SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
April-May 2006
Volume 12, Number 4-5
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> Unknown Unknowns
-> Publisher's Note
-> On Fatherhood
-> The Fog
-> Joe Sobran Turns Sixty
The Sobran Forum
-> Otto Scott, 1919-2006 (by Phillipa Scott-Girardi
Nuggets (plus electronic Exclusives)
"Reactionary Utopian" Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
Unknown Unknowns
(page 1)
When President Bush confirmed that he'd authorized
the National Security Agency to conduct an enormous
secret program to monitor Americans' telephone calls, as
reported in USA TODAY, I assumed that this remarkably
unpopular president had finally taken a fatal step too
far. Now the American public, already revolted by this
administration's blunders, crimes, lies, scandals,
domestic surveillance, deficits, et cetera, would roar
"Enough!"
It soon appeared not. In fact, a poll the day after
the story appeared found that most Americans, including
many who generally disapprove of Bush's job performance,
accepted the program as a legitimate "national security"
measure to contain terrorism.
As Bush told it, no laws were broken, the
Constitution wasn't violated, no calls were wiretapped
without court orders. The NSA was merely studying
=patterns= of phone calls in the records of three major
phone companies (a fourth refused to cooperate).
Innocent people, in short, had nothing to fear. A
huge, shadowy government agency, known to most of us only
by its initials (not to be confused with the National
Security Council, mark you), was merely exercising,
without telling us, another power we didn't know about.
That power isn't authorized by the Constitution, but it
isn't forbidden by it either, and the U.S. Supreme Court
has permitted similar things in the past, under certain
conditions, which are being scrupulously observed by the
NSA. Possible abuses aren't worth worrying about.
Big government is just a wee bit bigger than we
knew, that's all. But then, we're also more secure than
we knew. No telling how many terrorist plots the NSA has
foiled! And no telling how much it has cost the taxpayer
to collect untold volumes of useless information. But
that's not for us to know either.
As long as most of us support our government, that's
what counts. And of course we do support it, without
knowing quite what it is now. We are assured it's a
democracy, responding to our needs (as it defines them)
and under our control.
What? Your civics teacher didn't explain this to
you? Well, the old civics books may be a little out of
date. As Donald Rumsfeld has explained, there are some
things about our enemies that are known, and some that
are unknown, and the latter can be further broken down
into the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns.
I suppose the same is true about our rulers. We know
a lot about what they do, and we also realize that a lot
more than we know is concealed from us. In the case of
the NSA it happens that some of the unknown unknowns have
come to light. But countless unknowns remain.
The film UNITED 93 is being hailed for showing and
celebrating the courage of the passengers on a hijacked
airliner on September 11, 2001, who immediately fought
back against the terrorists. But who will fight back
against those who have hijacked our country?
Publisher's Note
(page 2)
Dear Reader,
This month's issue is double the size of a regular
SOBRAN'S -- twice the size and I hope twice the treat for
fans of Joe Sobran. This combination April-May issue
contains two timeless classics: "The Fog" from the CENTER
JOURNAL (Summer 1982); and "On Fatherhood" from HUMAN
LIFE REVIEW (Spring 1978). Twelve of Joe's recent
"Reactionary Utopian" columns are also inside.
With this issue we introduce a new feature, "The
Sobran Forum." Joe Sobran and the newsletter lost a good
friend in May. Otto Scott, a distinguished writer and
eloquent speaker, died just shy of his 89th birthday. We
are printing an article in "The Sobran Forum" by his
daughter Phillipa, who told us that Otto used to send her
copies of SOBRAN'S with key passages underlined. I am
happy to report that Otto returned to his Catholic faith
in the final weeks of his life, receiving the Last Rites
of the Church.
You can expect the unexpected in SOBRAN'S, and count
on something extra each time we appear in your mailbox.
This month, I am pleased to announce the release of our
newest publication: REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME:
CONFESSIONS OF A REACTIONARY UTOPIAN. This booklet has
hundreds of pithy quotes from Joe that appeared in
SOBRAN'S over the past five years -- several are featured
throughout this very special issue.
REGIME CHANGE is available at =no= charge for all
renewals to SOBRAN'S. It is a sequel to ANYTHING CALLED A
"PROGRAM" IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL: CONFESSIONS OF A
REACTIONARY UTOPIAN (now out of print). It fits easily
into a shirt pocket or a purse and can be a welcome gift
to a fellow traveler or serve as a treasure trove of
opinions to annoy your left- (and right-) wing friends.
Welcome!
Welcome to our new subscribers! We are in the midst
of a subscription drive and have recruited many new
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If you are looking for a lively speaker, why not
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Michigan to give two talks and do a TV appearance for
John Mangopolous's program, THE BATTLE OF IDEAS.
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Thanks for being a loyal reader of SOBRAN'S!
