The Patriotism We Need: Principled and Spirited

Editor’s note: For Independence day this year, please enjoy Carson Holloway’s timeless review of Steven F. Hayward’s Patriotism Is Not Enough: Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and the Arguments that Redefined American Conservatism, from our archives (originally publish July 5, 2017).

The presidency of Donald Trump raises the question of patriotism more forcefully than it has been raised for a long time in American politics. On the one hand, Trump and his followers think of their movement as a restoration of a proper patriotism, an effort to rescue a country and a people, the true interests of which have been shamefully neglected by an excessively cosmopolitan elite. On the other hand, Trump’s critics think that he appeals to a dangerously atavistic nationalism, an unenlightened and extreme love of country that neglects our duties to the world community. Thus the Trump movement and the controversy it has created force us to ask: what is a just and reasonable patriotism? More specifically, what kind of patriotism is appropriate to a country like America, which is founded on universal principles and not on any particular and exclusive ethnic or religious identity?

This question is especially relevant for American conservatives. In general, patriotism looms larger in the minds of conservatives than in the minds of their liberal counterparts. Conservatism is about preserving, as much as circumstances permit, the country we have inherited, and such an enterprise necessarily presupposes patriotism—a loving approval of that country’s way of life and a desire to see it safely extended into the future. This is not to say that American liberals are unpatriotic. It is just that their patriotism is rendered more complicated, and perhaps more qualified, by their commitment to progress—which necessarily entails a belief that the country is imperfect, and hence more in need of improvement than of preservation—and by their commitment to cosmopolitanism—which leads them to think in terms of political obligations aside from, and maybe in some cases more compelling than, those they owe to their country.

The present question of patriotism is also more compelling for American conservatives simply because the Trump phenomenon arose on their own political turf. Trump is not a conventional American conservative, but his movement is certainly of the right. He has, for the present at least, taken over the traditional political instrument of American conservatism, the Republican Party. His candidacy first swept aside his conservative opposition and then co-opted a good deal of it. These reasons, too, force conservatives to ask themselves whether they can support the kind of patriotism to which Trump has so successfully appealed.

In this context, American conservatives—and anyone interested in American politics—should welcome the publication of Steven F. Hayward’s Patriotism Is Not Enough: Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and the Arguments that Redefined American Conservatism. As his subtitle indicates, Hayward’s book offers in the first place an account of the intellectual journey of Jaffa and Berns, two students of Leo Strauss who became in their generation two of the leading scholars of American political thought and the American regime. Unlike their great teacher, however, Berns and Jaffa did not limit their intellectual activity to the realm of scholarly and philosophic inquiry. Strauss was primarily an interpreter of the great texts of the western philosophic canon, seeking to understand them on their own terms and to use them as a springboard for his own philosophizing. He rarely commented at length on any of the political questions of the day. In contrast, Jaffa and Berns chose to be both scholars and public intellectuals, offering commentary from roughly the right side of the political spectrum, Jaffa operating from the Claremont Institute and Berns from the American Enterprise Institute. Accordingly, the story of their thinking, of their agreements and disagreements, is to a considerable extent an account of many of the important issues with which conservative intellectuals have grappled over the last fifty years.

Although Hayward writes with a winning affection for Jaffa and Berns, both of whom he knew personally, his primary aim is not to provide a pair of intellectual biographies. Rather, his main interest lies with the key issues themselves, using Jaffa and Berns’s arguments to explicate them. The book is not and does not claim to be an academic study of Jaffa and Berns’s political thought. Indeed, for whoever wishes to take up the task, a scholarly book (perhaps beginning as a doctoral dissertation) remains to be written on Strauss’s first generation students who took up the study of the American regime, including not only Jaffa and Berns, but also Martin Diamond and Herbert Storing.

Hayward, however, writes here for a more popular audience of thoughtful citizens, offering them an accessible account of the questions that Jaffa and Berns pondered and that played an important role in conservative intellectual debate during their careers: Can modern political science be morally serious without being moralistic, avoiding the extremes of scientistic value neutrality, on the one hand, and ideological fanaticism, on the other? What is statesmanship, and how can it be guided by high principle while also accommodating the intractable imperfections inseparable from political life? To what extent can conservatives look upon Abraham Lincoln as a model of American statesmanship? What role, if any, should natural law and natural rights play in the exercise of the judicial power? Can equality be understood as an intelligible and limited political principle, or must it degenerate into an unreasoning and unquenchable passion?

All of the questions that Hayward explores are of perennial interest to students of American politics. Once again, however, none is of more immediate importance than the question of patriotism and its proper basis, which is a key theme of the book, as its title indicates. What does Hayward mean by asserting that “patriotism is not enough”? He seeks to remind us that, at least for a political community like the United States, a healthy politics requires more than just a sentimental attachment to the country and its interests. As he says, “American patriotism is based on ideas.” Unlike most countries, America was founded at a particular moment in time and, more importantly, on the basis of certain moral and philosophical principles to which its founders dedicated it. American patriotism, therefore, needs to be an enlightened patriotism, in the sense of being informed by knowledge of the founding principles and reflection on how to preserve them and apply them anew in each generation.

Put another way, America has a political identity much more distinct, and much more central to its being, than other nations, many of which have existed for a long time and maintained some kind of stable identity under a variety of regimes. At least until recently, a perfectly good Frenchman might be a republican, a monarchist, a socialist, or a communist. A good American, however, must be committed to a particular political creed: the natural rights doctrine of the Declaration of Independence and the republican self-government under law established by the Constitution. Accordingly, American patriotism, and American conservatism, is concerned with understanding and preserving this creed, the way of life to which it gives rise, and the institutions and mores that sustain it. This is the kind of patriotism and conservatism taught by both Harry Jaffa and Walter Berns, whatever disagreements they had on other questions.

Hayward’s book is so timely precisely because the kind of patriotism he discusses provides a useful corrective for Trump-style nationalism. The patriotism to which Trump appeals is almost entirely affective and hardly at all intellectual. As has been observed many times, he almost never refers to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the founding more generally. Instead of meditating on the country’s highest ideals, Trump usually expresses patriotic solicitude for its most elementary needs. He wants America and its citizens to be safe and prosperous.

One can see this, for example, in the way Trump talks about how immigration should be regulated. A conservative in the mold of Jaffa, Berns, and Hayward would remind us that the immigrants we admit should understand, believe in, and have the habits necessary to preserve the doctrine of natural rights and constitutional self-government. Trump has never said anything like this, but has instead simply held that we need to make sure that the immigrants we let in “love our country and love our people.”

As Hayward’s book rightly reminds us, Trump’s emotive patriotism is “not enough.” As a candidate for the presidency, Trump was once asked in what sense he is a conservative. He replied that he wants to “conserve the country.” There is no reason to doubt his sincerity in this. Trump seems to be animated by a genuine protectiveness for America and its citizens. Nevertheless, one has to admit that the country cannot be conserved or preserved without going beyond sentimental patriotism and adding an intellectual appreciation for the founding principles and disciplined thought about how to carry them forward. An America that is safe and prosperous, but not committed to constitutional self-government and natural rights, would no longer be the same country.

This is not to say, however, that there is anything wrong with the kind of patriotism to which Trump appeals. That it is insufficient does not make it irrelevant. Feelings of love for the country one inhabits—irrespective of its regime or form of government—are a natural and just human impulse. Among American statesmen, there has been no greater teacher of philosophic, principled patriotism than Abraham Lincoln. Nevertheless, even Lincoln admitted the legitimacy of the more elementary patriotism to which Trump appeals. In his famous eulogy on Henry Clay, Lincoln noted with approval that Clay loved his country both because it was a “free country” but also in part because it was simply “his own country.”

Moreover, Trumpian patriotism is politically effective not only because it speaks directly to the simple and untutored love of country that any ordinary person feels, but also because it addresses the vital link between the nation’s well-being and the self-interest of individual citizens. Thus Trump denounces certain trade practices, for example, as not only bad for the country, but also as contrary to the economic interests of the working- and middle-class voters whose votes he sought and won. This is, to be sure, not the lofty, principled politics of, say, Lincoln’s effort to preserve respect for the equality of rights promised by the Declaration of Independence. But neither is there anything illegitimate about it by realistic political standards. On the contrary, the American founders themselves recognized and taught openly that most ordinary political activity is animated by self-interest. Thus, when Trump appeals so directly to the economic interests of those whose support he courts, he is only doing what the founders expected that politicians would do as a matter of course.

Accordingly, we can say not only that Hayward’s principled patriotism provides a useful corrective to Trump’s emotive and interest-based nationalism, but also that Trump’s nationalism provides a useful corrective to a patriotism based only on philosophic principle. They are mutually correcting and mutually supportive. On the one hand, a patriotism that is based only on the principles of the founding cannot succeed in winning elections, because voters rightly demand that any political movement that seeks their support have some plausible plan to address their ordinary interests. On the other hand, a patriotism that is based only on the untutored loves and interests of ordinary voters cannot preserve our precious inheritance of a regime based on natural rights, the rule of law, and self-government. A movement that acknowledges each of these concerns amounts to the kind of patriotism, and the kind of conservatism, that can both win elections and deserve to win them.

The Religion of Democracy

Without much overstatement, one can describe the history of modern political philosophy as the search for a suitable replacement for Christianity. Progress replaces providence, humanitarianism replaces charity, and mind (or reason) replaces God himself. Into the void left behind by Christianity have rushed all sorts of ideologies—that is, comprehensive systems of belief that purport to explain the whole of human thought, action, and purpose.

Americans are well aware of this totalizing tendency among our least favorite ideologies, communism and fascism; however, democracy itself is likewise prone to become just such an ideology. Pepperdine University’s Emily Finley calls this the “ideology of democratism,” and her 2022 book by the same name aims to highlight some of the metaphysical and religious aspects of contemporary democracy. She contends that democracy, or democratism, has become “perhaps the dominant political belief system in modern Western society.” In other words, democracy has become more than a regime type; it has become a secular religion, complete with its own dogmas, practices, clerics, and eschatology.

 

Democracy vs. Democratism

The relationship between democracy and democratism can perhaps best be understood in parallel with the relationship between science and scientism—the former being a concrete and practical method whereas the latter is merely a comprehensive (and, one might add, dubious) belief system that goes well beyond the method. Similarly, whereas democracy is the political rule of the people, democratism is, as Finley puts it, “a hypothetical or ideal conception of democracy that is only tenuously connected to the actual, historical desires of real popular majorities.” According to Finley, the prominent characteristics of democratism are (1) the belief that true democracy lies above and beyond the actual wishes of actual people, (2) that an elite legislator or vanguard is necessary to call forth the idealized will of the people, (3) that coercion and propaganda are suitable means of instantiating the popular will, and (4) that all individuals, were they stripped of their historical and contingent particularities, would be little democrats. In short, whereas democracy is the process whereby one ascertains and implements the will of the majority, democratism is an abstract conception of what the people as a whole should ideally will for themselves.

Finley rightly identifies Rousseau as the original prophet of democratism. His notion of “the general will” is the necessary philosophical prerequisite for the present division between the actual wills of the people (plural) and an idealized will of the people (singular). Indeed, Rousseau develops something like a set of procedures for setting aside individual wills in order to comprehend the general will: for example, citizens should not communicate with one another to avoid bias, and they should be “sufficiently informed.” (The parallel between Rousseau’s procedures and John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” is perhaps too obvious to mention.) If these procedures are followed, all laws will theoretically be simple, equal, generally applicable, and therefore just.

One need not be a skeptic to think this set of circumstances is unlikely to obtain under most conditions. Enter Rousseau’s deus ex machina—a quasi-divine legislator who can ensure the people choose rightly. Rousseau’s legislator will “persuade without convincing”—calling forth from the diverse interests of the people the true general will. Finley sees this divorce between actual and idealized wills as leading inevitably to a divorce between the people and their democratist leaders. Any version of this line of thinking, whether it be Rousseau’s or Rawls’s, will detach politics from individuals’ actual concerns and open space for powerful parties to cloak their own interests in the guise of something universal.

