincent, Jim Towey, who once worked under President Bush, wrote a sharp and exact rejoinder to Mr. Brennan in the May 4 edition of the paper. So there is no need for me to take up the particulars. But there are some good background points to make.

Before I had read Mr. Brennan’s fevered letter, I had written of my own nostalgic fondness for St. Vincent, as I began thinking ahead to the visit of a president of the United States to my old stamping grounds in the small towns of southwestern Pennsylvania—the quarterback capital of the world, you may recall from The Joy of Sports.

I have long loved St. Vincent, visited there often, lectured there three or four times, and my wife’s seventeen prints of the Apocalypse hang there as a set, the gift of a former trustee of the college.

So Mr. Brennan’s falsifying screed made me angry.

It would be easy enough to tear down his argument detail by detail, so wildly wrongheaded and inaccurate is it. For example, he argues that the average income of the top one percent–1.1 million dollars–is in itself unjust. Yet closer study reveals that the average income of the top one percent is biased toward the very upper end by a few extremely high incomes. It is more instructive that the bottom income limit of the top one percent is $328,000–including a lot of doctors, lawyers, consultants, and other professionals who have incorporated themselves in past years but who now, with lower income tax rates, have gone back to paying themselves outside the corporations in which they used to find tax shelter.

Again, the numbers and the percentage of the poor have plateaued and wiggled around only slightly for some two decades—and for significant reasons. Only a tiny fraction of them work (or even can work) full-time year-round. The major part of them consists of female-headed households, some with children. Most of these are widows or never married women, the fathers of their children having abandoned them. Wages can’t go high enough, where there is so little work. (And for those who do work doggedly—modern immigrants, for instance—their stay in poverty is short.)

On top of that, generous government subsidies for income, housing assistance, Medicaid (or Medicare for the elderly), and the like do not count in the official poverty numbers. Therefore, no matter how much the government assists them with grants, their income cannot go up—by federal definition they cannot.

The actual amount of federal moneys targeted for the poor and paid out each year is so high that if it were paid out per capita directly to the poor, and also allowed to show up in official tallies of poverty, no one in the United States would be poor. But most of the money doesn’t reach those at whom it is “targeted.” It is rather inefficient, in Tom Sowell’s memorable simile, to feed the horses first in order to feed the swallows.

Further, in feeling sorry for the poor victims of Katrina, and blaming their condition on President Bush, I wonder if Mr. Brennan has been watching the way other people in other regions respond to even more total devastation, in the Midwest, for instance. I wonder if he remembers that the Johnstown flood of 1889, just over the mountains from him, killed almost five hundred more persons than Katrina.

Mr. Brennan stands by the Benedictine Peace Statement of 2005. He is free to do that, but that statement is by no means the best, deepest, or longest-standing peace statement of the Catholic social tradition. “We believe that violence does not yield peace,” he quotes. Perhaps he is confusing force with violence. It has long been the duty of states to use force in such a way as to establish and defend the tranquillity of international order, within whose rule of law alone peace can bloom among states. Peace depends on law, and law needs sometimes to be enforced, at great cost.

War is not the answer to everything, but in the recent past it has been the answer to slavery, German imperialism in 1914, fascism (1922–1945), and communism at various spots around the world until in 1989—checkmated and wildly overspending on arms—the beast withered from within and gave up the ghost.

Mr. Brennan praised 2,357 Benedictines who felt “concerned about the military and political ethos of our own country where justice is defined on the basis of our self-interest rather than on a consciousness that we are part of a common humanity.” This America hating is truly not admirable, and even if it does emanate from 2,357 holy, highly moral, and prayerful Benedictines, it remains a slur on many noble and brave fellow citizens. American men and women are not dying in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to advance their own or their nation’s self-interest but out of a noble purpose to bring long-suffering Arab peoples under the same elemental protections as the “common humanity” of the world community of democracies. The aim is to turn the tide toward a more peaceful form of government and economic progress.

Does Mr. Brennan think these bravest ones are dying for oil? The war has already cost more in dollars than our nation could ever pull out of Iraq in oil, even if it wanted to.

Does Mr. Brennan think the war in Iraq has been good for President Bush’s presidency? From the beginning, President Bush understood the costs to himself and his reputation. It would have been irresponsible for him not to act, given the intelligence that President Clinton, Vice President Gore, Secretary of Defense Cohen, and others had themselves learned of and spoken out about. The risk of not acting at all (on a scale of one to ten) was estimated variously by various sources, but by no one was it zero. Many before Bush and before September 11 feared that the probability was in the high range rather than the lower.

Meanwhile, under Saddam Hussein, every violent group in the Middle East was being assisted and given haven, and ten thousand Iraqi citizens were being killed each month. UNESCO reported that five thousand infants were dying a month, from malnutrition brought on by Saddam Hussein’s diversion of funds into his armies and his private palaces.

It is true that Pope John Paul II pleaded with President Bush not to go to war in Iraq. But the Catholic catechism obliged him to recognize that the concrete decision and the personal responsibility in that regard rested with the president himself, and on other world leaders, not with churchmen. In actual fact, as the American ambassador to the Vatican at that time has reported repeatedly, never once did the pope in their meetings insist on no military action by the United States, and certainly never on pacifism (Pope John Paul II was no pacifist). The pope didn’t want the war. But neither did President Bush; it would have gone much better for his presidency if he could have found a way to duck his responsibilities.

Rightly or wrongly, President Bush decided that his constitutional responsibilities could not shield him from the need to take action against Saddam Hussein. What he added new was a positive thrust, an attempt to give the Arab world a first-ever chance to turn the vital energies of their unemployed young into the search for human rights and legal dignity among Arabs, for the rule of law and for the economic opportunity and prosperity long denied ordinary people in that part of the world. This was an attempt to change the direction of history, from terrorism to civil creativity.

