Marching for our lives

Words for a conversation in the wake of children militant

A conversation on social media between two friends I respect and admire, regarding the “March for Our Lives” protests, contained an exchange in which one of the interlocutors expressed the desire to locate the demonstrations squarely within the bailiwick of “pro-life” advocacy. Another interlocutor was not so much reticent to accept that location, as unsure how to receive it. That is a perplexity many of us are experiencing right now, and one through which it is worth working together. I hope the words of mine to follow, which draw on the words of others I respect and admire, can be words for a conversation.

“Exciting Story” by Tihamér Margitay via Wikimedia Commons

If we take seriously the idea — epitomized in the words of Dr King in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail — that “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust,” we must admit that every properly basic question of how we ought to order our lives together is a “pro-life” issue. Here’s the rub: when everything is a “pro-life” issue, nothing is. Said slightly differently, the term is evacuated of its content, and left to be filled with whatever the manifesting party happens to have to heart. It isn’t that the demonstrators are wrong to think their cause a “pro-life” cause in some appreciable and even significant sense. It is that the intellectual procedure that underwrites and is supposed to undergird the asserting of “pro-life” status for the cause, actually undermines the foundation on which a sound and robust “pro-life” position may be staked.

This is particularly evident when one views the issue of our epidemic gun violence problem in confrontation (in the French and Italian sense of the term) with abortion.

Procured abortion is the direct and deliberate destruction of innocent life. We can say, on purely rational and reasonable grounds, even making a prima facie case, that – to paraphrase St Teresa of Calcutta – if abortion is not wrong, nothing is. Opposition to abortion is “pro-life” in the prosaic and even pedestrian sense that one is for protecting innocent life from precisely the deliberate harm and destruction that abortion is.

To the extent the protesters want to see an end to the mass murder of schoolchildren by firearm, their position is evidently “pro-life”. The matter is complicated, however, by three considerations:

• Guns are not evil per se, nor even are gun manufacturers. Many of the uses to which we put the former are evil, as are many of the methods of the latter, especially insofar as the plying of their trade is concerned. Many of the former and the latter are not.

• There is no single “pro-life” position in opposition to the admittedly intolerable status quo, around which the marchers are demonstrating, e.g. the appalling miscarriage of justice that was the SCOTUS decision in Roe.

• There is a constitutional right — spelled out in words — to keep and bear arms. Where that right is located and what are its limits, and which are the proper constraints to the exercise of it that it is in our power to place, and which among those last are prudent at any given time and place, are all matters of urgent public import.

What we are witnessing is a groundswell of enthusiasm that has yet to find direction, scope, purpose within the national discourse. This movement has a great chance to be a powerfully effective force for good. As things stand now, however, the thing could just as easily go the other way.

That is a statement of fact, and one that responsible leaders of great movements in America have frankly acknowledged when they have been at their best. “It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro,” Dr. King argued from the rostrum on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963. “This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality,” he continued. He concluded that portion of his speech saying, “The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.” Those lines of his also contained the following admonition:

Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.

Today, I hear those words as a twofold warning: against an attitude of dismissiveness on the part of our elected leadership especially and the broad public more generally; against the temptation to confuse emotion with reason and to conflate the two. The emotion of our children and young people is real, and raw, and will demand a reckoning that, should we fail to give it them, heaven most surely shall not. Nevertheless, sentiment is not argument.

I must say that I am glad that my son is returning to our country to continue his education in these heady days. Our young people are truly an inspiration. They may save the republic, or destroy it. Whichever it is, they will need our help to do it. Here, another great American may be of help to us. Teddy Roosevelt once said:

I want to see you game, boys, I want to see you brave and manly, and I also want to see you gentle and tender. Be practical as well as generous in your ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars and keep your feet on the ground. Courage, hard work, self-mastery, and intelligent effort are all essential to successful life. Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.

Teddy was speaking to boys, and he meant “boys” when he said it, though in our day we happily see that his exhortations rightly apply in equal measure to our girls — and that there are qualities of manliness, in the sense of homo and ἄνθρωπος, which it is the particular province and task of our fellows of the female sex to demonstrate — who are recovering a sense of their especial and unique dignity and taking their place in the leadership of our society.

In any case, Teddy exhorted the boys to the practice of those disciplined excellences of character and disposition precisely because they are indispensable to the man and the citizen of a healthy republic. We must model them for our young people even as we demand of them their practice unto perfection.

When the people who became the American people were debating the great question, whether they should be a people at all, and if so, what kind of people they should aspire to be, Alexander Hamilton brought together two other leading men of the founding generation under the allonym, Publius [Valerius Publicola, hero and savior of the Roman republic], framing the question before them in these terms:

[I]t seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

After the events of this weekend, I believe more strongly than ever that we are at a point in our national life, in which, again to borrow the words of Publius:

[T]he crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.

Publius went on to remind the people of New York that:

[I]t would be disingenuous to resolve indiscriminately the opposition of any set of men (merely because their situations might subject them to suspicion) into interested or ambitious views. Candor will oblige us to admit that even such men may be actuated by upright intentions; and it cannot be doubted that much of the opposition which has made its appearance, or may hereafter make its appearance, will spring from sources, blameless at least, if not respectable–the honest errors of minds led astray by preconceived jealousies and fears. So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society. This circumstance, if duly attended to, would furnish a lesson of moderation to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy. And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection that we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists. Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question.

