SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
March 2002
Volume 9, No. 3
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> The Moving Picture
-> Burke's Transformation
-> The State and Heresy
Letters to the Editor
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted
FEATURES
The Moving Picture
(page 1)
NATIONAL REVIEW has all but added a fourth member
to George Bush's "axis of evil": Saudi Arabia. In a cover
story, editor Richard Lowry suggests that "we should
contemplate the end of the House of Saud." He means
something more active than contemplation. "Stability in
the Middle East may be important, but it should be on
America's terms." Shall we nuke Mecca?
* * *
Traditional U.S. allies are showing no enthusiasm
whatsoever for a wider war against Evil. The voices of
Infinite Justice and Enduring Freedom are graciously
allowing that these folks may be weak and cowardly rather
than actually pro-Evil. No matter. The Axis of Good --
the United States and Israel -- will proceed alone, if
necessary.
* * *
Moving on, Bush went to New York to assure the city
that it will get the $20 billion in aid he promised to
help it recover from the September 11 attacks. "When I
say I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it.... And
when I say $20 billion, I mean $20 billion." Awfully big
of him. I didn't know he had that much money. Or did he
mean *we* are going to pay? Just the sort of generous
gesture we'd learned to associate with Bill Clinton.
* * *
Now we learn that several Catholic bishops, among
them Boston's Archbishop Bernard Cardinal Law, have been
covering up for pedophile priests and allowing them to
carry on their pastoral perversions. "I am not a
policeman," explains Brooklyn's Bishop Thomas V. Daily.
"I am a shepherd." Exactly -- and these shepherds have
been protecting the wolves instead of the poor lambs.
Church officials have paid roughly a billion dollars in
out-of-court settlements to keep the scandals quiet --
and continuing. The faithful in the pews, filling the
collection baskets, have had no inkling where their money
was going. Meanwhile, we are told there aren't enough
funds to support retired priests and nuns in nursing
homes, after lifetimes of service to Christ.
* * *
It can be argued that Abraham Lincoln was the worst
enemy America ever had -- and ultimately the most
successful so far. What greater triumph than to be
worshipped by your victims? Genghis Khan had his fun, but
it was short-lived; he never enjoyed lasting popularity
among those he beheaded and raped. Of course, he never
pretended to be "protecting" them. That is the difference
between a barbarian and a state.
* * *
In THE GODFATHER, Don Corleone is portrayed as a
noble mafioso, whose crimes (horses aside) are
essentially victimless. His scruples won't allow him to
engage in sordid vices like drugs, yet, unlike the
mafiosi of the real world, he apparently doesn't depend
on terror and extortion for his daily bread. He inflicts
violence only on his evil rivals. In short, he is a
sentimental conception -- very much like the patriotic
image of the U.S. Government
Burke's Transformation
(pages 3-5)
When Samuel Johnson, that notorious hater of Whigs
("The first Whig was the devil"), reflected, in a pacific
moment, that a wise Whig and a wise Tory would generally
agree, he was undoubtedly thinking of his Whig friend
Edmund Burke. Johnson's respect for Burke was boundless.
He observed that after a brief chance meeting with Burke
in the street, even a total stranger would say to
himself, "This is an extraordinary man." He found Burke's
conversation so challenging that once as he lay ill he
said, "Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me." Always
sparing and precise in his praise, Johnson spoke of Burke
in superlatives: "His stream of mind is perpetual."
Burke warmly reciprocated Johnson's respect. They
might easily have been rivals, or even enemies, but for
all their sportive competition in conversation they
unreservedly loved, admired, and forgave each other.
I first came under Burke's spell more than 30 years
ago, when I was in college. Conservatives cited him often
in those days; Russell Kirk had celebrated him as the
fountainhead of modern conservatism in his excellent book
THE CONSERVATIVE MIND. And of all Burke's writings, none
had more impact, in his own time and later, than his
REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE.