 

Christian Origins

In one of the most interesting sections of the book, Finley shows how the notion of the “general will” was historically associated with Christian theology and still assumes some of that original framework: after all, discerning a singular, all-encompassing will requires a “God’s eye” view. Whether such an idea still makes sense in the absence of that original framework is an open question. Finley says, “For Rousseau, . . . the general will retains its original theological connotation of wholeness and perfection, but instead of being attributed to an infinite and omniscient God, it becomes a rational and ahistorical ideal. Rousseau and others substitute for the will of God an abstract will of humanity universally accessible through reason.”

In other words, the general will used to be situated in the mind of God, and fully accessible only to him; however, we hubristic moderns seem to think we too are omniscient (perhaps by virtue of our sheer number and our chronological superiority—call it “democratic omniscience”). Rousseau’s general will is certainly a major break from a Christian framework, but it is not nearly so profound as Rousseau’s total redefinition of human nature—a revolution at which Finley only hints. Rousseau plainly admits that his whole system of thought rests atop one fundamental doctrine: the natural goodness of man. If this is true, then perhaps it is Rousseau’s faith in our innate goodness that is the true foundation not only of the general will and democratism, but of political modernity itself. We have yet to fully understand how many social and political revolutions owe their existence to this fundamental shift in anthropology. Even Tocqueville points us in this direction when he notes that “the perfectibility of man” is the deepest dogma of democratic ages.

Nevertheless, there is great value in looking at democracy as an ideology. In fact, Finley helps us understand one curious fact about contemporary politics—namely, the incessant refrain of elites who blame “the people” for subverting, or perverting, true democracy. It is now commonplace to hear our moral and political elites utter—with no sense of irony—that our democracy is threatened by the will of the people (or at least the will of a certain class of people they find morally and politically repugnant). Indeed, between the election of Donald Trump and Brexit, one need not strain too hard to find examples of elites who were positively apoplectic over the result of free democratic choice. Even more recently, American progressives bemoaned the fact that abortion, as a matter of public policy, was returned to the state level (which is to say, would be resolved democratically rather than by judicial fiat).

Time and time again, we hear that democracy (the procedure) threatens to undermine democracy itself (ideological democracy), with the added irony that this typically comes from the mouths of Democrats. These mental contortions are possible because we have imported many other notions into democracy, and we are unable to disambiguate democracy as a procedure from democracy the ideology or belief system. Moreover, in one of the great virtues of the book, Finley helps us realize that we import into democracy a full-blown eschatology—the expectation of a “new age of peace and equality.” Few books have such keen vision of the religious aspects of modern democracy.

 

Critiquing Democratists

The subsequent chapters of Finley’s book are a series of investigations into how democratism explains the actions and ideas of various influential thinkers, including Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Jacques Maritain, John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, George W. Bush, and the neoconservatives in general. All of these people or groups believed, in some fashion or another, that true democracy was “just around the corner”—simply in need of a good shove. For all democratists, the success or failure of democracy rests on two factors—leadership and education—both of which should “refine” the will of the people and shape it into what it ought to be. Unlike the Founders, who contented themselves with the modest achievement of a system of compromises between interest groups, these various figures were bewitched by what Finley calls the “idyllic imagination”—a dream of a future utopia in which individual interest could be sublimated and transcended.

Some of the figures Finley critiques, such as Woodrow Wilson, won’t come as a surprise to most readers. In Finley’s poignant words, “Wilson believed that he was tasked with nothing less than completing Christ’s work on Calvary. If the world would but heed his counsel, he could help to bestow on humanity ‘the full right to live and realize the purposes that God had meant them to realize.’” While this sort of secularized theology, or civic religion, is not terribly surprising from Wilson, Finley sees the same sort of heresy on the part of Catholic political philosopher Jacques Maritain. Her chapter on Maritain makes it clear that democratism tempts individuals whether they happen to be secular or religious. Finley, who is herself a sincere Catholic, reserves some of her harshest criticisms for Maritain (as one is typically justified in criticizing most fervently those nearest to oneself).

According to Finley, Maritain’s “Christian” or “Personalist” democracy owes more to Rousseau than to the Apostle Paul, and his central social and political ideas—“the brotherhood of men,” “universal community,” “the whole human family,” etc.—emerge from a sentimental humanitarianism rather than genuine Christian charity. Harsh words, but probably justified. Moreover, while Maritain is remembered for his criticism of the atheistic and materialistic underpinnings of Marxism, Finley sees Maritain’s political philosophy as only superficially different from Marx. Here, Finley can speak for herself:

Maritain’s vision of earthly renewal founded in a new brotherhood of humanity resembles Marx’s broad outline of the same idea. Are the differences between the two visions of these major points substantive or merely rhetorical? Maritain articulates a vision of international brotherhood, freedom, and equality that is to be accomplished through major socioeconomic reorganization at the hands of a knowing vanguard, aided by what is nothing other than a secular political faith—the “democratic creed.” . . . Such a focus on the material and political . . . at times spiritualizes the political—a charge Maritain laid on Marxism. Under the auspices of Christian “democracy,” Maritain seems to be a major contributor to a new political ideology not so different from the one he repudiates.

These and similar denunciations can be found on nearly every page of Finley’s book, and they are in equal parts interesting and convincing. She reminds us that democracy, at least in its democratist form, shares many of the same assumptions as communism and fascism, lest we be too enamored of our own preferred political presuppositions. She is not the first to make these claims; they are a version of Eric Voegelin’s idea of political gnosticism. However, Finley’s contributions are still valuable: one cannot be told too often that even democracy is not immune to delusional utopianism.

On the topic of delusional utopianism, much more could be said about Finley’s other chapters on “deliberative democratism” (featuring Rawls and Habermas) and “war democratism” (featuring George W. Bush and neoconservatism), but some things are better left for the reader to explore themselves. Individuals of every political persuasion will be challenged by Finley’s account, and, best of all, one cannot level the charge of partisanship against Finley, for some of her harshest criticisms are reserved for Republicans, like President Bush, who took up the democratist mantle of Wilson. Democratism, whether right or left, represents a profound departure from the Founders.

If one is to criticize Finley’s book, one could begin by suggesting perhaps that it is not merely democracy, but progress, that is modernity’s reigning ideology. In truth, democracy worships at the altar of progress, which is why the democratists wait in expectation of a future blessed estate (rather than look backward to a rosy past). Perhaps not Rousseau, but Francis Bacon, is the principal founder of modernity. However, the truth is that modernity is probably a marriage of Bacon and Rousseau—a sentimental naturalism wedded to techno-utopianism. Maybe this nightmarish combination is what really constitutes Finley’s “democratism.”

 

Democracy, like many good things, is destroyed if it is elevated above all else. Democracy is valuable to the extent that it is placed in its proper position and context—bounded and balanced by other elements. As Edmund Burke wisely noted, one does not obtain liberty, equality, and self-government by merely letting go of the reins; these things require a complex system of incentives, punishments, and checks and balances that parallel the complexities of human nature. Our Founders understood this far better than do the democratists.

Finley’s book ultimately demonstrates how we have been bewitched by a simplistic and false notion of human nature that is prone to delusional optimism, and she makes a compelling case for returning to the wise foundations of our country. Overall, Finley’s critique of democratism is a service to our understanding of modern politics and a cautionary tale against making democracy into a comprehensive worldview. I recommend to you The Ideology of Democratism, even if I maintain that the book should have been called The Religion of Democracy because that better encapsulates the sacred, if not sacrosanct, nature of democracy in contemporary society. In the final analysis, Finley shows us that democracy is ineradicably religious; the question that remains is whether religion can bolster democracy without being swallowed up by it.

Russian Wonder and Certainty

With Ukraine’s spring counter-offensive now commencing, the backlash against Russian culture continues in the West, raising the question why one should read Russian literature. Gary Saul Morson, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University, offers a reason in his latest book, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter. For Morson, to read Russian literature is to live between wonder and certainty—to sit somewhere between an attitude of humble awe and unyielding dogmatism before the world. This oscillation between wonder and certainty not only shaped Russian intellectual, literary, and political debates for the past two centuries but also asks us in the West who we are in our own tradition—whether we are open to wonderment and surprise or smugly satisfied with our knowledge. Simply put, to read Russian literature is to know ourselves.

Russian literature is known for wrestling with universal questions about the nature of good and evil, human freedom, moral responsibility, and political utopianism. This is because it was written under extreme conditions. Since the nineteenth century, Russian writers have responded to their country’s experiences that included the liberation of over twenty million serfs, terrorism and political assassinations, revolutions and civil war, famines and Gulags, world wars and the collapse of two empires. As Morson observes, such extremity does “not invite euphemisms.” It created a literary intensity that has perhaps been unmatched since the age of Greek tragedy. The direct confrontation of evil stripped the veneer of civilization, so that Russian writers starkly asked what the human condition was and why suffering occurred. The answers from Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, and others were equally severe and ranged from deep awe before the world to shutting oneself up in solipsistic certainty.

 

The Intelligentsia vs. The Literary Class

According to Morson, the best analogue to Russian literature is not French, English, or American literature but the Hebrew Bible, where the “artist communes with God.” Like the Bible, Russian literature came to be perceived “not as a series of separate books but as a single ongoing work composed over many generations.” It is a conversation with both the present and the past simultaneously. For example, Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel is as much a critique of Lenin’s Marxism as of Tolstoy’s philosophy of history in War and Peace. Nothing is untouched in Russian literature, and therefore everything belongs to it. The aim of Russian literature is not just “to amuse and instruct,” but to search for something higher—to discover truth itself.

The emergence of the intelligentsia in nineteenth-century Russia marked the beginning of the “golden age” of Russian literature with Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. Morson contrasts these writers with the intelligentsia: university-educated people whose cultural capital in schooling, education, and progressive ideas allowed them to assume moral leadership in Russian politics and public opinion. Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, Chernyshevsky, and others were members of this social class who were certain of their revolutionary ideas and committed to the radical transformation of Russian society.

These two traditions in Russia—the literary and the intelligentsia—had their own canons and their own truths, with the former favoring wonder in art, beauty, and religion, and the latter valuing materialism, utility, and revolution. While Russian thinkers and writers did not always neatly fall into one category or the other, they worked within these two paradigms. Russian society was polarized like our country today, with writers and the intelligentsia corresponding to “red” and “blue” America. This exchange of ideas was aired in public in journals, newspapers, and literature, and lasted over generations.

 

Take, for instance, Turgenev’s 1862 novel, Fathers and Children, where the author satirized the protagonist Bazarov, who was a nihilist and member of the intelligentsia. In response, Chernyshevsky published the following year his own novel, What Is to Be Done?, which refuted Turgenev’s claim about the importance and value of beauty and instead remained steadfast in its philosophy of materialist utilitarianism that denied human agency. These ideas, in turn, were mocked by Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground (1864) and Demons (1872), and later rebutted by Tolstoy in his own What Is to Be Done? (1886) which argued for the existence of moral responsibility. Yet in the next century, Lenin published his 1902 pamphlet, What Is to Be Done?, again echoing Chernyshevsky’s novel, and called for a vanguard party to educate and lead the proletariat to revolution.

The Three Archetypes

According to Morson, out of this exchange between writers and the intelligentsia emerged three archetypes that reflected the dominant personalities in Russian civilization. The first was the “wanderer” who was a pilgrim of ideas, often trading one theory for another, in search of the truth. Some writers experienced life-changing spiritual conversions, such as Tolstoy, as told in his Confessions, or Solzhenitsyn, as told in the Gulag Archipelago; while others accepted ideas bereft of God as the source of human salvation, such as Belinsky or Kropotkin. While both writers and intelligentsia looked to ideas for truth, the intelligentsia mistook theory for reality and thus became dedicated to a fanatical idealism. By contrast, writers like Chekhov and Dostoevsky understood the limits of theory in accounting for reality, acknowledging that mystery and wonder were at the root of human existence, and they criticized the intelligentsia for their naïve beliefs.