Let us remember that we are citizens of a great republic, with a duty to face our failures squarely and without stint, and an equal one not only to preserve but to foster and allow ourselves to be guided by the best angels of our nature, knowing that we will often be preserving them against what is worst in ourselves. Let us all give those better angels some exercise now.

Educating citizens

I want schoolchildren to learn all about how many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves, and I want them to learn all about exactly how morally awful and physically brutal a system of race-based chattel slavery ours was.

I do not want that to be the only thing they learn about the Founders, though: I want them also to learn about how the men and women of the founding generation – and of the half-dozen generations before that – loved and cherished their rights and their liberties, and honored those among them who served the public interest honorably.

I want them to learn all about how we casually cheated, bamboozled, and murdered Native Americans, but I do not want that to be the only thing they learn either about Native Americans or about the “White Man’s” dealings with them, past and present.

I want schoolchildren to learn about the terrible religious bigotry that stained the souls and the honor of our forefathers in nationhood, and I want them to learn about how they struggled to find a way to order their lives so that each man could worship and advocate for truth according to conscience, and at the same time fully participate in society and in the public counsels – and how, in the main, they succeeded in so ordering their lives after much effort.

If I reject the tendency to deify the Founders, I repudiate the tendency to demonize them: they were human, just as we are; and just as we have, so did they have, feet of clay.

I want schoolchildren to know the awful things the men we revere did (and the women, too), even as they believed – not wrongly – that they were basically good people about a worthy business and even a truly noble cause.

I want them to remember how hard it was for our forefathers to recognize the humanity in others – wasn’t it obvious to them? – and how deeply that failure to recognize the full and equal measure of humanity they shared with those others (who should have been fellows) wounded their own.

I want them to remember how the Civil War was and was not “over slavery”.

I want them to remember, because I want them to realize how much the ways in which which our forebears did and did not struggle with each other in peace tell us about the real and genuine importance of the causes for which the parties to that terrible conflict contended in war, and I want them to be capable of thinking about the limits to the moral vision of even the best of men, even and especially those with the best of intentions, and about the strictures societies place on the moral imagination of their members, and about why those strictures exist, and about what it costs to adjust those strictures, and about what we get for an adjustment of them, whether well or poorly done.

I want them to be mindful of the consequences of our failure as a society to recognize the humanity of others – whether they be the gay couple, the snake-handling Pentecostal, the immigrant family from Honduras, the Catholics with ten children or with two, the Muslim refugee with four mouths to feed (he was a promising young lawyer back home before the war), or the young man with the mullet and the penchant for playing Merle Haggard records and the perpetual sunburn and three-beer buzz (he’d be happy to turn the music down and even happier to tell you why your engine rattles like that at low revs) – because, simply and shortly put, those others are people, too.

I want them to know all about the men and women in the founding generation and in every generation after that, who – in the main – loved  public spirit, honesty, fairness, industry, kindness, and charity, but did not always practice them or even try to. The Founders knew that being good citizens meant first and foremost being good neighbors, and they believed that America was exceptional precisely because in America people worked until they found the way to order their lives together (except when they didn’t, and remember what happened then?). They knew the world was dangerous, and they did not let it scare them (except when they did, and what happened then?). They understood how lucky they were, and tried to be worthy of their good fortune (except when they didn’t, and what happened then?). They were happy when their neighbors did well and they were there to help when times were tough (except when they weren’t, and what happened then?).

I do not know whether we are still – or ever were – the kind of people the Founders believed themselves and tried to be.

In the depth of my soul I know that such a people is the only kind of people it is worth trying to be.

Let’s each of us make a go of it.

Charleston, SC slave auction

John Adams

The public challenge of Catholic faith

Catholics have a peculiar way of thinking about politics: ours is a universal way of thinking about “the things of the city”. If this way of thinking is peculiar, it is nevertheless neither unique, nor inaccessible to people who do not share or subscribe to Catholic claims regarding the basic structure of the world (“We believe in one God, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, of all things visible and invisible…) and the ultimate reason of things (“For God so loved the world…”). Indeed, its very universality – the universality of the claims Catholicism advances and by which Catholicism professes to live as true – requires Catholics to engage discussion and debate in the public square by way of publicly available arguments, i.e. by way of reason deployed in a manner that does not require even notional assent to the data of faith in order to be comprehensible and even cogent.

This is not an easy task, though it is one that all citizens – of every tradition of faith and religion, and none at all – all share together and in equal measure.

As Benedict XVI put it when he visited the United States in 2008, “[Freedom] also demands the courage to engage in civic life and to bring one’s deepest beliefs and values to reasoned public debate.” NB it is freedom that requires such courage, not Catholic faith specifically, nor even religious conviction broadly considered – though the measure to which Catholic faith is compatible with ordered liberty in society will always be established in the concrete by the measure to which Catholics actually do display such courage in public life.