In short, there is more than one way of grasping the principles, working out the middle axioms, and examining with accuracy and through open, respectful debate the concrete realities addressed by Catholic social thought. The particular left-wing way so ardently backed by former president Brennan is one way of doing so—a highly questionable presentation even of the left-wing way, as I have tried to indicate. But Catholic social thought has more than one wing. It needs at least two to fly.

Alas, the imperialist Catholics try to foist off their monolithic, myopic vision of Catholic social thought as though it were the whole of that beautiful, long-lived, and many-colored intellectual tradition. Theirs is only a splinter, not the whole beam.

If Mr. Brennan were content to present his own views, and those of his allies, as one option among many, I would have no quarrel with them. We could then have many useful arguments about the concrete realities, as well as about the policy options most likely of success.

But in that case, Mr. Brennan would have to give up his imperial desire to pretend he is the official voice of Catholic social thought. He might actually learn to enjoy good arguments with persons of goodwill who roundly disagree with him on fundamentals, as well as on concrete matters of fact.

That used to be the good Benedictine tradition we all loved and admired—generous, open, respectful of diverse opinions, civilizing. That used to be the Benedictine charism. His colleagues are showing that it is still vigorous.

Published in First Things May 9, 2007

Good, Evil, and My Friend Irwin

Recently THE WEEKLY STANDARD published Irwin Stelzer's truly brilliant account of a literary luncheon arranged by President Bush to honor Andrew Roberts's History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, a thick, heavy book that picks up the skein begun by Winston Churchill with his long four-volume treatment of the subject. The President was not at all intimidated by his fifteen or so guests, including the formidable Norman Podhoretz and Gertrude Himmelfarb, Paul Gigot, Allen Guelzo, Seth Lipsky, Mona Charen, Kate O'Beirne, Irwin Stelzer himself, and of course Mr. Roberts and his wife, the writer Susan Gilchrist. The President was not pretentious; and he was not at all showing off. Stelzer gives such a vivid account of the event that there is little to be gained by adding new details. (How does he memorize so well what others say? I don't remember him taking any notes.) But there is one thing I must clear up to save my theological reputation and one interesting detail that I had caught wind of before the meeting, and took the occasion to confirm.

Prior to the event, I had fixed two points in mind to insert into the conversation if an opportunity came up. (From past experiences, I had learned that merely going with the flow and not adding something--or if adding, doing so only on the spur of the moment--is afterwards a bitter memory). Before sitting down, therefore, I was already determined to press the president on two of his favorite themes. The first is the peace and calm that he says comes to him from the Almighty, which allows him not to be perturbed by the high-decibel (and often mean) shrieks of critics. The second is a phrase he often uses, "the war between good and evil." Stelzer actually quotes me a tad inaccurately on the second discussion, in a way that brought me a sharp warning from a theologian friend. Stelzer had written: "The discussion centered on Novak's contention that although there is indeed evil, there is no such thing as absolute good." My theologian friend noted that this formulation not only abandons the orthodox Christian tradition (Catholic and Protestant) since St. Augustine, but is a total inversion of it. Augustine reasoned that there is an absolute good, namely God, in all His radiance and power; whereas evil has no ontological existence on its own at all, being no more than a defective good or a perversion of the good.

In actual fact, of course, a White House lunch or even a lunch with friends anywhere is no place for a formal disquisition. Nor did I wish to prompt the president in any pre-determined direction. When he himself introduced his usual phrase about the Almighty, I leapt in to say that some folks criticized him for claiming to have a telephone line to God, Who told him which policies to follow and what to do. The president scoffed. "Hey, no telephone line. I know I'm a sinner. I know that." He added that every day he wants to make sure that he is not being diverted from what is right. "I want to have my conscience clear with Him. Then it doesn't matter so much what others think."

On the question of good and evil, I had heard the president telling a group of clergymen a few days before that "We are engaged in a war of good and evil." The clergymen had said he should repeat that phrase publicly over and over: "good versus evil." That advice had made me very uncomfortable. So at this lunch I seized the chance to introduce that very phrase, and to say I didn't like it. "I have no problem with evil," I said, I have seen plenty of real evils in my lifetime. But I have a problem with saying that anyone is good. Purely good.

To my mind, the context here was solely about human beings, not God. And I was, without saying so, alluding to a point made by Reinhold Niebuhr, about the irony of American history: America serves a noble, good principle, but yet often does so through flawed men and flawed policies (such as slavery). "In my good, there is always some evil," I was thinking.

However, I was trying to instruct neither my fellow guests nor the president. Many (including my wife, she told me later) did not like my formulation. Some, pre-occupied with the threat from relativism, made fun of the left-wing fetish for limiting speech to various shades of gray. But my own worry concerned the tendency of the pious to be too moralistic and careless in speaking of good and evil. After batting this around, pretty soon the president and then the whole table came up with a rather neat formulation, very much as Stelzer records: In this world there are good causes and evil causes. When we commit ourselves to advancing a good cause, we need to recognize that we are not so good ourselves, but quite imperfect agents.

There is today an intense battle between good and evil principles. It is correct to focus on good v. evil in this sense. But it would be incorrect to imagine that we ourselves are purely good, without flaw and fault in ourselves. We must not let our imperfection, however, detract from the nobility of the good we serve, and the horrible damage the triumph of an evil principle always wreaks. All in all, the discussion ended up just exactly where I had hoped it would, without knowing it for sure, and without my trying to guide it there. My aim was to throw down the provocative propositions. Pardon me for writing all this, just to clear up my theological conscience. I do think of God as, to quote from George Washington, "the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be." But no human being stands in God's sight perfectly good--exceptions made (in the Catholic view) for Jesus and his blessed Mother.

The one tid-bit I picked up prior to the lunch, and confirmed at the meeting, is that the president and Karl Rove are competing to see who can read the most books during 2007. For the first six weeks, the President was ahead. But by the beginning of March, Rove had surged ahead to twenty books, to the President's sixteen. Just to make sure that no one cheats, Rove also keeps track of the number of pages and the number of lines per page.