Sincerely,
[signature]
Fran Griffin
Correction: In the February SOBRAN'S in an article on the
Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, the phone number listed
was incorrect. One can reach the Foundation by writing to
P.O. Box 270, Vienna, VA 22183; e-mail:
FGF@vacoxmail.com; 703-242-0058; toll-free line: 1-877-
726-0058. Visit the new website for information on the
Foundation's first book, SHOTS FIRED: SAM FRANCIS ON
AMERICA'S CULTURE WAR, at www.shotsfired.us.
On Fatherhood
(pages 3-7)
Tocqueville observed that the American father
enjoyed less respect than his European counterpart, and
it is commonplace that American popular drama depicts
Father as a comical and somewhat feckless figure. To be
sure, there is a great deal of affection for this father,
and for life with him. Tocqueville thought that on the
whole the American family was a healthy thing, and he
thought the informality between fathers and sons allowed
a degree of warmth less easy to achieve in Europe.
Perhaps nothing separates us from the older European
experience so much as this. Our own ancestors might sing
of the "Faith of Our Fathers," but that kind of
veneration is difficult for us to feel toward =our=
fathers. It is hard for most of us even to imagine the
awe formerly inspired by patriarchs -- Abraham, King
Lear, Old Karamazov are nearly as alien to us as
Confucius. Patronyms -- Odysseus Laertides, Nikita
Sergeivitch -- are all but incomprehensible. A last name
among us is not a symbol of tribal identity, any more
than a first name is an honorific link with a patron
saint. Pop Freudianism had a great vogue here, but
Oedipal theory never had much resonance: the typical
American father problem is not an oppressive atavistic
presence brooding over the weak psyche, but simply the
absence of the father.
American boys are supposed to be trained for
independence. This is making a virtue of necessity. They
are going to be independent anyway. By their mid teens
they are too mobile and, often, too wealthy to be
controlled. What can the American father threaten to do
to his disobedient son? Precious little -- for there is
little he can withhold. Fathers may be important
formative influences, but they are not terribly important
as sources of identity and status. The American father
bequeaths no title, no tribal authority, and very little
property. We are a nation of self-made men, and most sons
can acquire much more than they have any prospect of
inheriting.
Moreover, we have no powerful tribal traditions to
speak of. Social authority is, as the sociologists say,
bureaucratized, rationalized, made abstract and
functional. Genealogy does not connect us to any fount of
sacredness. There is little motive to revere a father, or
any other human being: the very words "reverent" and
"pious" are apt to be a bit derisive; to call a book
"irreverent" is to recommend it, not to censure it. We
worry very little about what our ancestors might have
thought about us: we fear the judgment not of our
fathers, but of our children; not of the past, but of the
future. This has given a strange new meaning to the word
"history." The admonitory rhetorical question we ask
ourselves is now something like "What will history say?"
Conservative societies worry about betraying a heritage:
a liberal one worries about betraying a hypothetical
future.
The sense that the nature of things is not fixed and
can be remade inevitably changes our conception of
everything, including time. The past ceases to be
something to be cherished and commemorated; tradition
becomes "the dead hand of the past," rather than
something in which we jointly participate with
antecedents and posterity. Continuity no longer is felt
as a moral and metaphysical urgency. Conventional
presumptions become disreputable prejudices. A holiday
becomes an occasion of indulgence rather than of
holiness; as when we shift an honored president's
birthday for our convenience. After all, the whole idea
of honoring something is that we are willing to be
inconvenienced by the duty of paying our respects: and by
decreeing that Washington was born on a Monday we really
cease to honor him.
The point of all this is not to condemn the changes,
but simply to point out that they have occurred, and that
they have resulted in certain losses, which may or may
not be justified by the gains. One way or the other, we
should be conscious of what we are doing and undergoing.
Margaret Mead has pointed out that the capacity for
childbearing gives women a built-in social role, while a
corresponding role must be invented for men. For women,
as Freud notoriously remarked, "biology is destiny";
while men, in Sartre's phrase, are "condemned to be
free." Motherhood is a biological role, and every society
has it, but fatherhood is a social role which every
society must reinvent. As a result, there are great
variations in male roles. Some primitive societies don't
even recognize that copulation is the cause of
reproduction, and the role of men varies accordingly. Our
society increasingly repeals the causal link between
coitus and birth, and this too has changed the meaning of
sex -- and the experience of what it means to be either a
man or a woman. Women too are free now; whether condemned
or privileged to be free, free they are.
The conventions of fatherhood have enormously
intricate consequences. In most societies the paternal
line has been the source of the individual's (which is to
say the individual man's) rank. Military and economic
achievement have been the main modes of achieved rank,
but even these achievements have usually proved to some
extent hereditary. Men have often been able to claim
glory by tracing themselves back to some glorious
ancestor -- even a god. Lines of descent have at times
loomed large even in egalitarian America, particularly in
New England -- where, ironically, an "upstart" line like
the Kennedys has now been transmuted into an aristocracy.