Bishop John Carroll, SJ, by Charles Wilson Peale

The difficulty for Catholics – not only for Catholics, though for Catholics especially – is that we very often disagree about which of our convictions ought to guide us in our consideration of a given public question, and about where our faith is guiding us in this or that public matter, great or small.

This ought not be a surprise to anyone, since Catholics are and always have been people who – to say it with Chesterton – agree about everything, and disagree about everything else.

The matter is complicated, however, by an ineluctable, often troubling and even embarrassing fact: the “everything” about which Catholics agree is an intricate weave of truths the Church teaches, which do not come to us all directly from a single source. Some of the things the Church teaches as true are things the Church has learned directly from God, e.g. that He is one nature in three persons (though it took a good deal of thinking to understand that God had taught the Church about His Triune nature, and still more very messy and often quite bloody history had to happen before we had hashed out exactly what that teaching means and does not mean, especially regarding the Second Person of the Trinity – but I digress), and teaches as true because God has revealed them to the world through the Church; there are other things that the Church teaches because they are true and we know them to be true quite apart from a direct and immediate Divine didactic intervention, e.g. that there is a cause of, and an order to all that is, and that we are capable of knowing a good deal about that order and about the principle by which things are ordered (e.g. that good is to be done and evil to be avoided, and therefore that it is wrong deliberately to destroy innocent life, that human life begins at conception – not a matter of religious conviction, as is so often erroneously claimed – for if real assent to the truth of revelation were necessary in order to recognize the intrinsic evil of procured abortion, then advocates of legal abortion would have a much stronger case), that defrauding a worker of his just wage is not only wrong, but one of the worst things one human can do to another, inter alia).

When everything is so complex, everything else is inevitably complicated, and we owe it to ourselves, to our fellows in religion, and to our fellow citizens to be mindful of the complexities as we engage in discussion and debate about matters touching what we used to call, “the public weal”.

Practically speaking, it means that we must resist the temptation to reduce our public advocacy of this or that policy to a mere matter of applying Catholic teaching to a particular social problem. It means, in other words, that as Catholics, the first thing we must resist doing is publicly claiming that it is “as Catholics” that we hold anything in the way of policy: the Church teaches us it is an act of charity to welcome the stranger, but she does not tell us how to conduct that charitable activity – upon which our salvation mysteriously and at once doubtlessly depends – in a manner consistent with our duty as citizens to obey the laws and our duty as participants in the government of our republic to make laws that provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare. The danger in taking principles meant to be guides to forming prudential judgment, and erecting them into principles of conduct from which policy directly flows, is clear and present: it leads in short order both to irresponsible citizenship and to ineffective Christian witness.

The second thing we must avoid is closely related to the first, and involves our modes of evaluating the fitness of candidates for the offices they seek, and the manner in which we conduct that evaluation in public discourse.

Neither our system, nor the persons who seek offices within and under that system, are perfect. Every candidate for every office supports some policy or holds some position, which is ultimately indefensible morally. No one may support a candidate because of the candidate’s opinions and/or policy positions, which run counter to the moral law (and “no one” means “no one”). When we support candidates who hold morally repugnant opinions and/or policy positions (and we do so every time we support any candidate) we do so despite that candidate’s opinions and positions – if, that is, we do so in a manner consistent with the moral law.

The foregoing considerations do not foreclose the question whether support for this or that candidate is morally defensible, still less whether support for this or that candidate is really prudent (in the technical sense of the term). For example: a Catholic might have supported then-Senator Obama in his bid for the Presidency, despite his confessedly radical views on legal abortion, on the grounds that his social policy broadly would tend to decrease the number of children actually slain in their mothers’ wombs; it is harder to see how a Catholic could have supported President Obama’s bid for a second term, given the war his administration was waging on the Catholic Church at the time the regulatory framework of the infamous HHS Mandate was being crafted (if the description of the Obama administration’s stance toward the Church as a “war” seems hyperbolic, remember that the editors of America Magazine – a publication known neither for partisanship, nor for hyperbole in analysis –  opined at the time,  “The church cannot function peacefully in the United States under the current regulatory framework.”). Even in this example, however, the issue before each of us as citizens was neither simply nor primarily one of “connecting the dots” between Catholic teaching and public responsibility. The teaching of the Church was, and is, clear: even so, Catholics did reach different conclusions then regarding the most appropriate manner in which to allow Catholic teaching to inform our choices as citizens.

That, for example, I think citizens who chose to support President Obama in his bid for a second term, despite his administration’s stance and behavior toward the Catholic Church in the United States, made a profoundly wrong-headed choice, is beside the point. Even if they were wrong-headed, that cannot on its own be proof of my fellow citizens’ insufficient formation as Catholics or as citizens. Still less can it be used as proof of bad faith.

The present election cycle presents us with similar difficulties.

Former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton is known as a lifelong champion of legal abortion. A Catholic could choose to support her despite this (again, not because of it) on the grounds that her social policy program would tend actually to reduce the number of abortions. That assumption could be – indeed ought to be – exposed to the most rigorous critical examination. Assuming a fellow Catholic – or any citizen of whatsoever religious persuasion, or none at all – were interested in supporting Clinton, one might also urge that a candidate so obviously in the pocket of the abortion interest cannot inspire the confidence of a candid mind, even one that happens to share the Senator’s views on the subject broadly.