I would not have guessed that the President had read more books than most of us from January 1 to February 28. When I asked him about it in informal conversation, he said that the ones he was enjoying best "to relax his mind" were some of Travis McGee's novels. Those John D. MacDonald stories depict a knight errant who runs his own house-boat in Miami "engaged in the salvage business," and comes to the aid of needy persons (especially needy damsels) in distress. Travis McGee used to be one of my favorites, too, until when I was laid up for a week, I read six of them in a row, and over-dosed on them. For many years, though, they had given me considerable pleasure when I was tired and needed a book, on an airplane for instance.

Travis McGee: not such a bad choice for a President, especially one who thinks about good and evil, and often enough in a hard-boiled way.

Published in The Weekly Standard March 14, 2007

Harvey Cox's Secular City

In the next few days (March 19), Harvard theologian Harvey Cox will be celebrating his 70+ birthday (I leave it to him to say just which birthday it is). Since I'm pressing right behind him, this seemed like a good time to express my gratitude for many kindnesses of his so many years ago – for so many stimulating conversations and exchanges. Such wonderful discussions were my first with a Baptist theologian, a man bursting like fireworks with energy and ideas. So, let me go back in memory just a little. 1965 seems like so many years ago, and yet I can remember many events from that time as though they were still before my eyes. (I admit, though, that my memory does play little tricks from time to time, more so these days.) It was in 1965, in December, that the Second Vatican Council came to its grand conclusion, and on the very next day that Karen's and my first son was born. It was a little earlier that year, in late August, that we had moved to Stanford for my first full-time teaching job, alongside the great Robert McAfee Brown (who had already been on the cover of Newsweek magazine). A cold fear struck me when at my very first seminar, no one showed up. The question rose in my mind, “Will the administration fire me? Dock my pay?” Then some nine students straggled in late. That blessed first nine!

The spring before, I had been teaching at Harvard as a graduate student, studying for doctoral exams, and taking part in wonderful evening ecumenical discussions with such members (over the years) as Harvey Cox, Daniel Callahan, Ann Orlov of Harvard University Press, and others. Harvey Cox and I shared the same editor at Macmillan Press in New York City, and as I was visiting her about the upcoming publication of Belief and Unbelief (as close as I would get to a Ph.D. thesis, but a bit more personally felt than theses usually are), she told me how pleased she was to have signed up a brilliant young Harvard writer, Harvey Cox, and she gave me a copy of a new paperback collection of his occasional essays, The Secular City. Neither she nor Harvey, I was to learn later, expected anything unusual from this modest collection, but suddenly the demand was far too overwhelming for the first printing, the second, and many another. Before long, hundreds of thousands were in print. Across the religious world, the word “secular,” now used in a positive, not pejorative, sense and the word “city,” now used as if far more promising than anything rural, agrarian, or traditional, rang out on everybody's lips.

I had arrived at Harvard on a fellowship in philosophy in 1960, just before John F. Kennedy's election, and I have to admit I was about as green and innocent as a lad of twenty-six can be, having spent the prior twelve years in the seminaries of the Holy Cross Fathers. So far as I can recall, until I got to Harvard, I had never heard the term “Wasp.” I learned quickly at the Divinity School that full respect was reserved chiefly for the mainline Protestant Churches of the old New England kind, including Congregationalists, Anglicans, Unitarians, and Presbyterians, with considerable respect also for the mainstream Lutherans (less so for the Missouri Synod) and some Methodists, but very little for the Baptists and those others from “the left wing of the Reformation.” All such fine points of differentiation were quite new to me, and I was totally unprepared for the thin veneer of tolerance and the highly visible condescension shown to Billy Graham when he preached (to a full house) at the Divinity School.

Well, Harvey Cox was the village Baptist and very proud of it, bright as anybody around, original, questioning, challenging, proposing, dreaming; he was a dazzler, serious and probing and ready to act as well as to talk. He loved pastoral work and activism fully as much as writing and studying. He was the model of an engaged intellectual, of the sort Albert Camus had taught our generation to admire. His personal hero was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the super-sober and serious young German pastor who had ended up with his throat garroted for suspicion about his role in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Baptists may have been in relatively low repute at Harvard in those days (cousins, so to speak, in the condescension shown Jerry Falwell today), but no one dared hold Harvey in that repute. Their problem was to live up to his level of intensity in mind and action.

Those of us who were Catholic in the Divinity School around that time, that meant Daniel Callahan and me, really took to Harvey. For one thing, his attention to the city seemed like a Catholic thing; in Europe, “pagan” had meant country folk, and Christianity for a long time thrived most in cities. For another thing, his attention to the “secular” was in some ways (not in others) analogous to our habitual attention to the “natural” order, the philosophical, the non-theological, the ‘what-we-know-if-we-abstract-from-the-Bible.’ Of course, as a Baptist, Harvey came to this secular or natural point by showing how the Bible directed our attention to it. In his view, it is Revelation that tells us to evaluate the real for what it is, to look at it (as it were) without the gloss of religion overlaid on it. To put it briefly, Harvey shook up everybody’s categories, those of evangelicals, the mainline, Catholics, and maybe even Jews, and forced us all to look at basic things again, and think them through anew.

Some of us thought Harvey avoided going deep enough, abhorred metaphysical reflection (in which he was untrained), and became uncomfortable in the presence of ritual and liturgy. A few years later, he admitted as much, and revised his views, at least about ritual, liturgy and popular religion. Because he did not have reference to the deeper streams of metaphysics, his thought sometimes seemed to veer from one side to the other. Yet the heart of men of good will is also a compass, and Harvey seemed to find a way to correct one hitch to the left as he climbed the mountain by another in the opposite direction, and back again, as he pressed ahead in a fairly direct way.