Not only honor, but disgrace may be attached to
bloodlines. Bastardy has been a matter of shame in many
societies -- mostly, I think, in middle-class societies,
where it has been uncommon, thanks to a broad and
universally applied standard of sexual morality to which
all are expected to conform. In aristocratic societies,
where ranks vary widely and there are sexual as well as
other social privileges, it is treated more
matter-of-factly. And where rank is hereditary, as Samuel
Johnson noted, it is accepted on all sides as accidental
without strong moral implications. A nation of self-made
men tends to be a moralistic nation. More accurately, it
tends to be moralistic about individuals rather than
about classes. Americans tend to resist the idea of
making judgments about classes, because they like to deny
that classes really exist. This means not only social and
economic strata, but tribes, races, and, in a sense, even
sexes. In the quasi-official American ideology, only
individuals -- "citizens" -- really exist, and the model
of free and equal citizens supplants collectivities in
law and manners. There are no "superiors" here, except
functionally; and increasingly we address even our bosses
by their first names, signifying the essential national
camaraderie.
It is generally overlooked that the great American
institution is the individual. Of course it is odd to
talk this way, but that it because we don't think this
way: the individual, for us, is not an institution, but
an irreducible fact, isn't he (or she)? But the
individual is always a physical fact without necessarily
being a locus of morals and rights. Other societies
demand the subordination of the individual to any number
of other things: for most of the human race the
individual has been only a component of larger social
realities, and one by no means sanctified with individual
rights of religious freedom, free speech, unlimited
sexual freedom, and so forth: the degree of freedom
enjoyed has always been a function of rank. In many ways,
of course, this is still true even in America, a fact
that is a source of endless scandal to mainline
egalitarians. And so we abound in leveling crusades with
respect to race, wealth, sex, and age. One philosopher,
Peter Singer, has argued for a kind of equality for
animals; though, like those who lowered the voting age,
he has been forced to draw the line at shrimps.
Race and fatherhood
Let us consider what in America has become an
especially touchy matter: race. Since the nineteenth
century, with the rise of biological and anthropological
inquiry, race theory has become naturalistic, and the
concept of race has been broadened and magnified.
Earlier, however, a race was merely a sort of figure of
speech, so that Dr. Johnson could refer casually to "the
race of writers." This made sense when the term meant,
loosely, a line of descent, including an inherited status
and occupation.
In earlier times, a "race," in this sense, was a
narrow thing, much like a tribe or a nation (from
"natus," born). It meant something you belonged to by
birth. A Roman dignitary might trace his ancestry to a
god. The Hebrews traced theirs to Abraham. Aristocrats
had proud pedigrees. This kind of membership in a larger
ancestral group carried with it religion, culture,
whatever social authority one had, and ascribed traits --
positive traits in the eyes of members, mostly negative
ones in the eyes of outsiders, so that tribal or racial
cohesiveness had functions it no longer has for most of
us. The racial prejudices we frown on had their uses too
-- largely defensive, since life depended to a great
extent on group survival. As Margaret Mead has observed,
the fear of miscegenation reflects a sense of the
precariousness of intricate cultural patterns. It also
reflects the unsophisticated perceptions of tribes which,
looking outward, see nonmembers as animal, subhuman,
because they lack the ritual competence (in Erving
Goffman's phrase) of members: competence, that is to say,
in the cultural ways of the group, which the group itself
erects as its measure of humanity. We now term this
"ethnocentrism," but it would be unwise to adopt a
posture of simple condescension to it, since it is based
on the insight that the capacity for cultural
participation is the mark of humanity. Ethnocentrism,
properly speaking, means supposing that there is only one
test (that of one's own culture) for this capacity.
So even racial prejudices reflect a positive and
genuine conservative impulse: the desire to maintain the
integrity of tribal modes. In simpler times there was a
certain point in assuming that members of other races
were threats to this integrity: it was often a simple
fact. With the rise of individualism and the ideal of
citizenship, however, prejudices of this kind became
obsolete as safeguards, and became merely negative
prejudices "against" rather than obverse of group
loyalty. Pluralism began by assimilating all groups, so
long as they ceased affronting each other with open
claims of superiority and exclusive privilege. Humanity
ceased being composed largely of "barbarians,"
"foreigners," "savages," and "goyim," and became the
"human race." The very word "humanity" came to mean
something positive, an equal-opportunity race, universal,
with open admissions. Everyone was a member; nobody could
=not= be a member. The jealous and sacred conditions of
group membership became discreditable "barriers."
Hereditary blessings became unfair "accidents of birth."
In a sense, Hitlerism was a desperate and monstrous last
stand for genealogical triumphalism: hence the violence
of its appeal and opposition at a historical watershed.
What all this means is that fatherhood -- and by
extension descent -- no longer confers authority. One's
line no longer vouchsafes special dignity or access to
truth; no longer commands loyalty; is no longer a
legitimate source of pride. One may be "proud of his
heritage," but that really means that he needn't be
ashamed of it, rather than that he may vaunt himself
above others on account of it. And as social welfare
undertakes the material responsibilities for child care,
the old necessity for fathers is considerably weakened.