The second archetype was the idealist—the opposite of the wanderer, because he or she remained steadfast in loyalty to a single ideal, such as Don Quixote in his dedication to Dulcinea. In fact, the character Don Quixote was an object of fascination among Russian writers, especially Turgenev, as told in his essay, “Hamlet and Don Quixote.” In Russian literature there were two types of Don Quixote idealists: the disappointed and the incorrigible. Vsevolod Garshin was representative of the first—disillusioned with reality, accepting the ugliness that it was; Gleb Uspensky was emblematic of the second—unable to reconcile the horrid truths about the peasantry with his idealization of them. Uspensky remained incorrigibly committed to his ideals in spite of reality, leading him to praise despotism and justify policies of cruelty out of an abstract love of humanity.

 

The third dominant personality was the revolutionist who loved war and violence for their own sake. Bakunin, Savinkov, Lenin, Stalin, and others represented this Russian archetype. They were motivated by a metaphysical hatred of a reality that could not be explained with certainty, and, with Russian liberal acquiescence, they came to power to murder millions of Russian citizens.

All three of these archetypal personalities reveal the limitations of theoretical thinking in accounting for reality. Russian writers showed how the intelligentsia’s infallible methods of science fell short, as in the cases of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Pierre in War and Peace, and Arkady in Fathers and Children. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn explained why human freedom and moral agency existed and why suffering brought one closer to God. Human beings cannot be simply classified as good or evil; doing so, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, was the key moral error of totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany: “The line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.”

The Mystery of Ordinary Life

Literature, particularly Russian literature, illuminates for us not only the actual but also the possible. There are no ironclad laws of human progress, nor does an inevitable future await us. In his analysis of Russian writers, Morson observes that Solzhenitsyn has shown us the Russia “that might have been” and Dostoevsky has illuminated the “cloud of possibilities” that every human confronts before choosing. As Morson states:

The poetic process suggests that no fate predetermines our future. Possibilities ramify. Constraints limit choice but allow for more than one. There will never be a moment when everything fits and stories are all complete. The future, like the past, will be a series of present moments, and each present moment is oriented towards multiple futures. Time’s potential is never exhausted.

Literature is especially suited to account for life’s endless possibilities, because its attention is on the ordinary—the family, marriage, personal happiness. Chekhov was a master at capturing the ordinary in literature, as were Tolstoy and Grossman. Characters were changed by their choices, but their choices were conditioned by their ordinary context. This is part of Morson’s theory of prosaics, that “Cloaked in their ordinariness, the truths we seek are hidden in plain view.” Meaning is not derived from some intelligentsia’s abstract ideology; it is discovered in our ordinary encounter with the world as it is.

Like Russian writers and their characters, we live in a reality that will always elude our understanding; we can respond with either wonder or certainty. Do we seek a life of contemplation and reflection that always will be incomplete, or one of convicted activism and dogmatic ideology? Does our happiness spring from being with our spouses, children, and local surroundings, or from dreams of an inevitable future of progress and enlightenment? Are we morally free creatures or merely products of a predisposed identity, whether it be race, class, or gender? This is a conversation that all civilizations have, but in Russia it was manifested in literature. All the more reason to revisit its writers and read their works.

A Feminism Embedded in Human Nature

What happens when elite women get what they want? Mary Harrington’s Feminism against Progress is in part a tale of a dream fulfilled: a feminism of pure freedom, driven by the ideals of progress, achieving its goal of unfettered self-actualization. However, viewed up close, the promised utopia is not as Edenic as it seems. In fact, it’s an anti-Eden: a rootless, borderless realm of liquidated social bonds, populated by atomized, disembodied selves, and the only deity walking amidst them is the devouring Spirit of the Market.

Harrington, erstwhile citizen of this anti-Eden, takes on the role of Virgil, a prophetic guide through our purgatorial present, regaling us, her readers, with an account of where feminism went wrong, and what can be done about it. The book unfolds in three parts, which can loosely be described as a glance backward at where we’ve come from, a hard look around at where we are now, and a glimpse of where we might go from here.

First, Harrington treats us to feminism’s origin story as a response to the situation of women in the era of industrialization. She describes modernity as a great disembedding, an uprooting of the productive, gendered household, in which work was once centered for both men and women. In this premodern model, the sexes were not seen as interchangeable units of production; rather, their distinct spheres of influence and activity were complementary and interdependent, as well as conducive to childrearing and family life. Their shared economic life was grounded in a “web of relationships,” and gendered asymmetries were sources of synergy, rather than exploitation.

 

According to Harrington, industrialization shifted the center of productivity from the household to the factory, thus introducing a schism between “work” and “home.” Under this new model, in order to engage in economic activity, women had to be estranged from their children and labor in cruel conditions. Families who had the option would send the men out to work and keep the women at home, in a newly narrowed domestic sphere centered on consumption rather than production. Harrington argues, with help from Illich and Marx, that industrialization “reduced women’s economic agency,” opening an era of separate spheres, where “women were to a far greater extent at the mercy of their legally and financially all-powerful husbands.” It is in this context that the first feminist movement emerged—not in response to the bogeyman of patriarchy, but to the effects of industrialization. As Harrington puts it, the “challenges addressed by feminism are less evidence of eternal male animus than effects of material changes.”

This nascent women’s movement, from the outset, was marked by a tension between what Harrington calls a “feminism of care,” which resisted the logic of the market, emphasizing interdependence and the domestic realm, and a “feminism of freedom,” which “embraced the individualist market logic, and sought women’s entry into that market on the same terms as men.” The movement, Harrington contends, was more or less balanced in an “ambivalent tension” until the mid-twentieth century, when feminism’s embrace of contraception and abortion tipped the movement decidedly toward the market. From this point on, “feminism largely abandoned the question of how men and women can best live together, and instead embraced a tech-enabled drive to liberate humans altogether from the confines of biology.”

In the book’s second arc, Harrington provides a dizzying and dismal tour of the impact of feminism’s alliance with transhumanism, which has wrought a “cyborg age.” Here, she shows her writerly knack for coinage: Bio-libertarianism, Cyborg Theocracy, Progress Theology, Meat Lego Gnosticism. “Bio-libertarianism” is a particularly helpful term that captures the gist of what freedom feminism has become—a worldview that “focuses on extending individual freedom and self-fashioning as far as possible, into the realm of the body,” in order to pursue “self-created ‘human’ autonomy.”

Harrington argues that what is cast as moral advancement—i.e., progress—is the “revolutionary destruction of previously immutable-seeming limits.” Those limits, as it turns out, are difficult to dismantle. Much easier to destroy are the social practices and codes we have “developed over millennia” to help us navigate those limits. What gets dissolved along with those norms are bonds: the bonds between the sexes, the bond between mother and child, and the bond with one’s own body. Bonds inhibit freedom. Love calls for sacrifice; even, at times, suffering. And so, in the name of freedom, bonds must go.

 

What, then, can provide social cohesion in the wake of widespread dissolution? The market. This is the central claim of Harrington’s critique, the sharpest point in her skewer: “Whatever has been smashed in the pursuit of progress ends up reordered to the atomised laws of the market.” The downstream effects of this “liquefaction” of bonds—and the commodification of what remains—are numerous and bleak. The sexes use one another, forgoing covenant and commitment; the female body is subjected to “biomedical mastery”; the innate bond between mother and child is pathologized and replaced by “impersonal, tech-mediated care”; and, with the advent of the “trans kid,” even children are now invited to dissociate from their bodies and pursue Meat Lego customization. Every aspect of human personhood that is accessible by tech, down to our secondary sexual characteristics, has been commodified.

As a critic of progressivism, Harrington will probably get mislabeled “conservative,” because we are increasingly unable to think beyond that bifurcation. But thinking beyond it is exactly what Harrington is trying to do. One of the strengths of her analysis is its resistance to easy political categorization. She relies heavily on Marx and Engels in her account of industrialization and its effects, and maintains steady suspicion toward the demiurge of the market. She also exposes the flaws of flimsy conservative narratives that scapegoat feminism for social ills that originate in the disembedding of industrialization and the transition to a market society. The conservative nostalgia for “traditional” gender roles, she aptly points out, is actually a nostalgia for “industrial” sex roles, not traditional at all, but peculiarly modern. While conservatism looks naively backward toward an idealized past and progressivism gazes deludedly toward a Meat Lego future, Harrington, in the final part of her book, offers a positive proposal grounded in the here and now, in the complexity of our bonds and the boundaries of our nature.

In this third section, Harrington successfully avoids two common pitfalls of the culture critic: maintaining a purely critical mode, which is always easier than making a positive proposal, and hovering safely in the theoretical and the abstract. Harrington does neither, instead focusing the final part of her book on what an alternative to bio-libertarian feminism could look like. In doing so, she takes what might be called an approach of subsidiarity, emphasizing the need to “think concretely as possible” within the smaller sphere of interpersonal relationships, rather than sweeping, top-down policies.

This positive program depends on reclaiming the notion that the well-being of women depends on the well-being of men, and vice versa. In sketch form, Harrington’s practical strategies are, first, to reinvigorate marriage and an interdependent, productive solidarity that is centered in the home—a twenty-first-century take on the premodern model. Second, to roll back the beige-ification of society, i.e., mandated gender neutrality. This would mean allowing men and women to form separate social clubs, as well as reestablishing sex realism in any sphere where sex dimorphism is salient, like prisons and military combat units. Third, Harrington makes a bold, pro-embodiment, pro-desire case for “rewilding” sex by ditching the birth control pill—that first transhumanist technology that sets women at war with their own bodies, and displaces sex from a context of trust, commitment, intimacy, and the thrilling risk of new life.

Harrington offers her proposal under the banner of Reactionary Feminism—a feminism that positions itself against the bio-libertarianism of progressive feminism. This framing is provocative, and appeals to the rebel spirit that has animated, in one form or another, the various waves of the women’s movement. It also highlights an uncomfortable truth: the delusions of Progress Theology have proven to be destructive to both men and women, but it is undeniably women who are the guardians—or as Harrington puts it, the “priestesses”—of this quasi-religion. According to Harrington, it is the “majority-female mid-tier knowledge class” that most benefits from and currently curates the alliance between feminism and bio-libertarianism, to the detriment of almost everyone else. This means that Harrington’s heretical feminists are not warring with an amorphous patriarchy, but with other women. It is elite women who “have always been the guardians of moral and cultural norms,” as Harrington puts it, and so it is elite women who must now rise up as reactionaries.

 

I’m all but ready to sign up and join Harrington’s army of feminist heretics—if there is one point to quibble over, it would be that this re-envisioned feminism has to be more than reactionary; it can’t simply remain locked in unending mimetic rivalry with Progress. I want to shift the terms slightly to emphasize that this reformulated feminism needs to have a reactionary phase, but must also be proactive.

This is a rhetorical quibble, because Harrington’s articulation of reactionary feminism gives a clear sense of what it offers, not merely what it rejects. “It is not enough just to resist,” she writes near the end of the book; “reactionary feminists need to take positive steps to institutionalize a worldview capable of supporting men and women as we are.” I emphasize those last three words, because here Harrington gets to the heart of the matter: a reclaimed feminism has to offer a coherent and abiding account of human nature—specifically human nature as sexual. This is something feminism, in all its forms, has never done. The entire trajectory of bio-libertarian feminism, to put it simply, has been an ongoing project of denaturalization, a flight from the very idea that we have a nature. Feminism has thus assumed an empty, atomistic anthropology, one easily shaped and co-opted by consumerism. On her penultimate page, Harrington calls for a “positive restatement of human nature” in the face of cyborg theocracy, and her book as a whole reveals the contours of that nature: embodied, generative, sexual, interdependent, relational, prudential, capable of love, commitment, and sacrifice. And as relational, this is a nature that must be formed and cultivated through healthy social bonds: we have a nature that requires nurture.

This new feminism must be realist, rather than utopian, grounded in the muck and magic of the real, even as it offers ideals to be pursued and enculturated. Those ideals, however, must be grounded in the contours of our nature—not in a transhumanist fantasy, but in a vision of what our nature looks like in a state of flourishing. Progress theology divorces human flourishing from human nature, and thus the flourishing it offers can only ever be inhuman.

