There is no theology here,” Dietrich ­Bonhoeffer wrote to a friend shortly after arriving in America in 1930. He was referring to Union Theological Seminary, home to some of the day’s most respected liberal theologians, including Reinhold Niebuhr. But he didn’t just mean the seminary. Later he would write:

In New York they preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life.

For Bonhoeffer, the American churches in the Union Theological Seminary orbit seemed no longer dedicated to the preaching of the gospel. This kind of Christianity had become a “social entity” with more worldly purposes. “In the place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social ­corporation.”

As Joel Looper notes in this excellent book, Bonhoeffer’s first sojourn in America came a hundred years after another European visitor traveled to this experimental nation and returned to old Europe to write about it. Alexis de ­Tocqueville’s account has several points in common with Bonhoeffer’s. Looper quotes one passage that anticipates ­Bonhoeffer’s more withering attacks a century later:

A countless number of sects in the United States all have differing forms of worship they offer to the Creator but they all agree about the duties that men owe to each other. Each sect adores God in its own particular way but all sects preach the same morality in the name of God. If it matters a lot to the individual that his religion is true, that is not the case for society as a whole. Society has nothing to fear or hope for from the afterlife; what matters is not so much that all citizens profess the true religion but that they profess one religion.

In Bonhoeffer’s view, the morality of the American church had become conformity to the politics of American democracy. And so the preaching of God’s word was, at best, relativized to suit the needs of that order. More often, the gospel was simply neglected and ignored. As an outsider, Bonhoeffer could see that this species of Protestantism took its cues from the social order rather than the word of God: It was a Protestantism that could exist only within the peculiar social order of American public life. The core problem of American ­Christianity, ­Bonhoeffer thought, was that the word of God had been made ­subservient to worldly authorities. As Looper puts it, “Each ­individual, it seemed, determined the will of God by her own reading of the scriptures by the Spirit, by the ‘inner light,’ or by an internal sense of what was morally right.” ­Bonhoeffer’s own starting point was Reformation Christology. But for him, the American church exhibited “Protestantism without ­Reformation.”

Bonhoeffer’s dismay at American Christianity has something in common with critiques from scholars such as John Milbank, William Cavanaugh, and Jeffrey Stout. Looper shows that Bonhoeffer can usefully complicate this debate. For Milbank and Cavanaugh, secularism is almost a purely extractive, negative social force, replacing a thick web of interconnected common life with atomized individuals and all-powerful nation-states.

But, Stout counters, how should society function when its members are pluralized not only religiously, but also along cultural and economic lines? Explicit appeals to Christian thought to buttress one particular vision of the good might still be worth hearing out. Yet such appeals are ­unlikely to be conducive to a healthy body politic when many members of that body explicitly reject such reasoning. For Stout, secularism isn’t about secularist individuals, but about a secularized public square in which radically different communities can find ways of coexisting.

Yet for Bonhoeffer, as Looper puts it, “American pluralism was not first and foremost a product of capitalism and an increasingly interconnected world.” Rather, pluralism had been forged by English dissenters who gave authority to their own personal reading of Scripture. In more extreme forms, this personal reading of Scripture gave way to an “inner light,” by which individuals could discern the truth by means of their own internal disposition or witness.

Stout views pluralism as intractable due to economic and social transformation. He bases his argument for secularism on the ­unalterable fact of pluralism. But for Bonhoeffer, secularism grew out of a church that had chosen to define itself politically and subjectively rather than according to Scripture. When privatized Christian ­experience and “the inner light” become normative, the word of God wanes in the church, and the politics of the church become the politics of the world.

Thus, Bonhoeffer seems to see “the secular” and “unbelief” as bound up with one another, such that secularism is less a prudential means of holding together diverse coalitions and more a consequence of the church’s failure to attend to the word of God. Bonhoeffer’s concern was that as churches were secularized, Christians ceased to “practice the church’s politics in public.”

Bonhoeffer came to believe that the origins of the accommodating Christianity of the American church could be traced back to Wycliffe and the ­Lollards in England. Though historical genealogies of this sort can be and often are more than a little dubious, Looper’s explication of Bonhoeffer’s theory is interesting and not without merit.

The Lollards, Bonhoeffer said, were the first to give primacy to the private reading of Scripture, which in time would give way to the “inner light” of the individual believer—an idea that one can find in a variety of radical Protestant movements, including many that took deep root in America, not just the Quakers but the New Light Presbyterians and other offshoots of the First Great Awakening. Looper suggests that one can detect this spirit in Jonathan Edwards. Edwards’s treatise Religious Affections asks “what is the nature of true religion?” and answers that “true religion, in great part, consists in holy affections.” The church itself is almost entirely absent from Edwards’s answer to this question. “In fact, being formed into the image of Christ together with one’s sisters and brothers barely enters the equation for Edwards,” Looper writes. He goes on to say,

The individualism of Edwards’s analysis is never clearly paired with any ecclesial politic at all. In fact, it seems that only one unambiguous reference appears in all of ­Edwards’s writings that discusses the church as church enacting a different sort of politics from civil society. Perhaps this is not surprising given that nearly everyone in early America claimed to be Christian. But it is also exactly what one would expect if Edwards, whether he knew it or not, had Wycliffe in his theological family tree. Like the Lollards and English dissenters before him, religion was an inward, spiritual, individual affair for Edwards. . . . After all, for Edwards, “True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections.”

Looper does impressive work in substantiating Bonhoeffer’s claim that pre-Reformation and radical Reformation sources exerted significant influence over American church life, by highlighting the many ways in which Union faculty were themselves far more interested in the radical Reformation movements than in the magis­terial Protestant tradition to which ­Bonhoeffer was committed.

If American Christians have “often eschewed Christian reasoning in public discourse,” Looper writes, they have not done so for reasons of prudence. Rather, “American Christians do not know how to reason politically as Christians.” Our politics should have begun with theology, our activism should have been primarily that of witness. Instead of making Christ and the church our starting point, “we have directed our political action and our allegiance to the nation-state.”

This critique obviously hit the mainline harder in Bonhoeffer’s day than it does in ours. But it would seem to hit contemporary evangelicalism no less hard. It’s sadly common to find older evangelical churches that mark July 4 as a Christian celebration, as when Robert Jeffress’s First Baptist Dallas notoriously sang a hymn titled “Make America Great Again.” Other evangelical establishment congregations have accommodated themselves to the consumerist spirit of postwar suburban capitalism, presupposing that “church” ultimately exists to give people good feelings and to make demographically targeted appeals through specific event offerings and programs. Likewise, many younger evangelical churches are now beset by the totalizing claims of therapeutic culture and discourse. Pastors are often seen as vaguely spiritual therapists or life coaches, and Christian maturity has been rendered virtually synonymous with emotional health or self-actualization. If Bonhoeffer visited today, he would surely detect signs that the gospel is once again being accommodated and relativized to American life.

Where, then, should American Christians look for a way past these pitfalls? Bonhoeffer’s ­experience in America again suggests an ­unexpected answer—­specifically, his experience with the black church, during his time visiting and teaching Sunday School at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, then pastored by Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. “Here,” Bonhoeffer wrote to a friend in 1931, “one really could still hear someone talk in a Christian sense about sin and grace and the love of God and ultimate hope, albeit in a form different from that to which we are accustomed.” In 1939, after his second visit to America, during which time he again visited Abyssinian, he would write: “Here the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Savior of sinners, is truly preached and received with great welcome and visible emotion.”

It is not terribly difficult, given his critique of American Christianity, to understand why Bonhoeffer would see the black church as existing outside that critique. If the word of God had been sidelined in favor of American democratic unity, where better to look for the word than in those communities that had often been excluded from that same unity?

Today, American Christians struggle to understand their own place in this republic and what Christian faithfulness in the American nation looks like today. Much ink has been spilled arguing for and against “Christian nationalism.” But what is interesting is that when one considers some of the core ideas of “Christian nationalism” as defined by scholars such as Andrew ­Whitehead and Samuel Perry, the black church scores very highly for Christian nationalism.

If “Christian nationalism” simply means that “the federal government should advocate Christian values” and “the federal government should allow prayer in public schools,” for example, then the black church is quite friendly to Christian nationalism. According to the research ­cited in Perry and Whitehead’s Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, African Americans are more likely to agree with articulations of Christian nationalism than are white Americans, and black Protestants support Perry and Whitehead’s tenets of Christian nationalism at rates nearly as high as do white evangelicals.

Of course the black church ­faces all the usual temptations toward political partisanship. But at its best, it has provided an important model of how Christianity can transform the life of governments and nations. Critics of “Christian nationalism” speak as though there were something wrong with Christianity’s shaping public life. ­Bonhoeffer suggests, by contrast, that the real problem is when Christian faith is shaped by politics. What if the word of God were let loose in America, not merely in service of our national norms, but in order to call our nation to a more faithful Christian discipleship? That is the potential Bonhoeffer sensed at Abyssinian Baptist Church.

The post Political Religion appeared first on First Things.

A closer look reveals a surprising answer. In ­China there is a great deal of love for Western conservative authors: The works of Samuel ­Huntington and Leo Strauss, for instance, are studied and admired by Chinese intellectuals and academics. And Chinese interpretations of American politics often parallel those of the American Right. These affinities undoubtedly have many causes, but one shared belief stands out: a profound sense that any ­society, and a healthy one in particular, is held together by an integral, holistic culture.

Chinese thinkers are “politically incorrect” when measured against the progressive liberal standards dominant in North American universities. The Chinese term for North America’s identity politics—baizuo (“white Left”)—is strongly derogatory. It implies something like “the wild stuff lefty whites say these days.” Even scholars from China’s most liberal faction, such as intellectual historian Xu Jilin, judge North America’s baizuo to be excessive and divisive. In a forum on Black Lives Matter, Xu criticized “the coercive tactics the movement employs,” which amount to “purging history” and only provoke “deeper racial and ethnic conflicts.”

To many of a certain age, such as the dissident artist Ai Weiwei, baizuo recalls Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76). The memory of its terror against “class enemies,” committed in the name of cultural equality, leaves these thinkers allergic to progressive hyper-idealism—the kind of idealism that believes egalitarian utopia would materialize if only critics and moderates did not stand in the way of historical progress. They recognize that thought pattern wherever it emerges, and they know that narrowmindedness, coercion, and worse come in its train. No more of that, please.

This wariness extends to social and political theory. The Western thinkers shunned by today’s progressive liberals in the West attract the most interest in China. When I worked at Peking University a few years ago, I noticed that Samuel Huntington was cited frequently and taken seriously. As David Ownby of the Center of East Asian Studies at the University of Montreal observed, “Huntington, a cultural conservative, is strangely beloved by many Chinese intellectuals, even Chinese liberals.” But “strangely” is the wrong word, for obvious factors favor Huntington’s popularity in China.

Huntington rejected the West’s universalistic self-understanding, predicted a rise in Asian confidence, and disentangled modernization from liberal democracy. His Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) argued that political order and state capacity are more important variables than liberal democracy when it comes to modernization. As it happens, contemporary China prides itself on having disproven the thesis, widely touted by liberal theorists after the end of the Cold War, that modernization requires the West’s liberal-democratic model. Jiang Shigong, a prominent political theorist and public intellectual on the Chinese mainland, expresses a central reason for the Harvard political scientist’s appeal: “Huntington criticized Western political theory for its dogmatic ideological belief that liberal democratic governments represent the highest political ideal.”

Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996) offers another point of contact. Though initially unpersuaded by its pessimistic forecast of inevitable conflict, Chinese intellectuals have come to judge the book’s thesis about the geopolitical importance of civilizations and cultures to be correct. ­Huntington’s strongly “culturalist” angle, which accords religion and cultural values superordinate roles, reinforces China’s official self-­understanding. CCP propaganda consistently plays the culture card, arguing that China should not become a Western-­style liberal democracy, because to do so would go against China’s cultural values. Huntington argues that cultures should respect each other’s political systems and manage differences rather than attempt to eradicate them. Chairman Xi’s call for “inter-civilizational dialogue in difference” approximates this line so closely that, as literature professor Huimin Jin of Sichuan University observes, it is as if Xi were “intentionally responding to ­Huntington’s expectations and concerns.”

A similar contrast—admiration in ­China, abhorrence in American academia—applies to Leo Strauss. Strauss, who taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, is often cited at gatherings of conservative intellectuals who don’t have academic posts. In departments of political science and philosophy, his ideas are confined to a few eccentric corners. How very different is the situation in China. There, Strauss has gained a “cult following,” as Matthew Dean observed. Chinese translators and editors of his work are so enthusiastic and diligent that, at present, “more Strauss is available in print in Chinese than in English.”

Two pioneers of Straussianism in China, Liu Xiaofeng and Gan Yang, studied under Allan Bloom. They preface each volume in their coedited series, Sources of Western Scholarship, with a warning that Strauss and his students would have appreciated: “Chinese scholars who embrace a healthy reading of the West maintain an attitude of skepticism toward the systems of Western thought, and are even more vigilant in the face of the various fashionably strange theories found on Western college campuses.”

What attracts Chinese scholars to Strauss’s works? According to Mark Lilla, who wrote an essay on this question after spending time in China in 2010, widespread dissatisfaction with liberal conceptions of political life makes Strauss appealing, for Strauss, too, doubted the adequacy of modern liberalism. Lilla also identifies Strauss’s “idea of an elite class educated to serve the public good,” which resonates with China’s Confucian tradition. He adds that Chinese readers appreciate that Strauss takes them on a grand tour of Western political philosophy.

I would add another factor: Strauss’s view of society matches a Chinese preference for what might be called “cultural holism.” Drawing on the Greek tradition, Strauss treats societies as politico-­cultural wholes, each with a particular overall character, its politeia, or, in his translation of the Greek term, its regime. As he put it in “What is Political Philosophy?” (1957): “Regime means that whole, which we today are in the habit of viewing primarily in a fragmentized form; regime means simultaneously the form of life of a society, its style of life, its moral taste, form of society, form of state, form of government, spirit of laws.”

Chinese thinkers likewise reason in terms of regimes. In his 1991 travel memoir America Against America, Wang Huning approached American ­society as an integral cultural-political regime. Wang—then a professor of international politics and now one of China’s top political figures—tried to capture the overall spirit of American life. He noted that Americans have a much more fragmented social imagination than do the Chinese. This lack of an integral sense of who they are makes Americans incapable of grasping the interlinked nature of their country’s ills. Americans prize individualism. Belief in it is a cornerstone of the American regime. But Wang sees this mentality as the cause of social breakdown, or worse still, break-up.

There is a pattern in the Chinese attraction to conservative thinkers. Strauss and Huntington conceive of politics as embedded in distinct national and regional “forms of life,” that is, in what we commonly call cultures. Chinese intellectuals see the world in the same way. Social life and political reality are formed within (and form in turn) cultural wholes. “Culture,” writes Huimin Jin in Telos, “can never be just one thing, divided from other things, since culture appears as a whole.” Cultural values hold a society together. As Xu Jilin explains, “A country’s internal order of justice requires powerful common values with substantive content.” He criticizes the strands of American liberalism that neglect this fact. Xu argues that such liberalism, which relies on legal rights and procedural norms, demands too little from its citizens—while ironically expecting too much normative convergence internationally. Modern liberalism promotes “Western human rights standards” without realizing that they are narrowly Western and ­incongruent with “many axial civilizations.”

Progressive liberal ideology seeks to downplay cultural wholes. It envisions the world in universal, globalist terms, while reducing national ­societies to collections of atomized individuals. In its advanced form as identity politics, this version of liberalism views individuals as members of intersecting identity categories—categories that are not real communities and cultures, but rather demographic abstractions such as “Asian American” and “LGBTQIA+.” The word “community” may be added to such abstractions—as in “LGBTQIA+­ ­community”—but it is empty, for none of the identity-­politics categories are concrete communities with shared cultural lives. Indeed, the pseudo-­solidarity of identity politics further atomizes the individual by undermining the legitimacy of inherited cultures. This outcome is not accidental. Progressive liberals seek to weaken the hold of larger cultural collectives by erasing them from their accounts of the social world, accounts they disseminate using their dominance in the West’s humanities and social science departments. Many conservatives in the West criticize this project, and Chinese intellectuals find themselves in agreement.

Western intellectual life has not always been hostile to a culturally holistic understanding. The founding figures of Western sociology conceived of societies as organic wholes or as distinct and coherent arenas of conflict and resource allocation. True, French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) and German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) highlighted the ways in which modern societies had become more internally differentiated on the level of professions and value spheres. But according to Durkheim, modern societies nonetheless continued to be unified by a shared social imagination. And though Weber was more attuned to value conflicts within cultures than Durkheim was, his studies of the socioeconomic legacies of various world religions compared different civilizations. For Weber, the civilizational orders of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and China each consist of a unique dynamic of values and traditions, giving rise to distinct forms of social life.

In Western academia, comparative civilizational theorizing of the sort Weber undertook was last entirely respectable in 1963, when Israeli sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt, in The Political System of Empires, explained how Europe, Japan, China, and Islam had produced different versions of modernity. Since then, fragmenting visions have reigned. Etiquette in Western academia requires that we not “reify” or “essentialize” cultures, and that we avoid the terms “civilization” and “Western world,” which are said to stimulate jingoism and underwrite the oppression of non-Western peoples. Large cultural units are suspect. It is acceptable to attach the adjective “cultural” to micro-groupings; subcultures are fine. But postulating something like “American culture” would seem overly stereotyping, insufficiently attuned to diversity, even reactionary.

Reflections on what unifies a society—the cultural holism that Chinese scholars take for ­granted—is said to benefit nationalist political programs, which professors and students must ostentatiously abhor. Against this possibility, Western academics highlight subcultures and thin identity groups, alongside the study of formal institutions and globalization. Anything is fine, really, as long as it breaks open the supposedly suffocating patchwork of national attachments and civilizational blocs.

As a result, Western academics reject out of hand cultural comparisons based on shared traditions, and they underestimate the extent to which humanity’s cultural life is organized in distinct and well-consolidated blocs, as Huntington describes. Of course, cultures are not perfectly distinct. There have always been porous border zones, diasporas, subgroupings, local variations, and free-roaming individuals with unique identity assemblages. But if we focus exclusively on these aspects, we underestimate how bloc-like much of cultural life on earth nonetheless remains.