The Secular City caused such a sensation that by 1966 both Christianity and Crisis and Commonweal had published symposia on the book, in each of which Cox replied to his critics. These symposia plus a set of the outstanding critical reviews that had already appeared, and a set of essays newly commissioned for the occasion, appeared in a very useful volume, The Secular City Debate, edited by Daniel Callahan. To this volume, too, Cox added “a vigorous rejoinder.” In addition, Cox issued a new and revised edition of The Secular City in 1966, “to correct some of the more egregious overstatements, tone down an occasional vivid passage, and respond at points to helpful criticisms the book has elicited.” In particular, he now welcomed metaphysical questions, while continuing to doubt the utility these days of metaphysical systems. He also modified some of his earlier assertions about the “end of religion,” in recognition of the different role religion plays in the United States compared to its role in Bonhoeffer’s Germany.

In retrospect, I can think of few books in the last forty years that so thoroughly broke down so many walls between and among the sects, denominations, and churches that mark the religiously tangled American scene. For one of the few times ever, virtually all theologians of virtually all traditions began arguing about the American city, in confrontation with the same set of problematics, and in the same idiom. It helped that Cox chose the newly martyred John F. Kennedy as the model of his new pragmatic, secular mind, for JFK had audaciously attacked old questions of civil rights, poverty, crime (quaintly called at that time “juvenile delinquency”), and welfare with a new vigor, and stirring a whole new generation to new thoughts. Christian ministers and Jewish rabbis were made to feel “relevant” to national issues as they had not felt for some time. Cox threw considerable light on how that was coming to pass, and he mightily encouraged social activism in many spheres.

For all this, some sober scholars scoffed at Harvey Cox, and cultivated a certain disdain for “relevance” and “being with it,” and indeed for religion masquerading as sociology, and piety that was now squeezed into a new mold of merely social change, not change of soul. Even as they complained about his leadership, Cox was off into new territories, raising respectful questions about the necessary role of play, ritual, and imagination, questions about the undeniable strength of the popular devotions of stubborn peasants--in Latin America under the traditional power of the landlords, and among the shipbuilders and electricians of Poland, who had the foot of Communism on their necks. And always further questions. There was one exception to that. For reasons never made clear, he became a little too predictably leftist in his tendencies, at least in my vision of reality. But even there he has always been pushing onwards.

Thus, I have often disagreed with Cox, and found myself moving right just where he was moving left, and sometimes the reverse, but I have always been grateful for the stimulus of his active mind and very good heart. The metaphysical “system” that (despite his strictures) I internalized as a very young man, that is, in my way of asking questions, has served me in very good stead down the years. Sometimes my internal list of unanswered questions allowed me to sympathize when Harvey took a new turn, and to be grateful to him for opening up my eyes, wherever it was he got into. Granted, my own way is a lot more plodding and slow than his. Besides, I am sure that my disavowal of the political left, after watching so many of its programs and underlying theories fail, caused him considerable pain (if he thought about it much at all).

And yet for all that Harvey was, at the beginning – I don't think we’ve actually seen each other for decades now – a warm, welcoming, and marvelous intellectual companion. Becoming aware of the Protestant world through his eyes (and those of other colleagues) was a great place for a young Catholic to begin.

Quite unexpectedly, Harvey and I have both shot past age seventy. Time for me to say a word of thanks, Harvey! Can't be too much time left for either one of us.

See you later.

Published in First Things March 5, 2007

Was Washington Really a Deist?

As we approach George Washington’s birthday—so often lost these days in the good shopping bargains of a long holiday weekend—it seems fitting to celebrate the whole man Washington was in light of the hottest issue in the world just now, religion. Most historians of the last hundred years have said the Father of Our Nation was a deist (in his excellent recent biography, Joseph Ellis called Washington a “lukewarm Episcopalian and quasi-Deist”) and suggest, along the way, that his virtues were Stoic rather than Christian, and his appeals to Providence rather more Greek and Roman than biblical. Since Washington speaks seldom of Jesus Christ, and almost never invokes the Savior or Redeemer or Trinity but prefers to use philosophical names for God (”Beneficent Author of all good,” “Divine Providence,” “Almighty Ruler of the Universe”), it is easy to think he was a deist.

A more sustained investigation into Washington’s God, however, makes all claims that he was a deist highly problematic and finally untenable.

Deism is not exactly a creed with clear tenets; it is more like a tendency of the mind; a movement like rationalism or romanticism; and, in the view of some historians of ideas, a half-way marker slowly moving from Jewish or Christian orthodoxy toward early modern science. The general drift of deism is that the originating and governing force of the universe is the god of modern rationalists (Newton, Spinoza, et al.), not at all like the Great God Jehovah of the Hebrew Bible. Deists prefer the god of reason to the God of revelation.

The latter has a special love and care for particular peoples and persons, unlike the deist god, who is impersonal and indifferent to the world he sets in motion. The God of revelation intervenes and interposes in historical events and personal lives, and hears and answers prayers; the god of reason does no such things. At the same time, from various motives some Christians, even bishops and clergymen, described themselves as deists as well as Christians.

Still, in one sense “deist” is intended as the opposite of “Christian” or “Jewish,” and incompatible with them. To say that Washington is a deist is in this sense to derogate from his being Christian. The evidence on this point comes down to this: When Washington prays and urges the nation (or his army) to pray, does he expect God to care about the fate of the American cause, as distinct from the British cause, since they also pray to the same God? Does he imagine God actually interposing himself in the events of history? Or inspiring a human mind with ideas, or forgiving sins?

The most important answer to these questions is found in the prayers that, as general and as president, Washington publicly urged upon the army and the nation. The Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789 declared it “the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor . . . and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions.”

In a letter announcing his retirement from the army at the close of the War, he wrote: “I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection, that he would incline the hearts of the Citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to Government, to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another, for their fellow Citizens of the United States at large, and particularly for their brethren who have served in the Field, and finally, that he would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all, to do Justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that Charity, humility and pacific temper of mind, which were the Characteristicks of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion, and without an humble imitation of whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy Nation.”