This would have surprised his contemporaries,
especially Johnson (who had been dead for years when the
book appeared in 1790). For most of his career Burke had
been thought of as a great liberal; as he had sympathized
with the Americans during their revolution -- when
Johnson snorted that Americans were "a race of convicts,
and ought to be grateful for anything we allow them short
of hanging" -- it was assumed that he would likewise side
with the French during theirs.
But Burke saw an essential difference between the
two upheavals. The Americans had demanded only the
traditional rights of Englishmen, and he had urged
prudent and magnanimous conciliation. Tories like Johnson
had insisted on the legal authority of Britain over the
colonies it had chartered; Burke's view was that such
claims, however valid in law, should not be pressed too
hard when justified discontent was so widespread in
America.
By contrast, Burke saw the French Revolution as one
of "theoretic dogma," appealing not to history or
tradition but, on the contrary, to "abstract" but
allegedly "natural" human rights. Burke held that these
supposed rights were directly opposed to both history and
tradition, the only safe bases for civil society. Such a
revolution, he insisted, could only end in chaos,
violence, and tyranny. And events in France soon bore out
his prediction. Just as he had opposed monarchical
tyranny in England and America, he opposed democratic
tyranny in France.
Burke saw no inconsistency in this, but it cost him
the friendship of other Whigs, notably Charles James Fox,
who saw the French Revolution as a natural extension of
the American (as did Jefferson). Suddenly Burke found
himself a hero of his old foes the Tories.
It isn't easy to distill a general political
philosophy from Burke's writings, since nearly everything
he wrote was a response to current events. The single
exception was his problematic treatise, A VINDICATION OF
NATURAL SOCIETY, written when he was still in his
twenties and published anonymously in 1756; and it was
anything but conservative. It was, in fact, a radical
anarchist tract, fiercely attacking all governments as
tyrannous and murderous. All had begun in brutal
conquest, and few had risen far above their sanguinary
origins.
Nothing could be more at odds with Burke's later
conservatism; or so it would seem at a glance. It is so
different from, even opposite to, the views he is
generally associated with that it has been ignored as a
minor anomaly. Yet it may provide an important clue to
Burke's development as a political thinker.
Burke was born in Dublin in 1729. Since Catholics
were then excluded from the legal profession under
British rule, his father had joined the Church of
England; Burke followed him in both religion and
profession, but always retained strong Irish and Catholic
sympathies. His Irish relations always found him a
generous benefactor.
When he entered politics in the 1760s, he was forced
to explain how he squared the Vindication (his authorship
had become known) with loyalty to the British crown. By
the book's argument, it was nonsense to speak of *any*
government as legitimate.
Burke's explanation was simple: the Vindication was
a work of irony, a parody and reductio ad absurdum of the
radical opinions of the late Viscount Bolingbroke.
But many have suspected that the Vindication was
entirely sincere at the time he wrote it, and that his
later repudiation of it was a disingenuous attempt to
save his budding political career. The great anarchist
Murray Rothbard judged it impassioned, cogent, and
unrefuted by anything in all Burke's later writings; he
found few if any traces of irony in it. Burke the
politician disowned it, Rothbard argued, only because he
felt he had to.
Certainly there was no political future in
advocating anarchism in the England of Burke's day; being
Irish would have been a sufficient handicap. Was Burke
the politician, then, living a lie? Did he betray his
convictions when he entered politics?
Maybe. But there is another possible explanation,
which seems more likely.
Burke did go on to enjoy a brilliant political
career in Parliament. He became the leader and spokeman
of the Rockingham Whigs, and his speeches were widely
read, studied, and admired. They weren't always listened
to: his voice was weak, his delivery boring, and his
thoughts too dense for instant comprehension. Yet those
same speeches, when they appeared in print, offered
marvelous wisdom and an eloquence worthy of the great
English poets. He was a consistent champion of liberty
and temperate government. But why did he go back on the
unadulterated anarchism of the Vindication?