In other words: while Catholic teaching informs at least one of the hypothetical citizens’ thinking on the issue of abortion, it need not be applied directly and immediately to their thinking together about the question whether to support Sen. Clinton in her bid for the Presidency.

Said shortly: the question is not whether, but how we ought to bring not only Catholic doctrine in its distilled form, but the whole great Catholic tradition of thinking about politics, to bear on our thinking about how to order our lives together.

Clinton’s olim colleague in the Senate and co-contender for the Democratic Party’s nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders, describes himself as a Democratic Socialist.

Not a few fellow citizens have questioned whether Catholics can support a Democratic Socialist in a bid for office.

Many of the Catholics who have raised the question whether their faith permits them and their fellows in religion to support Sanders believe that Democratic Socialism is wrong on basic points of anthropology, bedrock realities of politics, and fundamental economics.

This may or may not be the case: the Church, however, does not pronounce herself in a universally binding manner on those matters, nor does she proscribe the specific political creed such fellow Catholics impugn. Indeed, Democratic Socialism is so far from being proscribed by Catholic moral teaching, that it has been (in its explicitly Christian acception) the political position of the past several Bishops of Rome.

The point here is not that Catholics ought therefore to espouse either Democratic Socialism or Sanders: the point is that to decry Democratic Socialism as incompatible with Catholic doctrine sic et simpliciter is both counterfactual and lazy; citizens – Catholics and others – who maintain (as I do) that Democratic Socialism is wrong on basic points of anthropology, bedrock realities of politics, and fundamental economics, owe their fellows who see it differently an argument.

The current front-runner for the Republican nomination is a man of such character, that anyone needing an appeal to the authority of supernatural revelation in order to accept that he is unfit to serve as canine controller of any town or village in the country, let alone to hold the highest office in the land, frankly cannot be trusted to contribute to the national conversation.

We noted earlier that our system is not perfect.

Our system does, however, tend to give us the candidates we deserve, and our unwillingness to argue with each other has produced a frankly disappointing crop of candidates, even when compared to the generally lackluster quality of candidates for political office in the history of our republic.

Another part of what has brought us to this point – to this surreal, bizarro-world place in our national life at which we are arrived – is our willingness to let ourselves be “sold” on candidates who “speak my language” and “represent MY views” etc., coupled with our unwillingness to expose the candidates with whom we tend broadly and generally to agree, to the caustic process of critical examination, at precisely the same time we are willing to believe the absolute worst about the candidates with whom we broadly and generally disagree.

Here, Catholics have a tremendous opportunity once again to prove, contra Paganos, that Catholic religion is not only not inimical to the morals of a republic, but can – if practiced – in fact have a quite salutary effect thereupon: indeed, the Catholic Church is the bearer, the caretaker, the champion of the greatest intellectual tradition that ever there has been or shall be; that tradition has always inspired those in it to dedicate themselves to the task of making subtle and particular distinctions within the unity of truth, to seek and always be in awe of the infinite nuance necessary and possible within the oneness of knowledge, to live in the confidence that comes from knowing that the world is larger (the Church wiser, and God greater) than one’s own powers of apprehension; indeed,  true religion has always inspired men and women to think all the good they can of those with whom they find themselves in disagreement; to mark and toe the line between the position and the one who holds it; to pronounce judgment only in the case of gravest necessity, and only for the best of all possible motives, i.e. the salvation of souls (the salus animarum, which in the present context also has the added incentive of serving the salus rei publicae).

In the meantime, let us remember that citizens and the candidates they choose are imperfect even in the best of times: the world, after all, is fallen and awaiting – St. Paul says it is groaning in travail – the fullness of its redemption; only Christ has the true and lasting victory over evil.

Meanwhile, we mostly muddle.

Though most of it were muddling, nevertheless, we must be about it. We are citizens of a great republic, and, to borrow a phrase from Edward R. Murrow, “There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities.”

The contribution Catholics have a chance to make to the national discourse, is that of their example: let us be those quintessentially Chestertonian people who agree about everything, and disagree about everything else – only let us do so carefully, rigorously, and always charitably.

Baseball and the soul of America

Baseball is back. What does this mean for America?

Whatever else it means, it means that we Americans, as a nation and a people, are once again given the chance to pluck the mystic chords of memory, to draw from the well of story and grace, and renew our acquaintance with the better angels of our nature.

Baseball is the expression of our genius for living and for ordering our lives together:

Supposing for the time being, and for the sake of argument, that the edifice of Western philosophy does have an American inflection (if the idea of a talking edifice seems strange, remember that edification is one of the reasons for speech, and that, in the philosophical context invoked by Cavell, education—the goal of philosophy—is a matter of “building up” before or as much as it is a matter of “leading out”), it becomes reasonable to wonder what philosophy might sound like in America. By way of suggestion, and as a way further into the problem, consider the following lines from Terence Mann, the character James Earl Jones played in Field of Dreams, a film based on the W.P. Kinsella novel, Shoeless Joe:

Ray, people will come Ray. They’ll come to Iowa for reasons they can’t even fathom. They’ll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won’t mind if you look around, you’ll say. it’s only $20 per person. They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. and they’ll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. america has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh, people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.