Feminism and individualism
If lineage, particularly on the father's side, is no
longer sacred, there is no obvious reason why fathers
should have special authority regarding children. A new
verb, "parenting," expresses the desexing of parental
roles. Perhaps the most vivid illustration of how far the
father has fallen is the fact that it is now unnecessary
for a woman to obtain the consent of her child's father
before having it aborted -- no matter whether she is
married or not. Many feminists hold that she has no
obligation to inform him of her decision to abort. Apart
from the question whether the child has any rights, this
raises a question of justice concerning the father.
Assume that abortion is perfectly justified in every
case: does it follow that the man should be obliged to
support a child whose very existence is no longer his
responsibility? Is the decision that he shall be
compelled to subsidize a biological accident to be made
by someone other than himself?
The answer to these questions is by no means
obvious, though ceteris paribus, it would seem that he
should have some say, if not over whether a woman
undergoes an elective abortion, then over the
consequences to himself. There is at least an obvious
inconsistency between holding that a fetus is merely part
of a woman's body, hers to dispose of at will, and
holding simultaneously that her will may impose on him
the obligation to act as if it were partly =his= body.
Grant that she may control her own body; may she also
control his? Should her biology be his destiny? She is
free to abort; what is he free to do? So far the autonomy
of the woman in this area seems not to coexist with an
equal autonomy for the man: his succumbs and falls into
the orbit of hers. Apparently the feminists would say to
the man what anti-abortionists have said to the woman:
"You should have controlled your own body at the critical
moment; having failed to do so, you must pay the natural
consequence." The woman decides, not only whether she
shall be a mother, but whether he shall be a father. By
depositing a small quantity of semen he has to a degree
subjugated himself to her will.
All kinds of counterarguments are conceivable; but
they come oddly from the kind of individualist credo that
justifies feminism and especially the right to abort in
the first place. If the fetus has no individual value
beyond what the mother chooses to give it, then the
father evidently should have no more responsibilities
than he has rights. He is otherwise in almost the
opposite position from the Roman paterfamilias, who had
discretion to kill even a full-grown child without legal
penalty. Whatever such a system may be called, it is not
one of individual liberty.
As so often happens, the new feminism has gone from
demanding equal rights to demanding special prerogatives;
in a word, privileges. Of course all demands for
privilege in modern America are made in the name of
equality, and especially in the name of rectifying past
wrongs, but that hardly means that what is demanded is
not privilege. In an odd way, the new feminism represents
not only the flowering of individualism, but even, in
some respects, the resurgence of tribalism.
Feminists nowadays are in the habit of talking as if
women's suffrage and other rights had been wrested from
men by force. But this is hardly plausible. It was, after
all, men who voted to let women vote. Nor was this an act
of sheer magnanimity (or chivalry) on the part of men.
Women's suffrage was resisted by as many women as men (as
the Equal Rights Amendment is), because it was rightly
perceived not so much as a shift of half the political
power from one sex to the other, as a fundamental
alteration in the principle of social organization.
Previously men had been the legal heads of families, even
if few of them had any great social stature outside the
family. It was the father who, like the shadow of the
tribal paterfamilias, voted on behalf of the family, as
its virtual representative in public affairs. The reason
women were given the vote was not that people decided
that men were violating women's rights and interests; if
men had been conspiring against women with any
determination, after all, they would hardly have chosen
to enfranchise them. The real reason was that it was
generally felt to be a kind of indignity to women as free
and rational adults for them to be represented by others,
even their own husbands. And a man who voted to let his
wife vote did not consider that he was freeing her from
his bondage; he thought that he was simply honoring her
individuality. The sexes were not at war, and there were
no demands for reparations in the form of "affirmative
action." Such notions of sex as a relevant factor in
public life were actually being filtered out: women's
suffrage was a modernizing movement, an act of
"differentiation" that separated biological identity from
political identity. The "little woman" became a
full-fledged "citizen."
This is an important distinction between the old
feminism and the new kind, which tends to emphasize
sexual identities to the detriment of men. The old was
Protestant and individualist, abstracting political
"souls" from feminine bodies. The new, while still driven
by many of the same ideals, also has a more Jewish
flavor, and hence a quasi tribalism. Even the epithet
"pig," never a typical symbol in Protestant invectives
(except Milton's) expresses this element. Nor are
collective derogations in the Protestant mode. Catholic
women too (especially disaffected Catholics) are in
evidence; like Jewish women, many of them have a
generalized resentment against men and the subjection of
women to the role of childbearers. Big families are
disappearing in America: people of all three faiths now
regard familial satisfactions as less important than
individual ones. It takes considerable nerve, bordering
on gall, to insist that sexual intercourse -- what
Catholic moral theology calls "the conjugal act," because
it constitutes the sacrament of matrimony -- must be
"ordered to procreation." To say such a thing is to
blaspheme against that American god, the individual.