A recent study, “On ʻNationology,ʼ” by Plamen Akaliyski and others, compares the explanatory power of national units in the World Values Survey to that of alternative grouping units such as religion and ethnicity. It turns out that “nations capture the bulk” of the explainable variation in an individual’s cultural values. “Contrary to many scholars’ intuitions, alternative social aggregates, such as ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, as well as diverse socio-demographic categories, add negligible explained variance to that already captured by nations.” Thus, the prevailing view of Chinese scholars and of many Western ­conservatives—that nations are not only very real units of culture, but in most instances more important than other ­differentiations—turns out to be true.

In an earlier study, sociologists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel presented their well-known world culture map (see graph). It shows that respondents to the World Values Survey and ­European Values Study, if grouped by nationality, cluster into larger world-cultural regions or civilizations. ­Inglehart and Welzel contrasted traditional and secular values, as well as survival and self-­expressive values. The y-axis (traditional–secular) shows the weight respondents give to religion, family values, and legitimate authority. The x-axis (survival–­expression) runs from economic and physical security concerns to subjective well-being and quality of life. World-regional patterns are discernible if the national averages are placed in a scatter plot. European countries with a strong Protestant tradition, for example, score high on secularism and self-expression, whereas the Anglosphere countries are equally self-expressive but more traditional.

Putting together the two research findings—that national belonging covers the bulk of variation and that nations group into larger cultural regions—it appears that our cultural world, to a great degree, is one of “people within nations and nations within civilizations.” So, the tendency of Western conservatives and Chinese scholars to imagine a world of cultural boxes is not wildly off the mark. The view of nations and civilizations as central realities for political life has a far sounder empirical basis than do progressive-liberal attempts to think outside the culture box.

Society has moral substance; cultural differences matter; and civilizations are real. Chinese thinkers and Western conservatives agree on these fundamental points. Both groups regard society as a thickly cultured whole held together by shared values. But, of course, the convergence has limits. The cultural holisms that Chinese thinkers and Western conservatives perceive in society and embrace politically differ in substance. The holism that is aligned with Western conservatism’s emphasis on national culture and civilizational identity differs from the holism of Chinese political thought, as the latter is grounded in views of human nature, social cohesion, and political authority that Western conservatives reject.

Chinese thinkers often hold the utopian belief that leaders and society are morally perfectible. This optimism allows modern Chinese philosophers to expect that, with good leadership and sustained efforts of moral education, selfishness and partiality will one day disappear from people’s hearts. When I first stumbled on this belief in my readings of Chinese philosophy, I could not get myself to take it seriously. But in 2017, I tutored a high-schooler in Beijing. On various occasions, this student suggested that having discussions with people was pointless, for such “discussions are soon going to end.” He explained that a unifying moral truth would soon emerge, after which people would have nothing to debate. Why bicker when disagreement itself was about to become obsolete?

This sincere, bright teenager was echoing a broad strand in Chinese political thought, one that sinologist and political theorist Thomas A. Metzger labels “Chinese utopianism.” In A Cloud Across the Pacific, Metzger characterizes Chinese utopianism as “the belief that the concrete here-and-now not only should but also could be made morally perfect.” This faith derives from a modern reworking of Confucian idealism. For premodern Neo-Confucians, humanity’s golden age lay in a distant past, when the Duke of Zhou’s perfect rule (1042–1035 BC) brought all under heaven into one harmonious family. Since then, humanity had declined, with the gradual downward trend interrupted only sporadically by partial restorations. Influenced by socialism and modern Western notions of historical progress, this representation of history was turned on its head at the dawn of the twentieth century, when modernizers such as Kang Youwei (1858–1927) moved the state of salvation into the near future. Kang’s famous Book of Great Unity foresaw a harmonized, peaceful world in which all would be equal in all respects, including economically, and rivalry would be overcome as everyone strove to be humane and self-cultivated.

This fusion of the Confucian and the modern, Metzger explains, prepared the way for the importation of Marxist-Leninist utopianism in the mid-twentieth century, and it remains influential in Chinese thought. Philosopher Zhao Tingyang of Peking University has made waves in recent years by outlining a vision of global moral revolution whereby partiality will be eradicated from the hearts of all people, diplomatic tensions will become obsolete, and the world’s cultures will come to respect one another. His latest monograph, All Under Heaven, reiterates his plea to replace political conflict with a worldwide order of friendship: “Politics must become an art for transforming enmity into friendship rather than a technology for coping with competitive conflict.”

This moral utopianism conflicts with the core of Western conservatism. Whether Burkean, Hayekian, or theological in persuasion, a robust conservatism rests on the Christian notion of human fallenness. It accepts that sin, including everyday selfishness, is an ineradicable feature of human existence, and therefore seeks to impose safeguards against the worst abuses of power. Checks and balances, the rule of law, and open debate are indispensable, because leaders can never be trusted fully. And political disagreements will always remain. Even the best leaders and citizens have interests and perspectival limitations that affect their judgment.

A pessimistic view of human nature leads conservatives to conceive a well-ordered society as a balancing act. Order is possible when different institutions and cultural traditions keep each other in check and compensate for the fallibility of human beings. In the optimistic Chinese view, by contrast, the collective is integrated harmoniously; all of society’s parts, including all individuals, can rise to higher moral planes in unison. Chinese demographics has a concept of “population quality” (renkou suzhi). As defined by Baidu Baike, China’s largest online encyclopedia, this term denotes a population’s “ideological, cultural, and physical qualities.” All such qualities, it is believed, can be improved. Everything in society, including the moral character of individuals, can—and must—grow together when the cultural collective rises and improves, finally yielding a morally perfect society with flawless leaders.

Belief in the possibility of fundamental collective improvement of the people’s moral character makes Chinese thinkers posit a cultural holism more collectivist than even the most integral visions of Western conservatives. In that sense, the Chinese mainstream might be called more “right-wing” than Western conservatism itself. But at this point, comparisons shift. Chinese utopianism, a prominent strand in Chinese political thought, has its closest Western counterpart in radical socialism and the dreams of a perfectly harmonious multicultural society of inclusion. In this sense, Chinese utopianism might be characterized as leftist.

The pivoting of the Chinese social imagination from right to left demonstrates the folly of placing something so complex and complexly different on the Western left-right spectrum. Chinese intellectual life is a different world—albeit one that bears affinities with, and shows a great deal of interest in, Western conservatism. Perhaps we can return the interest and even muster sympathy, since, so long as perfect global harmony has not yet materialized, it will be necessary for the West and China to coexist while disagreeing about many things.

Image by Jonathan Kos-Read via Creative Commons. Image cropped. 

The post Why China Loves Conservatives appeared first on First Things.

My speech proposed a more thoroughgoing conservatism. America stigmatizes “toxic masculinity” and endlessly celebrates careerist women. Universities, the “citadels of gynocracy” as I called them, are especially implicated in this disastrous system of honor and shame. I concluded by calling for institutions to adopt sex-role realism—an unapologetic celebration of the fact that men and women want and do different things.

Weeks passed. Some former students told me over Thanksgiving break that a video criticizing my speech was trending on social media. I paid little heed, because I was not interested in the social-­media world. But the social-media world was interested in me.

As I sat down early on Monday, November 29 to prepare to teach my classes at Boise State, five emails arrived in quick succession. They were full of name-calling, with quasi-­threatening tones. I knew that a cancellation was on, since this was not my first. Four years earlier, a storm had erupted over an article of mine arguing that transgender rights, when promoted by school authorities, threatened parental rights—a thesis that is painfully obvious now. The university complained. I got nasty emails and bitter phone messages. Student groups protested with signs saying that I had blood on my hands. The outcry went nowhere, for the most part. The faculty senate tabled the motions against me. I waged a successful public relations campaign to defend myself. Ben Shapiro and the late Mike Adams took up my cause. I appeared on Tucker Carlson.

My first was the boyhood of cancellation attempts. Both cancellations were coordinated, but with the second, the breadth expanded exponentially. Senders created email accounts with names like eatmyass@hotmail.gov and yourworstnightmare@gmail.com. They challenged my manhood and questioned my ability to reproduce. (I have five kids.) Phone messages were startling in their frequency, intensity, and vulgarity. People spiked Amazon reviews for my latest book, The Recovery of Family Life, and for my previous books. They spiked my teaching reviews on Rate My Professor and elsewhere. They signed me up for newsletters from Planned Parenthood, National Organization for Women, Them, and other left-wing groups. Someone sent on my behalf an application for admission to the University of Phoenix, and admissions counsellors hounded me to complete it. Attempts were made to hack my social media and financial accounts. Emails arrived daily, beckoning me to click on the link to the “intimate photos” I had, they said, asked for.

My dear wife was not exempt from such attacks. Miscreants sent her vulgar, threatening messages on social media. Calls were made to her employer. “Is Scott Yenor married?” trended on Google. Though many of our friends rallied to my cause, many of my wife’s acquaintances avoided her or avoided the topic of the speech. Some ducked behind doors when she approached. Others stopped calling. Fewer lunch dates. More insecurity and anxiety. The social costs my wife bore could have led to bitterness and marital strife. But we were not without support and love. Text messages from our kids, and their wives, kept a smile on her face. Other friends kept her spirits up. Cancellations test marriages. They test friendships. Mine tested my ability to command myself. In all of life’s ­challenges, a Christian father and husband finds purpose in managing how the strife affects his family. By no means am I perfect at this, but I am getting ample opportunities to improve.

The most concerning complaints were from evangelical acquaintances. Some came in the form of letters demanding my resignation from the Ambrose School, a classical Christian school on whose board of directors I have served for twenty years. These evangelicals equated being winsome with being Christian. Defending the family is one thing, but my words had been “neither respectful nor gentle.” I did not meet the “general requirements” to be an elder—in fact, my “remarks were hurtful, sexist, discriminatory, degrading, and demeaning.” Nearly every one of these letters presumed a secular feminist worldview.

Soon, I fear, the Church will cancel its own teachings in order to be seen as “respectful and gentle” by today’s cancelling swarms. Members of the Ambrose board knew what time it was. Convinced that the Christian family and its defenders were to be defended, it refused to cave to those who demanded my resignation. A heartening development. May more such institutions read the times and act accordingly. Nothing strengthens courage like the courage of others exercised on your behalf.

Cancellers know what they are doing when they exert stress on friendships, families, churches, and Christian schools. Friends, united by common loves, pursue common projects as part of their life’s missions. Schools and churches are organized around missions. A husband and wife prioritize home and family as a joint mission. Without stability, these common projects cannot easily be brought to successful conclusions. Stability, wrote James Madison, is “one of the chief blessings of civil society.” People must be dependable and respectable in order to deserve responsibility. Legal and moral environments must be dependable, too. Words must have the same meaning today that they had yesterday.

Cancellation undermines the stability necessary for common projects. My first thought was for my family. Many people depend on my steady employment, and I could not let them down. Next, I thought about my professional future. The life of a tenured professor has its advantages, and I never would have considered giving it up before this controversy. My teachers had made sacrifices to help me through my programs. I love teaching, and I am pretty good at it. And then there were the projects I had helped to shape as a leader in several communities, projects now at risk of being stigmatized by my participation. The fear of becoming a drag on my family, a stumbling block to my adult children, and a liability to the communities I served was at times overwhelming.

Cancelling swarms know the stakes, so they use media megaphones to increase the pressure. In my case, local media—and then national media—picked up stories and ginned up on-the-ground outrage. Local reporters found former students who were willing to lie about me. One student claimed to a local news website that I “never gave her constructive criticism or feedback on how she engaged with the material,” whereas I had challenged men and gone to bat for male students. Another spun this yarn: “I remember the very first day of class and he went around the room and he purposefully called the women Mrs. Whatever and he’d pick a last name, but he wouldn’t say your last name . . . If I corrected him, he would tell me it didn’t matter because it wasn’t really my last name anyway, it was my husband’s.”

The libel machine transformed the proposal of my National Conservatism presentation from “Do not recruit women into male-dominated majors” to “Keep women out of certain majors” to “Keep women out of certain professions,” and finally to “Keep women out of all professions.” What had begun as a defense of part-time work allowing the prioritization of motherhood was transformed into a prohibition on women’s leaving the house. Trying to correct these people was futile: They were not interested in the truth.

Boise State joined the swarm. One female faculty member in my department, a person I had evaluated favorably enough in every circumstance since she’d been hired, joined the call-out in the media: “How am I supposed to go back to work knowing that someone who is directly responsible for evaluating my tenure profile thinks women shouldn’t be working?” University leaders sent out statements to everyone on campus but me. Andrew Finstuen, the Honors College dean, sent a note to honors students: The Honors College “heartily endorses and encourages women to pursue their education, interests, careers, and dreams,” even if “Prof. Scott Yenor has articulated a very different view.” Finstuen, a professing Christian, set up counseling sessions in which Honors College professionals would help students through what was widely described as a great trauma. Similar things happened in the Engineering College, the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Public Service, and other parts of the university. And in my own department.

Complaints were couched in sober-seeming appeals concerning “discrimination” or “student safety” or “trauma.” As my old dean had said during my first cancellation, “People are hurting!” These are just retail arguments. The real goal is victory for the ideologues. Public shaming of scapegoats modifies behavior. Thousands notice when certain topics and opinions become taboo. No one at Boise State who cares about his reputation and influence will ever again raise taboo questions and provide dissident answers. Professors at other universities notice, too, as do students who might be interested in joining the professorate.

This is how radical feminism wins. This is how sexual liberation wins. This is how Critical Race Theory wins. This is how climate alarmism wins. This is how the broader left plans to win. The threat of public shame for violating sacred principles and the concomitant need for social-media approval drive the modern university and shape its agendas for research, course development, and institution-building.

Boise State made a show of defending academic freedom against the swarm. Their media relations flunky, Mike Sharp, released a statement affirming free speech, but also urging all who felt that they had been discriminated against or harassed to file charges. Within days I received a Notice of Investigation and Allegations from Boise State, alleging that I had “graded women lower than their male peers based solely on sex and not performance” and that I had not “engaged with women in class to the same degree” as I had with men. Monitors would attend my classes to ensure that I did not discriminate against or harass students. Someone would contact me about the investigation soon. More charges might be forthcoming.

The Title IX charges marked an escalation and, strangely, a path to quasi-victory. Until then, the cancellation had been social, a campaign to make me feel confused, isolated, irrelevant, and weak, as if I had no friends or allies. A fight against public opinion never yields clear results.

Alexis de Tocqueville knew of democratic social tyranny, but he did not anticipate its exact mechanisms. Ancient despots had exiled, killed, or maimed people who thought differently. Democratic republics, Tocqueville writes, have created a tyranny that leaves the body, striking instead at the soul. Under democracy, the social master says, “You are free not to think as I do; your life, your goods, everything remains to you; but from this day on, you are a stranger among us . . . those who believe in your innocence, even they shall abandon you.” Democratic social tyranny extends beyond national borders. Those who are cancelled in one democratic country are often cancelled in all, and those in other lands may participate in a ritualized cancellation taking place in America.

Tocqueville did not imagine the particular system of civil rights laws that supports our democratic despotism. With my Title IX investigation, a great deal was on the line. A “conviction” could lead to the loss of my job as a tenured professor and make me unemployable in academia. But exoneration would, one hoped, prove that my forbidden opinions did not compromise my ability to do my job on terms acceptable to my accusers.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal aid. From the beginning, Title IX has empowered judges and administrators to define what discrimination is and how discrimination is proved. Since the Obama era, Title IX has become a power base for ideological policing on campus. Under its banner, policies and culture are changed to secure equal outcomes among groups, or equity, or a “safe learning environment.” University charges of harassment and discrimination are used to silence dissenting professors without, officially, disturbing free speech at all. Professors can say what they want—but certain questions or statements will invite discrimination or harassment charges. Just ask Joshua Katz, Laura Kipnis, Amy Wax, Roland Fryer, or Charles Negy, to name a few.

Title IX tribunals are not traditional trials. In my case, the witnesses and accusers were not named. The accusers could not be cross-examined; their motives were never explored. The investigator, in fact, seemed duty-bound to assume that the accusers had pure motives (never a personal or ideological ­vendetta). The investigator and the judge were the same person. Charges could be dropped or modified as new evidence rolled in. Evidence might matter, but that depends on the charges, the lawyer, and the ­investigator.

Boise State offered a counselor to help me. But accepting representation from people who want to fire you is stupid. I needed my own lawyer. Friends established a legal defense fund through which $25,000 was raised within hours. Others pledged more if I needed it. Their financial and emotional support I will never forget. Samantha Harris, an attorney with long experience in campus discipline and Title IX cases, agreed to serve as my counsel, an inspired choice. She advised me to gather documentation concerning the charges over Christmas break.

This task was time-consuming, but I had been preparing for it for years, knowing that someone who treads on controversial topics such as the family and feminism would eventually face the ire of the university’s civil rights regime. All my lectures for the past five years are recorded and stored. All student communications and grades are saved. I had kept detailed records on whom I called on during each class.

Officially, of course, the charges and legal proceedings against me had nothing to do with my National Conservatism speech. All complaints were “unsolicited” in the official record. But ­only a child or a Title IX investigator could believe that. Title IX rules encourage students to make false charges against the disfavored. Boise State had solicited the charges against me, even enabled false charges, by allowing students to make accusations and then stop cooperating with the investigation so as not to be responsible for perjurious testimony. (If I had accused students of providing false testimony, I would have been charged with “retaliation” under Boise State’s Title IX policy.) ­Eventually there were no accusers left, so Boise State itself became the complainant.

My hearing arrived on February 10. All the charges were rebutted with actual evidence. Accusers had claimed that I graded women more harshly than men—but statistics showed otherwise.Others had claimed that I provided comments for papers written by male students but not for papers written by female students—and I presented emailed comments that put the lie to that charge. It was said that I called on male students more than on female students—and I exposed the lie with detailed records. Discussing other accusations would make me vulnerable to “retaliation” charges, but suffice it to say that the accusing students had lied repeatedly, and I had the receipts to prove it. At the end of the hearing, the investigator said she would recommend that no charges be filed, unless something additional came up. Samantha had never heard of such a thing.

Sure enough, exoneration, or what passed for it, arrived later. The investigator found “insufficient evidence” to support Boise State’s charges. Only after I pestered them for an answer did Boise State let me know that they had accepted the investigator’s report. The legal cancellation was over. For now. The results have been public for months. So far, not one person who accused me of something has apologized. I’m not holding my breath.