As a practical matter, Burke may have decided, with
some regret, that the state was here to stay, at least
for the foreseeable future, and that men had better make
the best of it. In THE CITY OF GOD St. Augustine had
argued that the state, along with war and slavery, was
punishment for original sin; yet he had come to terms
with the earthly City of Man as an interim arrangement
until the Second Coming and the Last Judgment. The state
was not an ideal, but a modus vivendi for fallen human
nature. At worst, a state without justice was nothing
more than piracy writ large; and even at best, it was
never far from this condition.
Burke's mature conservatism could therefore have
been a sort of Augustinian compromise with the world as
it is. Centuries of Christian civilization, with the
gradual influence of tradition, "chivalry," "manners,"
and "opinion" (weighty words in Burke's vocabulary), had
tamed the monster and humanized what had originated in
raw power. He found in the Christian states of modern
Europe something more than tolerable; something actually
appreciable, and not to be discarded. At bottom the state
was built on power, and original sin still lurked in all
human affairs; but these evils were greatly mitigated and
refined by what he called "the unbought grace of life."
Under the Christian regime, "vice itself lost half its
evil, by losing all its grossness."
In his famous lament that "the age of chivalry is
gone," Burke complained that the French revolutionaries
were stripping away "all the pleasing illusions, which
made power gentle, and obedience liberal," as well as
"all the decent drapery of life." They were destroying
the two principles that had civilized Europe: "the spirit
of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion."
Burke explicitly connected this reductionism --
"this barbarous philosophy," "this mechanic philosophy"
-- with a decay in manners: "There ought to be a system
of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would
be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our
country ought to be lovely."
Without the influences that "beautify and soften"
society, politics would be reduced to a crude and bloody
struggle, in which law depended solely on raw force and
terror; for "power, of some kind or other, will survive
the shock in which manners and opinions perish; and it
will find other and worse means for its support."
Burke has been criticized from many standpoints, but
nobody can deny that he foresaw the course of the French
Revolution with uncanny accuracy, from the Reign of
Terror to the dictatorship of Napoleon. One of his
harshest critics, Tom Paine, went to France to support
the Revolution -- and narrowly escaped being guillotined
himself!
The Reflections give us a clue as to the change in
Burke's philosophy since the Vindication. We can only
speculate; Burke was never a confessional writer and we
have little access to his inner life. But I suspect that
he had come to accept power as an inevitable reality,
which could never be eliminated from human affairs. This
meant that a stateless society was a vain dream, a
Utopia. At best, a civilized society might, so to speak,
*feel* stateless, in that its subjects would rarely
encounter power in its harshest forms.
For all his angry and sarcastic invective against
the revolutionaries, not only the French but their
English admirers as well, I think Burke agreed with them
on more than he admitted. He never denied that the state
did ultimately rest on force. That was what made the
revolutionary philosophy dangerously seductive and
potentially contagious -- so much so that he wanted the
nations of Europe to wage a ruthless war to crush the new
French regime, lest its "theoretic dogma" engulf the
whole Continent. He stressed this theme with increasing
fury until his death in 1797.
"On this scheme of things," he wrote -- meaning
according to the new "barbarous philosophy" intoxicating
France -- "a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a
woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest
order.... Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but
fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by
destroying its simplicity. The murder of a king, or a
queen, or a bishop, or a father, are only common
homicide; and if the people are by any chance, or in any
way gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most
pardonable, and into which we ought not to make too
severe a scrutiny."
Whether the Vindication was a satire, a credo, or a
mere thought-experiment, it shows that Burke was capable,
even in his youth, of empathy with the reductionist style
of thought that was now convulsing France. He sensed its
power and appeal immediately. Unchecked, it might mark a
disastrous turning point in European history. He knew
well enough, as his own rhetoric shows, that the
chivalric fictions of the old European tradition were
"pleasing illusions," mere "drapery"; however "lovely"
they might be, they were extremely vulnerable to
skeptical rationalistic analysis.