Clearly these samples, only a small part of what might be adduced, are not the prayers of a deist to an impersonal, nonintervening god. These are the words of someone who expects God to be deeply involved in our nation’s welfare. Why? Because he made the world for liberty, and our nation was, under God, a pioneer in political, civil, and religious liberties.

These are the prayers, the non-deistic prayers, which gave General Washington fortitude and hope in the very dark days of more than 230 years ago, in 1776. Now again, we are a nation in great need, under the powerful threat of a murderous worldwide terrorism. So it does not seem wrong for us, either, to “beseech the kind Author of these blessings ... to dispose us to merit the continuance of His favors.”

Published in First Things February 21, 2007

Married Women and the New York Times

As a general rule, the New York Times tries so hard to discredit Jewish and Christian morality that it is foolish to trust any of its articles purporting to describe Census Bureau statistics, especially when the latter involve marriage and family. It is best to treat analyses appearing in the Times as provocations reminding you to check into matters for yourself. A prime example is a January 17 Times article entitled “51% of Women Are Now Living Without a Spouse” (online by subscription only). There is a second rule I adopted for myself years ago. While paying respectful attention to numbers that include the entire U.S. population, I disaggregate those numbers and single out the numbers for white non-Hispanic persons, who form the large majority. The point of this rule is to test common impressions.

There are two reasons why this second rule is useful. First, it provides a clear look at the single largest ethnic profile. Second, many behavioral patterns differ significantly among ethnic groups. Blending them together changes the general picture rather drastically. For example, two-thirds of Asian women twenty years old or older live with husbands present, as compared with one-third of black women.

Thus, the profile of white non-Hispanic women in the most recent data (2005) shows seventy-six million age twenty and over.

Some 12 percent of all these women were divorced (some more than once). Fewer than 2 percent were separated. Only about 15 percent of those over twenty had never yet married.

An impressive 58 percent of white non-Hispanic women were married with husbands present.

Looking at these numbers another way, add to the 58 percent of white non-Hispanic women with husbands present, the 12 percent that had been divorced as of 2005, and the fewer than 2 percent separated, plus the 1 percent married but with husbands absent. Also add another 11 percent who were, not by choice, living as widows. Therefore, the total of white non-Hispanic women over twenty who were or had been married was 85 percent. It is obvious that, in that year, marriage was the overwhelmingly preferred choice of American white women over the age of twenty. In addition, a significant proportion of the not-yet-married women over twenty will also enter into marriage in the future. The proportion choosing marriage, then, easily exceeds 90 percent.

Because these numbers do not include black, Hispanic, and Asian women, they do not give an accurate picture of the whole U.S. female population. But they do give a clear picture of the largest culture, as a point of comparison.

Finally, unlike the Times, these numbers report only those white non-Hispanic women ages twenty and over. I am excluding those age 15-19, because only relatively few teenagers (93,000 out of some 6.3 million) have experienced marriage.

The moral of this story, then, is to do your own research; do not always trust what you read in the newspapers. As though you needed to be told that. Published in First Things February 7, 2007

Beginning Again in Poland

As an American, far away, with a deep love for Poland, my deepest sorrow is felt for all the citizens of Poland, for the Polish church, and even for the now-resigned archbishop and his family. There were so many heroic acts by so many people in Poland and its neighboring countries during the Soviet nightmare. The solicitations to help the secret police were constant, seductive, and insistent. Some of these solicitations seemed almost harmless—but, of course, once responded to, they were subject to blackmail, to oblige the weak ones to take further steps in assisting the secret police.

In those days, it was extremely difficult to be on guard in resisting every blandishment. Yet many millions of brave and faithful souls did so, in one of the most beautiful displays of spiritual resistance in human history. The Polish nation and the Polish church were conspicuous in steady, daily, humble but heroic acts of fidelity to the truth.

That is why the recent admission of the Archbishop hurt so much. It was public—it had to be—and it hurt the reputation of the country and the church. Of course, we do not yet know the full truth about what happened. Yet even a small surrender leaves the one who signs a document vulnerable forever to blackmail. This case is such a personal tragedy, and so sad.

But this case can also be a new beginning for a new Poland, with a new openness and a new honesty, and a real accounting for the unpleasant past which all would be happy to forget.

Years ago, during the Second Vatican Council (where I first learned the name of Karol Wojtyla), I wrote a history of the second session of the council in 1963, which was entitled The Open Church. The church should be transparent, like a pane of glass, so that the light of God’s grace may shine into it and out of it.

The great political philosopher Karl Popper made a similar argument about the free society in The Open Society and Its Enemies—except not that grace should shine in and out, but at least honesty and reasonableness.

The two goals—the open society and the open church—are always goals worth striving for. We need constantly to begin anew and to do better than in the past. Often we do this by humble means, such as a well-chosen commission of inquiry, fully trustworthy, that would periodically issue public reports on its findings.

Such a process needs also to be tempered with mercy and forgiveness, for the light of justice is sometimes so overpowering that it is more than humans can bear. This imperative of mercy was the subject of one of John Paul II’s early encyclicals.

As many societies around the world have found out in practice, from Chile to South Africa, the best social cure is at least public honesty and public repentance. Even if nations do not get into the impossible job of meting out exact punishment, if they want social healing they must demand, at least, honesty, truth, openness—and public repentance for wrongs done.

There were so many people in Poland who performed heroically, and not least in the church—both in its ordinary people and in its leadership—that I am sure Poland will exit soon from the present turmoil and heated passions into a new, determined era of beginning again.

Beginning again is the human condition.