In contrast, Harrington offers a rich and complex social vision, one that, in my opinion, is not adequately captured by the word “reactionary.” Yet Harrington is right that in our cultural moment, an embodied, relational feminism—one that does not see sexual difference as a threat—has to be reactionary; it is countercultural by default. Those hoping to realize that vision need to be against progress, but also for something more stable and enduring: a feminist movement that recognizes and embraces the limits of our nature, as well as norms that steward that nature; that guard it from pathological excess and enervation. It’s time to reject the utopian lie that we can “be anything we want to be.” Instead, we must learn to become what we are.

Reclaiming Museums’ Civic Duty

America’s museums are at a crossroads. Will they be sites of civic education, centered on Americans’ shared history and principles? Or rallying points of advocacy, aiming to replace those principles with divisive identity politics?

Museums aren’t the only institutions facing such challenges. Our ultimate trajectory as a nation will be shaped by the outcomes of a multitude of disputes. Those skeptical of some of America’s principles have gained influence in government and in higher and lower education, the military, the family, and throughout our civic associations. But museums and historic sites deserve special attention right now: they have not been overrun yet, which presents us with both an opportunity and an urgent need.

How we preserve and tell the American story at sites like Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier, and Colonial Williamsburg will help decide whether Americans will remain a self-governing people, since forming such a people is one of the main purposes of museums. Civic education promotes responsibility and gratitude, while advocacy that rejects the ideas of the American Founding tends to encourage a revolutionary impulse and feelings of resentment for past errors. Museums can provide occasions to unite around our inheritance and republican principles. Considering the importance of America’s history reminds and prompts us to assume our obligation to ensure America’s perpetuation.

 

The State of Affairs

George Washington’s Mount Vernon (run by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association) is an excellent example of how a museum can function as a site for civic education. When visitors go through the mansion, an entire museum, and education center detailing Washington’s accomplishments, they leave with an appreciation for the remarkable character of America’s general. The interactive exhibits put young people in Washington’s shoes, which invites them to be deliberative citizens who consider political questions and reach their own conclusions. Mount Vernon tells the American story fairly and objectively, rightly incorporating the chapter on slavery, while giving Washington his due and strictly adhering to historical standards.

James Madison’s Montpelier (operated by The Montpelier Foundation), on the other hand, discourages civic deliberation by pushing a political narrative on visitors. The site omits pertinent facts and, in crucial instances, Madison’s own words. Some exhibits sweepingly condemn the Founders and Madison for having owned slaves, without adequately addressing their myriad contributions to our nation. While Madison is discussed during a portion of the house tour and through a brief video in the visitor’s center, no exhibits cover the deeds of the man commonly referred to as the Father of the Constitution, and of the Bill of Rights, which Madison introduced in the first federal Congress. The sole exhibit on the Constitution paints it as pro-slavery. The one for children is a dispiriting display on race and slavery, housing a book that prompts children to imagine themselves as aggressors, whipping someone until he is bloodied.

 

Monticello and Colonial Williamsburg are mixed bags. Monticello lacks exhibits focused on Thomas Jefferson’s political accomplishments; he was president, vice president, secretary of state, governor, drafter of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and founder of the University of Virginia. Most discouraging is the absence of a proper examination of the Declaration of Independence, America’s “rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression,” as Lincoln put it. In turn, Colonial Williamsburg is losing its own story: what the American Revolutionaries did there and what makes the town unique. But, even though these sites omit crucial historical details about the founding, they still offer some good content and are not beyond saving.

Montpelier, the National Trust for Historic Preservation (the organization that owns Montpelier and 26 other sites), and Monticello are all seeking new leadership. Who is selected will tell us much, and determine much, about their trajectory and that of the museum industry.

Republican Aims

Mount Vernon and Montpelier represent fundamental disagreements over the purpose of education and the character of our nation. Civic education centered on republican principles promotes unity, deliberation, responsibility, and gratitude. But far-left ideology requires advocacy, as it asserts that society is composed of power structures in need of dismantling. Reframing history is one step that activists take in pursuing a false sense of equity and justice.

This push for historical reeducation is reflected in the language used by national museum associations. For example, the American Alliance of Museums, which boasts 35,000 members (individuals and organizations), contends that teaching history is not sufficient. Instead, museums should “champion an anti-racist movement” to create a “more just and equitable world.” James French, who maneuvered to become chairman of the Montpelier board last year (and has since left the post while still serving on the board), has also commented that “museums such as Montpelier are dominated by people who look like Madison.” French believes that this must change, and that “[t]he change in the power structure then allows us to affect how public history is presented. And public history is really important.”

French is correct about one thing: public history is really important. Civic education doesn’t just happen in the classroom or cease upon graduation from high school. Museums and historic sites are unique places where multiple generations of Americans, who went to different schools and grew up in various parts of the country, can come together to rediscover their commonalities, the principles and history that formed the American character. Presidential homes, aside from being museums that house relics, can offer our children the reflective and reverential experience of standing in the same room where Abraham Lincoln considered the Emancipation Proclamation or James Madison envisioned the structure and potential of the Constitution.

Museums assume, both for the country and the individual, a special trust of preservation and civic encouragement. That encouragement need not involve glossing over the failings of our past. We distort our history both when we whitewash it and when we overemphasize our shortcomings. Whitewashing is its own kind of propaganda, discouraging deliberation—and so it is inconsistent with the civic virtues needed to sustain a free society. But solely focusing on flaws demoralizes our children, forming them into citizens deprived of the gratitude for and proper pride in accomplishment.

The false promises of victimhood and resentment have never made anyone gracious, honorable, or happy. We want our children to navigate this world with spirited strength and the resolve of being able to contribute to a purpose greater than themselves: to an experiment that depends on their character.

That is the promise of the American Founding. When our children, as Lincoln explained, look

through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.

We assume our civic responsibility when we realize that the Declaration’s maxim of human equality invites our participation, that America is a continuous, rather than a stagnant, story of hope. We have certainly had our setbacks and committed our sins, and that is part of the story. But our contributions to the cause of human freedom are significant, and America’s overall trajectory, despite its ebbs and flows, has been toward a greater realization of our principles.

 

That progression was renewed by Lincoln and his generation of soldiers, and it was originally made possible by the Founders who first declared our national purpose and creed: the idea that “all men are created equal.” The hope of America is not simply in those principles, but in the American people themselves. There is hope in the fact that we are asked to join in the experiment in self-government, to prove to ourselves, and to the world, that we are worthy of preserving it and perhaps even further perfecting it. But our institutions must cultivate these virtues, and as storytellers of our history, museums bear unique responsibility in fostering citizens capable of deliberation and self-government.

Historic sites like Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier, and Colonial Williamsburg are places that connect America, from Pennsylvania to Virginia. The Miracle of Philadelphia—the Constitution—has its symbolic birthplace in Virginia, and largely through the mind of James Madison. The primary purpose of the document he imagined is to protect and form a nation of citizens capable of self-government, “to ensure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.” That is the shared aim of our historic sites.

In this time of immense political discord, we must choose whether to defend the birthplaces of our national character, so that they may remain in the hearts of our children. We are worthy of fulfilling Madison’s vision for this nation and are capable of the demands of self-government.

The Virtues of Mary Wollstonecraft

In 1978, the University of Chicago Press journal Signs published a short essay introducing Mary Wollstonecraft’s lost anthology of prose and poetry she had published “for the improvement of young women.” Wollstonecraft’s anthology reproduced edifying fables and poetry; excerpted from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton; and included four Christian prayers Wollstonecraft had authored herself. Among the last is a lengthy “Private Morning Prayer” which reads, in part:

Though knowest whereof I am made, and rememberest that I am but dust: self-convicted I prostrate myself before thy throne of grace, and seek not to hide or palliate my faults; be not extreme to mark what I have done amiss—still allow me to call thee Father, and rejoice in my existence, since I can trace thy goodness and truth on earth, and feel myself allied to that glorious Being who breathed into me the breath of life, and gave me a capacity to know and to serve him.

Though Wollstonecraft is now regarded a canonical thinker in the fields of history, political science, and gender studies, secular feminist scholars still struggle to make sense of her religiosity. Many suggest, as Moira Ferguson did in her 1978 Signs essay, that Wollstonecraft’s own skepticism grew as she crafted her more influential political work. Meanwhile, religious thinkers tend to ignore her religiosity, subscribing to the selfsame interpretation of her as a duly secular proto-feminist.

Enter Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent (Oxford) by Emily Dumler-Winckler, the first adequately theological treatment of Wollstonecraft’s pedagogical, social, and political thought. In a beautifully written, deeply learned, and insightful book, the St. Louis University theologian maintains that there is far greater continuity throughout Wollstonecraft’s work than scholars realize. The imitatio Christi commended in her early publications, including the Female Reader, is the key that unlocks her entire corpus. Deftly employing knowledge of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, but also Burke, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, and Paine, Dumler-Winckler situates Wollstonecraft in the Western canon as the seminal philosophical and theological thinker she rightly is.

 

Dumler-Winckler is at her best in revealing the kinship between Wollstonecraft and the pre-moderns, and distinguishing her from contemporaries like Kant. Such scholarly care helps Dumler-Winckler show how Wollstoncecraft’s thinking about virtue, justice, and friendship can inform those who resist various racial and economic injustices today.

However, Dumler-Winckler is less convincing in her efforts to distinguish Wollstonecraft’s pre-modern insights from those she dubs (and derides) “virtues’ defenders,” namely, Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and Brad Gregory. Certainly, their thought—like the “virtue despisers” she more charitably challenges—would be well served by the rich encounter with Wollstonecraft that her book offers. But given Dumler-Winckler’s own judicious critiques of our modern ills, these “defenders” (especially Gregory) may be more friends than the foes she imagines.

Cultivating the Virtues through the Moral Imagination

Given Wollstonecraft’s sharp critique of Edmund Burke’s (prescient) condemnation of the French Revolution—as well as her Enlightenment-era claim of “natural rights” for women—Wollstonecraft has long been regarded a paradigmatically liberal thinker: akin to a female Thomas Paine, a feminist John Locke, a proto-Kantian. However, some scholars in recent decades have rejected these inapt comparisons, with most now placing her, rightly in my view, in the civic republican tradition that dates to Cicero. This reexamination of Wollstonecraft’s thought has also allowed for greater scrutiny of her argument with Burke over the French Revolution, with some now seeing far more affinity between the two English thinkers than was previously thought.

Dumler-Winckler’s 2023 book deepens these insights by foregrounding Wollstonecraft’s early pedagogical texts as the key that unlocks her account of the virtues, which itself is the prism through which to view her entire corpus. Throughout Modern Virtue, Dumler-Winckler strongly contests the view that Wollstonecraft’s account of virtue resembles that of the rationalist Kant, or the “naked” rationalism of the French revolutionaries Burke rightly scolds. Early on, Wollstonecraft writes: “Reason is indeed the heaven-lighted lamp in man, and may safely be trusted when not entirely depended on; but when it pretends to discover what is beyond its ken, it . . . runs into absurdity.” As Dumler-Winckler shows, respect for the ennobling human capacity for reason and its limits can be found throughout her work.

 

But Dumler-Winckler also ably distinguishes the proto-feminist from the “sentimentalism” of Hume, the “voluntarism” of some Protestant contemporaries, and the “traditionalism” of Burke. Dumler-Winckler finds the golden mean by looking beyond the moderns with whom Wollstonecraft is too hastily classified to show her kinship with ancient and medieval thinkers, especially Aristotle and Aquinas. It’s in the rich Christian tradition especially that Wollstonecraft finds dynamic resources to bring to bear on her “modern” subjects (abolition and women’s education, in particular)—even as the late-eighteenth-century thinker refines the tradition for the “revolution in female manners” she seeks to inspire. Thus, the seemingly incongruous subtitle: “a Tradition of Dissent.”