But even if they were in some sense right in
abstract principle, the revolutionaries had everything
backwards. By reverting to naked force and Machiavellian
calculation, they were annihilating the very things that
had gradually, over many centuries, civilized the state.
Once gone, those delicate yet necessary fictions would be
impossible to restore. True, they were artificial; yet he
insisted that "art is man's nature," and in that sense
even the artificial can be called "natural."
Burke's Reflections are best known for their
wonderful (if sometimes slightly cloying) purple patches
on Marie Antoinette and the passing of chivalry; the
second half of the book is little read or heeded. Yet in
its latter pages he brilliantly turned reductionist
analysis against the reductionists themselves. Using all
his vast knowledge of practical politics and finance, he
showed how the new regime had relied on fraud, worthless
paper money, confiscation, broken faith, and empty
rhetoric, all in the name of "the rights of man," to
bring France to ruin. Since nobody could escape the
consequences of inflation and debased currency, France
had been turned into "a nation of gamesters."
Burke was especially scathing on the
revolutionaries' seizures of church properties: "These
gentlemen perhaps do not believe a great deal in the
miracles of piety; but it cannot be questioned, that they
have an undoubting faith in the prodigies of sacrilege."
As a politician, he had an unsurpassed ability to detect
the real sources and stratagems of power; as a
rhetorician, he could sting like a scorpion.
But the big question remains: Was Burke, after all,
right? Despite the vehemence of his attack on the French
Revolution, he was none too sure himself. The Europe he
loved may have been a period of unstable equilibrium,
doomed in the end by the dynamics of power; it was quite
possible that the civilized state could never last
indefinitely, given the momentum of decline and the
evanescence of refinement in this fallen world. Europe's
greatest achievements might prove mortal.
Burke acknowledged this when he wrote, in a passage
Matthew Arnold would later call one of his finest, that
it might be the irresistible will of Providence that a
new order should supplant the old. If so, the effort to
conserve was finally futile.
Johnson's Tory conservatism was rooted in a sense of
permanence, which mocked the folly and presumption of men
who aspired to change the world: "Why, Sir," he told
Boswell, "most schemes of political improvement are very
laughable things." And again:
How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or
cure.
But Burke understood very well, as Johnson never did,
that politics could drastically change the human
condition, and for the worse. He lacked Johnson's
confidence that social order was sturdy enough to
withstand "schemes of political improvement." His fears
proved prophetic. He lived to see the arrival of
political modernity, of states matching the horrors he
had described in the Vindication.
The State and Heresy
(page 6)
(TEXT OMITTED FROM THE PRINT EDITION BECAUSE OF
SPACE LIMITATIONS IS INCLUDED HERE IN DOUBLE
BRACKETS [[ thus ]].)
In recent weeks I've been debating with people I
usually agree with: conservative Christians. Many of them
feel I've gone too far in the direction of philosophical
anarchism, in defiance of both Scripture and Catholic
teaching.
One reader, a self-identified Catholic socialist,
went so far as to call my views "heresy." He cited
particularly the encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI. His
e-mail message was so intelligent, provocative, and yet
charitable that I answered him at some length, and we
have had a long, friendly exchange ever since. [[ We're
still arguing, and neither of us is backing down. ]]
I've also been in touch with an old Protestant
friend, now a minister, whom I haven't seen since high
school. He too thinks Christian doctrine requires
submission to government, and he argues his case with a
power and sophistication I find especially impressive,
considering the level of our old Scripture-banging
arguments in our school days.
The key text for Christians is chapter 13 of St.
Paul's Epistle to the Romans, which begins: "You must all
obey the governing authorities. Since all government
comes from God, the civil authorities were appointed by
God, and so anyone who resists authority is rebelling
against God's decision, and such an act is bound to be
punished. Good behavior is not afraid of magistrates;
only criminals have anything to fear.... The state is
there to serve God for your benefit." This is from the
Jerusalem Bible; the more familiar King James Version
says that "the powers that be are ordained of God."