Published in First Things January 16, 2007

In Honor of Jeane Kirkpatrick

Aristotle wrote that the criterion of good moral action is not a principle or a law so much as “the man of practical wisdom”—that is, the person in your environment who habitually makes the wisest and bravest decisions of anyone else you know. Aristotle mentions, in his context, Pericles. In my circle, I always wanted to ask Jeane Kirkpatrick for advice and counsel. I wanted to watch what she did. I guess nowadays they call persons of this type “role models.” But that term doesn’t quite get the whole idea. It misses the interiority of the thing, the inner life, the fount of the wisdom one is seeking. Not a role player but a person who has lived through a lot, learned from it, and has a burning desire to get things right, circumstance by circumstance. That was Jeane. Someone asked me once who I would like to see as the first woman president. I said I would pick Jeane Kirkpatrick, but I really want her to be the first woman empress of the world! There are not many tough enough, but she was. Like Margaret Thatcher. It was wonderful to have two such strong women leaders in those crucial decades of our time. Women strong enough to keep the men from going “wobbly.”

When Karen and I first came to the American Enterprise Institute in 1978 (although I had been an adjunct visitor once a week for a year or so longer than that), Jeane was already one of our most distinguished colleagues, a widely noted author and lecturer, and a teacher whose classes were much sought after by students at Georgetown. Democracy and human rights were two of her main issues, although she was also fascinated by their opposites—the old-style tyrannies of the Latin American caudillo school, and the real totalitarians of mind and body, such as the Soviets and Red Chinese. One of her first big books was on women in politics, although her most well-known writings were her powerful essays in Commentary, such as “Dictatorships and Double Standards.”

Before he ran for the presidency, Ronald Reagan had read some of her work, and during the later stages of his campaign he called her to California to test some of her arguments on dictatorships, the idea of human rights, the prospect of democracy, and even arms control. She told it to him straight. She told me later that she never met a man who so effortlessly treated a woman as an equal, and who felt totally secure of himself in his own person. She was more impressed than she had expected to be, not least by his probing questions and the well-thought-out clarity of his own views. He was not what the press had led her to expect.

Later, when he asked her to be his Ambassador to the United Nations—in those days, causing no small amount of mischief for the United States and its allies (being rather more than most observers had noticed under the influence of well-placed communists in key staff positions)—Jeane consulted with her husband, a very wise political scientist himself, and quickly said yes. She demanded the kind of candor and straight-up treatment that her Oklahoma upbringing had taught her to expect—and to demand. She loved having roots back in Oklahoma, the freedom of the Plains, the toughness of the land and the people, the Will Rogers humor, the hard shell of having been brought up a Baptist. (“Came in handy for me at the UN,” she told me once, after some of the criticism her early boldness brought down on her head. “I’m grateful for that education.”)

Jeane was a wonderful gourmet cook and had friends (Chuck Lichtenstein, for one, and Anne Crutcher for another—food editor at the old Washington Star) who were as good or better. Eating at her house was a rare delight, even on impromptu occasions. She spent summers at her small cottage in the Macon region of southern France, and so her selections of wines for her meals were also a special delight—and an education. But the best part about her dinners was the feast of conversation: probing, wide-ranging, drawing upon everybody present, funny, full of friendship and cheer, intellectually invigorating.

Jeane would tell me quietly about how much more religious being under fire at the United Nations had made her—fire not only from certain overseas delegations but also domestic criticism from the usual suspects—because she found it necessary to clear her mind, and drink at the founts of conscience and inner light, and strengthen her resolve. Being outwardly so active and strong required of her a deeper and quieter inner life, she said. She didn’t do what she did for ego but for justice and liberty.

Jeane was the architect of the emphasis on democracy and human rights that turned the later years of the 1980s into one of the most dynamic and star-bursting periods ever for the birth of new democracies. What she added to the Carter rhetoric was a firmer sense of the necessary habits, dispositions, actions, and institutions that turn human rights from “parchment barriers” on paper into real social forces. She tried to put substance and action into the high-flown empty statements of UN resolutions. When nations said one thing, then did another, Jeane carefully called them to account, privately or publicly as seemed to her wisest. She demanded straight-shooting. Countries that begged the United States for aid and relief, military help or emergency airlifts—and then stood rhetorically with the enemies of the United States on the floor of the UN—were informed that greater integrity was expected from them.

Jeane Kirkpatrick was an enormous force for honesty, liberty, candor, straightforwardness, and sheer moral bravery. She was a valiant woman and a gallant soul. She was a thoughtful and gentle colleague; a very warm, generous, and open friend; and a great, brave American heroine.

She will add much to the arguments and intellectual excitements that rage, I imagine, at the celestial banquets to which we are all called. It will be fun to engage with her again.

Published in First Things December 11, 2006

What the Islamists Have Learned: How to Defeat the USA in Future Wars

By the will of Allah, in all wars to come, may it prepare our brave martyrs for combat operations! Today, the purpose of war is sharply political, not military; psychological, not physical. The main purpose of war is to dominate the way the enemy imagines and thinks about the war. Warfare is not, these days, won on a grand field of battle. Nor is it won by the force that wins series after series of military victories. Nor is triumph assured by killing far higher numbers of the enemy. The physical side of warfare no longer holds precedence.

The primary battlefield today lies in the minds of opposing publics.

The main strategic aim of war today is to dominate the mind of the enemy's public, and then ultimately to dominate the mind of that public's leaders.

Let me offer three examples. At what moment did the war in Vietnam come to an end? At that precise moment when America's leaders decided that they could not resist the unrelenting storyline of the enemy, which had long prevailed in their own press. The press surrendered first, then the leaders of the nation.

Observe that the Cold War ended not in an explosion of unprecedented violence, but rather at the precise moment when the Soviet elites no longer believed their own storyline. Superior ideas cowed them, superior will, superior narratives. Quite suddenly, the invincible Soviet elites folded, accepted humiliation, allowed the Wall to come down, and watched in bitterness as hundreds of millions of formerly captive peoples chose new forms of government.