The idea of there being one constant through all the years is one of the most problematic ideas, with which philosophy has wrestled since its inception, indeed in the thinking of which philosophy may be said to be born. The thickness of memory, and the movement toward something, say a future, under the impetus of something past, in the hope of finding it there (though transformed utterly, as though an army of steamrollers had passed over it), when taken with baseball’s power to remind what was good and communicate, let us say, name a hope for what could be good again, may call to mind the magnificent phenomenology of memory St. Augustine gives in Book X of the Confessions. One may no more be made to hear it, than could Ray Kinsella make his brother-in-law see the game being played a few feet away. Can a game provide the peace that is lacking in the human heart? If it is the right game, perhaps the game called contemplation of wisdom, some to whom the name of philosopher has been granted have thought so.

There is a further text of baseball from another Kinsella story, one that instances a way of thinking that, if not exactly the kind of thinking that is philosophy, is at least concerned with concepts that are the stock-in-trade of accepted philosophy:

“Why not baseball?” my father would say. “Name me a more perfect game! Name me a game with more possibilities for magic, wizardry, voodoo, hoodoo, enchantment, obsession, possession. There’s always time for daydreaming, time to create your own illusions at the ballpark. i bet there isn’t a magician anywhere who doesn’t love baseball. Take the layout. No mere mortal could have dreamed up the dimensions of a baseball field. No man could be that perfect. abner Doubleday, if he did indeed invent the game, must have received divine guidance “and the field runs to infinity,” he would shout, gesturing wildly. “You ever think of that, Gid? There’s no limit to how far a man might possibly hit a ball, and there’s no limit to how far a fleet outfielder might run to retrieve it. The foul lines run on forever, forever diverging. There’s no place in America that’s not part of a major-league ballfield: the meanest ghetto, the highest point of land, the Great lakes, the Colorado River. hell, there’s no place in the world that’s not part of a baseball field.

On the side of philosophy, the quoted text contains an explicit discussion of dreaming and wakefulness, which have been themes of philosophy since Heraclitus; then there is the limitlessness of the field, which names quite literally the apeiron, and the convergence of time and always that might name the transformed condition of our world, into the history of which the eschaton irrupts; lastly, a reader may receive the invocation of hell, not as mere profanity, but as an admonition: the ballfield, and therefore America, and therefore the world (the whole of which is contained in an American ballfield) is a place in which we are playing out matters of eternal life and eternal death.

Baseball is a serious game.

Of course, no reader need necessarily see these things, and any reader may experience something akin to outrage at the suggestion that baseball, which is so obviously an entertainment, ought even for a second be considered as somehow in relation to the giants of Western thought. Perhaps no sane person would dare to suggest that W. P. Kinsella’s baseball story should be treated as though it were philosophy. Even so, the text of the game may be taken to show that there is in america, in American practices, an inchoate awareness of the flux of time and infinity within the weave of the world, which could be theorized.

Anyway, there’s plenty more about baseball and about America in The Soul of a Nation: America as a Tradition of Inquiry and Nationhood, so get on over to Amazon, or order direct from the publisher, Wipf & Stock, or go out and support your local bookseller.

We’re all in this together…

My brother introduced me to the Old Crow Medicine Show perhaps a dozen years ago, when their album O.C.M.S. had just dropped to instant critical acclaim and put them on the cusp of major commercial success. Their song, “We’re All in this Together”, instantly struck me as the best track of the album, and a real song of America:

The song is not only American, but also philosophical, historical, theological: perhaps I ought to have said, it is American precisely to the extent it is all three together and at once.

The procedure of the narrative, from seeing, sounding, to seeming – and then to to the certain knowledge of memory, which is found “in between”, thus naming the metaxy as the space of recollection in which we live presently – the presence of the past, the presence of the present, and the presence of the future, as St. Augustine articulates the power of memory to make us who we are in Book X of the Confessions – in the space that is caught between the beginning and the beyond – before us and behind us, as Emerson says in his Experience and as Cavell retells in This New Yet Unapproachable America – takes us through enough of that history, and barely avoids dropping (picking up?) enough names along the way, to make us think of breadcrumbs, or materials strewn on the ground: from the aforementioned “in-between” to the line that harkens to Plato – a line I’ve always understood Plato to mean for us to cross – dividing faith from fear – to the admission of intention in either constructing or collapsing eschatological tension in an explicitly Pauline register with the invocation of ourselves as images in mirrors, and the call for us to “put this thing together” and walk the path that worn-out feet have trod (a thoroughfare for freedom, as in another song of America?), and the appeal to evidence (of fellowship enduring) through the taste of salt in tears.

I will not now insist on hearing “the slow road to freedom” invoke the methodos – the hard road – of philosophy (recalling perhaps the ancient notion of philosophy as a way of life and preparation for death), though I cannot fail to tell you that I hear it.