Individualism and independence
It is not mere flippancy or derision to speak of the
individual as a "god." This does not mean that the
individual has any supernatural powers, merely that he is
a locus of value, an "ultimate term" in our rhetoric (to
use Richard Weaver's phrase). Many of the forceful terms
in our public discourse refer to the model of the freely
choosing individual: autonomy, self-determination,
liberation, and so forth. In this sense we might say that
sexual intercourse is now, so to speak, "ordered to
autonomy," to the "fulfillment" of the participating
individuals. Some would say that we are merely hedonistic
-- that sex is really ordered to pleasure. But this would
be to oversimplify, because pleasure too is ordered to,
and justified in terms of, autonomy.
It is not the rise of women that has weakened
paternal authority, but the rise of the individual. If
men wanted full power over women and children, they could
probably have it. But, on the contrary, they have
systematically -- and for the most part willingly --
forsaken it; because they recognize the principle of
autonomy as sovereign; as universal; as their own.
Accepting it, they have accepted the consequences. Men
qua men have abdicated. Nobody has forced them to do so;
the fact needn't be deplored, but it should be
acknowledged, along with the reason they have abdicated.
It has been virtually a religious process, a progressive
subordination of traditional male authority to a
charismatic principle. And of course many people think
that men themselves are better off for the changes.
America has a long tradition of declarations of
independence, and few Americans want to be George III.
This has meant a long succession of social fissions in
the name of liberty (under whatever synonym). But finally
the governing principle (what Weaver calls the
"tyrannizing image") has been the individual. In America
even collectivity movements, if they are to gain a large
following, must appeal to individualism. The
anti-abortion movement itself has adopted the language of
individual rights rather than the terminology of the
"integrity of the conjugal act" that one would expect if,
as its foes insist, it were a "reactionary" Catholic
movement.
The notion that one's individual being may inhere in
larger social bodies, or that one must subordinate
himself to an order of reality larger than the individual
self, is increasingly hard for Americans even to grasp,
let alone take seriously. Even the science of sociology
remains suspect here by its very nature, because it views
people under the aspect of more or less predictable
classes rather than as free (and hence unpredictable)
individuals. The sociologist had his own answer: as
Talcott Parsons has put it, modern society has
"institutionalized" individualism. One proof of this is
that less modernized societies than our own, like
Vietnam, Russia, and Brazil, have in their various ways
rejected the autonomous individual we have tried to
propagate among them as a bit of foreign tissue.
This is surely an interesting fact -- and, from the
viewpoint of the individualist ideology, an odd one. We
have been taught by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and perhaps
Kant and Mill to think of the individual as the "natural"
unit of society. How is it that less advanced -- and
presumably more "natural" -- societies have been less
hospitable to this unit? The reason is that the
autonomous individual is not a reality in any "state of
nature" yet discovered. On the contrary, primitive
societies are nearly always authoritarian (and
male-dominated). Individualism is a late bloom of
civilization. It is only when a society is highly refined
and sophisticated that it can entertain individual
"rights" sustained by the entire social structure. The
state-of-nature philosophers themselves were creatures of
remarkably advanced cultures. It was only when the
private contract had been long established that men could
imagine that all of society had its origin in a "social
contract."
Individualism did not antedate civilization. It is
the froth of civilization. Of course everyone professes
to know better than Locke that such a state never existed
in nature. (Actually Hobbes had admitted as much.) But,
just as fundamentalists and literal interpretations of
the Bible have given way not to simple unbelief but to a
rarefied liberal Christianity, with theologians like
Rudolf Bultmann distilling a Christian essence from the
residue of facticity, so modern individualism continues
to hold that somehow the individual is "real" and society
merely "conventional."
But of course this is a fatal reduction. The
interrelations of individuals (which is all that
"society" means) are as real as the existence of
individuals. Indeed, no individual could exist unless at
least two other individuals had interacted biologically;
and hardly one could have survived without the systematic
support of others. Most important, no one can have
"rights" unless others recognize, respect, and defend
such rights. There can be no genuine right that does not
presuppose a viable social order.
In a sense, abortion is the test of individualism.
If we realize that every individual is essentially
dependent on society, we can construct (or rather
perfect) a social order that fosters genuine individual
rights. But the doctrine that the genetically unique
human being in the womb may be killed at another's whim,
however this doctrine is disguised in the rhetoric of
liberty or self-determination for those others, is a
false and self-contradictory conception of freedom. It is
like speaking of the liberty of the slaveowner. It really
means privilege: the "right" under law of one person to
violate the right of another.