I bang my head against the wall sometimes. A political philosopher should have known better. Every political community narrows the horizon of opinion. The friend-enemy distinction is a reality in political life, even if it is not the final word. Socrates was put to death for questioning the city’s gods. Plato likened the education of citizens to a cave wherein the chained citizens see only shadows projected on a wall. Nietzsche noticed that all political communities have something about which people are not permitted to laugh. Every culture is a cancel culture that honors certain opinions at the expense of others. Traversing sacred opinions is always dangerous. There is nothing John Stuart Mill can do about it. I know all this—and yet I spoke against America’s sacred opinions and will continue to speak.

I determined from the start never to defend myself on the grounds of “academic freedom” or “free speech.” I do not want to be tolerated: I want to witness to the truth. I think that the body shapes an individual’s destiny, because it manifestly does. I think that more women should spend more time minding the home, because women are likelier than men to prioritize such work and do it well, so that without mostly women making homes, fewer homes will exist. I think that men need self-respect and accomplishment in order to be attractive as husbands, and that demanding service from men without honoring that service is counterproductive. I think that our institutions, in the grip of feminist ideology, dishonor traditional manly virtues and offer little encouragement to men. I think that societal health cannot be sustained on the unstable ground of feminism. Maybe I’m wrong on these points. I’m open to correction. But they seem true to me, and it’s my job as an academic to say what I understand to be true.

We can talk about free speech. It’s important. But cancel culture is inhumane and corrupting less because it cancels than because of what it cancels. Anyone who thinks the life of a loving mother is akin to a “comfortable concentration camp” (as Betty Friedan wrote, though she later regretted it) should be laughed out of polite society. Comparing motherhood to slavery and childbirth to defecating a pumpkin should occasion opprobrium, not debate or applause. Anyone who calls marital love “the pivot of women’s oppression,” as Shulamith Firestone did, should be unemployable in institutions that value truth. Friedan wrote that “the only kind of work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully” is “the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession.” For that slur on the lives of a great majority of women in my mother’s generation, a decent culture would boycott Friedan’s publisher. Many women have imbibed these feminist falsehoods, and they have done unspeakable damage to Christendom.

Most American churches have yet to be captured by such ideology. But there is reason to worry. Assumptions about the sexual revolution are corroding habits of faith and the commitment to motherhood and chastity among evangelicals, especially women. Though evangelical women attend church more often than men do, they are also more committed to the sexual revolution. David Ayers reports on this transformation in After the Revolution: Sex and the Single Evangelical. Evangelicals are abandoning Christian sexual ethics in thought, word, and deed—as mainline Protestants and many Catholics have­ ­done already. Not only do more American Christians than ever regard sex before marriage, cohabitation, and homosexuality as acceptable, but they are increasingly practicing the new liberationist gospel: More than 15 percent of young evangelical females have had sex with another female, and 37 percent have had sex by the age of seventeen. St. Paul exhorted the believers of Corinth to separate themselves from pagan perversity and pursue chastity as a distinctive Christian virtue, but today’s Christians are increasingly indistinguishable from their pagan peers.

Churches and other Christian institutions must serve as supports for family life, just as they have done for two thousand years. The same culture that tries to silence university professors and public intellectuals affects pastors, too. Pastors have been targeted for speaking the truth about Christian sexual ethics. Many have faced cancellation for opposing same-sex marriage. But the erosion of sexual ethics also happens quietly: A young couple is shacked up but still wants a church wedding; the pastor objects; the parents of the betrothed must choose between upholding the faith and endorsing the kids’ cohabitation. Too often, blood is thicker than doctrine. Speaking the truth and acting on it has costs. Protestants must constitute elder boards and vestries that are willing to withstand the pressures that are being exerted on pastors. A cascade of capitulation starts with the caving of a few elder boards. If elder boards and vestries cannot be counted on, steel-spined pastors may never seek ordination in the first place, and those in the field already will lose morale.

Churches have a duty to cultivate in their flocks a spirit of martyrdom, a willingness to pay the price for Christian witness. A church of “cultural engagement,” emphasizing niceness at the expense of doctrine, inculcates the innocence of doves without the wisdom of serpents. Supporting controversial witness is a necessity in an orthodox Christian church. The gospel is a sword; so is the law. While my cancellation was afoot, I received many handwritten notes of encouragement from my fellow parishioners. Other parishioners were solicitous for my family and my mental state when I encountered them at worship. Just as my fellow board members at Ambrose stood firm in our mission, so did my church. I am grateful.

Though churches should not teach their parishioners to run full-steam into machine-gun nests, the beauty of the martyrs is a story as old as Christendom. St. Ambrose’s courage to refuse Communion to Theodosius over the Massacre of Thessalonica was possible only because he feared God more than he feared man. As did St. Stephen in the face of stoning; as did Justin Martyr, beheaded for witnessing to Christ among the Romans; as did so many others. Such examples of faithfulness are crucial. Cancellation is not martyrdom, of course, but it is in the odor of it. And churches that recognize its nobility are much more likely to be rallying points for all that is central to Christian faith.

The post Anatomy of a Cancellation appeared first on First Things.

He lived, he worked, he died.” Heidegger’s famously terse summary of Aristotle’s life expresses one common view of the project of intellectual biography. An opposed view holds that every thinker’s work is a disguised confession—a translation into the abstract language of thought, of hopes and fears too deep to be uttered directly. Truth lies between these extremes. A good intellectual biographer will lay bare the threads that connect the creative mind to its surrounding circumstances without suggesting that the one is reducible to the other. He or she must have tact, discretion, and a willingness to let the hidden unity of a life show forth by ­implication.

Alastair MacIntyre: An ­Intellectual Biography was first published in French in 2005. Its author, Émile ­Perreau-Saussine, died five years later, at the young age of thirty-­seven. It is not, despite its subtitle, an intellectual biography. It is organized topically, not chronologically, and tells us little about the mental processes underlying MacIntyre’s public commitments. Why did he join and then leave the Communist Party? What caused him to lose and then regain his faith? Having no access to ­MacIntyre’s private papers, ­Perreau-Saussine was not able to answer these questions. Nor does he seem to have been granted interviews with the great man; or if he was, he evidently got little out of them. This was probably not his fault: All attempts to delve beneath the surface of MacIntyre’s published writings have met with the same terse ­unforthcomingness. “Auto­biographies should only be undertaken by those with the appropriate literary gifts . . . I do not have those gifts,” was his response to one ­interviewer’s suggestion that he might attempt a more confessional form of writing.

This, then, is not so much a ­biography, even an ­intellectual ­biography, as a conventional monograph by one thinker about another. Occasionally, Perreau-­Saussine permits himself some more personal speculations. He suggests that ­MacIntyre’s early leftism was a reaction to his encounter with posh boys at Epsom College, a minor public school in South London. It’s a good hunch—­MacIntyre clearly has no time for the English “gentleman”—but no more than that. A few pages later, he invites us to find deep significance in MacIntyre’s decision to move to America in 1969. “Why would an intellectual immigrate ­into the ­United States?” he asks, with snobbish incredulity. To which one can only reply: Why wouldn’t an intellectual immigrate to the United States? Universities there are lively, hospitable, and invitingly well funded. Perreau-Saussine rightly points out that MacIntyre’s version of communitarianism has had more resonance in the States than in Europe, but he gives us no reason to suppose that this was MacIntyre’s reason for relocating.

On the whole, however, this is a competent and at times insightful essay in intellectual history. Or rather, it is three essays, dealing respectively with MacIntyre’s politics, philosophy, and theology. The first covers MacIntyre’s early involvement with the British New Left. It notes, importantly, that he was always an ethical “guild” socialist in the mold of G. D. H. Cole. He was never attracted either to Soviet-style state socialism or to the sexual libertarianism of the sixty-eighters. (Marcuse is the target of one of his fiercest early polemics.) ­MacIntyre’s conversion to Catholicism in the early 1980s was therefore not the radical about-face it might at first appear. It was a return to the source of what had always been his deepest political and ethical convictions.

A second chapter deals with the philosophy of action and ethics. From Wittgenstein and Elizabeth Anscombe, MacIntyre draws the key thought that “action” is an interpretive category, a way of making sense of ourselves and others, and not a naturally given fact. Imagine a man hacking at a lump of stone. We are then told that he is “carving a spandrel.” Suddenly, an arbitrary string of movements heaves into view as an intelligible whole. But the enterprise of sense-making does not end here. We must further ask: Why is he carving a spandrel? Perhaps he is a mason, employed in building a house. And why do men build houses? MacIntyre’s point is that, in order fully to understand this particular act of stone-carving, we must first understand the practice of building in general. The individual action makes sense only in the context of an ongoing tradition of action. But, adds MacIntyre—and here his thought takes a pessimistic turn—our traditions of action have been eroded by the twin forces of state and market, rendering our practical lives fragmented and opaque. In this situation, we are naturally drawn to a rival account of action as an expression of blind desire—the account we find in Hobbes, Hume, and mainstream modern economics.

Perreau-Saussine’s coverage of this (admittedly dense) field of argument is thin and uncertain; he is, we feel, outside his intellectual comfort zone. Sometimes, he gets things plain wrong. Anscombe and MacIntyre do not think that “­rational explanation is a form of causal explanation.” That is a view they both reject. And emotivism does not treat “ought” statements as disguised orders; that is “prescriptivism.” These are small errors, which might easily have been corrected, but they weaken our trust in the general narrative.

A last chapter, on theo­logy, sees Perreau-­Saussine return to safer ground. The founders of modern political thought viewed organized religion as the chief threat to political stability, inasmuch as it demands a loyalty superior to all civic loyalties. They sought to defuse this threat in one of two ways: by subordinating religion to the secular sovereign (the Hobbesian solution), or by confining it to a sphere that is “private” and therefore harmless (the liberal solution). Yet this “theologico-­political problem” (as Perreau-­Saussine calls it) evokes little response in ­MacIntyre. What worries him is not religion’s threat to the secular state but the secular state’s threat to religion. It is not Hobbes’s nightmare of sectarian insurgency, but Kierkegaard’s nightmare of creeping relativism and indifference, that most preys on his mind. “When the sacred and the secular are divided,” he writes at the beginning of his first published work, Marxism: An Interpretation,

then religion becomes one more department of human life, one activity among others . . . But religion as an activity divorced from other activities is without point. If religion is only part of life, then religion has become optional. Only a religion which is a way of living in every sphere either deserves to or can hope to survive.

This, in a sense, has always been MacIntyre’s endeavor: to save religion from that attitude of mind which would make it just another item on the menu of consumer choices—the “aesthetic attitude,” as Kierkegaard called it. What distinguishes his later from his earlier thought is the conviction that politics in the conventional sense has nothing to contribute to this endeavor. There can be no salvation through revolution. This is the lesson of Stalinism: All attempts to destroy the bureaucratic state must end up swelling the bureaucratic state. What matters now—in the famous last words of After Virtue—is

the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. . . . We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.

Perreau-Saussine finds this retreat from politics surprising in a self-proclaimed follower of ­Aristotle, the great theorist of the polis. MacIntyre, he notes, has little to say about Aristotle’s political thought and shows no interest in the political Aristotelianism of Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. But there is no real surprise here. MacIntyre has always refused to identify the ancient polis with the modern state, which he insists is a merely prudential association, an alliance for the mutual benefit of its individual members. Politics in the modern world cannot be a “practice” in his special sense of that term: an activity aiming at the realization of goods internal to that activity. It can only be a managerial divvying-up of resources, or an amoral struggle for power. The modern state’s claim to embody “the spirit of the nation” is a hypocritical ploy to secure the compliance of its members. Being asked to die for the nation state is “like being asked to die for the telephone company.”

The motives for MacIntyre’s retreat from politics are clear enough, then. But is it justified? Perreau-­Saussine shrewdly points out that there is a certain bad faith in voiding the liberal state of any positive ethical value while at the same time insisting that nothing else can take its place. MacIntyre assumes the achievement of liberalism in securing religious peace, but he cannot, or will not, say anything explicitly in defense of that achievement; indeed, much of what he says serves covertly to undermine it. He is—to paraphrase brutally the gist of ­Perreau-Saussine’s ­critique—the spoilt, ungrateful child of the Enlightenment. And this, adds Perreau-Saussine, is why his philosophy has struck such a chord in the United States, the nation of ­Jefferson and Franklin that is at the same time host to a thousand cults and communes. “His St. Benedict is not so much the patron saint of Europe as the spokesman for antiliberal religious communities within the very heart of a liberal state.”

A final epilogue locates MacIntyre’s story within the broader story of his epoch—an epoch that has seen liberal democracy triumph politically yet lose its emotional and ethical appeal. What most people now seem to crave is not the thin air of freedom but the warm carapace of community, “identity,” belonging. “The particularities are arming themselves and sharpening their weapons,” writes Perreau-Saussine. That was in 2005. Since then, the “particularities” have only grown in strength and sharpness. In 2017, Rod Dreher wrote a bestselling book urging American Christians to recognize themselves as outsiders to mainstream society and build up a counterculture of their own, comprising schools, universities, and even farms and factories. He called this “the Benedict Option,” in homage to MacIntyre.

MacIntyre has disassociated himself from “the Benedict option.” But he cannot deny that it is one consequential response to what he himself has diagnosed as the ills of liberal modernity. And this fact seems to me to reveal a blind spot in his political vision. At this moment in time, when the terms “liberal” and “enlightened” are routinely denigrated by both left and right, it is more important than ever to hold onto them as symbols of something precious and easily lost: the possibility of civilized disagreement. “Liberalism” is a much debased word. But rather than jettisoning it entirely, our task must be to rescue it from its own distortions, to bring out its continuity with the best of the preliberal past. We must remember that a “liberal” was originally someone who showed liberalitas, the virtue of generosity, tolerance, and noble forbearance with the errors and weaknesses of others—a virtue little in evidence among most of those who call themselves “liberals” today. Liberalitas was not a virtue stressed by St. Benedict. But it is a virtue we sorely need in our current ­political crisis.

The post MacIntyre in Retreat appeared first on First Things.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited public- and private-sector entities from discriminating on the basis of race, color, and national origin. Title VII of the Act added sex to this list of protected categories for employment discrimination. Then, in 1972, Congress also passed a general education bill banning sex discrimination in schools receiving federal funds—Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, or “Title IX” for short. The law was uncontroversial when it passed, especially compared to the contemporaneous Equal Rights Amendment, the feminist attempt to amend the federal Constitution to mandate uniform treatment of men and women. Title IX had comfortable majorities in the House and Senate and was signed into law by Richard Nixon.

For most Americans, extending the principle of anti-discrimination to women seemed reasonable. The text of the statute is short:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.

But the law soon caused controversy. In practice, Title IX operates as a contract between the federal government and schools: A school agrees not to discriminate, and the government ­recognizes the school as eligible for federal funding. But within a few years of Title IX’s enactment, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the precursor to today’s Education Department, began to interpret it as requiring schools to spend the same amount of money on women’s sports as on men’s sports, regardless of disparities in interest. In short order, men’s teams in baseball, wrestling, and track were eliminated to make room for women’s teams in lacrosse, basketball, and soccer. Moreover, in 1987, Congress passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act, which defined “federal support” to include government-provided student aid. The effect was to make nearly every college and university in the United States subject to the federal government’s Title IX requirements.

For decades, Title IX news was mostly about this sports angle—a surprising development, given that the law’s original supporters had regarded it as primarily about access to education, not athletics. Then, in 1991, attorney Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of having ­sexually harassed her when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The claims were explosive: She alleged that Thomas had made vulgar remarks in her presence, about pubic hair in his drink and about his sexual prowess. This tawdry episode made “sexual harassment” a household word, though it failed to keep Thomas off the Court.

Hill’s accusations concerned the employment setting, so she could have complained formally under Title VII, the federal ban on sex discrimination in employment. Title VII and Title IX are often discussed together, since both ban sex discrimination; courts interpreting one law often seek guidance from jurisprudence that interprets the other. Sex discrimination was then a relatively new legal area, compared, for example, to constitutional law; precedent was sparse as courts worked to determine what, in fact, constituted an offense. Quid pro quo propositions, in which a superior demands sex in exchange for good grades or a job promotion, were readily recognized as discriminatory acts. But Anita Hill had not alleged this type of sex discrimination. Instead, she pointed to something else—what is now known as a “hostile environment.” By the late 1980s, judges had determined that this more nebulous problem could be a form of sex discrimination.

In accord with evolving legal theories of “hostile environment,” all of which tended to expand the concept, federal officials soon mandated that Title IX coordinators ensure that no “hostile environments” exist in educational settings. Just before the George W. Bush administration took office in January 2001, Clinton officials in the Education Department issued guidance that defined “hostile environment” as including “unwelcome conduct” of a sexual nature. Moreover, what counted as ­unwelcome was to be “considered from both a subjective and objective perspective.” Bush officials did nothing to alter or rescind this directive, and so it stayed in place for more than a decade.

During the Obama administration, a more ideological feminism gained still greater control over interpretation of Title IX. In 2011, Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights under Barack Obama, enforced a “Dear Colleague” letter that defined “sexual harassment” and hostile environment more expansively. Her OCR also launched investigations of colleges and universities that had been deemed insufficiently zealous in their enforcement of Title IX. The same Dear Colleague letter lowered the burden of proof, discouraged cross-examination, and encouraged a single-­investigator process whereby the Title IX coordinators at colleges and universities were called to act as police, judge, and jury—all changes that tended toward more frequent findings of fault.

In 2017, Trump administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos formally rescinded the 2011 Dear Colleague letter as a first step in promulgating her own regulation. Unlike the education secretaries in the Clinton and Obama Administrations, who used letters of guidance to impose new definitions, DeVos followed the formal rulemaking steps prescribed by the Administrative ­Procedures Act, which requires opportunity for citizen input through formal public comment periods. Promulgated in 2020, her Title IX Rule requires due process basics in school Title IX adjudications, such as the presumption of innocence, the right to see evidence, and the right to independent decision-­makers free of conflicts of interest. It therefore effectively prohibited the single-investigator approach, restoring a modicum of sanity to Title IX implementation.

But the DeVos reform is now under attack from the Biden administration, in which Lhamon serves once again as the assistant secretary running OCR. Its recently proposed Title IX regulation targets most of these protections for removal, including by favoring something like the single-investigator model (now called the “individual meeting” method) to replace a formal hearing. It also echoes Clinton-era expansions of “hostile environment” by introducing the new term “sex-based harassment,” defined as “unwelcome conduct that is severe or pervasive and that, based on the totality of the circumstances and evaluated subjectively and objectively, creates a hostile environment.” This definition illustrates how nebulous, expansive, and unstable the “hostile environment” category can be.