The endgame was psychological, not military. There was a military component--Star Wars--but nobody knew whether or not that would ever work. It was the idea of that weapon, and will or Reagan to proceed with it.

The weaker political will yielded to the stronger will.

Yet, as always, will followed storyline. First comes narrative, then the acts that give it flesh in history.

What we have discovered in Iraq is the weakest link in the ability of the United States to sustain military operations overseas. That link is the U.S. media. They are Islamists' best friends.

Experience shows that the mainstream press of the United States is alienated from the U.S. military. In addition, the American press is extremely vulnerable to anti-U.S. propaganda. Thus, the American public will be fed nearly everything that foreign adversaries--our band of brothers--wish to feed it about the war. Therefore, I write: Maxim # 1: To defeat America, impose upon the imagination of its media your own storyline.

Even if you can muster only 10,000 soldiers over the entire countryside of Iraq, paint the narrative like this: The Americans are irresistible occupiers, and yet they cannot prevent small (even individual) acts of destruction. Daily, unrelenting acts of destruction demonstrate that chaos rules. The American strategy, and the American storyline of the war, are invalidated by continuing chaos, highly visible, every single day, on worldwide television. The new dominating story is that the Americans cannot win.

Even though our own forces (for nearly two whole years now) can no longer afford to fight in a single operation lasting longer than a few hours, our martyr-brothers cannot be prevented from committing daily acts of destruction--the more stomach-turning the better--which demonstrate a ferocious will and a determination to destroy.

In such wars, my brothers, whichever party maintains the stronger will, along the most durable storyline, always wins.

To defeat the United States, then, it suffices to demonstrate that their vaunted military, for all its awesome power and tactical bravery in the field, cannot halt daily "chaos." To achieve this victory over America, it is not even necessary to create actual "chaos," but only its appearance. This definition of chaos cannot be made on cerebral, analytic, statistical, or comparative grounds. (In October the Times of London reported, "An average of 112 cars a day have been torched across France" this year, with 15 attacks a day on police and emergency services and nearly 3,000 police officers injured. We don't need comparisons like this or comparisons with traffic deaths and violent crimes in individual U.S. states.)

No, the shadowy existence of this "chaos" in Iraq is projected by a steady stream of stomach-churning, atavistic, destructive acts, staged day by day where the cameras of the U.S. press cannot resist them. Some of these acts bring orange explosions and black smoke, others consist simply of dumping dead and tortured bodies where the public cannot avoid discovering them.

We design these images to show that our fighters will go where the United States will not, that our brave martyrs have harder linings in their stomachs than anyone in the West, and that our ferocity and determination, day after day, cannot be resisted.

The aim of our terror is to induce surrender before the great battles are even fought. This is the true meaning of "asymmetric" warfare. The weaker side in military strength may demonstrate conclusively that it has a stronger stomach for relentless, unstoppable acts of terror.

Besides, brothers, there seems to be a psychological tic in the minds of American journalists, which prevents them from understanding that our terror is ultimately aimed at them. Today, yes, they think it is aimed at their government, and will cripple their political opponents within that government. Without qualm or fear, therefore, they do our bidding day after day. Willingly, gleefully, with much self-congratulation, they pump our storyline into the bloodstream of the Western public.

This is far easier than anyone ever taught us. This is our new discovery, our contribution to the history of warfare. Before our very eyes, the West grows fainter and weaker every day.

Maxim # 2: Take heart, then, my terrorist brothers! Bin Laden is even more correct than we knew before the last two years. The West does not have the will to resist. Those elites among them who do have the stomach to fight back, inexorably, day after day, are being undermined by their own media.

Now and in the future, the media will do our work. All we need are martyrs sufficient in number to keep a steady stream of orange flames and black smoke before their cameras, and to dump before them bodies that are stone-cold dead, and bear all over them the unmistakable blue marks of power drills and other disfigurements.

Of such martyrs, we need each day only a handful. In 365 successive days, we need fewer than one thousand.

This small band of brothers can defeat the most powerful army in human history. The path, my brothers, is to come to dominate the minds of their public, which they must suppose is supporting them, and in reality turns quite quickly into our best ally.

This is not so huge a task, my brothers! In the long run of glorious history, the time required is like the blinking of an eye.

Published in The Weekly Standard November 27, 2006

The New Ethnicity, Si!, Multiculturalism, No!

It is hard to believe that thirty-five years have gone by since the long summer of 1971, when I was writing the first edition of The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (published in April 1972). The world has changed a great deal since then. Some of the goals I set out to promote in that book came to pass. For example, my subtitle announced “The new political force of the seventies.” It can surely be said that the word ethnic (used of white ethnic Catholics, especially from Eastern and Southern Europe) entered public speech at that time, and that by their voting power, the newly identified “ethnics” reached out and grabbed the attention of politicians as seldom before. Moreover, reporters slowly began to pay unaccustomed attention to these “ethnic” voters and to the leaders who were rising from their ranks, such as Mario Cuomo in New York, Richard Celeste and George V. Voinovich in Ohio, Dennis DeConcini in Arizona, Pete Domenici in New Mexico, and Barbara Mikulski in Maryland. In 1974, President Gerald Ford initiated an office of ethnic affairs at the White House under Ukrainian-American Myron Kuropas. Jimmy Carter opened his September 1976 campaign celebrating “family days” in white ethnic neighborhoods of Newark and Pittsburgh, flanked by Joseph Califano and Msgr. Geno Baroni. In 1980, I was both surprised and pleased when the sunny Californian Ronald Reagan showed an unerring instinct in speaking the language of those who, after his two unrivalled landslides, came to be called Reagan Democrats, and also when he chose as his campaign slogan symbols that could have been taken directly from the last pages of my book: “Work, family, neighborhood, peace, strength.”