“The main business of our lives is to learn to be virtuous,” the pedagogue wrote in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787). For Wollstonecraft as for Aristotle and especially Aquinas, argues Dumler-Winckler, one learns to be virtuous through the gradual refinement of all the faculties in a dynamic engagement of the imagination, understanding, judgment, and affections—especially through imitating the patterns of Christ-like moral exemplars. “Teach us with humble awe to imitate the divine patterns and lure us to the paths of virtue,” Wollstonecraft writes. One “puts on righteousness,” then, not ultimately as a rule obeyed, a ritual practiced, or a philosophical tenet held, even as obedience, rituals, and understanding are, for Wollstonecraft, all essential components.

Rather, one “puts on righteousness” as a kind of “second nature,” which is the refinement and cultivation of raw, unformed appetites (i.e, “first nature”). Wollstonecraft artfully employs Burke’s metaphor of the “wardrobe of the moral imagination” to depict the way in which cultivation of the virtues refines one’s “taste” in particular matters. “For Wollstonecraft, nature serves as a standard for taste, only insofar as the passions, appetites, and faculties of reason, judgment, and imagination are refined by second natural virtues. . . . [I]t is never the gratification of depraved appetites, but rather exalted appetites and minds . . . which are to govern our relations.”

In imitating Christ-like exemplars from an early age, we develop the the moral virtues that perfect our relation with God and others—being crafted and crafting oneself, in turn. “Whatever tends to impress habits of order on the expanding mind may be reckoned the most beneficial part of education,” Wollstonecraft writes in the introduction to the Female Reader, “for by this means the surest foundation of virtue is settled without struggle, and strong restraints knit together before vice has introduced confusion.” Pointing to this dialectical design, Dumler-Winckler shows how Wollstonecraft wished for Scripture and Shakespeare to “gradually form” girls’ taste so that they might “learn not ‘what to say’ but rather how to read, think, and even pray well, and how to exercise their reason, cultivate virtue, and refine devotional taste.” Schooling the moral imagination through imitation was the key to acquiring virtue for both Aristotle and Wollstonecraft—but so was making virtue one’s own: “[W]e collectively inherit, tailor, and design [the virtues] as a garb in the wardrobe of a moral imagination.”

Wollstonecraft’s argument with Burke, then, concerns not the evident horrors and evils of the Revolution itself (in which she agrees with him) but the causes of such evils. For Wollstonecraft, the monarchical French regime Burke extols had become deeply corrupt, with rich and poor loving not true liberty but honors and property. The French peasants (and the revolutionaries that emboldened them) thus lacked the virtues that would allow them to respond to injustice in a virtuous way: “The slave unwittingly becomes the master, the tyrannized a tyrant, the oppressed an oppressor.” “Absent virtue,” Dumler-Winckler insightfully writes, “protest unwittingly replicates the injustice it protests. For Wollstonecraft, true virtue is revolutionary because it enables one to justly protest injustice, and so not only to criticize but to embody an alternative.” Throughout the text, Dumler-Winckler exhorts those who would critique various injustices today to showcase, in their particular circumstances and unique oppressions, virtuous alternatives.

Women’s Rights for the Cause of Virtue

Just as Augustine distinguished true Christian virtue from its pagan semblances, Dumler-Winckler tells us, Wollstonecraft distinguishes true virtue from its “sexed semblances,” especially in the thought of Burke and Rousseau. For the latter two, human excellence was a deeply gendered affair. For Wollstonecraft, however, virtue is not “sexed”—even as men and women, with distinctive procreative capacities and physical strength, clearly are. Dumler-Winckler yet again turns to Aristotle and Aquinas as those who “supply the material” for Wollstonecraft to call upon women to imitate Christ and live according to their rightful dignity as imago Dei. Dumler-Winckler’s own words could summarize her important book: “The affirmation of women’s ability to recognize, identify with, and even emulate the divine attributes has been so crucial for the affirmation of their humanity and equality, it may be considered a founding impetus for traditions of modern feminism.”

Wollstonecraft knew that women’s education and role in society needed to be reimagined. Dumler-Winckler writes that “unlike most of her predecessors, premodern and modern alike, . . . Wollstonecraft could see that growing in likeness of God would require a ‘revolution in female manners’ and a rejection of ‘sexed virtues.’” Mrs. Mason, the Christ-like protagonist in Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories, taught her female pupils to think for themselves “and rely only on God.” Mason’s advice did not commend the Kantian autonomy so often extolled today, but rather “virtuous independence.” Mason taught: “[W]e are all dependent on each other; and this dependence is wisely ordered by our Heavenly Father, to call forth many virtues, to exercise the best affections of the human heart, and fix them into habits.”

And thus we come to the rationale behind Wollstonecraft’s late-eighteenth-century appeal for women’s rights. It was an appeal “for the cause of virtue,” as Dumler-Winckler quotes the proto-feminist again and again. Wollstonecraft grounded rights in the imago Dei, viewing them as both important protections against arbitrary and unjust domination, and specifications of justice’s demands: “what is due, owed, or required to set a particular relationship right,” as Dumler-Winckler nicely puts it. Unlike the Hobbesian Jacobins, Wollstonecraft recognized that “liberty comes with attendant duties, constraints, and social obligations at every step.”

Recognizing how Wollstonecraft advocated rights on the basis of Christian theological anthropology, not secular Enlightenment ideals, it is odd then that Dumler-Winckler picks a fight with the likes of Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and especially Notre Dame historian Brad Gregory. It is true that in his 2012 Unintended Reformation, Gregory laments, in Dumler-Winckler’s words, “the eclipse of an ethics of virtue with a culture of rights,” but unlike MacIntyre and Hauerwas, who reject rights as a quintessentially liberal phenomenon, Gregory endorses an older grounding for rights. But this is precisely what Dumler-Winckler has shown Wollstonecraft offers: the good and right held together, just as, both happily acknowledge, Catholic social teaching does today.

 

Unfortunately, however, modern rights theories have followed not Wollstonecraft or CST but the “conceptions of autonomy and self-legislation” that both reject. Though Wollstonecraft’s view of “liberty is not, as Burke fears, a license to do whatever one pleases or as Gregory fears ‘a kingdom of whatever,’” that surely is a prevailing view of liberty today. Indeed, it manifests itself (in Gregory’s view) in acquisitive consumerism, “an environmental nightmare,” “exploitative (and often brutally gendered)” impact on workers, the decline in the “culture of care” and much, much more, about which Dumler-Winckler and Gregory (and I) agree! But more crucial, perhaps, is a common solution: if “disordered loves are at root, Wollstonecraft suggests, a matter of idolatry,” the remedy depends, according to Dumler-Winckler, on “their reordering, on the cultivation of what Wollstonecraft considers ‘the fairest virtues,’ namely benevolence, friendship, and generosity. . . . Not to banish love and friendship from politics, . . . but to refine earthly loves.”

Dumler-Winckler and I disagree about some of the practical implications of Wollstonecraft’s vision today. She sees unjust essentializing in the TERF movement; I, in the gender ideology against which TERFS rally. She hails Kamala Harris as an exemplar, I, Justice Barrett. But that we share a common understanding—and indeed an intellectual framework—that each person “learning to be virtuous” can transform a society for the common good is itself a great advance from the MacIntyrian lament. It is one for which she and I can both happily thank an inspiring and insightful eighteenth-century autodidact, one who should be more widely read—and carefully studied—today.

What the Surge in LGBTQ Self-Identity Means

We are now a year removed from the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. In the flurry of protests that followed the late June 2022 decision, LGBTQ-identified persons and organizations paid a surprising amount of attention to the Court’s decision. The rainbow flag was a mainstay at Dobbs protests. Even a shallow dive into written backlash against the Court’s decision revealed that LGBT people were concerned about Dobbs at least as much as women in heterosexual relationships were, despite the latter’s lopsided contribution to actual abortion numbers. The most obvious reason for the former’s concern was Justice Clarence Thomas’s reference, in his concurring opinion, to reconsidering other “substantive due process precedents,” like those in the Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas decisions.

But some share of the political angst no doubt comes from the fact that there has been a surge in LGBTQ self-identification among young adults who do not display homosexual behavior. That’s right. New Gallup data analyses put the LGBT figure among Zoomers (i.e., those born between 1997 and 2012) at 20 percent. Data from the General Social Survey—a workhorse biennial survey administered since 1972—reveal that the share of LGBTQ Americans under age 30 exploded from 4.8 percent in 2010 to 16.3 percent in 2021. No matter the data source, it’s clear that in 11 short years, LGBTQ identification among young Americans tripled. And yet under-30 non-heterosexual behavioral experience, while climbing, remains just over half that figure, at 8.6 percent (in 2021).

Sexual behavior once comprised the key distinction to homosexuality. Homosexuality, however, has given way to ideological and political self-identity. In light of this shift away from using behavior to self-identity in defining homosexuality, LGBTQ antagonism to the Dobbs decision starts to make more sense. In fact, we should have seen it coming. In a study published last year in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, my coauthor Brad Vermurlen and I found that the key predictor of adult attitudes about treating adolescent gender dysphoria with hormones or surgery—a topic you might not equate with abortion rights—was not age, political affiliation, education, sexual orientation, or religion. The best predictor was whether the respondent considered themselves pro-choice about abortion.

 

This surprised us. In hindsight, it shouldn’t have. Opinions about abortion and gender medicine tend to turn on basic differences in how people understand the human person, their own body, others’ bodies, and the very ends for which we exist. Sociologist James Davison Hunter mapped this out in his 1991 book Culture Wars. In what he described then as the “progressive” worldview, bodily autonomy is paramount. We determine who we are, and we should be free to do so through body modification and the control and redirection of bodily processes. In what Hunter called the “orthodox” worldview, on the other hand, bodily integrity trumps autonomy and self-determination. As the Heidelberg Catechism famously opens, we are not our own, but belong—body and soul—to our savior Jesus Christ. Bodies—systems, parts, organs, and processes—have natural purposes and ends toward which they are objectively ordered. They are to be received as a gift. The two are strikingly different perspectives about the self.

The prospect of motherhood can no doubt undermine one’s sense of self-rule over one’s own body. This is particularly the case if you understand your body as “belonging” to you, and that you rule over it by making choices for it. You can permanently alter it, be harmed by it, or be at odds with it. It’s not surprising that a pregnancy can scare people, because—in the progressive worldview—you have the right not to be pregnant, just like you have the right to self-identify as you wish. It’s a cousin to asserting you have the right to body modification in service to your own self-definition. (And why should being a minor prevent such rights?) Dobbs appears to undermine all this; its three dissenting justices claim that “‘there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter’—especially relating to ‘bodily integrity’ and ‘family life.’”

As previous legally effective arguments about fixed, stable sexual orientations give way to malleable sexual and gender self-identities, it’s tempting to wonder whether we’re not simply speaking about different worldviews—as Hunter’s terminology maintained—but alternative religious systems. LGBTQ, after all, is a big-tent system that contains its own rituals, creedal commitments, forms of worship, sacred items and places, a liturgy, a calendar with holy days, appropriate confessions, salvation accounts, martyrs, moral codes, and magisterial representatives. Religious belonging commonly begins with self-identification. Just as not all Christians practice their faith, so too not all self-identified LGBTQ persons demonstrate behaviors long associated with the movement. And just as there are many moral questions that divide Christians, so too is this the case in the LGBTQ world. But the emotional depth of disagreement here suggests core religious belief systems are clashing.

Language and authority structures are no less pivotal in the LGBTQ world than they are in our own faith. British social theorist Anthony Giddens—a leading public intellectual in England and one of the more famous sociologists alive today—articulated the importance of sealing new ideas with new words in his 1992 book The Transformation of Intimacy: “Once there is a new terminology for understanding sexuality, ideas, concepts, and theories couched in these terms seep into social life itself, and help reorder it.” This is why Hunter described culture (in his book To Change the World) as the power of legitimate naming. With regularity we now find ourselves wrestling with our opponents over basic terms. But sometimes even new religious movements get ahead of themselves, bungling their systematic ontology. As one Wall Street Journal columnist noted recently,

Those protesting the (Dobbs) ruling have a particular challenge in that there is now some disagreement among themselves about what exactly they are advocating and for whom. The left has been engaged in a confusing internal debate about what a woman is.