What’s more, Biden’s proposed rule redefines “sex” to include both same-sex orientation and an individual’s “gender identity.” Clearly Biden officials are abusing Title IX, and doing so for ­ideological purposes. To the degree that a “hostile environment” can be subjective, moral objections to homosexuality and to the latest gender ­ideology may be deemed sex discrimination. And that is ­exactly what has happened in many recent Title IX investigations.

In short, Title IX has now become not only a weapon but a blank check for radicals in the federal government and on campus, who see the law as an opportunity to impose the latest progressive politics. As R. Shep Melnick observed in a 2018 ­survey: “Title IX initially focused on what happens in the classroom. That focus soon shifted to the playing field, then shifted again to bedrooms and bathrooms.” Title IX is now an instrument of “the much more ambitious project of changing the way we think about sex differences, gender roles, and sexuality in general.” And this ambitious project does not rely on persuasion. Dear Colleague letters and other mechanisms of bureaucratic maneuvering create a lawless system of coercion that tramples the basic rights of individuals and punishes dissent.

Some observers hope that the courts will rein in the excesses of Title IX. In the 2021–22 term, the Supreme Court determined that the Environmental Protection Agency had overstepped its bounds and unlawfully made policy in place of Congress with its Clean Power Plan, which was not authorized by the Clean Air Act. Perhaps the Court will restrain other government agencies such as the Education Department as well. But there are grounds for skepticism.

The Supreme Court’s most definitive word on Title IX was in the 1999 case of Davis v. Monroe, which the DeVos team often cited in its comparatively sensible definition of sexual harassment. The case involved a fifth-grade girl in Georgia, LaShonda Davis, who for six months was ­taunted by a male classmate with comments such as “I want to feel your boobs.” This classmate also accosted LaShonda in gym class and rubbed his body against hers in a school hallway. LaShonda complained to the school, but action was not immediately taken. Eventually, the male student was charged with and pleaded guilty to sexual battery. In the interim, LaShonda’s grades had suffered, and she had stopped going to school. Her mother sued the school for failing to ensure LaShonda’s access to education, citing sex discrimination in violation of Title IX as the cause.

The majority opinion insisted that harmful conduct could give rise to a Title IX violation ­only if it were “so severe, pervasive and objectively offensive” that it denied access to education. In this way, the Court kept the focus of Title IX on educational access, and sought to ensure that Title IX would not become a broad invitation for students to sue over misunderstandings (occasional off-color language or jokes, for example) or one-time actions. Notably, the Court shut the door on subjective offense by insisting that the conduct be “objectively offensive.”

This restrained understanding of the ambit of Title IX is admirable. But the Davis opinion also authorized student lawsuits against schools for Title IX violations, including in cases of ­student-on-student conduct, not just for conduct by a school employee. These lawsuits can also seek damage awards. This means that, under ­Title IX, educational institutions are answerable both to the federal government and to potential ­complainants—though many observers claim that the former influences Title IX practice more. In recent years, most lawsuits against schools have been filed by victims of the Title IX regime, not by its advocates. Those victims are often male students wrongly accused under Title IX and then wrongly branded as sex offenders because of due process violations.Disturbingly, schools have not been deterred by these lawsuits. They appear to regard them as the price of advancing their ideology.

As the actions of the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations make clear, federal bureaucrats have flouted Supreme Court precedent with expansive redefinitions beyond what Davis allows—including, now, redefinitions of “sex” itself. The activity of the Office for Civil Rights, whether in “guidance” or in proposed regulations or in its general oversight of Title IX, will be very difficult to rein in. For this reason, we must not put our trust in jurists.

There is a further barrier to any courtroom strategy for rolling back Title IX excesses. Under Lhamon’s leadership, OCR changed its approach to investigating claims of Title IX ­violations. In the past, it had made public statements only after completing its investigations. Lhamon inaugurated a policy of publicizing the names of all schools under investigation, some of which remained so for years. This policy has changed the incentives: Schools now need not only to avoid ­violations, but to avoid being investigated in the first place. Not surprisingly, they have hired more Title IX coordinators and adopted extremely stringent policies, which often echo the ideological agendas of the federal bureaucracy and of activist feminist organizations.

The Office for Civil Rights has also expanded the scope of Title IX investigations. Lhamon explained that the office would treat complaints filed by individuals as opportunities “for a broader assessment of a school’s overall compliance.” The possibility of a single violation in one area occasioned wholesale revisions of school policies. In this way, Title IX offices were able to mandate ideological faculty training and student programs. What’s more, many OCR investigations ended in settlements, one key element of which was the creation of large Title IX compliance offices. As Melnick notes, “It has not been ­unusual for schools to demonstrate their good faith by hiring former OCR lawyers to run them.” And so a revolving door allows feminist bureaucrats to migrate from government to campus and back again.

A change in administration can bring relief. The DeVos team did a good job of rebalancing requirements toward a more sane understanding of sexual harassment. But, as the Biden administration now shows, such gains can be reversed. More significantly, the entrenchment of ideologues in university administrations, and their empowerment by the tangled web of judicial precedents, administrative lawmaking, and private lawsuits, cannot easily be undone by Supreme Court decisions.

Today, the most extreme cultural ideologues have access to legal and quasi-legal instruments to impose their views on the educational establishment. Title IX coordinators function as veritable commissars. Star Chamber proceedings make a mockery of basic rights. The only way to dismantle this perversion of justice and debasement of our educational institutions is to repeal Title IX.

This measure will sound extreme to ­many. Must we sacrifice the great good of ensuring women’s equal access to education in order to prevent these abuses? The answer is no. That’s because Title IX is no longer needed to ensure educational opportunity, free of sex discrimination, for women—if it was ever needed in the first place.

The fact that Title IX quickly became about sports rather than education suggests that its ­ostensible original purpose was specious, or at least misleading.

As University of Michigan–Flint professor Mark ­Perry and others have documented, women have outnumbered men as undergraduates since the mid-1970s, arguably before the first Title IX cohort could have graduated. More importantly, the number of women in postsecondary education had been growing since 1947, the earliest year in government records on this point. In all likelihood, women became a majority in college in the 1970s because of a trend already underway, with Title IX having nothing or little to do with it.

Even if Title IX played a role in women’s full access to educational opportunities in the past, it is now redundant. Today, women represent nearly 60 percent of undergraduates. Women earn more PhDs than men do. More than 50 percent of medical and law school students are female. From its very first decade, Title IX has been a law in search of a purpose, which is why it has been such a ready tool for mischief.

Title IX’s more moderate defenders cite its success in promoting women’s sports. But it is far from clear that this success has been an unalloyed good. A study led by William Bowen indicates that female college athletes do more poorly in school than do female non-athletes. Data show that before ­Title IX, however, female athletes did just as well in college as non-athletes. Has Title IX given women the ­dubious honor of joining male athletes as an ­exploited class that is brought to campus to win games, in defiance of what is best for them as young people in need of an education? The problems are not ­only in university athletic departments. Young girls are fed into our society’s mania for sports and its delusional view that everyone should aim to be a major leaguer and Olympic medalist.

Perhaps these fifty years of mission drift were not accidental. Katharine Silbaugh suggests that feminists had long sought a law like Title IX as an end-run around prosecutors, while others saw it as a tool for social engineering to remake male-female relations—not just at work and at home, but in college romance. Silbaugh documents the feminist discontent with the standard of proof in cases of rape, where the “he said, she said” problem means that a tie goes to the accused, since the accused has the presumption of innocence. Absent other evidence, if a man says a woman consented to sex and the woman says she did not, the woman generally doesn’t prevail. Tradition handled this problem by cautioning against time alone for college couples in the evening and curbing visits in dorm rooms, with restrictions known as parietal rules. But because feminists endorsed sex-on-demand as part of the sexual revolution, their solution to this problem was to lower the burden of proof and discard the presumption of innocence—if not in the criminal justice system, then in the parallel system on campus called Title IX. People often wonder why and how the crime of sexual assault became a matter of civil rights under a nondiscrimination law like Title IX. One answer is that Title IX feminists wanted it that way.

Newcomers to these debates often assume that Title IX is necessary to discipline sexual misconduct. On the contrary, schools have always had the means to address sexual misconduct under their general conduct codes and through their disciplinary offices. There was no need to create a parallel disciplinary track, as the Title IX apparatus does. That apparatus answers to the demands of feminist social engineering—and, more recently, the LGBT agenda—not to the standards of decency that any institution ought to maintain when it comes to intimate relations.

Ironically, schools are now showing that they know how little they need Title IX. Samantha ­Harris is an attorney in private practice, with ­many Title IX cases. She reports that schools are now choosing to discipline students accused of sexual misconduct under their own student conduct codes, written in accord with the principles that informed the Obama Department of Education, rather than Title IX. They do so in order to evade the DeVos rule’s due process requirements. This is called the “dual track” phenomenon. When it comes to the purported “epidemic” of sexual ­violence on college campuses, the existence of two tracks proves the point: Title IX was never needed and isn’t needed now.

One last practical point must be made. The weaponization of Title IX is not just a top-down phenomenon by radical federal bureaucrats. Yes, Catherine Lhamon is an unapologetic feminist, happy to abuse Title IX for her political goals. But the problem is also on the ground, in the campus Title IX office. A 2020 National Association of Scholars Report on Title IX found that the overwhelming majority of Title IX staff have backgrounds in women’s studies, gender studies, and similar disciplines. They have virtually no legal experience with due process; sadly, this statement includes the staffers with law degrees. Only one of the fifty-five campus officials surveyed had courtroom experience of defending accused parties and therefore familiarity with due process as a real, and really needed, staple of adjudication.

Purdue University, for example, suspended a “John Doe” for a year after a suicidal female student claimed their sexual relations had been nonconsensual—even though she had neither written down nor filed a formal complaint against him, or shown up at the conduct hearing, where a feminist Title IX coordinator was both fact-finder and final judge. Doe was never allowed to see the charges against him, or to present exculpatory evidence, such as friendly text messages from his accuser after their encounters. He was found to be a sex offender, and in addition to his suspension lost his ROTC scholarship.

Columbia University’s Title IX coordinator similarly found a John Doe guilty of sexual assault and likewise suspended him for a year—having interviewed no witnesses, having found no evidence of coercion, and having ignored friendly contacts after the alleged misconduct.

Hundreds of similar stories have been aired in court, and the majority of federal circuits have not only chastised schools but lamented the campus culture that appears at war with the best of America—its legal practices and level playing field. Perhaps the strongest language comes from Judge José Cabranes in a Cornell University Title IX case decided this past spring: “The day is surely coming—and none too soon—when the United States Supreme Court will be able to assess the various university procedures that undermine the freedom and fairness of the academy in favor of the politics of grievance.” Sober and forceful as this language is, it falls short of what needs to be said (though perhaps not by a federal judge), namely this: Title IX must go.

A system is only as good as the people in it. And the Title IX system is run by ideologues, not professionals. Attempting to get fairness from them is a square-the-circle exercise. If some universities choose to keep their Star Chamber procedures and woke commissars, so be it. But we must eradicate the legal structure that compels them to do so. That means repealing Title IX.

Though Americans support equal opportunity and therefore have supported Title IX in principle, the original necessity for the law is dubious and its record of mischief—even misery—undeniable. Voters were not consulted when Title IX started to address sports, then sex crimes, then student dating, then due process. The history of Title IX has been a signal instance of culture warring by means of bureaucratic power, masked by the prestige of the civil rights movement.

It’s time to talk about repealing Title IX and the feminist-industrial complex it has spawned.

The post Repeal Title IX appeared first on First Things.

When T. S. Eliot gave a lecture on “The Frontiers of Criticism” on April 30, 1956, in the Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota—the largest basketball arena in America at the time—­nearly fourteen thousand people showed up. A front-page column for the Minneapolis Morning Tribune reported that requests for tickets “had come throughout Minnesota, from all adjacent states and from as far away as Montana, Nebraska and three Canadian provinces.” The entire text of Eliot’s lecture was printed in the paper the following day, and a recording was broadcast that evening on KUOM. Eliot told the ­audience “that I have never before in my life seen so many people facing my direction—for the moment, at least.”

Eliot had won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1948, but unlike other winners, he was by that time already a global phenomenon. When he traveled to the United States in 1932—his first visit since leaving the country in 1914—to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, Paul Elmer More had called him “the most distinguished man of letters today in the English-­speaking world.” Wallace Fowlie remembered that students at Harvard would follow him around campus “to see where he walked, where he ate, what he ate. If he went into the Coop, what did he buy?” When Eliot traveled to his hometown of St. ­Louis to give a lecture at Washington University shortly after Christmas, he thought he would be speaking only to the English department. Instead, nine hundred people showed up. Before returning to England, he delivered the Turnbull Lectures at Johns Hopkins and the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, and accepted an honorary doctorate from Columbia.

In retrospect, it is somewhat surprising that the shy and formal ­Eliot, who had neither the ­charisma of Hermann Hesse (who won the Nobel in 1946) nor the passion of François Mauriac (who won the ­Nobel in 1952 and produced far more cultural commentary than Eliot did) would become not only “a symbol. . . of the significance of poetry,” as he told the Swedish Academy in 1948, but a symbol of culture itself. How did Eliot come to be regarded as the greatest living man of letters during his lifetime? Why is he now regarded as merely a symbol of the past? And what is his importance today, almost sixty years after his death?

Robert Crawford’s excellent Eliot After ʻThe Waste Land,ʼ the second and final volume of his biography of the poet, provides a few answers. Crawford’s goal in Eliot After ʻThe Waste Landʼ is the same as it was in Young Eliot: to “humanize” the poet. He calls Eliot “Tom” throughout and writes about his boyish predilection for practical jokes. (Eliot once set off fireworks at a tea party and gave guests chocolate mixed with soap.) “Tom” was devoted to his mother, loved risqué verse, and enjoyed dressing up. (On a cruise to Cape Town, “he attended the ship’s fancy dress party as ­Sherlock Holmes.”)

Eliot also loved boozy lunches and hard-drinking evenings with his Criterion colleagues. He downed “no less than five gins” at a lunch with Aldous Huxley, drank half a bottle of Booth’s Gin after church (but before lunch) one Sunday while writing “Journey of the Magi,” and confessed to drinking all his host’s whiskey on a visit to Cambridge. His friends complained that he was often drunk. During his unhappy marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, Virginia Woolf told her sister that she had come to dislike visiting ­Eliot and Vivien, in part because Eliot “will, no doubt, be sick in the back room” and “we shall all feel ashamed of our species.” He had a temper and could be cruel to those he disliked. Lady Ottoline Morrell, who funded Eliot’s Criterion ­magazine for several years, told an American visitor that he was “1/8 devil.”

To many, he was a tragic figure, who spent his days either caring for a wife who suffered from paranoia and bouts of inexplicable illness or holed up in his office at the bank or at Faber & Faber. He had few close friends and hid the turmoil in his life behind a mask of formality. When Humbert Wolfe saw him in 1928, he remarked that he was “pale, cold and speaking slowly with his soft persuasive voice like a white kid glove.”

The Waste Land took the literary world by storm when it was published in late 1922. James Joyce’s Ulysses was also published in 1922, as was Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. The first English translations of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time were published in 1922. But The Waste Land, more than any of these, captured the feeling that the West was in crisis and that “everybody is in a hell of a fix,” as the poet John Peale Bishop put it.

The poem remains the cornerstone of Eliot’s literary reputation, but Crawford argues convincingly that Eliot’s religious verse play Murder in the Cathedral, about the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, was almost as important. First performed in 1935, it showed that Eliot was capable of writing in a completely different tenor, and it was an enormous success, running in London until early 1938 and performed shortly afterward in New York and Dublin. A 1945 French translation ran for 150 performances, making Eliot all the rage in France. With the play’s success, Crawford writes, Eliot “achieved what no other English-speaking ­poet has ever ­managed: having become recognized as arguably the leading poet of his era, he gained almost immediate international success as a popular dramatist.”

The mid-century West was infatuated with artistic celebrity. Marc Chagall was commissioned to provide canvases for Lincoln Center, New York’s gleaming monument to high art. To intone Picasso’s name was to evoke artistic genius. ­Leonard Bernstein hosted popular TV performances and composed the Broadway hit West Side Story. Ernest Hemingway was among the most famous Americans of his generation, on a par with movie stars. Eliot was part of this larger phenomenon. In the popular mind, he represented the summit of poetic achievement.

His religious conversion in 1927 “shocked” Virginia Woolf. She wrote to her sister that he “may be called dead to us all from this day forward. . . . I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.” But for others, it added to his aura. I. A. Richards remembers Eliot visiting Cambridge at the time carrying “a large new, and to us awe-inspiring, Prayer Book.”

Christianity also gave Eliot what he had longed for since at least his first years in England: hope, order (he received Communion three times a week), meaning in suffering, and a foundation for art. He told a friend that “only Christianity helps reconcile me to life, which is otherwise disgusting,” and he began to express in his lectures and his increasingly frequent BBC broadcasts that there could be no civilization without religious belief. With a self-­assurance inherited from a long line of ­influential (and very religious) ­Eliots, he wrote authoritatively on the need for Europe to return to a Christian order in The Idea of a Christian Society. This book was published in 1939, at the same time as Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Unpopular as it was with some of his friends, Idea struck a chord. As Hitler’s armies conquered Europe, thinking people in the West wanted to know what had gone wrong. Eliot had an answer: Germany, like the rest of Europe, had given itself over to atheist materialism. The humanism of the West rests on Christian foundations, and the only way to regain a culture oriented to “virtue and well-being in community” is to return to “a Christian organization of society.” Idea sold more rapidly than Cats.

Four Quartets, published in the United States in 1943 and England in 1944, was a commercial and critical success, and solidified Eliot’s position as one of the best living poets, if not the best, even if it would be his last work of serious poetry. It can be read as a response to The Waste Land in which Eliot turns from the empty movement of desire to a love that redeems time and space through suffering. “Love is itself unmoving,” Eliot writes, “Only the cause and end of movement.” Four Quartets is one of the few modern masterpieces—painted on a large canvas—that risks a holistic and essentially redemptive vision of life.