One test of a right, after all, is whether it can be
universalized and reconciled with other rights. The
"rights" asserted by the new feminism seem to have been
formulated willfully, without consideration either for
those of fetuses, whose humanity is denied, or for those
of fathers, whose humanity is, however grudgingly,
admitted. The phrase "women's rights" means more than it
purports to mean. Most people assume that it means simply
the extension of human rights to women, when in fact it
means the extension of special rights to women as a
privileged class -- at the expense, if need be, of the
rights of others outside that class. Hence this feminism
is not altogether in Parsons's language a universalist
movement, but a regression to particularism. Its rhetoric
is progressive and humanitarian, but its substance is
reactionary and anti-human. It makes unqualified claims
for self-serving values without regard for the competing
claims of other values, or the rights of other people.
And the best evidence of its essential inconsistency and
even hypocrisy is its on-again, off-again
admission/denial of the relation between a man and his
child.
In a sense, there is no turning back from
individualism. Civilized people have recognized that we
are all related to each other, and that each is therefore
special by virtue of membership in the whole. It may be
wearisome to repeat that no man is an island, and it may
seem fresh and daring to assert that every woman is an
island; but a philosophy that denies even the most
intimate of human relations -- those among spouses,
parents, and children -- is hardly a philosophy of the
sacredness of responsibility, not only in its derogation
of duty, but in its indifference to the things that
really do make people respond to each other morally:
love, the sense that a part of one's self is invested in
others who are close to one. Human dignity means not that
everyone is important to himself, but that he is likely
to be -- and ought to be -- precious to someone besides
himself. One of the evil things about abortion (as we are
often reminded) is that it arises, in many cases, from
the dereliction of men who don't want to be fathers.
Surely it is no remedy to weaken the rights of men who
do.
This essay originally appeared in HUMAN LIFE REVIEW
(Spring 1978) and was reprinted in the book SINGLE
ISSUES: ESSAYS ON THE CRUCIAL SOCIAL QUESTIONS.
The Fog
(pages 8-9)
Now and then one comes across a passage in an old
book that seems to leap off the page to address the
present. I recently happened across this one in G.K.
Chesterton's WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD?:
There are two things, and two things
only, for the human mind, a dogma and a
prejudice. The Middle Ages were a rational
epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age is, at its
best, a poetical epoch, an age of prejudice.
A doctrine is a definite point; a prejudice
is a direction....
It is not merely true that a creed unites
men. Nay, a difference of creed unites men --
so long as it is a clear difference. A
boundary unites....
It is exactly the same with politics.
Our political vagueness divides men, it does
not fuse them. Men will walk along the edge of
a chasm in clear weather, but they will edge
miles away from it in a fog. So a Tory can
walk up to the very edge of Socialism, =if he
knows what is Socialism.= But if he is told
that Socialism is a spirit, a sublime
atmosphere, a noble, indefinable tendency,
why, then he keeps out of its way; and quite
right, too. One can meet an assertion with
argument; but healthy bigotry is the only way
in which one can meet a tendency.... Against
this there is no weapon at all except a rigid
and steely sanity, a resolution not to listen
to fads, and not to be infected by diseases.
I think this perfectly catches the plight of the
orthodox in our own day. All the new enthusiasms, so
baffling at first, turn out to be elaborate evasions.
What looks like an unfortunate ambiguity turns out to be
a willful equivocation. For while you ought to apologize
for failing to understand the new theological, political,
or cultural savant, finally it dawns on you that he has
been intent on confusing you all along. His vagueness is
not an accident, but a strategy.
A familiar example is the campaign for legal
abortion. At first the reformers wanted to sound as if
they deplored abortion as much as anyone, but thought the
way to contain its evil effects was to legalize it and
thereby put it under the standards of public hygiene.
Soon, however, they had attained legalization, and began
expressing doubts as to whether we could even say that
abortion was wrong. And finally they demanded that
abortion be accepted as a "basic constitutional and human
right." Their doctrine has shifted; their direction has
remained constant.
Abortion foes have been accused of stridency and
bigotry for predicting that legalizing abortion would
lead to legalizing infanticide and euthanasia, but they
have been vindicated by events. The once furtive practice
of allowing defective infants to die (usually by
starvation) has begun to peep forth to seek -- and obtain
-- the sanction of the courts. A movement for euthanasia
has already begun.
All this is happening in a moral fog. At each step,
the new enthusiasts warn us against expecting further
steps, yet further steps regularly follow. And why not?
We hear the constantly changing rationales for change,
but no principle on which we can expect change to stop.
We are merely told that it is futile, and morally
reactionary, to "oppose" change.
The convolutions of casuistry are dizzying. We are
informed that to outlaw abortion is to impose a religious
conviction on others, and even that getting an abortion
is a free exercise of religion, yet we are also informed
that the public should subsidize abortion. All that is
clear is that somebody really wants to increase the
number of abortions by whichever means and arguments will
serve the purpose.
The appeal to religious freedom is especially
audacious. Orthodox people are forbidden to bring their
doctrines to bear on political and public issues. The
unorthodox may do so freely. They tell us, for their own
ends, that abortion is a human right, but they forbid us
to define a human being.
It must be said that they have enjoyed tremendous
success -- not so much in persuading as in confusing and
demoralizing. If there is even the faint suspicion that a
human fetus has a soul of its own, an immortal soul, then
we should be opposing legal abortion with all our might.