Indeed, this may prove to be a bridge too far. The recent flare-up involving Bud Light and Target Corporation, and the mystifying battle over whether drag queens should read stories to other people’s children, suggest that many people of any and no faith are fed up with the proselytizing. There’s plenty of religious tolerance in libertarian America—including among Christians—but little interest in revolutionary ideas about “queering” the gender binary. Sexual difference is not a problem requiring a solution. The Human Rights Campaign, as close to “headquarters” as it gets, should have seen this coming. Instead, it declared an LGBTQ “state of emergency” in the United States, akin to a plea for religious tolerance. But when parents’ rights are openly undermined by their efforts, the HRC should not be surprised when people of all faiths have heard enough talk about children’s “bodily autonomy,” or their supposed ability to express informed consent. As we are witnessing, mothers and fathers remain a powerful bastion of reason in our new post-gender turn, because they display with and in and through their bodies the reality that Roe sought to hide or ignore.

 

Christians have a distinctive anthropology of the human person and a better, happier long-term vision for human flourishing. Unfortunately, many of us are unable to articulate it. But the time for making explicit what we believe—the true, the good, and the beautiful—is now. While it remains to be seen how our post-Roe society will look and how the present cultural conflict will play out in courts, legislatures, and around kitchen tables, a few things are certain. Subtlety won’t cut it. Gradualism won’t do. Charity—courtesy, kindness, and love—is always in good form. But don’t think that being deferential or nice will evangelize effectively or preserve our longstanding vision of the human person and its design, purposes, and ends from its ideological challengers. To paraphrase one old saint’s remarks about laws concerning marriage and education, it is in these two areas that Christians must stand firm and fight with toughness and fairness, and—if I may add a category—good judgment. A world, and not simply one country, is at stake.

The Bookshelf: Gifts of Friendship

My oldest friend and I met in school when we were ten years old, over half a century ago. Although it was just seven years later that we moved to different parts of the country thanks to college, grad school, and jobs, we have stayed in touch and seen each other now and then—much too infrequently for the majority of those years. Decades ago, we began our habitual exchange of birthday gifts each spring. Although each of us has occasionally gone for the “gag gift” (in remembrance of our young fanaticism for Monty Python, I once gave him a “Tim the Enchanter” helmet), this usually means the gift of a book.

But it is not always easy to buy books for friends—or even for family. The nature of the relationship one has with another, and the knowledge of the other’s interests and capacities, will affect one’s choices. With my old friend, both distance and the rarity of our being together have frayed but not destroyed the fabric of affection we wove so tightly when we were boys. I know his high intellectual capacities, and the general drift of his interests, well enough to make my annual educated guess at a good book for him. Though our politics, religions, and careers are quite different, I hope I have not disappointed him. His choices for me are consistently good.

Aristotle, in Book 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics, says we love things because they are either “good, pleasant, or useful,” and that these characteristics apply to friendships as well. We are on friendly terms with some people we know—in strictly business transactions, for instance—for the sake of their utility to us. Other people, whom we encounter socially, we may value for their wit, their charm, their beauty, their ready contribution to a pleasant experience each time we meet. In each of these kinds of relationship, the mutual benefit of friend to friend can be very real, yet the friendship remains ultimately disposable if utility and pleasure fade from the experience. “But,” says the philosopher, “those who wish for the good things for their friends, for their friends’ sake, are friends most of all, since they are disposed in this way in themselves and not incidentally. Their friendship continues, then, while they are good, and virtue is a stable thing.”

 

Recall that Aristotle’s tripartite schema applies not just to the persons we call friends but to any of our objects of affection or value—whatever we have reason to “love.” So it is striking but perhaps not surprising that Francis Bacon states essentially parallel criteria for books in his essay “Of Studies”: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.” In the first group we might place manuals and references—eminently useful, but valued only in their parts and not for any integral wholeness. The books we “swallow,” gulping them down, are ephemeral delights—say, popular fiction and true tales of adventure—often pleasantly absorbing while they last, but leaving little mark on our thought and character. In the last group are books demanding “diligence and attention,” worthy of being “read wholly,” for their lasting contribution to our minds and hearts.

It does not follow, of course, that the three kinds of books correspond exactly to the three kinds of friends we have—so that we give useful books to our useful friends, pleasant books to our pleasant friends, and so on. In the case of these less than complete friendships, we may normally give no gifts of any kind, without failing in our mutual esteem or obligations. And with our “true” or “complete” friendships, especially those that persist through thick and thin in a mutual devotion of each to the other’s good, it is good to recall that the other grounds of affection are caught up in the relationship as well. For our true friend is probably also useful to us (for his advice or knowledge) and pleasant to us (for his company and conversation). Hence it is that, in thinking about books to give our friends, we can range across all three grounds of choice: giving useful books, pleasant books, and the best books worth “diligence and attention.”

Books we give (or are given) for their utility would include, for instance, my copy of the third edition (please ignore all those that came later) of William Strunk and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style, which my mother gave me for Christmas in my senior year of college. I think I must have let her read some terrible dashed-off term paper of mine, and the book was her big hint to clean up my act. No, it’s not a perfect book—critics like to carp that its comments on the passive voice are (ahem) a bit wide of the mark—but it is terse, direct, and very useful to young writers in particular.

Cookbooks, about which I’ve written here before, are definitely in the useful category, and for someone learning to cook, or an experienced cook interested in branching out into new cuisines, they make fine gifts. Beware of overwhelming, though. An aunt of mine, a great cook herself, long ago gave me Irma Rombauer’s massive The Joy of Cooking, when I was far from ready for such an enormous compendium of recipes. It was just too encyclopedic, and it has turned out to be the cookbook I use the least of all the ones on my kitchen shelves.

You will notice that these examples in the “utility” class came from members of my family, and my own giving in my family has often fit this category. The affection of our close family members is presumed, and needn’t be proved with books for improving our minds and hearts; what interests them is what they think we need, in practical terms: a dictionary when we go off to college, a home-repair guide when we buy a house, and so on. With students, too, when I have given them books, it is likely to be a writer’s guide like Jacques Barzun’s Simple & Direct, or some essential text in their field of study if they’re off to graduate or law school.

Of books in the pleasure reading category, we have as many choices as our knowledge of our friends’ and loved ones’ tastes and reading history allows. Where those tastes evidently coincide with our own, the gift of a book we ourselves have loved is a fitting sign of our belief that we vibrate on the same frequency as the recipient. “I really enjoyed this and think you will too” is a tribute to a kindred soul who (we believe) shares our favorite pleasures.

 

Sometimes we may find that the expectation of shared enjoyment is frustrated. (“Why did Matt think I’d like that?”) Like people themselves—like, well, their authors—books are distinctive individuals. Our friends are not universally one another’s friends, and the same goes for the books that take our fancy. But if one’s friend likes science fiction, try giving him a classic in the genre that is new to him. She enjoys mysteries? Introduce her to a new (or old but undiscovered) detective. And so on. My old friend has twice given me books by Bill Bryson, a writer who reliably gives pleasure and who is instructive without pretensions to profundity. Such a gift says “here is a good time, and a bit of learning too,” which is thoughtful.

It is in the third category of books, the ones Bacon said must be “chewed and digested . . . with diligence and attention,” that a real challenge arises. It represents the highest expression of Aristotle’s complete friendship—“here is a book I chose for the sake of your virtues”—but for that reason the choice of such a book can be difficult. What am I saying to my friend with this book? That it supplies a deficiency in his intellect or character? One hopes not to give that impression. With fellow members of one’s religion, a devotional book or spiritual classic is a very fitting gift (among Catholics, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ is a good choice). But with some friends this is not an option.

Academic friends are the worst to buy books for, since they already acquire so many books in their central field of interest, and since their interests are so peculiar to themselves. I don’t think I have ever given a truly serious book (as a gift, that is) to a friend who was a professional scholar and peer. If I thought I’d found a first-rate choice that suited his interests, he would either have it if it was old, be planning to get it if it was new, or know of a reason why it was all wrong or useless to him! Besides, the books that scholars like most to give their friends are the ones they’ve written or edited themselves—in which case the special occasion is not on the recipient’s side, as for instance on her birthday, but on the giver’s side, namely the occasion of the book’s publication—which indicates who is really doing the celebrating.

So I am particularly thankful for my old friend’s distant but unsevered presence in my life. Though he is not in the academy, he has a first-rate mind, and interests both deep and wide. I let him take care of the deep ones himself, and try to contribute to his ever-expanding breadth with interesting works of history and philosophy (including two mentioned in this previous column), as well as some books that will simply give him pleasure. A few years ago, to mark fifty years of our friendship, he sent me a copy of Oliver Sacks’s final book, a slender volume of posthumously published essays titled Gratitude. When I opened the package and saw that title, I immediately thought “yes, me too.” Here’s to many more years of mutual enrichment, my friend.

John the Baptist Was a Witness for Life and a Martyr for Marriage

It is June, and Pride has flooded the world. Pride is on display in the streets, in stores, in schools, and even at the White House. All of the great and the good (or at least the wealthy, famous, and powerful) are affirming the triumph of the sexual revolution, and some even applaud transgender toddlers and sadomasochism on parade. Affirmation is increasingly mandatory; the devotees of Pride are literally taking away lunch money from low-income children because their Christian school dissents from some aspects of the rainbow creed.

Christians should not be surprised when many of the rich and powerful mock God and scorn His people, and boast of indulging their every material desire and sexual whim. We have been warned about the world and its rulers. But this month also offers us encouragement to resist the depredations of the sexual revolution. June 24th is this weekend, and it is not only the feast day marking the birth of John the Baptist, but also the anniversary of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade’s false declaration that there is a constitutional right to abortion. John the Baptist is an appropriate hero of faith for us this month: he began his life as a witness for the sanctity of unborn life, and ended it as a martyr for marriage.

Before he was even born, John testified to the sanctity of all unborn human life. The sexual revolution requires abortion as a backstop against the consequences of the promiscuity it promotes, but John shows why the personhood of humans in utero cannot be denied without embracing grave heresy about Christ’s nature.

 

John’s ministry testifying to Jesus began before either was born. According to Luke’s account:

when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.”

The unborn John’s recognition of the unborn Jesus was a miracle that demonstrates the value of human life in the womb in several ways. First, the passage shows that the fetal John the Baptist and the embryonic Jesus were human persons congruous with their adult selves, and that both were already participating in their divine missions.

Second, the recognition of Jesus as Lord early in Mary’s pregnancy testifies to His divinity even as He grew within Mary’s womb. This divinity at conception is why Christians honor Mary as the Theotokos, the God-bearer. This title is affirmed by Orthodox, Catholic, and Reformed Protestant teaching, and is attested to by many ancient sources, such as Ambrose of Milan’s great Advent hymn, “Veni Redemptor Gentium” (“Savior of the Nations, Come”), which in verses 3 and 4 declares both Jesus’ full divinity and full humanity in the womb.

Third, this episode demonstrates the full humanity of all unborn persons. To claim that the unborn are not fully human is necessarily to claim that Jesus was not fully human while in Mary’s womb. But the Bible insists that His humanity was like ours in every way but sin. Denying the full humanity of the unborn therefore requires either also denying the full divinity of the unborn Jesus (thereby rejecting the reason for the unborn John’s joy and the teaching of the ancient church) or asserting that Jesus’ full divinity was present without His full humanity. Either is an enormous heresy.

Just as the beginning of John’s life shows us the value of unborn human life, the end of John’s life shows us the importance of marriage. At the end of his life John sacrificed himself to bear witness to the inviolability of marriage. As recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, “Herod had seized John and bound him and put him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife,” because John had been saying to him, “It is not lawful for you to have her.” John was then executed at the request of Herodias, after Herod promised a favor to her daughter.

 

John could have kept quiet on this matter, contenting himself with calls to repentance that did not single out the powerful by name. He could have said that Herod’s sexual conduct was not actually a serious sin worth worrying about, that God doesn’t really care about what people do in the bedroom. He could have chosen to recant in the hope of saving himself after he was imprisoned. But there is no indication that John wavered or doubted his declaration that Herod was wrong to take his brother’s wife for himself.