Still, Eliot might not have become what he was—the embodiment of culture itself—if he had not had the good luck to be hired by Geoffrey Faber in 1925 as an editorial director of his publishing firm. At Faber, which also financed his Criterion magazine, Eliot slowly developed one of the best poetry lists in the English language, publishing W. H. Auden, Stephen ­Spender, ­Louis MacNeice, Ezra Pound, and many others. He was “a staunchly reliable colleague,” Crawford writes, and took a paternal interest in younger writers, to whom “he could seem intimidating, but also shrewdly and dutifully attentive.” “‘Come & lunch’ was his frequent suggestion,” and come and lunch many did—and not just younger writers, but a wide range of writers and intellectuals, from C. K. Ogden to Edwin Muir.

Eliot was dedicated, meticulous, and diplomatic—and he quickly came to be seen as a “canny metropolitan publisher” with an increasingly wide range of acquaintances and professional contacts. He managed his image carefully through his letters and public appearances. His lectures took on an increasingly authoritative tone, but his position as one of the leading publishers of modern literature, combined with the ­influence of his own poetry and the mass appeal of his verse dramas, made, Crawford writes, “his eminence . . . ­unassailable.”

Soon he was in demand across Europe. The British Council sent him to Sweden in 1942 for a five-week tour on which he was swarmed by writers, journalists, and publishers. Honorary doctorates and prestigious invitations rained down on him. He became a member of Rome’s Accademia dei Lincei in late 1947 and the Légion d’honneur in the summer of 1948. When he learned that he had won the Nobel Prize in late 1948, he complained to Marianne Moore that his travel plans had been “completely disarranged by this misfortune.”

When he died in 1965, he was feted around the world—but his star had already begun to fall. Why?

One reason is that there was no place for him to go but down, and younger poets, anxious to free themselves of Eliot’s influence, were quick to minimize his accomplishment. In a talk at New York’s The Club in 1952, Frank O’Hara criticized Richard Wilbur for writing poems “based on . . . the dross of such important writers as T. S. Eliot.” In 1956, ­Kenneth Koch wrote in “Fresh Air”: “Is Eliot a great poet? no one knows.”

There is something about Eliot’s tone, too, that grates. The Waste Land seems too serious when compared to William Carlos Williams’s funning in Al Que Quiere! (“You exquisite chunk of mud / Kathleen—just like / any other chunk of mud!”) or Ezra Pound’s crazy-eyed ventriloquism in The Cantos. Eliot clears his throat for pages in his cultural ­criticism—carefully telling us what he won’t say, what he will say, and why what he will say needs to be said. Today’s readers want the flavor, and they want it now. His double-breasted suits on the beach, his faux-English accent, his pronouncements that popular authors “write for an illiterate and uncritical mob”—they all seem so elitist, bigoted, fake.

But his tone is not the real reason Eliot has fallen out of favor, at least as a thinker. We live in partisan times, and Eliot was not a partisan man. He was political, of course, but his politics (and aesthetics) have never followed party lines.

Given the choice between “the cooked” and “the raw”—fixity and flux, tradition and invention—Eliot chose both. He loved Dante and was a defender of D. H. Lawrence’s erotic novels. He tried twice to publish Joyce’s Ulysses at Faber, but the firm determined that the legal risks were too great. He was a medievalist and a modernist, who had a soft spot for vaudeville and hated what he called “the Surrealist racket.”

He was no fan of liberalism, which he defined as “a movement . . . away from, rather than towards, something definite,” which dissolved society “into individual constituents.” But he nevertheless argued that it was a “necessary negative element” of society. It goes wrong when it is “made to serve the purpose of a positive.” “We are always faced,” he writes, “both with the question ‘what must be destroyed?’ and with the question ‘what must be preserved?’”

Eliot matters today because he attempted to answer both questions. That is, he matters not only for his portrait of the animalistic loneliness of a secular society devoted to “unlimited industrialism,” as damning as that portrait is, but also (perhaps more so) for his attempt to articulate an opposing vision of life and art—one that is oriented toward virtue and beauty, community and order. He is a modern man with answers for modern men, and as ex cathedra as those answers might sound at times, they were rooted in a lifelong practical concern with building a culture that might sustain the religious and irreligious alike. This is the Eliot captured in Crawford’s Eliot After ʻThe Waste Land.ʼ

Because Crawford’s goal is to provide the definitive life of Eliot, this second volume of the biography can read a little like a list of prizes and publications. But it is, overall, engaging enough and scrupulously nuanced. Crawford is a sensitive reader of Eliot’s work, particularly when it comes to shorter and less discussed poems like “Marina,” and he provides a careful and useful account of the personal sources of the Four Quartets (as he did with The Waste Land in Young Eliot). One can hope that Eliot After ʻThe Waste Land,ʼ along with Young Eliot, will lead to a renewed interest in Eliot as a thinker and a poet. Old Possum ain’t dead yet.

The post Old Possum Ain’t Dead appeared first on First Things.

Our home life became miserable, ­gradually, and then all at once—our father’s worsening alcoholism, our mother’s cold fury, their no-holds-barred ­divorce—and as soon as I could go away to college I got out of Chicagoland and didn’t look back for seven years. Serious trouble began for Peter when he was nine and he and a friend were caught smoking marijuana in our front yard. By the time Peter was fourteen, he was flying into violent ­rages and had done time in the locked ward of the ­psychiatric wing at a suburban Chicago hospital, where our mother was an anesthesiologist. When he was fifteen, he stole our mother’s car and drove south, skidding in a snowstorm into the “Welcome to Tennessee” sign on the interstate. Two tires blew in the accident, and kindly but clueless state troopers took him to get replacements, reminding him as they sent him on his way to tell his mom about the sign he took out, which would have to be paid for. Peter drove on into Georgia, where more prudent law enforcement put an end to his escapade. Our mother flew to Atlanta to retrieve him and her car. The conversation on the drive home should have had a John Cheever to record it.

Nothing could have brought me back except the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Our parents and my brother were happy to see me back in town, and they hoped that my presence might restore our family harmony.

We did try. Peter was off to college in the fall of 1978, just as I was starting out in the Committee. Largely at my urging he went to the University of California–Santa Cruz, a beautiful place far from the chaos of home, with a reputation for easygoing academic semi-­seriousness and tolerance for renegades. I flew out to San Francisco and saw him off at the bus for Santa Cruz, where he was chatting up a pretty girl with the loveliest blue eyes I have ever seen. It seemed an auspicious beginning. Three months later I flew out again to collect him from the Santa Cruz ­County Hospital. He had propelled himself into florid psychosis by taking LSD, just about the stupidest thing he could have done.

The official onset of Peter’s schizophrenia had come when he was fifteen or sixteen, rather than in the more customary early twenties. The diagnosis was later amended to schizoaffective disorder, the double whammy of schizophrenia plus manic-­depressive illness—the direst cognitive disease, with its soul-stealing hallucinations and delusions, and the most lethal mood affliction, with its aeronaut flights and sepulchral darkness. Treatment was catch-as-catch-can: antipsychotic medications, which might not work and would likely produce side effects (from cotton mouth to weight gain to persistent fatigue to impotence to disfiguring spasms); lithium or valproic acid or antidepressants to tame the moods; electroconvulsive therapy for the most extreme eventualities. Peter would get some of this and some of that, stop taking his medication when he was feeling better, and go into a tailspin. He hated his illness, hated the treatments, hated our sister, hated our father, and loathed our mother in particular. He was too afraid of God to hate him but freely hated the Catholic Church in which we had been raised.

Meanwhile, our father was going to pieces. An anesthesiologist like our mother, in his thirties he had been a tenured professor at Northwestern University Medical School. Now he bounced around from one hospital to another, one rehab clinic to another, an embarrassment to his colleagues and a menace to his patients. In October 1982, on the eve of my brother’s twenty-first birthday, our father was drunk and choked on a piece of leftover ribeye he had grabbed out of the refrigerator. Death was instantaneous: Some simple reflex mechanism stopped his heart. He was sixty years old. Peter was right there when it happened.

There ensued episodes of spectacular psychosis on religious themes. Of all the books in the Bible, Revelation lends itself most readily to the waking nightmares of the severely mentally ill. I remember Peter standing and reading aloud from our mother’s heirloom Douay Bible, his left hand raised like a minatory prophet’s, his right hand moving down the page as he declaimed at an auctioneer’s pace and a drill sergeant’s volume about the beast from the bottomless pit and the war in heaven. Voices told him that he was a “great sinner” who was paying the price for his misdeeds and was probably already damned.

To relieve his self-hatred, he redirected his rage toward our mother, whom he pronounced “schizophrenogenic” in the psychiatric palaver of the time. Thus, psychiatry enhanced a sick soul’s torture, not to mention the pain our mother endured in listening to the animadversions of her medical colleagues. Years later, after such notions were discredited, Peter continued to swear by them, never wavering in his vindictiveness and scorn for the person who professed to love him no matter what but who he knew was the real cause of his suffering.

A year after our father’s death, Peter became the father of twin boys, whom he never helped to raise; his girlfriend departed for a lesbian attachment in short order. He moved to Kalamazoo with another girlfriend and studied for a couple years at Western Michigan University but never graduated. Although he had never been any sort of athlete, he tried out for the Division I football team, but fortunately was cut before the hitting started. Never, never, never: One notices a theme developing, of failure to live. He and the girlfriend plotted an exercise in practical diabolism, modeled on a Highsmith novel and a Hitchcock movie, whereby he would murder her father and she would murder his mother, and both would get away with their crimes and inherit enough to begin a new life offshore. It’s a good thing schizophrenics find it famously difficult to realize their most ambitious ideas.

Mercifully, the sociopath girlfriend vanished from the scene, and around 1988 Peter met a slender brunette with a crackerjack mathematician’s mind, an energy analyst for a boutique investment firm, who loved him as he had always longed to be loved. He seized the chance as a drowning man does an outstretched hand. For a long time, he and his girlfriend and the daughter they had were ­happy.

On returning to Chicago in 1978, I floundered a long while. The family was counting on my presence to heal my father’s and brother’s broken souls. I knocked myself out for both of them, and their self-destructiveness seemed sheer, unforgivable perversity. Meanwhile, the euphemism exhaustion, code for depression, fit my case perfectly: When I started sleeping twelve hours a day, I told myself that I was just worn out, and my body would right itself in time. Seeking medical attention was the last thing on my mind; I wasn’t sick like they were. My schoolwork ­suffered—I looked to be a perpetual student in the worst sense, a loafer with no way up and out—as my main job became familial savior. I turned resentful and bitter.

Eventually my body righted itself, and things started falling into place. I aced the long delayed five-day exam for my master’s degree; I went to Berlin, and my long essay about being a tourist there was published in Commentary, leading to further work in intellectual journalism. I took up singing in 1985, and it turned out I had a large, handsome bass-baritone voice with basso profundo low notes; five years later, after serious effort, I was a rising star on the local opera and light opera circuit, nearly ready to pursue a career in music. My doctoral dissertation on Winston Churchill as historian was three or four months from completion in early 1990, and I was in love—happily, unhappily, too soon to tell—but savoring every moment I had with her. My life was sweet and my prospects were golden.

In February 1990, the American Spectator sent me to Lithuania to write about the revolution there that would end Soviet rule. I roamed all over ­Vilnius, whose architectural glories were being renovated in preparation for the cultural renaissance that freedom would surely bring. I interviewed leading intellectuals and prominent political men, including the diffident pianist and musicologist who would be elected president on my last day in town.

Perceiving and circumventing KGB harassment was part of the job. When I called up a militant dissident who had recently returned from the Gulag, the phone went dead. As I walked in the center of town, a man passing said, “You aren’t in Sweden now.” A crew of Polish construction workers occupying the room across the hall piled wooden scraps at my door, and one night they gathered in the hall and shouted, in drunken pidgin Lithuanian, “We’ll leave him bloody.” My airline ticket home was taken from my hotel room. Some of these events might have had nothing to do with secret-police surveillance, but they all contributed to the paranoid flavor of the place, and to the confidence that in Lithuania, paranoiacs have real enemies.

One night, at exactly 3 a.m., I awoke to a thought, which I spoke aloud: “They’re not going to let me out.” That morning I heard the maid say outside my door, “He’ll never again see the outside world.” Later in the day I was writing postcards to family and friends, when out of nowhere the certainty seized me that in an earlier life, I had been a young Lithuanian man during the Second World War. My Uncle Vitas, a former spy, had told me about this young man: Occupying Soviet authorities had murdered his parents under orders from a Jewish commissar. After the Germans drove the Soviets out of Lithuania, the youth sought revenge by joining a police auxiliary unit that collaborated with the Nazis and specialized in murdering Jews. When the Red Army drove the ­Nazis out, the young man was sent to the death camps of Kolyma and perished. I had never put any stock in the idea of reincarnation, had no memories of any previous life, and thought the whole business suitable for dupes; but I knew now that I had been vouchsafed the truth.

Then a voice from the next room said in English, “Since he thinks he’s a Jew, we’ll treat him like a Jew.” And the blackest bass voice I had ever heard began to intone a Hebrew dirge. The song went on for several minutes. I had never heard anything like it before and have never heard its like since. I fell trembling to my knees and knew my soul was done for. It did not occur to me that I had been drugged or gaslighted or that I was losing my mind; I was certain that the most profound mystery of my being had been disclosed. Any inconsistencies in the revelation did not concern me. I had been visited by the uncanny. No doubt about it. None.

I feared that the rest of my life would be punishment for unforgivable wickedness—if indeed I was still alive. Maybe I was already in hell or was being detained in the antechamber. The sickness unto death, as Kierkegaard called despair, infected my mind and my heart. I felt the horror course through blood and bone. My body knew.

Yet despondency and terror could not quite extinguish my hope of forgiveness. Perhaps my revelation was meant to change my life for the better. Perhaps I was in purgatory, with a chance for atonement. The God of Rescue might yet appear like the cavalry, just ahead of the scalping party. But I really feared the scalping party. I believed that at any moment the full calamity of my condition might emerge, the people passing in the street cast off their masks and show themselves pure demon, to haul me off for an eternity of scourging or impalement or slow roasting. I prayed harder than I had ever prayed before.

For years, I had indulged in a slipshod and self-absorbed spiritual life, modeled on the quasi-­miraculous egotism of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels, hoping the Powers, whoever or whatever they were, would guide me to success in work and happiness in love. Now I was more self-obsessed than ever, but prayed only that I might escape damnation. If the earth were to swallow me up and my soul be obliterated, that would be fine—anything not to feel the pains of hell. Never to have been born was the impossible ideal. Every day I went to Aušros vartai, the Gates of Dawn, the only city gate still standing, a sixteenth-century masterwork that contained the Chapel of Our Lady, Mother of Mercy, with a beautiful Black Madonna. Several people were always praying there, some saying the Rosary aloud, reminding me of the first prayers I ever learned, in Lithuanian, as a boy. Here was a sanctuary from the forces bent on destroying me. I always left with some trepidation.

Portents abound when you’re in the right mood. During an interview I conducted with a leading communist politician mediated by a journalist of the official Soviet press, every statement either of them made seemed a double entendre predicting my imminent arrest by the KGB, whom they doubtless served as operatives or informers. Afterward, in the street, I almost ran into a ten-year-old kid who had the misdemeanor-demeanor of a ­Dickensian street urchin. He looked me in the eye, stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth, and made the rotary motion of forefinger to temple that means “­crazy” most everywhere you go. Then he was off. The paranoid mind sorted swiftly through the possibilities: Was he an employee of state ­security taunting one of its victims, or a child demon in training, or just a young punk who had noticed the obvious fact that I preferred not to admit to myself? None of the answers promised a brighter future.

Despite further signs ominous or bizarre, I made it home to Chicago and my Marquette Park bungalow, safe if less than sound. A couple days after my return, I went to dinner at the Hyde Park home of Saul Bellow. My excited description of a spiritually transfiguring but hair-raising pilgrimage, with its intimations of momentous insights yet to come into the nature of good and evil (I avoided mentioning my previous life murdering Jews), made Bellow realize that I was flying pretty high. What the Lithuanian punk had seen was plain to his practiced eye; he’d lost beloved friends to madness. He waited a day or two to advise me to speak with the student health psychiatrist, with whom he had arranged an appointment. He also suggested that I read Inferno, a memoir by the Swedish playwright and polymath August Strindberg. And he asked me to stay with him in his apartment for a few days; Marquette Park had begun its transformation from sedate working-class neighborhood to violent slum, and he rightly thought it uncongenial for me in my current condition. I thanked him but declined, told him I would eagerly read the Strindberg, and, after jousting with him about the need to bring ­psychiatry into this—I was an intrepid adventurer of the soul, scorning uncomprehending medical interlopers—gave in and said I’d see the doctor.

The psychiatrist wanted me to check into the university hospital psych ward. I said fat chance, politely. I read Inferno—ostensibly Strindberg’s account of his plunge into demon-populated schizophrenia—as in fact the story of his torments at the hands of actual demons, whose noxious power he dispelled by returning to the faith of his ancestors. Voices told me that I, too, was in the demonic universe, so I figured, what the hell, and started going to church again. My demons, however, only intensified their attacks.

About a month later I was in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the home of my Uncle Vitas and Aunt Colette, who I thought were privy to secret knowledge that could be my salvation. My strange behavior—crying jags alternating with truly insane laughter to shoo the devil away—led ­Colette to call a psychiatrist, who told her to call the police and tell them that I was trespassing. Given the ultimatum on the doorstep, thinking I was in some kind of mythic hero’s trial, I started back into the house and the police arrested me and took me to the Fairfax County Jail in Falls Church.

Jail was the worst place I could have been. I took the name of the town to signify that I had fallen from the normal world into the demonic universe, this place of darkness and punishment, where I was born again into the true Church of the new dispensation. The break between the old world and the new was sharp, brutal, and definitive. My mind was no longer my own. A voice from the corridor informed me that I was not a human being with a soul but a synchronized automaton. Sounded plausible to me.

A less ethereal voice came from a cell nearby: If I was still in jail by nightfall, I would be raped. It would be wise to fake a heart attack. My screaming fortissimo brought three or four guards and someone who may actually have been a doctor. He put a stethoscope to my chest and declared me healthy. The cell door was opened, and my neighbor yelled for me to run. I took a lunge toward freedom and the guards pinned my arms behind me and carried me to a larger cell, with no bed or sink or toilet. When the guards were gone, another voice helpfully advised that I kill myself, for if I didn’t, I would be crucified on the wall and locked in this room alone forever. I punched and kicked and butted my head against the heavy wooden door. When it became clear that my pounding would not do the trick, I started screaming at the guard standing just outside the door, “Kill me! Kill me!” He stood there impassively until I had finished, then shook his head, rather sadly it seemed, as he walked away.