Many Christians quote this passage to support the
view that we owe allegiance and obedience to the
government. But this interpretation, though obvious at
first sight, soon raises difficulties for Christians.
After all, the Christian martyrs -- including Paul
himself -- lived under pagan tyrants and chose to die
rather than submit to worship the emperor. [[ Paul is
thought to have died during Nero's persecution. ]]
Later Christian political thought was extremely
varied and complex. But St. Augustine took a dark view of
earthly government, which, with slavery and war, he
deemed a consequence of original sin. St. Thomas Aquinas
held that even unfallen man would need government (as
even good drivers need traffic laws), but he agreed with
Augustine that a positive law that clashed with divine or
natural law was unjust and void -- a principle that might
invalidate most statutes on the books.
Over two millennia, pagan states were replaced by
Christian states, which gave way to secularist states.
During all this time Christians have been forced to
grapple with many questions: What is a state? How do we
recognize its authority? What are its limits? Can we
distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate states?
Is rebellion ever justified? Must the state defer to the
Church? Must the Church obey the state? All these
difficult questions have been further complicated by the
experience of barbarian conquests, feudalism, monarchism,
religious divisions, dynastic quarrels, republican
constitutionalism, capitalism, nationalism,
industrialism, mass democracy, dictatorship, Marxism,
totalitarianism, the welfare state, and of course war,
particularly total war.
Today almost nobody holds the position of Romans 13
in its full rigor, if that means a duty of unqualified
submission to whatever regime happens to exist. Nearly
all Christians distinguish between legitimate and
illegitimate regimes; if rebellion is always a sin, how
can we have a duty to obey the successful rebel when he
assumes power? Must we obey the tsar one day, and the
Lenin who topples him the next? Does Paul mean to say:
"Thou shalt obey anyone who holds coercive power over
thee"?
Or consider the United States. Here, "We the People"
are in theory the sovereign authority, and our ruling
officers are mere servants. The powers "delegated" to
those servants are defined and limited by the
Constitution. Must we obey them, even when they usurp
powers never entrusted to them? When they claim such
powers, it would seem that *they* are in rebellion
against *us,* and we have no duty to obey. "Masters,
obey your servants"?
When there are so many kinds of states, some of them
mutually incompatible, the only defining trait they share
is the claim of a legal monopoly of coercion. Paul
doesn't assert that brute power constitutes a right to
command and compel. He must mean something else. But
what?
He says the civil authorities serve God, and
Christians can obey the law and be good citizens by
simply keeping the Commandments. Were these words meant
to ward off suspicions that Christians were subversive
and to encourage them to respect human law, at least
insofar as it conformed to God's law?
If so, Paul's words may carry an ironic meaning that
would escape the Roman authorities. By positing a just
government -- very unlike the rule of Nero -- he may have
been subtly implying that Christians are *not* morally
bound to cooperate with tyranny.
If that's what he meant, maybe I'm not such a
heretic after all!
Letter to the Editor
(page 2)
(TEXT OMITTED FROM THE PRINT EDITION BECAUSE OF
SPACE LIMITATIONS IS INCLUDED HERE IN DOUBLE
BRACKETS [[ thus ]].)
Mr. Sobran -- I've exchanged many e-mails with authors
and pundits who fail to confront a foundational issue. My
reasoning runs something like this:
Men tend to be wicked. They tend to form
associations that advance their schemes (which tend to be
greedy or promiscuous). Therefore, every human
aggregation tends toward wickedness, with its only
salvation being found in Christian belief.
It follows that government ("force," as Washington
called it) tends to be about as wicked as those who
institute it. The best measure of wickedness is the
presence or absence of meaningful Christian belief.