John took his stand for marriage and fidelity, and he held to this position to his death. And Jesus allowed this martyrdom. Jesus could have told John to ease up in condemning Herod’s sexual sin—that it was not that bad, or even not sinful at all. But Jesus did not do this. Rather, His teachings contain many hard words for us, including condemnations of the sins celebrated by Pride. Jesus calls us in the condition he finds us, but He also calls us to repent of our sins, including sexual ones.

The lurid details of John’s death highlight how sin grows when indulged. Herod did not really want to execute John, but he found himself so entangled by his sins of lust and pride that he felt compelled to add evil to evil by ordering John’s death. And so John the Baptist, the wilderness ascetic whom Jesus declared to be the greatest man born of woman, died as a martyr for marriage.

This is a reminder of how seriously Christianity takes marriage and sexuality. The union of husband and wife is both a symbol of Christ and the church, and the vocation that most of us are called to. Marriage is the basis of civilization and culture in this world, and a sign of our union with God in the world to come.

This should encourage us as we are beset by the celebrants of Pride. The Christian path is the way of Christ, which is almost always contrary to the habits and desires that prevail in our culture. This often means worldly suffering, rather than worldly celebration. But we know that the defense of life, marriage, and chastity is a service to God, and He will ensure that our labor is not in vain.

A Step Forward in the Debate about Masculinity

Early in 2019, the men’s razor company Gillette raised eyebrows with a new commercial. The ad depicted stereotypically disordered male behavior—aggression, catcalling, and a “boys will be boys” indifference to both—and contrasted it with a new generation of men taking a stand against that patriarchal past: a father breaks up a fight between two boys, a young man cuts off another’s unwanted advances toward a female stranger.

Many on the right complained that Gillette drew a glib equivalence between masculinity and toxicity, and the commercial was admittedly both myopic and preachy. But the conservative dismissiveness of the ad largely settled into a defensive, abrasive machismo. The ad was simplistic, but its critics missed an opportunity to think through the meaning of masculinity, and about the importance of male—and especially paternal—role models.

Conversations about sex and gender are surely just as difficult now as in 2019. Any talk about masculinity can easily veer into the same sclerotic patterns of the Gillette hubbub: a left that paints with uncritically broad brushes, and a right that gets defensive and dumbs down its beliefs. Richard Reeves’s latest book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It, manages to avoid predictability, blending statistical insight and easygoing wit to craft a fruitful exploration of the male malaise.

Reeves, a liberal economist at the Brookings Institution, bookends Of Boys and Men by presenting the educational, economic, and cultural challenges men face, and he proposes policy and social solutions for each. They’re all insightful and (unsurprisingly) subject to debate, especially, in my view, his discussion of fatherhood and marriage. But one of the most important lessons of the book—which Reeves introduces to reassure readers that they can care about both women’s equality and men’s struggles—is that “we can hold two thoughts in our head at once.” In that vein, we can disagree, even deeply, about some of Reeves’s premises or proposals, while also recognizing that Of Boys and Men models the sort of intellectual dexterity needed to tackle complicated matters in our polarized times.

 

Men Falling Behind

Reeves begins his book by pointing out how boys are falling behind in the classroom. He surveys data showing they are 14 percentage points less likely than girls to be ready to start school at age 5, as well as 6 percentage points less likely to graduate high school on time. Look ahead at college, and young men are 15 percentage points less likely to graduate with a bachelor’s. Women are narrowing gaps between themselves and their male classmates in typically male-dominant subjects (such as STEM), while stereotypically female subjects like nursing and teaching remain so.

Men are also being outdone in the job market. Worries about the wage gap—which Reeves handles with careful nuance—or about a C-suite glass ceiling have some legitimacy, but overemphasizing them paints an incomplete picture. The lack of female representation among Fortune 500 CEOs tells us that a small—albeit influential—proportion of men are doing very well. But by the same token, the people struggling the most economically are more likely to be men. An astounding one-third of men with only a high school diploma (approximately 5 million men) are out of the labor force.

To address these labor market problems, Reeves draws from the women-in-STEM push and calls for similar efforts for men in health care, education, administration, and literacy—or as he calls it, HEAL. In the same way that Melinda Gates pledged $1 billion to promote women in STEM, Reeves proposes an equal “men can HEAL” push. He envisions a combination of government and philanthropic funds for training and scholarships, and for marketing these often well-paying careers. Child care administrators and occupational therapists, two examples Reeves cites, respectively earned on average $70,000 and $72,000 in 2019.

 

One of the most discussed policy proposals in the book deals with educational gaps, which Reeves wants to address largely by “redshirting boys,” or delaying their start in kindergarten by a year. It’s not that young boys are less able than their female counterparts, but rather that they cognitively develop at a different pace, about two years slower than girls. For Reeves, giving boys the “gift” of an extra year before starting school “recognizes natural sex differences, especially the fact that boys are at a developmental disadvantage to girls at critical points in their schooling.”

Reeves’s reasoning reflects an important aspect of his approach: he acknowledges the importance of biology, and thinks that understanding biological factors should moderate a tendency, frequently seen on today’s left, to confuse equality with sameness. After examining data on men’s and women’s different career interests and outcomes, for example, Reeves concludes that we should at the very least consider that biology and “informed personal agency” play some role in occupational choices. He rejects attributing all gender gaps to sexism, or expecting perfect 50–50 representation in all fields.

People of different political stripes can debate the scope and specifics of both the HEAL movement and redshirting boys, among other proposals in Of Boys and Men, but Reeves leaves the possibility of fruitful deliberation very much open. He helpfully frames his discussion of education and jobs so that potential disagreements will be about means, rather than  fundamental ends.

But the same can’t be said about the third aspect of the male malaise Reeves identifies: the cultural status of fatherhood.

Fatherhood without Marriage?

Reeves recognizes a sense of aimlessness has taken hold of many men’s most personal relationships: between men and women, and between fathers and children. But he primarily wants to address the latter problem, and to do so by envisioning fatherhood as an independent institution, considered separately from marriage. We should address and improve relationships between fathers and children first, irrespective of whether fathers are married to their kids’ mothers. Our safety net should expect more than mere economic support from fathers—particularly among noncustodial parents—and reward them for involvement in their kids’ lives. In a nutshell, our culture and policy should reconcile themselves with the reality that we live in “a world where mothers don’t need men, but children still need their dads.”

Why doesn’t Reeves concurrently advance a marital renewal? For one thing, he regards the traditional model of marriage as too rigidly predicated on the expectation of a male breadwinner, and by extension on the economic dependence of women. From it flows a notion of fatherhood that may have encouraged family formation in the past, but that is now “unfit for a world of gender equality.” The decline of marriage poses problems, but it’s largely indicative of positive gains in autonomy for women, in his view.

Reeves emphasizes that many unmarried, nonresidential fathers are very involved in their kids’ lives. Black fathers, for example—44 percent of whom are nonresidential—are more likely than white nonresidential fathers to help around the house, take kids to activities, and be generally present, according to one study he cites. Reeves argues that our cultural expectations of fatherhood “urgently need an update, to become more focused on direct relationships with children” (emphasis added). Since about 40 percent of births in the United States take place outside of marriage, he concludes that insisting on a model that assumes an indissoluble link between fatherhood and marriage is just anachronistic.

But Reeves doesn’t fully reckon with the gravity of divorcing fatherhood from marriage. Chapter 12 of Of Boys and Men, which Reeves dedicates to his independent fatherhood proposal, advances particular policies to support “direct” fatherhood unmediated by marriage, from paid parental leave to child support reforms, to encouraging father-friendly jobs. But he spends surprisingly little time directly arguing against the empirical and philosophical case for fatherhood within marriage as distinctly positive.

For example, Reeves writes that “there is no residency requirement for good fatherhood. The relationship is what matters.” Fair enough. But which model—fatherhood within marriage or nonresidential fatherhood—tends to facilitate more of the positive interactions needed to build healthy relationships between fathers and children? In general, the one where more of those interactions can potentially take place. A study by Penn State sociologist Paul Amato suggested this, reporting that from 1976 to 2002, 29 percent of nonresident fathers had no contact with their kids in the previous year, while only 31 percent had weekly contact.

 

In fact, contact with their biological father plays a positive role in advancing the two other major concerns Reeves has for boys: work and education. A 2022 report from the Institute for Family Studies found that “[y]oung men who grew up with their biological father are more than twice as likely to graduate college by their late 20s, compared to those raised in families without their biological father (35% vs. 14%).” According to the Census Bureau, approximately 62 percent of children lived with their biological parents in 2019, and 59 percent lived with married biological parents. In other words, growing up with a biological father is deeply intertwined with growing up with a married father—there are very few cohabitating biological or single biological fathers.

Beyond social science, there’s also a conceptual issue at the heart of Reeves’s proposal. It’s undeniable that many working mothers don’t need men in the same way past generations did—if what we mean by “need” is economic support. But it’s also very clear that mothers do need men. Without men, well, they wouldn’t be mothers (and vice versa) for the very simple yet profound fact that the sexes need each other in order to fulfill their biological end. This is more than a semantic trick—it’s a recognition that mutual dependence is at the heart of our biology. At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, men and women could not exist without each other—and that realization should caution us against overemphasizing independence.

Moreover, shouldn’t fatherhood also entail modeling what lasting commitment to a spouse looks like? Reeves is right to stress that fatherhood should mean more than just economic support, but he misses the fact that prospects for decoupling marriage from fatherhood are similarly discouraging in this regard. In a study by the late Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan, 80 percent of unmarried parents were in a romantic relationship (with each other) at time of the birth of their child. But here’s how McLanahan summarized her five-year follow-up with them:

Despite their “high hopes,” most unmarried parents were unable to maintain stable unions. Only 15 percent of all our unmarried couples were married at the time of the five-year interview, and only a third were still romantically involved (Recall that over 80 percent of parents were romantically involved at birth.) Among couples who were cohabitating at birth, the picture was somewhat better: after five years, 26 percent were married to each other and another 26 percent were living together.

In divorcing fatherhood from marriage so hastily, Reeves misses an opportunity to consider why reimagining marriage is a key aspect of reinvigorating fatherhood as well. It’s the biggest drawback of Of Boys and Men.

Nevertheless, Reeves’s proposal has clearly opened a door to fruitful further debate. His case for direct fatherhood should temper a traditionalist reflex to assume that nonresidence is equivalent to abandonment—there are clearly many nontraditional, not-married, or separated fathers who embody dedication to their children. But if engaged fatherhood is so empirically and conceptually intertwined with marriage, then we would lose key aspects of both by separating them. We shouldn’t idealize marriage or how it affects fatherhood, but we shouldn’t hastily decouple marriage and fatherhood either.

Successfully reimagining marriage and fatherhood will probably even entail letting go of some of the overly rigid gender roles that Reeves criticizes in Of Boys and Men: more female breadwinners and paternal homemakers, as well as various policies and workplace arrangements to support the parent–child bond are all likely to be a part of the future of the family. But so should giving boys and men not just the tools to excel at school and work, but the habits and vocabulary to strive toward commitment, dedication, and love in the most personal dimensions of their lives.

 

Improving the Debate

Of Boys and Men is a book about men, written by a man, claiming that our culture doesn’t take men’s problems seriously. In the wrong hands, it would have been the latest entry in a seemingly incessant culture war, a callback to the silliness of the Gillette controversy. Yet it has been a resounding mainstream success. In matters of gender and sex, some might believe it’s impossible for there to be any interest in men’s issues across the ideological spectrum. The success of Of Boys and Men suggests that’s not the case.

Of Boys and Men has a point of view, but Reeves doesn’t close off the possibility of exchange or criticism by making a caricature of his opponents. This is the sort of book that not only exposes an often ignored issue, but elevates the quality of our conversations about it, even amid disagreement. That is perhaps its most impressive feat.

Juneteenth: A Conversation on Freedom

Editor’s note: This year is the second time that Americans celebrate Juneteenth as a national holiday. At Public Discourse this week, we offer essays that look back on Juneteenth’s history, and look ahead to consider its place in America’s self-understanding.