In fact, I learned much later, Reagan’s pollster Dick Wirthlin picked up those symbols from an article of mine addressed as a challenge to both Democrats and Republicans, tested them in his polling, and recommended them to the future president. Like many other “ethnics” (if on these grounds I may so include him), Ronald Reagan had started his political life as a labor-oriented Democrat and then, feeling more and more abandoned by the cultural Left of his own party, became increasingly conservative. Much of the rest of the country, including that other stout pillar of the Roosevelt coalition, Southern and Western evangelicals, began to do likewise. Reagan had the capacity to cast this “revolution” as a re + volvere (a revolving back) to this nation’s founding principles. He portrayed a new progressive vision–not a socialist or statist vision, but one based on limited government and self-rule. It inspired many of us, and it infuriated the cultural Left.

The publication of The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics in 1972 marked my own declaration of independence from the cultural Left, at that time the preeminent force watching over what could be said and what couldn’t in American culture. As readers will see firsthand in the 1996 edition (which leaves unchanged most of the original text), I was still writing as a man of the Left, certainly a man of the anticapitalist Left. But I was, in truth, departing from left-wing orthodoxy in singling out cultural issues, rather than economic issues, as the primary neuralgic point in American (and not only American) life. I was defending—no, calling into political and cultural self-consciousness, and trying to inspire—those whom the elites liked to picture as paunchy fascists in undershirts, bigoted and unwashed. I was repelled by “the bigotry of the intellectuals” and the unworthy prejudices of the cultural Left. At a time when intellectuals were celebrating the “liberation” of the swinging singles, I thought they ought to be stressing the importance of family, even the psychological differences between “family people” and those who find the unencumbered self a more fundamental reality. They ought to admire the latent strengths of traditional values and ethnic neighborhoods (even ethnic suburbs). To say the least, these ideas were premature. At the time, they were regarded as reactionary. They were said to be the insult our elites hurl when they are being unmasked—"spreading hate.”

Secretly, of course, I wanted very badly in those days to be accepted by the cultural Left, the gatekeepers all aspiring young writers must pass if they are to be allowed into the national dialogue. I wanted to be seen as offering a necessary and helpful corrective to mistakes being made in progressive politics, mistakes that were alienating the Democratic party from its base and even from its traditional tacit commitments. Naively, I thought this difficult analytic effort would be greeted with gratitude. I did not then know the fury of the Left when it marks someone down as beyond the pale of acceptability. I had never before understood how secular excommunication works: how effectively one can be banished from the innocent banter of old circles of trust, how even old friends change the flow and tone of a conversation when one approaches, signaling with a certain chill that one’s presence is no longer desired. All this is a good thing to go through when one is young. One will need the toughness later.

I have to confess here, however, that the many vivid anticapitalist sentiments I sincerely expressed in this book saved me from the full fury of rejection that was to be my lot when, a decade later, I published The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. In the circles in which I traveled in the late seventies, not to be sympathetic to the motives and spirit of socialism, at least democratic socialism, was a very great sin. To be positively in favor of capitalism was a sacrilege so great that to seek forgiveness was useless. Even friends who continued to agree with me, I couldn’t help noticing, would in their writings distance themselves from me even when taking positions close to mine. I would have been alone except for the fact that, at about the same time, a handful of other former leftists was beginning to agree that the death of the socialist idea, at least in economics, was the most underreported fact of the late twentieth century. After 1989, many more began to concede the point. And the problem for the “progressive” Left became, as a poster on Manhattan’s West Side put it in 1991, What’s Left of the Left?

Culture was left. The Left occupied most of the commanding heights of American culture by that time, in Hollywood, in the chief national television and newspaper news departments, in the most influential national magazines, in the universities, in the prestigious publishing houses (one or two excepted), in the great foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur, Pew, Mellon, and others, and even among most corporate executives who were likely to sit on the boards of symphonies, museums, operas, and theaters. Dinner table conversations in elite circles of American culture were likely to be in the grip of the latest animosities, enthusiasms, and hygienic speech codes of the Left. What not to say lest a dinner party be thrown into an uproar was always somehow clear.

I had begun noting in 1971 that people on the Left increasingly lived in one culture, people on the Right in another. (This process only got worse in the 1980s, and still deteriorates.) Certain exceptions are made for persons of proven social graces. A few on each side are allowed on certain polite conditions to penetrate the circles of the other. A few mischievous persons, knowing exactly where the limits are, could always light fuses by saying with feigned innocence in a left-wing crowd something kind about Reagan, the Religious Right, Jesse Helms, or pro-life demonstrators; or, at a right-wing table, about Teddy Kennedy, Tip O’Neill, feminists, and how this country is taxed too little. In the circles of the Left during this period, guests from the Right would feel like social climbers admitted to the inner sancta of this culture’s movers and shakers.

In the circles of the Right, guests from the Left would usually feel as though they were slumming. Reagan with his Hollywood glamour changed that a bit, but not much. The contempt for him at the heights was wonderful to behold. (Not that this really mattered. Clare Boothe Luce once explained that a movie star who became president had an occupational advantage: Early in his career, a Hollywood veteran like Reagan had learned the difference between box office and the critics, and being secure in the former he could cheerfully be kind to the latter.)

And yet something funny happened to The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics on the way from its basic thesis about the “new ethnicity” of the 1970s to the “multiculturalism” and “diversity” of the late 1980s. My friends in the university began to send menacing dispatches from the front saying that I had to do something, my book was being cited in favor of some of the absurdities they were now witnessing on campus in the name of “multiculturalism.” From having been excoriated in 1972 for daring to divert attention from “blacks, women, and the poor” to such forbidden subjects as cultural diversity and “ethnics,” by about 1992 I was being quoted in roughly the same quarters in support of that new beast called “multiculturalism.” Setting aside the “honor” of the attribution, I abhor the new thing and disavow the allegation of paternity. A few important distinctions should not have been missed.

This is adapted from the Introduction to the 1996 Transaction edition of The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics.

Published in First Things September 1, 2006