It worries me to see writers suggest that giving
government anything results in giving government
everything. This kind of extreme parceling out of force
will leave us with what some have called the "sovereign
individual." What is the first thing the sovereign
individual will do? He will form an aggregation with
other persons to advance his best interests, and the less
the Christian influence, the more egregious those
interests.
Therefore, limited government is not a myth. To
speak of the virtue of implementing anarchism (even
within the safe ambit of its precise, political
definition) is reminiscent of another political theorist
who believed the state, having served its function of
setting all things aright, would wither away. This didn't
happen, and neither will a libertarian/anarchist
approach. Indeed, it would take another government to
prevent people from forming new governments to take the
place of the previously deposed government.
There is no structural cure for postmodern political
thinking. Moreover, discussions about it miss the point
so badly as to create false hopes.
Bill Wilmeth
Ogden, Utah
REPLY
Every state depends on popular belief in its
legitimacy. Anarchism would likewise depend on popular
belief that no state can be legitimate, that the essence
of the state is force. Both the state and anarchism
require what might be called cultural preconditions.
Unless a considerable body of people deny that any state
may justly command, an anarchic order is impossible.
But if enough people denied the authority of any
possible state, it would be very hard for such a state to
claim legitimacy. A merely cynical gang of rulers, bent
on robbing the mass of people and not pretending to be
"legitimate," would never be able to settle into power
for long. Even a limited state, supported by much of the
population with moral conviction of its legitimacy, but
also jealously watched, opposed, and even resisted by a
large and articulate anarchist minority, would have to
watch its step.
[[ At the moment the anarchist minority is
minuscule, so the precondition for anarchism doesn't
exist. I hope that will change. ]] Of course we can
imagine a situation in which a criminal majority rules
for a time by raw force, but even Communism at its worst
needed some feeble pretense of legitimacy. I don't think
men can be ruled for long by raw force; some element of
fraud -- a more or less plausible ideological claim of
legitimacy -- is also necessary.
Legitimacy claims are hard to sustain when even a
sizable intelligent fraction of the people deny them, if
the majority are aware of an alternative view. Every act
of tyranny would create more sympathy for, and generate
more attention to, the dissident position.
[[ Slavery itself depends on the general contentment
of slaves, the belief that their masters are taking care
of them and protecting them from worse evils; the state
likewise ]] The state also depends on people feeling that
it protects them -- from enemies, poverty, et cetera.
Osama bin Laden has been a boon to the limitless state. I
don't think anarchism is any more utopian than the hope
that this government will return to its constitutional
limits.
JS
NUGGETS
MINOR RESERVATION: I whole-heartedly approve of the film
version of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING. I admire its good
intentions and high moral tone. I rejoice at its success.
I just didn't enjoy it. (page 5)
HEADS OR TAILS: NATIONAL REVIEW and THE WEEKLY STANDARD,
equally sophomoric on foreign policy, have come to a
parting of the ways. NR wants to overthrow the Saudi
Arabian government; TWS wants a "regime change" in
China. Wouldn't it be simpler just to nuke Israel?
(page 8)
TRUTH WILL OUT, BRIEFLY: Senator Tom Daschle mildly
criticized President Bush's "axis of evil" speech; but
when a furious reaction ensued, he issued a
"clarification," saying he fully agreed with the
president. You can always tell when a politician has
spoken from the heart: he takes it back the next day.
(page 12)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD? Since Bill Clinton moved
into Harlem, other whites have followed suit, crowding
blacks out. One Harlem landlord is quoted: "Man, I'm
looking to rent to white folks. I don't want the brothers
anymore."
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* How Killing Became a "Right" (January 15, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020115.shtml
* Anarchism, Reason, and History (January 24, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020124.shtml
* Words and Power (January 29, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020129.shtml
* On with the War! (January 31, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020131.shtml
* The Cross and the Swastika (February 5, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020205.shtml
* O Canada! (February 7, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020207.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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