I lay gasping on the floor and awaited the hammer and the nails. Occasionally a guard would look in through the little window in the door. No one brought food or water. I urinated in a corner. Hours later, another prisoner was brought in and promptly passed out on the floor. Evidently the guard who accompanied him saw I was in bad shape—my hands swollen into catcher’s mitts, my feet unfit for walking, my forehead bruised—and someone decided at last that I belonged in the hospital.

Because I again tried to run per demonic instruction, the hospital authorities sedated me, and when I woke up in bed my hands and feet were in restraints and a young policeman was stationed in a bedside chair. I didn’t mind; the treatment was better than I had been getting, and the policeman and I gabbed for a long time, mostly about the fishing trip we would take together when I was released. I was hatching big plans and ready to make friends with everyone.

My mother had flown in from Chicago, and she came to see me with my aunt and uncle. I tried to explain my situation: Unable to choose between the alternative lives the invisible Powers were offering me—to become a devout Roman Catholic and aspire to saintliness, or a Nietzschean Übermensch with the fortitude to live my earthly life joyously over and over ad infinitum in the eternal recurrence—I had failed every test and proven myself one of the lukewarm whom He shall spit from his mouth, a man without qualities, unworthy of any noble fate, consigned to the outer darkness. What I needed now was for someone wise to tell me how to escape my wretched mediocrity, or how to live with it, and above all how to avoid the flames of hell. The three family elders—the respected physician, the former Defense Intelligence Agency spy, and the daughter of a Vichy general—were unanimous in their baffled silence. Who could blame them?

After several days of bed rest, when I could walk again without stabbing pain, I was transferred to the psych ward. There the doctors concurred in the tentative diagnosis of bipolar psychotic mania. They prescribed a trial of lithium and Haldol, the aboriginal antipsychotic, which my ear caught as Helldull. The sulfurous taste of the demonic persisted. What I remember most vividly from the hospital is a pretty, thirteen-year-old girl who seemed always to be smiling. She walked on one-of-a-kind, green sponge-rubber shoes shaped like happy frogs. In the throes of psychosis, she had plunged her hands and forearms into a pot of boiling water and then dumped the water down her legs. I wondered what sort of God she prayed to. For me, the temptation was strong to embrace the nihilist outrage of Ivan Karamazov at the suffering of innocent children and to give back my entrance ticket to this unholy Creation. The thought of this little girl’s blighted life filled me with horror. Her suffering appeared more frightful than my own, which might be just punishment. Helldull did help relieve the demonic infestation, but it couldn’t dispose of the most trying theological question: How could a loving God do this, or allow this to be done, to his human creatures? The problem of evil does not long remain abstract when one falls among psychotics.

Saul Bellow called me in the hospital and said he was sorry about steering me toward Inferno: He had meant only to show me that psychosis can happen to anybody, even to a genius such as Strindberg. He said he had always been protective of me, having seen me struggle with the burdens of my family life, and he thought I would make it through this trouble, too. I got to know the best of Bellow, his uncommon kindness and generosity; but I’ve been unable to disentangle myself from Strindberg’s occult universe, which has become my second home, with its hallucinations and its master delusion, which intrudes upon my daylight world, announcing a darker but perhaps more glorious reality whose denizens we all are—not demons as in Christian belief but daemons like the being whose secret voice guided Socrates, half-human and half-divine, going about our lives in the immemorial familiar way, yet communicating telepathically with the living and the dead. This meets the textbook definition of madness, no doubt—­schizoaffective disorder in my case, the original manic-depression diagnosis having been revised when the trial of lithium failed and my hallucinations continued even when the mania abated.

In many ways I am a model patient, religiously compliant with doctors’ orders, and a ­psychiatric success story, a high-functioning schizophrenic and manic-depressive. I see a psychiatrist for a fifteen-minute session every two or three months, and I haven’t missed a dose of medication in thirty-two years. I somehow complete my work, even though hallucinations snipe at me as I read and write. Since falling ill I have finished and published my doctoral dissertation and written some 250 essays and reviews on literature, philosophy, history, art, architecture, music, and the history of science. After eleven years of not singing in public, I joined the Palm Beach Opera Chorus for two seasons and was chosen for the company’s resident artists’ program. I told no one there about my illness.

And yet, and yet: For several years early in my illness, the antipsychotic Prolixin, though gentler than Haldol, so weighed me down that it was all I could do to read and write for three hours a day, fighting off sleep all the while. The American Spectator cover story on Lithuania was not completed until four months after my return. Finishing the dissertation seemed such an impossible task that I laid it aside for eight years before daring to pick it up again. I had to turn down several singing gigs with Chicagoland and Wisconsin opera companies and symphony orchestras and gave up any hope of a solo career just as the possibility of success was drawing near. I had to decline the American ­Spectator’s offer of a position as writer in residence, which promised greater financial stability than I have since managed to achieve. And my vagrant moods have cost me much in business and friendship, as well as a chance at romance.

Moreover, as the doctors say, I lack insight into my illness. That is, I cannot quite believe that I am out of my mind, even when reasonable observers and my own common sense assure me that I am. My most intractable delusion is that I am not deluded. As I was finishing the last sentence, a chastising voice stated clearly, “You are not deluded; you are in the daemonic universe.” I wish I could absolutely disagree. Troubling as such interjections are, the most distressing symptoms have been physical assaults from the unseen: stinging and burning pains that can strike anywhere on my body and tend to coincide with unseemly or hostile thoughts of mine. Though doctors inform me that these are tactile hallucinations, it has been hard to understand them as anything but appointed punishment from a higher authority, like ­Caliban’s cramps and pinches. Fortunately, they have pretty well disappeared, after being commonplace for many years.

We have met the enemy and he is us. Sixties cartoon-strip wisdom is not usually incisive, but self-loathing and rage do indeed nourish psychosis. It took a long time for my demons to behave more like daemons. My mother took me in when I could not care for myself, and when she retired from medical practice, I moved with her to a suburb of West Palm Beach. The life I had enjoyed and the future I had worked for were gone. I came to hate God, in the name of my father, my brother, and above all myself, not daring to be demonstrative, just immersing myself in unreachable sullenness, like the despondent in Dante’s Hell. Then I spent the better part of three years writing an unpublishable novel, Bad as God. The title reflected the evil protagonist’s exalted opinion of himself, but it also enunciated an editorial ­sentiment: The God I knew was a bad dude.

I can’t remember how I decided to go back to church. Strindberg’s exhortation to return to the ancestral faith (but Catholic or pagan?) had failed to deliver the goods. A turn toward Goethe and his beloved classical Greeks was about as pagan as I got, and it did not move the demons an inch. Regular attendance at Mass imparted a momentum to my piety, and for two years and more I received Communion every morning. I took to reading the Bible intently—not a particularly Catholic thing to do—and wrote a couple pieces for Commentary about the Hebrew Bible, pronouncing the wisdom of Solomon and the author of the Book of Job superior to that of Goethe’s esteemed Socrates and Sophocles. It was in the New Testament that I found my best solace. Christ truly was my comforter and my refuge against confusion.

There were nights when I would fall to my knees for hours, trying to fend off the demonic visitation that the voices told me was imminent, hoping to pray hard enough to counteract the powers of darkness. Mine was a sick soul as William James describes it. I longed for healthy-mindedness. But just as you go to war with the army you have, so I prayed for mercy with the soul I was stuck with. The results were mixed.

For some ten years I went to church alone, my daily regimen eventually tapering to Sundays only. My mother would not join me. She, too, had her grievances against the Almighty: the loss of her homeland, the broken marriage and the broken children, her failing eyesight (she would be legally blind for the last sixteen years of her life). Yet I never heard her complain. Without ever having heard of Seneca or Epictetus, she was a natural Stoic. Then one Christmas she gave me a card on which she’d written, “You’ve sought Him. I’ll seek Him too.”

Her Stoicism gave way to a warm and enlivening love of Christ. My mother and I went to church together for several years, and then it was I who fell away. I went to confession one day, wildly crazed, and flummoxed the Vietnamese priest—a boat person, probably a saint—with my account of consorting with demons (conversing only, glad to say), after which I refused to utter another word, on demonic orders, lest the demon kill my mother. Father Peter recommended that I calm myself by going out to enjoy nature, which was particularly serene that Florida winter afternoon. It was fine advice, but wrong for my sick soul: I left feeling that the Church had nothing to offer me against the demonic onslaught. In due course, after Mass the disembodied voice of the pastor hectored me for my unworthiness and ordered me not to show my face in his church again until I had gotten my soul right. In weeks to come the voice became a regular feature of my spiritual life. I gave up going to Mass, and the voice stopped. Now it was my mother’s turn to cajole me, but I dug in my heels. I’d drop her off and pick her up, but I wouldn’t enter the church. Since then, whenever I feel the need for a Sunday Mass, I tune in to EWTN, and nobody has tried to chase me away.

Most of the time I can pass for normal, though I hear voices pretty much every day. Nowadays when I’m lucid, the notion that the voices are real strikes me as sheer stupidity. That’s the only word for it. Schizophrenia makes me dumb as a rock. Reasonable opinion is massed against my version of reality. Why can’t I recognize what is obvious to all? But then I don’t claim to have any special knowledge—rather I suspect that everyone else knows what I know but won’t admit it. Those are the rules of this elaborate daemonic charade.

Think it might be interesting to be lunatic in this way? Allan Bloom told me that as a young man he had wished he could go mad: What ­Romantic excitement, summoning Olympian gods like Hölderlin, ecstatic with song like Schumann! I held my tongue but thought he would have been sorely disappointed. Whatever might be said about the electric thrills of mania, on the whole madness makes for a sadly diminished life. It is tiresome to have to deal daily with a mind so cracked and soiled, especially if one has been trained in the refinements of the intellect and hoped to enjoy some of its best pleasures. I admire immensely, and not without sorrow, the philosophic ideal, the examined life founded on reason. Of course, there exist splendid alternatives: Pascal’s reasons of the heart (by which he means the soul) acknowledge the limitations of the very finest intellect. Yet mine is a sick soul. And so, with neither mind nor soul in order, there is no Zeus, and Whirl is King, to quote Socrates as Aristophanes imagined him. And the daemons, whatever they are, whoever we are, real, unreal, have the upper hand.

No one can fathom the crushing power of schizophrenia, the strength of its grip, unless it has had you by the throat. I did not appreciate my brother’s struggle until I went mad myself. However well the medication works, however well you negotiate everyday life, your mind is no longer your own. Darkness never leaves you.

My brother seemed to be one of the rare schizophrenics who could escape the shadow. He and Mary and Rachael had an enviable life together. Rachael did not know that her father suffered from schizophrenia until she was sixteen; to her he had always seemed a jolly eccentric. When they lived in Kingwood, Texas, the neighbors hailed Peter as the King of Kingwood. He slapped every back and tickled every funny bone, Texan as all get-out, the best good old boy there ever was.

When he returned with his family to Chicagoland, his contentment came undone. He became convinced that a woman he had known for a few weeks in a psych ward thirty years earlier was the love of his life, the only one who understood him. Peter had long reserved his contempt for our mother and me, certain that we were uncharitable, inhumane, hypocritical in our conservatism and Catholicism. Now he turned his vitriol on Mary and Rachael, and on himself. One day he gathered his daughter’s dolls, took them into the backyard, and set them on fire; asked to explain, he said he had burned the witches. He would tear down the highway at 110 miles an hour, once aiming the car, with Mary screaming beside him, straight at a concrete road divider in a construction zone, veering to safety only at the last moment. In three years he had three suicide attempts. One overdose after another of alcohol and medication rendered him comatose for days. More than once, doctors told him they thought he was done for this time. And each failed attempt left him more hateful than before, enraged that he had failed to die.

Our mother died at home with me and a hospice nurse beside her, around 11 p.m. on Christmas 2016, at the age of ninety-four. I called my sister, Donna, just before midnight. We observed that our mother, with her impeccable comic timing, had not passed up the chance to give us something to remember her by, on the supreme family holiday. We laughed and cried. It was a hard loss, but we both knew we would get over it without descending into bottomless ­melancholy.

Our mother had donated her body to a medical research outfit, and a pair of undertakers came at two in the morning, wrapped the corpse in a shroud with military snap and precision, and took it away. I stayed up till dawn, then crashed hard. Donna called Peter with the news toward noon. I did not speak with Peter till the evening. He said he was in the garage smoking pot, upset that Mary was not mourning our mother with sufficient vehemence; instead she was chatting with a cousin of hers about something entirely different. Peter never wanted for vehemence. He always carried on as though he felt the pain of living more intensely than anyone else, and perhaps he really did. But he failed to understand that for most people life is not an open wound that must be probed with maximum ferocity. I suggested he call it a night. He continued mourning as only he knew how, with Fireball whiskey and Xanax. The next morning Mary and Rachael found him dead on the floor. The medical examiner would rule it death by misadventure. Some family members had their own ideas.

Soon afterward, while thinking of Peter, I heard his voice cry out, “It was an accident! It was an accident!” He has not become a featured player, however, in my vaudeville of the dead. My mother has the leading role, and her loving, gentle advice has occasionally lent a cheerfulness to my schizophrenia, which customarily razes every hope to the ground. She also tells me—has told me again just now—that I’m not to mention my conversations with her: Daemonic protocol forbids. I am sane enough to disobey and write what I have just written, and crazy enough that I won’t say more about it.

It’s an odd life, straddling two worlds, either of which may seem unreal at a given moment. To suffer schizophrenia is to be born again, into a reality stranger and more excruciating than anything you could imagine while sane. But one can get used to almost anything, and still cherish one’s life, however it may hurt. I still know at times the living presence of a good and generous God who is mindful of my pain and wants me to overcome it. And in less agreeable times I rely on the pagan resolution of Goethe, who suggests avoiding the belief that you have been singled out by the gods for special attention: “Whatever comes to pass, [you] may consider that it happens to [you] as a man, and not as one specially fortunate or unfortunate.” That is some of the soundest advice I know for the soul condemned to be born again crucified.

The post My Madness appeared first on First Things.

The Abuse of Conscience:
A Century of Catholic Moral Theology
by matthew levering
eerdmans, 368 pages, $45

In the mid-1980s, the Catholic philosopher Elizabeth ­Anscombe drew up a syllabus of errors, which she delivered—rather appropriately—in Rome, to a group of moral theologians. Her syllabus consisted of twenty theses, commonly held by her fellow analytic philosophers, that she deemed “inimical to the Christian religion” and that could, she insisted, be shown “false on purely philosophical grounds.” They include:

—We are not members of a species, but “selves.”

—There are no absolute moral prohibitions.

—The laws of nature afford complete explanations of everything that happens.

Anscombe’s complete syllabus is comprehensive, comprising theses in metaphysics, psychology, ethics, semantics, and even natural theology. Nearly all of the theses pit nature—conceived as formless, and thus empty of objective meaning or purpose—against reason. Of course, this error is not unique to the analytic school, nor to the discipline of philosophy. It is simply the conceptual world we’ve ­inherited—the ideological air we breathe.

As a graduate student, I had ­Anscombe’s syllabus tacked on my office wall for two reasons: first, to remind myself why I was so invested in recondite, abstract questions about reasons and causes; second, to avoid falling into error myself. For error is the default when the vast majority of philosophers (including a great many self-described “Aristotelians” or “Thomists”) cannot adequately account for the fact that we are rational animals: creatures whose material form of life is shot through with norms that place definite and necessary limits on the imaginative possibilities for authentic human flourishing. The self-conception that pervades contemporary moral philosophy is that of the autonomous self whose freedom consists of the introduction of form into a natural world that is bereft of it. Anscombe clearly believes this is a false image of man, and much of her work sets out to attack it from different angles. Ultimately, the problem is metaphysical, which is why, in her most influential essay, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” she asks her readers to stop doing moral philosophy altogether until we have a metaphysically respectable account of human nature.

Anscombe was Wittgenstein’s most famous student as well as his literary executor. (She learned German for the sole purpose of translating his late masterwork, Philosophical Investigations, which he believed she understood better than anyone else.) Her syllabus, and her failed attempt to issue a cease-and-­desist order for moral philosophy in the modern mode, kept coming to mind as I read David Goodill’s new book, Nature as Guide: Wittgenstein and the Renewal of Moral Theology. ­Goodill argues that Wittgenstein’s enduring legacy is the development of a form of philosophical realism that avoids pitting reason against nature. His main claim is that ­Wittgenstein’s philosophy helps us to overcome two central, animating dualisms of contemporary philosophy: that between reason and ­nature, and that between theory and practice.

One of the signal achievements of the book is Goodill’s demonstration that these two divisions are conceptually bound up and ­mutually reinforcing. Despite an extensive concern with ­Wittgenstein’s philosophy, the book’s thesis is ­ultimately theological. For Goodill, Wittgenstein is important insofar as the philosophical integration of reason and nature is necessary to the operations of moral theology, the principal goal of which is to provide an account of how human nature is healed, elevated, and perfected by God’s grace.

Readers may be skeptical that Wittgenstein is the philosopher who will help us overcome the ­ideologies of modernity. After all, on the standard reading, ­Wittgenstein is a quintessentially anti-­metaphysical thinker, resolutely uninterested in finding ultimate, metaphysical foundations for our beliefs and practices. But this reading is out of joint with Anscombe’s understanding of Wittgenstein; she very clearly believed that his use of “grammatical investigation” was closer to Aristotelian metaphysics than to anything in contemporary linguistics. This closeness to ­Aristotle is revealed in Wittgenstein’s claim that “essence is expressed by grammar.” We need to pay careful attention to the use of words if we want to know the essences of things, including the essence of the human.

Goodill’s own presentation of Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation is bound up with his account of ­Wittgenstein’s dialectical method: the bringing to bear of opposing perspectives on a question in order to arrive at a proper starting point for inquiry. Philosophy, in this view, is less about finding specific solutions, and more about formulating better questions. Many of our philosophical assumptions turn out to be based on grammatical confusions, and proper ­dialectics brings this fact into sharp relief.

Taking dialectics seriously, ­Goodill argues, leads us to rethink the nature of metaphysical inquiry altogether. Metaphysics is not the project of constructing static systems of reality; rather, it is a lived praxis whose defining aim is wisdom. Wittgensteinian dialectics, Goodill argues, “arises out of our everyday forms of reasoning and involves the exchange of differing points of view” for the sake of unmasking false opinions and establishing the starting points of inquiry. In the Philosophical Investigations, for example, it is clear that Wittgenstein is not advancing any particular thesis, but using opposing voices in order to overcome philosophical illusions and see reality more clearly. Goodill argues that Wittgensteinian dialectics helps to expose the modern picture of the will—as autonomous and sovereign over nature—as radically out of step with the underlying grammar of our practices.