We do not. We are afraid to bring this up. Legal abortion
can only depend on the dogmatic =denial= of the soul.
Abortion advocates should be forced to make this denial
explicit. They are not.
The orthodox, in short, have allowed their enemies
to manipulate the terms of the debate. Embarrassing words
like "soul" were effectively banned years ago, by an
unwritten rule which both sides still scrupulously
observe.
I speak of "orthodox" and "unorthodox" rather than
"Christian" or "anti-Christian." This is another
concession to the fog. Many of the unorthodox are
professing Christians, appealing to Christian principles,
even as the devil cites scripture for his purpose.
It is the essence of heresy to seize on a piece of
the truth and magnify it until it cancels out other parts
and distorts the whole. Freedom of the will (or for that
matter predestination) can be cited to nullify the claims
of moral law. Nowadays people typically insist on the
right to follow their consciences without respect to what
their consciences may be following, or where they may end
up.
The same pattern occurs in American jurisprudence,
where the Bill of Rights is exalted over the body of the
Constitution. To many people, in fact, the Bill of Rights
=is= the Constitution. They think it is self-evidently
good if the Supreme Court construes the whole
Constitution in such a way as to "expand" the rights of
the individual.
But what individual? The individual as dissident,
heretic, crank, eccentric, freak, pervert? What about the
individual we are best acquainted with: the member of
family, church, workplace, society? The Constitution
prescribes the social order. To invoke the Bill of Rights
for the purpose of subverting that order is rather like
quoting the Bible to subvert the truth of Christianity:
it is simply perverse. But it is common practice.
The new enthusiasts are often accused of being
utopian. I sometimes think this is exactly the wrong
charge. A utopia is a vision, an intelligible ideal. It
may be impossible, but at least it must be specific. The
innovators are just the opposite. They seldom specify.
They dislike the status quo, and they want change, but
they give few clues as to when they would stop changing.
The radical never gives us a hint of the kind of society
in which he could be a contented conservative.
Chesterton give us another clue when he speaks of
"the modern and morbid weakness of always sacrificing the
normal to the abnormal." The contemporary idealist has no
ideals because, although he is hypersensitive to
abnormalities (about which we can often agree with him),
he is usually blind, deaf, and dumb with respect to
norms. The only ideals he deals with are the animating
ideals of normal society, and he hates them. He has a
whole vocabulary of invidious terms of all the epics,
loyalties, and aims by which ordinary people live.
The Protestant Reformation was begun by people who
wanted to remove what they saw as specific corruptions of
Christendom, so that the Christian faith could be whole
again. But there was another kind of spirit that arose
too -- a spirit of perpetual discontent, that could never
say that its work was accomplished until the faith was
purified into annihilation. C.S. Lewis observed that
certain liberal strains of Christianity could never
convert the heathen, because they were a way out of
orthodoxy, not a way in.
The observation has a broader application to all of
contemporary culture: it is infested by people who are
bent on destroying the West, whether they know it or not.
This essay originally appeared in CENTER JOURNAL (Summer
1982) of Notre Dame University, Indiana.
Joe Sobran Turns Sixty
(pages 10-11)
These web pages (with photographs from Joe's birthday
party this past February) load pretty quickly for most
users, but those with dial-up connections should expect
to have to be patient.
http://www.sobran.com/articles/birthday/page1.shtml
http://www.sobran.com/articles/birthday/page2.shtml
THE SOBRAN FORUM
Otto Scott, 19182006
by Phillipa Scott-Girardi
(page 12)
Otto Joseph Scott, born Otto Scott-Estrella Jr., age
87, passed away peacefully on May 5, 2006, in Issaquah,
Washington. Mr. Otto Scott was a journalist, editor,
columnist, book reviewer, corporate executive, and author
of ten books: THE EXCEPTION: THE STORY OF ASHLAND OIL AND
REFINING COMPANY; JAMES I: THE FOOL AS KING; THE CREATIVE
ORDEAL: THE STORY OF RAYTHEON; ROBESPIERRE: THE FOOL AS
REVOLUTIONARY; THE SECRET SIX: JOHN BROWN AND THE
ABOLITIONISTS; THE PROFESSIONAL: A BIOGRAPHY OF JB
SAUNDERS; THE OTHER END OF THE LIFEBOAT; THE GREAT
CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION: HOW CHRISTIANITY TRANSFORMED THE
WORLD; BURIED TREASURE: THE STORY OF ARCH MINERAL
CORPORATION; and THE POWERED HAND: THE HISTORY OF BLACK &
DECKER. His articles and essays have appeared in numerous
publications, including the LOS ANGELES TIMES, SAN DIEGO
UNION, SAN DIEGO TRIBUNE, CHRONICLES, SALISBURY REVIEW
(London), CONSERVATIVE DIGEST, HUMAN EVENTS, TABLETALK,
CHALCEDON REPORT, SOUTHERN PARTISAN, and IMPRIMIS.