One of these days, I am going to pull together the essay that has been percolating for more than a dozen years, involving some critical observations of Stanley Cavell in his collection of essays In Quest of the Ordinary, in which Cavell revisits Thoreau’s revision of Emerson’s assertion that the whole history of philosophy is contained in a single American day – an idea I thematize in The Soul of a Nation as placing America in the way of philosophy by placing the projects of civilization and history in America, thereby making America to stand in the way of the history of order as such:

More to this, as in order further to place America in the way of philosophy: wonder—an experience possible only in community—the experience of the community of the divine and the human, is the condition and the constitutive of the experience of order. Socrates’ interpretation of the Delphic oracle is a challenge to the city (one that cannot be known not to be a mortal threat, at least not prior to examination). Thoreau would have America take up Socrates’ challenge to the city—to embrace, rather than indict Socrates’ commitment to philosophy. This is to say, Thoreau would make America to stand or fall on her ability to make good on Socrates’ commitment. Thoreau’s claim to be contemporary with the most ancient philosophers ought to be read in this light. Consider now the following from Emerson’s essay, “Nature”:

“Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams. (Carpenter, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Selections, 17)”

Emerson, the American scholar, here claims that the whole history of civilization, and all philosophy is contained in one American day. This claim, in its turn, establishes the question of America’s relation to philosophy, as one, not of negation, but of assumption. To the extent that there is an America to speak of, it will have in it the whole project of civilization—and in a way that leaves open the question whether America depends on that project, or whether that project depends upon the success of America, and finally, whether these are really alternatives, i.e., really mutually exclusive.

I will have to include the OCMS song, as a sort of test-case, along with the three versions of “America the Beautiful” – though to say how and why were to write the essay. Here is a promise…

Looking for America

A chance hearing of a bit of this song the other day put the whole thing in my head. I keep returning to it, and I keep wondering: “Why are we so afraid?” and “What are we so afraid of?” – I mean broadly and generally: could anyone hitch-hike from Saginaw to Pittsburgh today? Would anyone dare? I mean to say: it probably was not the most prudent course to take even in 1967, and the song’s character’s disposition is one of clear vision and disenchantment, so we cannot imagine that his choice should have been rooted in care-freeness or naïveté.

The man in the Gabardine suit may well have been a spy, you know, but Kathy’s traveling companion chose to poke fun – a deflection (is that the right word for it?) that as such did not directly challenge the premise on which the call to caution was based.

Then again: no candid mind can deny that the phenomenon we once unproblematically called “mass hysteria” is at least as American as (Mrs. Wagner’s?) apple pie. Think Witch Trials and Snake Oil and Utopian Separatism and EO 9066 and “safety-this” and “safety-that” and a hundred-hundred other things between.

Perhaps this is the reason for the journey and the deflection (if that’s what it was): it is as if the survival of America – wherever America is, and if America is out there at all – depends in any given moment on whether each of us – whether any one of us – will stick his thumb out and place himself in the hands of – a stranger? – a fellow traveler? – and laugh (not uncompanionably) at the lady afraid of the Man in the Gabardine Suit who might be a spy but is on the bus.

As one who has spent a lot of time counting cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, and traveled more than most through space and time in search of America, I wonder…

The Poles of the Revolution (plus ça change…)

“If we take seriously the idea that Jefferson and Adams thought representatively, that they were, in the words of their mutual friend and fellow founding father, Benjamin Rush, “[T]he poles of the revolution,” and that, while others wrought and fought, “[They] thought for [them] all, (letter to Adams, october 17, 1809)” then their thinking with and against one another will have a claim to being the first expression of an American tradition of thinking. That claim was substantiated when we found, in the subsequent history of America, the presence of the arguments that constituted their conversation.” – The Soul of a Nation, 199

The question is whether we have words left for a conversation:

“America, like philosophy, exists only and entirely in an endless conversation. One cannot stop either; engagement in each is a matter of finding oneself (engaged) in it.” – ibid., 4

David McCullough on human events

David McCullough is a national treasure. Here he is being engaged by Librarian of Congress James Billington on writing history, especially on writing about the man who was in my estimation the greatest Founding Father, John Adams.

THE SOUL OF A NATION: in brief (with audio)

On March 10th, 2016, I presented The Soul of a Nation: America as a Tradition of Inquiry and Nationhood to a group of scholars and journalists – mostly the former on this occasion – at the Center for American Studies in Rome.

L-R Dr. Andrea Chiappetta , Prof. Kevin L. Flannery SJ , Prof. Paolo Savarese, Prof. Christopher R. Altieri, Prof. Giorgio Salzano (the lovely lady in the foreground is Avv. Ester Rita, AKA Mrs. A; the young fellow to her right with his eyes fixed on the moderator and his elbows on the table is my son, Joseph)

Unfortunately, the recording I made of the event was corrupted.

Since several friends and colleagues have asked me what the book is about, and what was said at the presentation, I’ve decided to make a recording of the summary of the work I prepared when I was defending it as my PhD dissertation.

I decided to have some fun with this little exercise: I stayed pretty close to the prepared text, but I tried not to make it a “straight read” as we say in the trade, and I added a little music, top and tail, and have a couple of ad libs. I hope you all enjoy it (and if you do enjoy it, please do share it around).

The text of the presentation is below the audio.

This work considers an actual, historical political society as an apt field of study in and for the general science of order.

The work shows how the people that was formed through common experience on the northeastern littoral of the North American continent is particularly apt for this type of study. The aptness of the chosen historical society, however, becomes visible only during the course of the work, itself.