To some ears, this emphasis on praxis may sound like the opposite of metaphysical realism. Practices, prima facie, are conventions, which may or may not track nature appropriately.Consider, for example, how much the “language game” of gender has changed in the last one hundred years, especially in the last decade. Many people take gender talk to be a game whose rules are up for constant revision. How can we distinguish between good and bad human practices, between language games that capture reality and those that distort it?

I don’t think Goodill has a compelling answer, though central to his reading of ­Wittgenstein is the idea that our practices are not mere conventions, nor can grammar be invented at will. Goodill demonstrates this point convincingly when he turns to explain human action. He argues that Wittgenstein’s treatments of intentionality, interiority, training, and rule-following reveal the ­exercise of reason and freedom to be embedded in our practices in such a way that human agency cannot be reduced to a causal mechanism and remain recognizably human. But it is unclear to me that we can shift so easily from this analysis of action to sweeping claims about practices generally. As Anscombe noted, some essences are products of human ­intelligence.

Despite his emphasis on it, Goodill is attuned to the limits of Wittgenstein’s value for moral theologians. Though Wittgenstein can help us clear the ground for an account of the metaphysics of nature, that account will need to arise from sustained reflection on ­Aquinas. The Wittgensteinian aspect of ­Goodill’s Wittgensteinian Thomism is about method more than content. ­Wittgenstein can help free us from the false picture of ourselves as rational minds set over and against nature, but that cannot get us all the way to an account of nature. And we need such an account.

It’s important, however, not to downplay method. Nature cannot be a guide apart from some form of realism. The whole edifice of natural law rests on the idea that the starting points of reason are given by nature, that we are naturally ordered and inclined to self-­transcendent norms of truth and goodness, and that authentic human freedom cannot be conceived apart from this natural ordination to a final end that both defines and ­evaluates our actions. The best pitch for Wittgensteinian dialectical realism, then, is that it can help us to achieve a vision of reality in which reason and nature are shown to be not opposed, but mutually illuminating.

Further evidence of the need for philosophical realism comes from Matthew ­Levering’s latest book, The Abuse of Conscience: A Century of Catholic Moral Theology. Though Levering is no Wittgensteinian, his project complements Goodill’s by showing, in painstaking detail, what happens to moral theology when nature, freedom, and reason are held to oppose each other in our account of the human person acting in nature. The result is that freedom is no longer meaningfully bound up with the pursuit of the good understood as a transcendent end, but is reduced to the activity of the authentic and autonomous self, and judgments of individual conscience begin to supplant judgments of right practical reason. Virtue, vice, and sin become sidelined topics, if they are taken seriously at all.

As Levering notes at the outset, conscience-centered moral ­theology has been with us since at least the sixteenth century, and perhaps the paradigmatic instance of it is the work of St. Alphonsus ­Liguori (1696–1787). Prior to Vatican II, moral theologians began mounting a critique of the conscience-centered manual tradition, with its emphasis on casuistry, law, and obligation, and favoring an approach that emphasized virtue and growth in charity. Post-­conciliar theology put conscience back at the center of morality, but with a quite different, more existentialist understanding of what conscience is and how it functions. The difference becomes plain when we review the philosophical sources many post-­conciliar theologians were drawing upon: existentialist philosophers such as Heidegger and Jaspers. In his most depressing chapter, on conscience and German thought, Levering traces a line from ­Heidegger’s emphasis on conscience as authenticity—the “summoning [of] Dasein to its ownmost potentiality of being-a-self”—through ­Jaspers’s account of conscience as “the deepest core of the self, choosing for or against Existenz” and ideally keeping us “faithful to the existential decision to be the self that our core self calls us to be,” to the moral theology of Karl Rahner, Josef Fuchs, and Bernard Häring. As the contemporary German Church continues on its “synodal way” toward explicit, public rejection of longstanding church teaching on sexual desire, chastity, marriage, and the family, understanding the theology that animates these developments becomes more important than ever. Levering’s detailed account of post-conciliar German moral theology is for this reason timely and important.

Karl Rahner, one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, labored mightily to reconfigure Catholic theology along existentialist lines, and many German theologians followed suit. Rahner’s account of freedom was grounded in a denatured, transcendental philosophical anthropology that emphasizes the particular over the universal, and self-actualizing freedom over the authority of norms common to all persons in virtue of their shared nature. It is clear that for Rahner, freedom must be understood apart from nature, and bound up with the “self”—an inner space of existential experience that cannot be encroached upon ­without subtracting from our responsibility to make ourselves what we are.

In addition to making conscience the center of the moral life, Rahner casts doubt on the possibility of arriving at and rightly applying universal moral norms grounded in human nature. Human nature changes, Rahner argues, so that norms that once were binding have lost their force. Discernment about these changes rests not primarily with the Church, but with “spirit filled believers” who will consult their own experience. Josef Fuchs goes even further than Rahner and puts forward a radical historicity of human nature, which flatly denies the existence of any universalizable norms that regulate right practical reasoning. For Fuchs, an act of rape or murder might be in accordance with Christian conscience, with “the inner core of the person” who experiences himself as “marked by the inner demand to realize the self” through free action. Though all of the German theologians Levering canvasses in this chapter concede that conscience can err, most of them don’t seem too worried about it. So long as the freedom and striving are done in good faith, authentically and autonomously, we needn’t trouble ourselves with the question of whether their deliverances are actually correct.

Of course we know where all of this led. Almost an entire generation of Catholics were told, when they asked whether they really had to refrain from sex outside of marriage, remain chaste after divorce, refrain from using contraception, or attend Mass every Sunday, to examine and follow their own consciences; nor were they given direction about how to make such an examination responsibly. Is it any surprise that, when ordinary and barely catechized people went on journeys to find their “authentic selves,” their consciences told them exactly what the secular culture was telling them on any given issue? At the end of the day, all the high-minded talk of “transcendental freedom” and authenticity simply bottomed out in ordinary Catholics’ following secular custom rather than the authoritative teachings of Jesus Christ, as articulated in Scripture and proclaimed by the magisterial authority of his Church.

If the existentialist account of conscience leads to empty confessionals and the synodal road to explicit dissent (and perhaps, inevitably, complete schism), what is the alternative? Levering’s answer can be found in his chapter on twentieth-century Thomists; here we find an account of conscience as an expression of human nature, and as such, bound by the natural law, which provides the measure of right practical reasoning: reasoning ordered to acting well. For Aquinas, conscience is not an inner, autonomous sphere of existential freedom in which one is answerable only to oneself. Conscience, as an act of practical reason, is good insofar as it reaches the truth about the good to be done, and it does this only insofar as it operates in light of prudence and the other virtues, which are necessary for living well generally. Since conscience, like any act of reason, can err, it remains a work of prudence to form our ­consciences properly so that error is rare and perhaps even excusable. Failure to do this is negligence of the highest order.

Conscience is also understood, like all acts of reason, to be teleologically ordered to the good. It operates from first principles that are given it by nature, principles that order it to the good so that, in cooperation with the exercise of prudence, it can reach the truth about what is good to do. This understanding of conscience is in keeping with Thomas’s Aristotelian anthropology, in which all the powers of the human soul operate for the sake of the natural and defining goal of human flourishing. Such a goal is not chosen by the self in its existential freedom but rather given by nature, and it is the necessary limit of our freedom to pursue what is objectively true, good, and beautiful. When we exercise our conscience well, we freely act in accordance with the natural law, which is the same as to obey God’s eternal law. In this account, freedom, reason, nature, obligation, and virtue are unified.

Levering does not merely tell the story of twentieth-­century Catholic moral theology; he attempts an intervention and correction. In the end, he sketches a path forward, one remarkably similar to that offered by Goodill: We need to arrive at a philosophical account of nature. Doing so would help us return conscience to its proper place—as part of an account of the moral life according to which we realize the full potential inherent in our human nature through the development of specific natural virtues, virtues that in turn must be taken up into the life of grace. In this account, conscience, though an important part of the life of virtue, by no means replaces it.

Both Levering and Goodill emphasize that theology must turn to philosophy to work out how to understand reality at the level of nature, and that how we understand freedom, reason, and nature at the level of philosophy will have profound implications for moral theology. And though Thomists naturally draw on Aristotle as a resource in philosophy, we cannot simply mine Aristotle and Aquinas for insights as if modernity had never happened. If we wish to defend natural law in a contemporary context, we must first heed Anscombe’s call to develop a proper philosophical ­psychology—that is, an account of the capacities that belong to the human person to use freely, and that must be shaped by a proper education if something like human flourishing is to be achieved. As Anscombe’s own efforts toward this end make clear, Wittgensteinian dialectical realism is one valid approach.

But whether that method is to be used or not, Goodill and ­Levering make clear that it is we philosophers who must first bridge the gap between reason and nature, in order to arrive at a proper account of freedom and responsibility in the moral life. If we can manage this, we will avoid nearly every heretical opinion on Anscombe’s syllabus of errors, opinions that have significant practical consequences once they make their way into Catholic moral theology and the life of the Church.

The post Get Real appeared first on First Things.

There is no settled standard for a “crime against humanity,” though most definitions share elements, one of which is coerced brutality and harm. In view of the fact that Canadian law concerns people who are clinically depressed, adolescents, and now infants, the “voluntary” aspect of “assisted” suicide is clearly illusory. “Extermination” seems an apt description.

How did we get to this dark place? One might imagine a long, step-by-step “creep,” but in fact that isn’t how it happened. It came as a converting onslaught. MAID was put in place shortly after a 2015 Supreme Court ruling said that state prohibition of assisted suicide violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Surveys indicate that in this brief period the Canadian public flipped from being largely against assisted suicide to being overwhelmingly for it. Current polls suggest that support for the legislation’s expanded reach hasn’t quite achieved majority support. But give it (a little) time.

There were warnings. Sober commentators noted that if we permit the terminally ill to get help killing themselves, we will next be permitting the less-than-terminally ill; the mentally anguished; teenagers; the disabled; children (or their guardians choosing death on their behalf). These concerns were dismissed as fearmongering. Those offering the warnings were derided as relying on the fallacy of “the slippery slope.” This is what reactionaries always argue, we were told: Open the door to one permission, and everything will automatically slide to a nadir of evil. The forces of repression have always ridden the fallacy of the slippery slope, we were told. They use it in their efforts to restrict voting rights, limit public education, and obstruct public healthcare. Ironically, when it comes to legal rights and freedoms, progressives and libertarians put the “fallacy” to work. They warn that any attempt to hem in a progressive achievement (abortion, sexual license) marks the first step in dismantling liberty across the board.

The slippery slope argument may be a logical fallacy, but it captures a sociological truth. As careful legal minds, behavioral economists, and other social scientists recognize, laws both prohibitive and permissive carry a social weight that moves public opinion, to which we need to add the fact that how laws are made—the context and social interactions involved—affects attitudes. In other words, laws etch channels of cultural expectation. This is called “path dependence” in the jargon of the trade. In no rational world are people’s behaviors and choices based solely on discrete facts.

Some slippery slopes are undeniable. Wars provide prime examples. Nations often slide into conflict rather than choosing it in a discrete moment. During conflicts, good people sometimes end up doing horrendous things. Once unleashed, violence has its own momentum. The same holds true in everyday life. More often than not, we are swept along by subtle yet powerful currents of unconscious expectation, permission, indulgence, and fear.

Christians need to take seriously the reality of well-greased slopes down which social and moral integrity can careen at a shockingly quickening pace. For slippery slopes are not just metaphors for how self-contained legal systems work and social expectations play upon the body politic. The image describes our very selves, caught in the downward-pulling reality of sin. Of all people, Christians should be alert to the threat of an engulfing extinguishment of life, fed by the many streams of our social deformations.

One of the earliest uses in English of the slippery slope was by the sixteenth-century poet Philip Sidney. He referred to the error into which “affection” can draw us. Sidney’s language relies on the central scriptural assertion that our hearts can lead us astray. Biblical slippery slopes are greased by temptation. Our desires are snared by an object, and bit by bit, or perhaps suddenly in a rush, we are enticed into consuming captivity. There are examples of implicit slippery slope arguments in Scripture—warnings against the allurements of the brothel in Proverbs 5:8 or, more extensively, calls to protect oneself from greed (see Luke 12:15). Small seeds of self-regard can grow into invasive plants, a “little leaven leavening the whole lump” (1 Cor. 5:6; Gal. 5:9). James describes the fatal downward slide in a classic form: “Each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death” (James 1:14–15).

Romans 1:18–32 outlines the great paradigm of the slippery slope. The descent begins with turning from God, whether by preferring something else to God or by failing to be thankful to God. The latter illuminates the Canadian slide toward criminal extermination of the most vulnerable. Suicide entails a final rejection of thanksgiving. Whether in the cause of Stoic honor, fear of suffering, or simple exhaustion, the voluntary ending of one’s life casts away the very thing upon which our thanksgiving to God is based: our createdness, our “being here.” “You have made me!” creation exults to God (as Augustine puts it). One cannot thank God by ending one’s life. “Do the dead praise you?” asks the Psalmist (Ps. 88:10). Disabled children and adults; emotionally tormented young people; physically and cognitively burdened individuals: They are no different from you and me in their capacity for thanks. Precisely in being experienced, even suffering is blessed by God, in some mysterious way.

Perhaps only Christians can understand this. Those for whom there is no God see a world that, if it is to be evaluated at all, will be measured only by its usefulness to this or that confected cause. Without a Creator, that which exists, including our own selves, is by default judged by us. This is the central moral claim of assisted suicide: We owe it to people to honor their judgment about whether it is better for them not to exist. Once a life’s usefulness is finished, then it is best to cast it off. And doing what is “better” takes on an obligatory character. Don’t we owe the useless the mercy of ending their lives? The mentally ill serve no purpose—away with them! Are there others who are useless to our schemes of meaning and purpose? Perhaps they should be done away with as well.

For Christians to evaluate human life that way would be blasphemy of the deepest kind, crucifying the Lord anew (Heb. 6:6). Canada’s regime of assisted suicide, which has now expanded to euthanasia, is a crime against humanity, yes; but it is even more a crime against God. Christians must resist and oppose such blasphemy, doing so with clarity of sight and bracing repentance for our tacit complicity at many stages. In so doing, however, we need to recognize that the shocking possibility of severely depressed teenagers being guided to their deaths by “caregivers” is but one example of a pattern that has taken our common culture in its grip on many fronts. The constructions of our own hearts are ever slipping, and as the rain descends, the floods come and the winds blow, the slope fast becomes a precipice, and the stumble becomes a descent—“and great is the fall of it” (Matt. 7:27).

The post Slippery Slopes appeared first on First Things.

Here it is, put bluntly: Americans voted the way they did because Americans have lost all hope.

Step back for a moment from the rat-a-tat of our hyperventilating news cycle and consider the last four decades stateside. What story would you tell about America if you had to sum up its recent history in a minute or less? If you’re thoughtful and honest, you’d probably point out some great achievements—the Civil Rights Act, say, or a more-or-less stable surge of economic virility. But then come the downers: declining birth rates; sagging life expectancy; universities turning into ideological consent factories; cultural institutions becoming propaganda production arms; big business melding seamlessly with the state to create a big, impenetrable blob that decides every aspect of life.

We’ve gone from morning in America to mourning in America in record time, in large part because our traditional sources of renewable spiritual energy—church, family, nation—have themselves been the targets of concentrated and clever campaigns run by political operatives for fun and for profit. Just look at the Black Lives Matter movement, which brought violence and unrest to American cities, advocated the dissolution of the nuclear family, and berated the nation as inherently evil—and which, for its efforts, earned a $50 billion pledge from multinational corporations without the inconvenience of transparency or accountability.

And while political operatives—mostly on the left but not exclusively so—spent the last forty-odd years stripping civic society of its emotional, social, and spiritual guardrails, they offered in return a paltry and toxic alternative: fealty to party. Increasingly, our political campaigns have less and less to do with clear and effective messaging, or good ground games, or clever segmentation and analysis of voter blocs and interest groups, or crisp communications, or any of the staples of political gamesmanship. Voting in America these days, as we all saw last November, has become a simple proposition: You walk in and support your tribe, even if it has chosen to nominate a cognitively impaired man, say, for Senate, and even if its commander in chief has presided over a disastrous economy, surging crime waves, and other terrible, no-good things.

How do we extricate ourselves from this sorry situation? This is where last November is ­instructive.

The answer, it should now be clear, isn’t to fret about elections. Sure, elections matter, and they have consequences, and no one living in a republic is at liberty to ignore or dismiss the electoral process. But these past midterms proved just how little effort elections require: Go ahead and nominate whoever you want. Trust your loyalists, divided right down the middle, to mutter their amens. Their affiliations as Democrats or Republicans have now replaced all deeper affinities and belief systems.

Instead, the answer to the question of where we go from here is wilder and eminently more cheerful. What we’re seeing now isn’t a political stalemate; it’s a ­spiritual crisis, and it may only be solved by spiritual means. How? This is where the faithful ride to the rescue.

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel; the wheel is already perfectly round and well-greased. All we have to do is learn from movements that have successfully cast off oppressive political realities and replaced them with something much more lively, soulful, and productive. My friend Srđa Popović, often credited as the architect of the Arab Spring and the man who nearly single-­handedly brought down Slobodan Milošević’s murderous regime, has spent his life studying how non-violent action can affect profound change, and his principles apply neatly to contemporary America, a nation in need of reawakening. Three of those principles in particular come to mind.

First, have a vision of tomorrow. Instead of griping about Biden and Trump and wasting our breath on this or that election, let’s show our morose and deflated brothers and sisters that what we offer isn’t just a ballot but a way of life. The America we’d refashion, if given the chance, isn’t a place where all elected officials pledge allegiance to the GOP. It’s a country where parents have a right and a responsibility to be active in the education of their children. It’s a nation where public servants see themselves as just that, servants of the public, rather than as impish czars who relish the power to regulate all aspects of human life, from shutting down schools to banning plastic bags. It’s a place where compassion trumps compensation, because everyone listened to the rabbis of the Talmud who taught us that we mustn’t look away when our streets are littered with the homeless and the hopeless. (On this point they emphatically agree with the rabbi Jesus.) The America we envision is a place of hope, where deaths of despair will be cured with the warmth of communal engagement and the strength of a belief in life’s higher purpose.