Mr. Scott was an Associate Scholar for the American
Council on Economics and Society, and a member of the
Council on National Policy, Philadelphia Society,
Committee for Monetary Research and Education, the
Author's Guild, and the Overseas Press Club. He is the
recipient of the George Washington Medal from the Freedom
Foundation (1976) and the John Newman Edwards Media Award
(1994).
From 1998 to 2004, Mr. Scott was a "scholar in
residence" at the Tri-City Covenant Church in
Somersworth, New Hampshire, where he provided historical
insight to the school and church staff and assisted in
Sunday School instruction, high-school history, and Bible
and economics courses.
John Chamberlain, writing in THE FREEMAN stated,
"From a libertarian point of view, Otto Scott is
America's most exciting contemporary historian and
biographer." The WALL STREET JOURNAL said, "Otto Scott is
the thinking man's author for the Bicentennial." And Dr.
Hans Sennholz, past president of the Foundation for
Economic Education says, "Without OTTO SCOTT'S COMPASS,
this Foundation would be devoid of an important
philosophical guide."
Mr. Scott is one of a great many Americans who are
well-known to a special audience, but unknown to the
nation at large. His ideas and concepts have had a way of
filtering through society, very often detached from their
origin. The phrase "the Silent Majority" is one such
example. But not many know that this phrase was coined by
Otto Scott.
While Mr. Scott made a living from his corporate
biographies, his fame was achieved from his thorough
knowledge of history and poetic use of language. Mr.
Scott was also the author of OTTO SCOTT'S COMPASS, a
monthly journal of contemporary culture which ran for 15
years and was widely read by well-known conservatives.
Though his work has proceeded without fanfare, it
had not gone unnoticed. Of the past, he has commented, "I
do not regard the past as dead. On the contrary, I regard
the past and the present and even the future as part of
an eternal reality. Ours are the same tests and crises
that our fathers and forefathers encountered: all I do is
remind my contemporaries that Eternity watches us
forever."
Otto is survived by his daughters, Katherine Anne
Scott-Estrella, residing in Tucson, Arizona; Mary Nazelle
Crispo, residing in Brooklyn, New York, grandson
Alexander Widen; Phillipa Scott-Girardi (Stephen
Girardi), residing in South Orange, New Jersey, grandsons
Gabriel Molina and Matthew Girardi; and Ann Elizabeth
Scott-Hugli (Hans A. Hugli), residing in Sammamish,
Washington, grandchildren, Roxane Sri Hugli and Alexander
Philip Hugli. Otto Scott was preceded in death by his
wife of 34 years, Anna Barney Scott, in August 1997.
Otto Scott is buried at Gethsemane Catholic
Cemetery, Federal Way, Washington.
Phillipa Scott-Girardi is an international management
consultant based in South Orange, New Jersey.
"We are living at a time when public knowledge of
the past is fading from view, except among largely unread
specialists. History, which is, technically, the study of
the past, has until fairly recently been treasured
because of the lessons it contains. As this knowledge
diminishes in general terms, it is gradually draining
everyday lives. If this trend continues unchecked, it
will render the lives of our children and grandchildren
empty and barren."
-- Otto Scott
THE COMPASS, May 1994
NUGGETS
For liberals, the Constitution as written is boring old
music. They want the Court to play ingenious new
variations on it, jazzing it up with penumbras and
emanations until it sounds like a totally different work,
one they can really dig. (page 7)
-- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME
The conservative movement, as it exists today, could have
taught the old Communists a thing or two about purges.
When "neoconservatism" comes, principled conservatism
goes. (page 16)
-- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME
To complain that a free economy favors the rich is like
complaining that free speech favors the eloquent.
(page 17)
-- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME
Let's put it this way: you don't hear the word
"usurpation" in Congress for the same reason you don't
hear the word "fornication" in Las Vegas. When a vice
becomes popular and profitable, it loses its proper name.
(page 20)
-- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME
Today it is easier to imagine the editors of NATIONAL
REVIEW attending a Bruce Springsteen concert than reading
Edmund Burke. (page 22)
-- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME
REPRINTED COLUMNS ("The Reactionary Utopian")
(pages 13-24)
* Apologies to the Swedes (May 18, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060518.shtml
* President Disastro (May 11, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060511.shtml
* Bush's Place in History (May 9, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060509.shtml
* Blaming Bush (May 4)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060504.shtml
* Apocalypse Now? (April 27, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060427.shtml
* Bush's Misgovernment (April 25, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060425.shtml
* Free Speech in the Nominal Democracy (April 20, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060420.shtml
* War and Faith (April 18, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060418.shtml
* Shakespearean Masterpiece (April 13, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060413.shtml
* As November Approaches (April 11, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060411.shtml
* The Philosopher and the Fossils (April 6, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060406.shtml
* Jesus' Government (April 4, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060404.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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