Specifically, that which emerges during the course of the work is that the debate over the kinds of institutions that are best for governing, which took place in the latter half of the 18^th century among British colonists in the New World, was in reality a primarily anthropological debate – a debate over the nature of man and the constitution of society.

In the public square, the debate over the nature of man was intermingled with the debate over the right kinds of institutions for the specific mass of humanity that was living on or near the North-Eastern littoral of the North American continent. For those, who were actually conducting the debate, however, the anthropological question was prior to the institutional one – they knew that institutions are for human beings living in society.

Most importantly, the debate in the British colonies during the second half of the 18^th century was a real, historical, practical example of the insight with which Plato began the critical scientific reflection on politics: the city is a man writ large, while society is a cosmos in miniature.

Thus, the work takes as its starting point the symbol in and around which that group of humanity, which was present along and relatively close to the aforementioned littoral, began to develop consciousness of itself as a distinct people – namely, “America”. America is the starting point, as I said, and it is also the object of the investigation – the point de depart and the point d’arrivée.

Here it is worthwhile to note that “America”, is a geographical designator and at the same time the name of a peculiar conceptual space. The geographical significance is rightly applicable to a broader territory than that comprehended by either the original littoral or even the present continental expanse of the United States, though the term has acquired its peculiar acception in the physical space occupied and governed by those human beings, who have become the people of the United States.

The point, here, is most emphatically not to deny that there are other conceptual spaces in the geographical area called America – perhaps the most pertinent example of which is Latin America, which extends through several geographical regions and constitutes a peculiar cultural-linguistic and political worldview. The point is rather that these are other conceptual spaces, with peculiarities and structures that qualify them as other than what citizens of the United States call “America”, peculiarities and structures that are independent of the conceptual space of the United States.

The United States is now and has been for some time possessed of enormous power and influence, for good or for ill, and the exertion of that power, the exercise of that influence is now and has been for many decades cause of, and occasion for considerable resentment among other peoples of the Americas and elsewhere. This work is not concerned with providing a criticism of, much less an apology for, the existence and exercise of U.S. power and influence. It is concerned with the generation of the conceptual space in and under which the people who created the United States came to recognize themselves as involved in a common way of life; as a matter of fact, the name they gave to that conceptual space is “America”.

As philosophers, we ought not to be scandalized by the phenomenon, but driven as by an impetus internal to the science we practice, to understand it. This is the spirit in which this work takes “America” as its object. 

Basic Premise and Problematic

The basic premise of this book is threefold:

1. That the forma mentis of the founders of the political society that is often viewed – by its members and by those external to it – as the non plus ultra of modernity, that is, the United States of America, is really steeped in the more ancient tradition of thinking that began in Athens and continued – continues – through the Christian centuries.

2. That the essence of human society is simultaneously to represent its’ members’ self-understanding and their understanding of the universal order in which the members participate by virtue of their human nature, is one of the deep and abiding currents of Western thinking.

3. That the society in form for action in history in and through and under the symbol, “America” – in other words – is an apt field for the study of the general problem of order.

The present circumstances of science and of society, however, are certainly colored, even though they might not be entirely defined by attempts to render that deep and abiding current inaccessible. Whether by ignoring, obstructing redirecting, interrupting or by some other how, such attempts are characteristic of much thinking done since the disintegration of the social-political order that was known as Christendom.

This meant that I wanted a method that would allow me to recover the current within the structure and order of American society. The order of America, in fact, informed and directed the structure of American society, though the availability of that (or any) order would be only and entirely in the history of the society itself.

The procedure upon which I settled, then, sought to discover what Voegelin calls, “the unfolding of the typical in meaningful concreteness,” in America. This procedure, however, is not an innovation; it is rather a recovery.

Insofar as it was concerned with discovering and elaborating the structure of experience, the work might have found itself  placed in the way of phenomenology. The work was also concerned with the development of a language symbol, and this – on its own – would have made the work essentially hermeneutical. Taken together, however, the two moments placed the work in the way of Platonic anamnesis.

Now, anamnesis is not simply an epistemological and psychological doctrine among others; it is the word Plato used to describe the soul’s experience of openness to the transcendent ground of the order of being.

Conscious and critical exploration of the experience is achieved in and through a particular way of living in the world, one he called philosophia – though the conditions for philosophia are given only in human society, itself at once a man writ large and the cosmos writ small.

This work attempted (I should say with some degree of success) to render possible the search for the general principle of order within a given political society in historical existence – namely, within America.

The essay engages three 20^th century philosophers, Eric Voegelin, Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Cavell.

In critical conversation with them and with the founding fathers, I basically show how a broad conversation regarding the constitution of society is constitutively present in the public discourse of the peoples that began to recognize themselves as such – I mean to say, as peoples, and eventually as one American people – during the imperial crisis of the late 18^th century in what was then called British America; that the participants in that conversation have at least an inchoate awareness of society as at once cosmic and anthropological; that this makes the political society founded on the northeastern littoral of the North American continent particularly apt for a recovery of the kind of thinking that recognizes an actual, historical political society as an apt field of study in and for the general science of order.