Such a vision is a start, but it isn’t enough. To win hearts and minds, we need to consider the second principle: unity. To win, it’s imperative that we realize that we aren’t the minority or even a slim majority in this country. It’s plain to see that it’s not 49 to 51 percent who want wholesome, normal lives. That aspiration is widespread. We are the overwhelming majority, even if some of our potential coalition partners strike us at the moment as standing on the other side of the partisan transom. The faithful Muslims in Michigan, for example, who are mobilizing against public school boards that bombard their children with sexually explicit content at a very young age, share our vision for tomorrow. So do gay and lesbian parents who are horrified by the new gospel of gender that erases their identities and ­experiences. So do Latino immigrants who came here legally to pursue the American Dream and are incensed to see their efforts ridiculed by secretive midnight transports of migrants into already struggling American regions for no reason other than cynical political calculations. Our goal should be to reach out to all who seek to make normal normal again. We must learn to overcome our considerable differences and focus on our crucial commonalities at this critical juncture.

To forge unity, we need the third and key principle of action: Make it rock. No movement worth its salt ever got off the ground by dourly debating facts and figures, or by sourly accusing its enemies of all sorts of malice. To win, we need to capture the joyous and ebullient and generative energy we so often feel in our houses of worship and around the dinner table with our loved ones. We need to invite our neighbors to join us, not in a culture war but in a church choir concert. The fact is plain: Fun trumps fear every time. Forget politics. Invite your neighbors over for a leisurely dinner, show them your loving and welcoming home and family, and you’ll soon note that their transformation had already begun.

All this may sound like pious mumbo-jumbo. It’s much more gratifying to speak of Red Waves and other sweeping crests. But hope is how societies heal, how spirits awaken, how futures brighten. And hope needs to be embodied in our lives if it’s to be visible to our neighbors. The late Michael Gerson, speechwriter for President George W. Bush, wrote of the “disorienting, vivid evidence that hope wins.” It’s time we prove him absolutely right.

The post Fun Trumps Fear appeared first on First Things.

Distilled is part of a cottage industry in the publishing sphere that looks at the world through, well, beer goggles. Tom Standage’s 2006 A History of the World in Six ­Glasses correlates the invention of beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola with key moments in the history of civilization. Rob ­DeSalle and Ian ­Tattersall, two curators with ties to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, are co-­authors of three “natural ­histories”—of wine, beer, and now spirits.

Distilled begins with eight chapters on the history of distilling, the process and ingredients that go into it, and the intersection of distillation, history, and culture. I was grateful for how the authors bring the hay down to the goats for the less scientifically-­minded. Their explanation of how the human body reacts to alcohol was one of the most lucid that I have read, and there was much that I learned. Did you know that alcohol dehydrogenases (ADHs), which detoxify alcohol, are found not just in the liver, but in the tongue and esophagus as well? And their chapter on spirits and bodily sensation was fascinating. “As sensory beings we are middling creatures,” the authors explain, “with neither the sharpest eyesight nor the keenest noses found in nature. But our sensory capacities are nonetheless astonishing, and they happen to be servants of a very unusual cognitive system: one that allows us to analyze our sensory inputs in a unique—and uniquely satisfying—way.”

The authors devote the remaining chapters to individual potations: first, the “big six”—brandy, vodka, tequila, whiskey, gin, and rum—and, then, eaux-de-vie, schnapps, baijiu, grappa, orujo and pisco, and moonshine. (For these chapters, DeSalle and Tattersall brings in specialists to help with the details.) The penultimate chapter is an entertaining history of cocktails and mixed drinks, which again includes fun facts: I had heard of mocktails before, but not “vocktails” (virtual cocktails generated by a device that electrically stimulates the senses to simulate the experience of downing a drink). Finally, the authors conclude the volume with their thoughts on the future of spirits and social drinking in the wake of the pandemic shutdowns.

Distilled is a readable and authoritative overview of hard liquors and their cultural impact, and like its two predecessors, it excels in the way it combines chemistry, evolutionary biology, history, anthropology, and common sense. The book, in other words, is true to its subtitle as natural history, both in the classical sense of the term (a study of things living) and in the modern (a broad umbrella covering different specialty sciences).

DeSalle and Tattersall’s latest does have a major flaw: It neglects the religious and specifically Catholic contribution to the world of spirits. The authors fail to mention, for instance, the role of Irish monks in the invention of the liquor for medicinal purposes. One medieval medical manual wisely prescribes it for “paralysis of the tongue.” The Irish also most likely shared their distilling knowledge with the Scottish when they preached the gospel to them around many centuries ago. (You’re welcome, Scotland.) The authors’ discussion of the grape brandy pisco does not include the role of the Jesuits, who brought viniculture to Chile and Peru in order to have wine for the celebration of Mass.

Nor does the book’s discussion of brandy acknowledge the significant contribution of Brother Timothy, a chemist and De La Salle Brother, to the revival of the industry after Prohibition. A more encyclopedic book might have mentioned such Catholic spirits as Bénédictine, the Carthusians’ Chartreuse, maraska (invented by Croatian Dominican apothecaries), and rompope (invented by Mexican nuns).

Perhaps it is unfair to ask that a natural history of spirits include the supernatural; then again, the impact of religious believers on culture should be of sociological interest. At the very least, it can be said that Distilled’s rich array of data provides ample matter for theological rumination. ­DeSalle and Tattersall note, for example, that Homo sapiens is one of the few species on the planet that has the right set of enzymes to break down ethanol (the alcohol in potable spirits), and that we acquired these precious digestive catalysts hundreds of millennia before our primitive forebears learned how to ferment or distill strong drink. If this is not proof of theistic evolution and the providential hand of a loving God, I don’t know what is.

Distilled, if you will, provides the lower blade of the scissors, cutting from the bottom of human experience towards the top. Seeing through the eyes of God, by contrast, is the upper blade of the scissors, cutting from above sub specie aeternitatis as it goes down to the weeds of our lives. To fathom the fullness of reality is to use both blades, and those who only use one or the other are missing something.

Or, to change metaphors, to see the whole is to see stereoscopically. As Chesterton writes in Orthodoxy:

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the ­twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. . . . His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.

Since alcohology is no exception to this rule, a complete treatment of the subject must include this mystical upper blade. And so it is fair to ask: What was God thinking when he designed a creature who could safely consume alcohol, and when he chose wine for his most Blessed Sacrament? Surely he knew that alcohol—like sex, and like the very faculty of reason that separates us from the beasts—was, on the whole, more to be abused than used rightly. As DeSalle and Tattersall wryly note: “Homo sapiens is perhaps most convincingly defined as a species compelled to take every excellent idea to a crazy extreme.”

And yet the Creator nonetheless chose wine, which on a natural level passes from our blood into our brains and affects us accordingly, to be the matter that turns into the precious blood of his Son and enriches our souls. This is no accident. St. Thomas Aquinas goes so far as to suggest that wine was chosen for the Eucharist not despite its alcoholic content but in part because of it. Aquinas reasons that just as bread is good for the body (gluten detractors notwithstanding), wine is good for the soul insofar as it “cheers the heart of man” (Summa Theologiae III.74.1–5). And wine produces that cheer, we hasten to add, by the C₂H₅OH contained therein, and not its oaky finish or nice legs.

There will be no sex in heaven and no booze, but that does not mean that these goods are to be despised. On the contrary, they are beautiful foreshadowings of a union, an intimacy, and a fellowship that will be enjoyed by all who experience the beatific vision. The dregs of these material pleasures will dissolve when we see God face to face, but that is no reason not to appreciate them now. In vino Veritas.

The post Mystic ­Alcohology appeared first on First Things.

If you are even a little f­­amiliar with Anglicanism, you are ­likely aware that it can be a bit of a mess. The recent death of John Shelby Spong, that tireless enemy of Christ’s Church, should serve as more than a reminder of the fact. You might also know that there is much hope, both here in North America and around the world, and this collection of essays documents it.

In the book, McDermott has gathered twelve Anglican scholars and clergymen from across the globe, as well as a Baptist and a Roman Catholic. Each gives a perspective on Anglican identity and its implications for what comes next. Even as a survey of different churchmanships and challenges facing the future of Anglicanism, the book covers the topic well and will give anyone a solid understanding of the complexities facing the tradition. Particularly heartening are essays from Africa and the Middle East, where Anglicanism grows at an lightning pace. At the same time, acknowledgement of the threat of a sort of “Neo-­Anglican Evangelical fusionism” appearing in the ACNA, the Church of England, and elsewhere can be difficult to find.

The volume’s most optimistic essays invoke Anglicanism’s past as a foundation for Anglicanism’s future. The latter half of the twentieth century saw an emphasis on ecumenism over doctrine and distinctives, which has come to haunt Cranmer’s children in an age in which identity is everything. There is hope here, too: Among ­many younger Anglicans an ad ­fontes movement has taken hold, and the roaring success of projects such as IVP’s The 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition shows that it goes beyond Twitter.

—Robert Ramsey

Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn:
Philosophy and Jewish Thought
by ethan kleinberg
stanford university, 248 pages, $28

Levinas (1906–1995) is regarded as a major figure of twentieth-century French philosophy. After World War II, he became a prominent expositor of Judaism, regularly teaching and publishing on the Talmud and other Jewish texts. He worked for Jewish institutions for most of his life, coming to university teaching late, after he published Totality and Infinity and became the subject of a lengthy treatment by the young Derrida. Levinas is the author of two bodies of work. His philosophical texts can be read on their own; his Jewish lectures are connected to the philosophy but not identical with it.

Kleinberg illuminates ­Levinas’s Jewish background—which was limited—and the nature of his engagement with Jewish life and the French Jewish community’s intellectual needs. The book ­presupposes some acquaintance with Levinas and his philosophical world but does not require detailed insider knowledge. It is most useful in tracing the formative stages of Levinas’s work, both philosophical and Jewish.

One peculiarity of the book is the use of two parallel columns, as found in Derrida’s Glas. One column traces Levinas’s life and thought, while the other contains summary and discussion of selected Jewish lectures by Levinas.

Apart from its value as an introduction to Levinas and to his Jewish side, the book tackles the question of whether and how the two elements in Levinas come together. It explores the relationship between the universal claims of Levinas’s philosophical work and the specifically Jewish texts that are the subject of his Jewish work.

—Shalom Carmy

Faith Seeking Understanding:
The Theological Witness of Fr. Matthew Baker
by fr. matthew baker
st. vladimir’s seminary, 368 pages, $30

Most readers will be unfamiliar with the life and work of Fr. Matthew Baker, a rising theologian of the Orthodox Church. That is likely because he died in a car accident on a snowy road in 2015 at the age of thirty-­seven, leaving behind his wife and six children. In my converstions with those who knew him, they expressed astonishment at the genius of his mind, coupled with his soft, compassionate, and down-to-earth humanity. He was especially kind and respectful with those who disagreed with him. His death was the end of one of the most promising minds in contemporary Orthodoxy. He could have easily become the next Georges Florovsky (his hero), John Zizioulas, or Vladimir Lossky.

This volume was lovingly compiled in his memory by his friends and with the support of his family. It contains a selection of ­Baker’s wide-ranging contributions to the fields of theology, philosophy, and ethics. Along with the essays and reviews is a selection of Baker’s sermons and personal ­correspondences (my favorites). They are a digest of his thought written in practical prose. Topics include “Florovsky and Ecumenism: A Critique of False Claims,” “A Dangerous Delusion: Against the State ­Re-definition of Marriage,” and others. Baker’s essays include a brilliant article on Georges Florovsky’s “Neopatristic Synthesis and Ecumenism” and an insightful review of Paul Gavrilyuk’s Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Baker’s strength (and weakness) seems to have been his inquiry into the role of reason in Orthodox theology. He believed in the fullest use of logic, yet the relationship between faith and reason seems never to have been fully articulated in his extant writings. Perhaps that would have been developed in the future, had he lived. Regardless, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in a balanced assessment of Georges Florovsky and the contributions of Fr. ­Matthew Baker to modern Orthodox ­theology.

—Bradley Nassif

The Prophet’s Heir:
The Life of Ali ibn Abi Talib
by hassan abbas
yale university, 256 pages, $33

In this illuminating and engaging book on one of Islam’s pivotal figures, Ali Ibn Abi ­Talib, Hassan Abbas represents a more balanced picture of the polarizing personality at the heart of the first Muslim civil war (fitna). Ali’s historical role is widely contested, and any attempt to bridge the Sunni-Shia ­divide is most welcome. Far from being the cause of this divide, ­Abbas argues, Ali can be the unifier. Abbas appeals to both Sunni and Shia sources to make his case. The book is clearly slanted, however, reading more like a hagiography than a ­biography.

Abbas highlights Ali’s critical role in Islam’s founding. One of the first Muslims, Ali is the Prophet’s most loyal companion, his unwavering defender, and a trusted confidant. Abbas describes the inseparable bond between the Prophet and Ali, such as in his moving account of Muhammad cradling the newborn Ali in his arms. Such details surely inspire in both Sunnis and Shias a “common appreciation for Ali,” one of the author’s aims.

The book must be read with two significant cultural trends in mind. First, the religious revival that has gripped the Muslim world for the last four decades. Abbas is keen to center Ali’s moral example among the early Muslims, thereby laying claim to the “true spirit of Islam.” The second cultural trend is social justice activism emanating largely from the Western world. Abbas describes Ali in terms prominent in social justice discourse; Ali, for example, was “the pinnacle of equity” whose rule as Caliph was distinguished by its egalitarianism and redistribution of wealth.

This broader context aside, nobody can deny the breadth of knowledge on display. The book is a delightful read which complements the existing literature on Shia experience and narrative.

—Nasser Hussain

The Evangelical Theology of the Orthodox Church
by bradley nassif
st. vladimir’s seminary, 284 pages, $30

Bradley Nassif has written an informative volume that will challenge committed Christians of all backgrounds to desist, at last, from sinning by bearing false witness against one another.For centuries, entire communities have regularly and repeatedly misrepresented one another’s faith in their competition for converts. Modern ecumenical dialogues were never conceived to promote doctrinal indifference, but rather to establish mutual respect and harmony across confessional boundaries.

Nassif’s book is a personal testament to that effort. At several points, he presents what he calls the four core beliefs of Evangelical Christians, and notes that the Faith of the Ancient Church clearly affirms all four. In later chapters, he demonstrates that his own Eastern Orthodox tradition would probably need a longer list of core tenets, perhaps even twice as many. Using a geometric analogy, he places the Evangelical circle in the center of a larger Orthodox sphere. His ecumenical geometry offers a kind of mathematical “proof” that these communities should be able to ­cooperate at some practical and even theological level.

While most of the chapters are essays the author has previously published, their inclusion and arrangement in this collection provides a clear context for the ecumenical thrust of his presentation. He articulates this primarily in the final chapters, which bring the book’s argument into clear focus, supporting his recommendations and conclusions.

This reviewer would have appreciated if Nassif had provided a reflective summary of an Orthodox “core” identity to compare more explicitly with the four points of Evangelical Christianity. Perhaps this awaits further reflection. The next natural step will include some additional ecumenical arithmetic. It all adds up.

—Rev. Michael J. Oleksa

The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis:
How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind
by jason m. baxter
ivp academic, 176 pages, $22

In addition to Lewis the apologist and Lewis the imaginative writer, there was, Jason Baxter suggests, a “third Lewis.” This is the Lewis who was immersed in the medieval world—its image of the cosmos, its literature, patterns of speech, and influential thinkers and artists, Dante especially. For those who have read Lewis chiefly in the first two ways, Baxter hopes to show how this third Lewis “is just beneath the surface even in his more ­appreciated imaginative and devotional writings.” I am not sure that these connections have been so hidden from Lewis’s readers, but Baxter surely does a masterful job of clarifying them. In the process he has written a book that invites us to return to The ­Discarded Image, ­Lewis’s depiction of the model of the world underlying the ­medieval and renaissance literature he taught.

Lewis was sensitive to historical changes in the way the cosmos had been pictured—from “symphony” to “machine” in ­Baxter’s ­account—and how that movement in turn had altered the way we think about our beliefs, commitments, and interior lives. The longing for joy that was such a central element in ­Lewis’s inner life seems to have no place any longer in our world. What Baxter’s chapters provide, therefore, is, first, a depiction of a world now seemingly lost to us, and second, the ways in which ­Lewis gradually reclaimed through his scholarly and other writings that more symphonic world.

Especially helpful is a chapter that explores the sense in which Lewis’s vision is “mystical.” ­Lewis affirms that the good things of ­creation elicit within us a longing for their Giver, and ­he acknowledges the transcendence of a God who cannot be identified with any worldly good. In that chapter, ­Baxter depicts the Lucy whom we know from the Narnia Chronicles as just such a mystic. This is one of many instances in which Baxter draws illuminating connections between Lewis’s depiction of the medieval model and his apologetic and imaginative writings. He ­unfolds the extraordinary coherence of Lewis’s thinking and the ways in which his different kinds of writings shed light on each other. Readers will come away with a renewed and deepened appreciation for the depth of Lewis’s intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life.

—Gilbert Meilaender

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The trope (an ocean’s oneness) seemed more apt,
or felt more apt, when, not so long ago,
the “each” was not each entity enrapt
by his or her respective plankton glow.

Each statuary gaze (the elbow crooked
like Ambrose holding his theology)
upon the screen is likewise overlooked.
Unseen is that there’s nothing here to see.

Did any of us wish for this, a phone
to leave ourselves reciprocally alone?

—Stephen Binns

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Her lovely tent of green threshed light from air,
And crooked, wide-flung branches sought the ground,
Rambled, rose again as conqueror,
A forest-like though single specimen
Of elegance, one oriental plane.

Xerxes praised boles that reared a canopy
Of fine-lobed leaves to colonize the sky
And overcome the land with clouds of green
That drank up sun and ruled by mystery,
Allurement vanquishing the sway of kings.

Her heart of birdsong in quicksilver change,
Her limbs at daybreak shining like long suns—
To celebrate this paragon of trees,
The son of Darius decked boughs with gold
And hoarded for himself green memory.

—Marly Youmans

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Which isn’t to suggest you aren’t one
This mystery can be borne in upon
By hints that speak as little to the mind
As whispers from a field in a wind.

—Daniel Brown

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