Said shortly, the five chapters of the book recover the forma mentis of the U.S. founders and trace the development of their way of thinking, at least so far as to allow me to locate the founders’ forma mentis in the broader tradition of philosophical inquiry – broader, I mean to say, than the tradition of 17^th and 18^th century political liberalism in which it is usually located – and therefore to see it as a distinct, though not a separate moment in the history of the general science of order that has been called episteme politike and also “political philosophy”.

Overview of the Body

The work was accomplished in five chapters, with an interlude between the third and the fourth chapters, conceived as a break between and a passage from the first phase of the work to the second.

The first phase saw with Eric Voegelin that the basic problem of political science is the problem of representation, and that America, insofar as it emerges in history as a contest over representation, is an especially apt field for study of the basic problem.

After establishing the aptness of America as a field for studying the basic problem – now recognized as representation, though in a sense at once broader and more layered than the merely elemental or institutional – the next step was to observe the ordering forces at work in America, and in observing those forces, it became apparent that they originated in social and theoretical contexts that pre-dated the historical emergence of America.

This meant – this means – that the way of interpreting existence through the generation of America – the symbols that represent the truth and existence of America, including but not limited to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were constitutive of a tradition of inquiry, and at the same time, possibly, of nationhood.

The next step was to observe that, and to a certain extent, how the search for order at the founding moment of American political independence was conducted as something I called with Stanley Cavell, a quest for the ordinary.

This was, broadly and roughly, the work of the first three chapters – and this work established that it would be at least arguable to claim the American tradition as one at once of inquiry and nationhood.

The final two chapters – the fourth and the fifth – constitute the second phase of the work and contain the conceptual nucleus of the project.

The order of society in America that had begun to emerge through the earlier chapters in a manner amenable to theorization, actually began to be theorized in the fourth chapter, which, you will recall, dealt with the presence of Gnostic threads in the fabric of America.

I would not dwell overmuch, at the present juncture, on the question of Gnosticism – at least not on its own merits. Ideally, this would be the time to turn to the theme of marriage in America – though I really cannot do more than mention that it is at this point in the work that marriage emerges as an explicit thematic concern.

The final two chapters also engaged the larger discussion of the project of philosophy as the science of order, though the engagement was with a view to establishing or recovering the beginnings of America’s theoretical articulation.

I have more to say in this regard, but I will say it in connection with my discussion of the nature and scope of the conclusions I reached – a discussion to which I now turn.

Nature and Scope of Conclusions

The concluding review did not seek to put a bow on definitions of problems exhaustively treated during the course of the work; rather, the basic task was to offer a sort of status quaestionis and articulate a series of further questions that were only, or at least much more readily amenable to formulation in light of and as a result of the work accomplished.

This is not to say that the conclusions are somehow hedged. The point is that to take the measure of a work in progress is delicate, and often difficult work; to conclude a stage of progress in a given task with a series of questions, the asking of which was either impossible, or only dimly possible, at the outset, is the sign of progress in the task of philosophy.

Most importantly, the work shows how the problem of America is intrinsically philosophical: it shows that, and how, questions belonging to philosophy arise in and under America, and it also shows that the human experience of awe at the order of creation, and of the intelligibility – is also the experience the founders discovered at the beginning of America. Specifically, the founders experienced this as a conversation of which they were neither the initiators, nor the concluders – an endless conversation.

The institutions erected by Americans emerged in these pages as an exercise in managing existential tensions that, while inevitably arising in and under elements of government, nevertheless bear principally on the constitution of the society for which those institutions are given.

America is, in short, a conceptual framework in which anthropological and social-constitutional questions inform and direct the search for answers to questions regarding the right structure of the elements of representation – that is to say, the former order of questions informs the institutions of government, so that America provides a reply to, and possibly a way to overcome the basic political problems of Modernity.

At the same time, the history of order in and under America shows how there is no ultimately or perfectly effective institutional guarantee against the decay of a society’s spiritual health. In other words, the general idea of freedom to pursue the good together in society, which America represents, can degenerate into post-modernity, and this possibility cannot be institutionally arrested or curtailed – at least not without violating the human freedom on which the experiment is based.

Quick takes from the presentation of The Soul of a Nation

On Thursday, March 10th, 2016, I presented The Soul of a Nation: America as a Tradition of Inquiry and Nationhood at the Center for American Studies in Rome. Proff. Kevin Flannery SJ, Paolo Savarese, and Giorgio Salzano, my teachers, offered critical appraisal and appreciation of my effort, while I responded to their criticism and received their praise, all the while learning about the book I wrote, the country I love, and the way of life I have embraced.

It was an unmerited and unforgettable grace.

The video below (shot by my wife) contains a moment in which I respond to Fr. Flannery, SJ’s careful – even gently placed – criticism of my use of Plato, specifically my discovery of the idea that the city is a man writ large and society the cosmos in miniature, as a motive force and an ordering element in the forma mentis of the founding generation. It takes me a while to get into the issue – there was some work of gratitude to do – and I am confident I owe him more words on the subject, and better chosen ones – but no matter.

I also realize, having listened to my response, the debt I owe to Stanley Cavell – I seem to be channeling – almost parroting – him in a few moments (the audio is shaky – it was a big room and this was shot on a phone – but it sounds fine in a headset):