Juneteenth, now a national holiday, is an opportunity for us to engage in a conversation on freedom and the American Project in a way that we have rarely, if ever, done as a national community. This might come as a surprise to many—after all, we commemorate and celebrate the Fourth of July every year with barbecues and fireworks, and this is certainly a great freedom celebration. But July Fourth can bring up mixed emotions for some of us—and I am not at all alone among African Americans who feel torn on this date.

Framing the Fourth

We are proud to be American, and do not long to live anywhere else. My father and grandfather were both in the military for much of their lives—my father having had the honor of serving on Air Force One and Air Force Two for years before retiring at the rank of Chief Master Sergeant. But we also remember, in some ways are haunted by, the fact that at that first July Fourth, and for far too many after that, we could not exercise the freedom being celebrated all around us.

This has created some ambivalence about how to think about and commemorate the Fourth. Consider, for example, our tentative groping as parents for the best way to observe this day in our home. It was another July Fourth holiday and our children were still young, perhaps six and nine years old. I am a scholar doing historical work on race, so it is an occupational hazard for me to think deeply and carefully about such commemorations. What is the essence of the July Fourth celebration? Where were we, as African Americans, in the memory and memorialization of this world historical event? Yes, we had read of Crispus Attucks, Phillis Wheatley, and others who advocated, bled, and died for this new America—but the liberty secured for so many did not extend to our ancestors—not at that time.

And so, on that day years ago, sitting around the table, about to partake of our special July Fourth meal, we first read aloud from parts of Frederick Douglass’s speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” It is an intense text, powerful and bittersweet, as Douglass recounts the glories of the revolution while at the same time mourning the fact that the vast majority of Black Americans were still in chains. My oldest daughter, eyes wide as she listened, asked in a pleading voice: “But we can still have a happy Fourth of July, right?” I was torn, trying to determine how best to thread the needle between celebration and remembrance of a difficult past.

I ended up assuring her that yes, indeed, we could and would have a happy Fourth of July. The preliminary reading was to bring to our remembrance the path we have come through in this country, to remember and respect the work it has taken to bring us to where we are today.

 

My daughter’s question: “But we can still have a happy Fourth of July, right?” rings in my ears across the years. I think, in retrospect, I could have framed the day more fruitfully if I had introduced it as a remembrance—one that is part of a larger conversation on freedom that begins each year with the commemoration of Juneteenth a few weeks earlier, and culminates on July Fourth.

Juneteenth, coming as it does just weeks before July Fourth, provides a perfect opportunity for us—both individually and collectively—to engage in a season of contemplating and celebrating the complexities and nuances, highs and lows, of this American experiment that has at its core the achievement of freedom. This dialectical pairing of the two holidays is important, I would go so far as to say necessary, for a people who have yet to develop a vocabulary and practice for discussing its complicated relationship with the past—a past that includes just as much slavery, racism, and injustice as it does freedom and the pursuit of happiness.

An Annual Conversation

The annual conversation I envision taking place between Juneteenth and July Fourth should include a healthy representation of Black voices from the past who can help us to narrate and pass on our national story of freedom-seeking across the centuries. Central to this conversation are the extraordinary ideas contained in the Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

This beginning of the republic held great promise, but the vast majority of Africans in America did not yet benefit from the promises of 1776, despite the fact that many of us had supported the Revolution with both the pen and the sword.

One of these, Phillis Wheatley, was kidnapped from Africa when she was about seven years old and was a poetic genius who supported the Revolution from the home of her owners in Boston. In her letters she compared white Americans to the Egyptians who held the people of Israel in bondage. She wrote: “in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and . . . that . . . same Principle lives in us.” She even penned a letter and poem of support addressed to George Washington when he was commander in chief of the Continental Army, cheering him and others on to win independence from Britain. (Washington received her letter and poem, was impressed with her, and responded in kind by letter. See the exchange here.)

Nearly one hundred year later, Frederick Douglass made his famous speech concerning the Fourth of July when he was invited by white Americans to deliver a celebratory speech commemorating the holiday in 1852. He had escaped a brutal slave owner fourteen years earlier, the wounds on his back scarred over, still visible. He brought the incongruity of the invitation to their awareness, saying:

This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?

Almost a decade later, the issue of slavery finally came to a head with the Civil War and was followed by emancipation with the Union’s victory. Firsthand accounts from formerly enslaved people in Texas on that original Juneteenth help to bring alive the excitement, anticipation, and dynamism of this moment. Tempie Cummins explains how the newly freed resisted the slave owners who ignored the news of emancipation:

When freedom was declared, master wouldn’ tell them, but mother she hear him tellin’ missus that the slaves was free but they didn’t know it and he’s not going tell ’em till he makes another crop or two. When mother hear that she say she slip out the chimney corner and crack her heels together four times and shouts, ‘I’s free, I’s free.’ Then she runs to the field, against master’s will and told all the other slaves and they quit work.

Felix Haywood has one of the most vibrant and philosophical reflections on how he experienced this new freedom and what it meant to him. He had worked as a sheep herder and cowpuncher and was about ninety-two years old when he was interviewed. When he was asked how they knew that freedom had finally come he responded: “How did we know it! Hallelujah broke out—. . . ” He then burst into song and went on to share the feeling of exhilaration that pervaded the community:

Everybody went wild. We all felt like heroes and nobody had made us that way but ourselves. We was free. Just like that, we was free . . . right off colored folks started on the move. They seemed to want to get closer to freedom, so they’d know what it was—like it was a place or a city. . . .

Haywood’s image of freedom as a “place or a city” evokes larger questions and conversations about what freedom ultimately is, and how we’ll know it once we’ve attained it. Indeed, as his narrative continues, he hints at the power these questions exercised over the newly emancipated. At first, he and others assumed that they would now be rich, even richer than the whites who had owned them because they were the ones who really knew how to do the work. But then he notes: “We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud but it didn’t make ’em rich.” Haywood’s reflections here highlight the many complex dimensions of freedom—the physical dimension being just the first step toward the development of political, moral, and intellectual resources and virtues that allow us to flourish.

New National Tradition

Haywood’s reflections on the expectations and realities of freedom evoke the many times when we long for something great, but it turns out to be more compelling in the imagination than in reality. Hard work often follows once we have achieved our long-anticipated goal. This brings us to the current state of our national conversation on freedom. I think it no coincidence that the decision to make Juneteenth a national holiday followed right on the heels of Black protest that swept across the country in 2020. After much striving and protest that has reshaped the national conversation on race, what will we do now that Juneteenth has achieved the status of being a national holiday?

 

If we are not careful, Juneteenth may simply become something that makes African Americans “proud without making us rich,” to paraphrase Felix Haywood. Our pride in recognizing and celebrating Juneteenth may rest there without going any further. We may be left “feeling good” without coming any closer to being “rich” in the deepest sense of that word. But what we desire is the kind of richness that allows us all to live fuller lives—whatever our race or ethnicity—as we seek to better exercise and enjoy the freedoms we have fought for.

There is also the danger that Juneteenth will become a holiday observed by a small segment of the population while being largely ignored by the majority of Americans. I sincerely hope this will not be the case. While the national observance is still new and nationwide traditions have yet to be formed, now is the time to initiate, to carefully cultivate, a new kind of conversation on freedom poised between the promises of the Declaration (celebrated on the Fourth) and the fitful realization of those promises across the centuries (which emerged more fully on June 19, 1865)—and that continue to unfold in new ways today. My hope is that these weeks between Juneteenth and July Fourth will become an extended time of conversation, celebration, and contemplation of our long road to freedom.

The Making of Juneteenth

Editor’s note: This year is the second time that Americans celebrate Juneteenth as a national holiday. At Public Discourse this week, we offer essays that look back on Juneteenth’s history, and look ahead to consider its place in America’s self-understanding.

Juneteenth is a linguistic compression of the date “June Nineteenth,” with the particular June 19th in view being June 19, 1865. The American Civil War was practically over by that date—the principal Confederate field army under Robert E. Lee had surrendered in Virginia on April 9, 1865, followed by the surrenders of other Confederate forces and the capture of fleeing Confederate president Jefferson Davis on May 10th. But only practically. The United States government had never recognized the Confederacy as a legal entity, and so there were no peace talks or treaty signings to mark a single end-point to the war; the Confederacy simply expired, and did so unevenly, from place to place. In Texas, there were still enough in the way of organized Confederate forces to fight a pitched battle, at Palmito Ranch on May 12th. Palmito Ranch was not a very large or significant battle, but it ended in the withdrawal of Union soldiers back to the southern Texas port of Brownsville, which they had occupied since 1863. Anyone who wanted to declare the war over might find themselves in more danger than they had imagined.

The same thing was true for slavery, which was the principal cause that triggered the war. President Abraham Lincoln had issued an Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, that declared “forever free” all the slaves in those parts of the breakaway Southern Confederacy not yet returned to Union control. This was an extraordinary step toward the ending of slavery in America, but not the final step. For one thing, Lincoln issued his proclamation on the strength of his “war power” as commander-in-chief, in order to weaken the Confederacy’s powers of resistance. But there was no body of settled law concerning presidential “war powers” in 1863, and even Lincoln was anxious that federal courts might overturn both the proclamation and the freedom it legally awarded to three and a half million black slaves in the Confederacy. For another, the proclamation—precisely because it was a “war powers” document—could only be operative against slavery in the Confederacy; it did not wipe out slavery in the four states where slavery was legal, but which had remained loyal to the Union (Missouri, Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware).

 

After his reelection to the presidency in November 1864, Lincoln pressed Congress to adopt a thirteenth amendment to the Constitution that would both erase slavery everywhere in the United States and put emancipation beyond the reach of the courts. Congress agreed, by a slim margin, in January 1865. But the amendment would not become legally effective until its ratification by the states, and that would not happen until December 1865. Until then, there was always the chance of a legal or political version of the Palmito Ranch battle that might upset every inch of progress made toward ending slavery.

But the hourglass on these threats was running out swiftly. On May 26th—two weeks after the collision at Palmito Ranch—Confederate General Simon Bolivar Buckner arranged a formal surrender of Confederate forces west of the Mississippi, a surrender confirmed on June 2nd by the last senior Confederate officer in the west, Edmund Kirby Smith. Union commanders were eager to move into Texas as quickly as possible: the Mexican border had been in chaos since the French empire of Napoleon III occupied the former Mexican republic in 1862, and many Confederates were crossing into Mexico to join the French. On June 13th, Union Major General Philip Sheridan, who had been appointed to command the formerly Confederate southwestern states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, directed Major General Gordon Granger (who had been in command of Union troops occupying the strategic port of Mobile, Alabama) to take charge of all Union forces holding points on the Texas Gulf coast and set up his headquarters at the port of Galveston. Chief among his responsibilities would be to “notify the people of Texas” that, under the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery had ceased to exist in Texas and that “all slaves are free.”

Gordon Granger was a career U.S. Army officer and a graduate of West Point in the class of 1845 (where he finished a lackluster thirty-fifth in a class of forty-one). He had served in the Mexican War in the Mounted Rifles during Lieutenant General Winfield Scott’s lightning campaign against Mexico City in 1847, and thereafter against the Apache and Comanche in southern Texas. The outbreak of the Civil War brought a demand for anyone with professional experience, and Granger found himself quickly jumped in rank from first lieutenant to command of the 2nd Michigan Cavalry, and then brigadier general of Volunteers, and major general by 1863. One of his superiors characterized Granger as “a man of brains and courage,” but also “blunt to a degree” that would be “well nigh intolerable to strangers.” When an Alabama clergyman asked if Granger intended to require prayers for the president of the United States rather than the Confederacy, Granger sarcastically replied that since the man’s prayers had evidently done little good for Jefferson Davis, “it is no sort of consequence about your prayers, any way.” Still, he served creditably with the Army of the Cumberland at the disastrous battle of Chickamauga, and followed Ulysses Grant in the compensating victory at Chattanooga in 1863, and in 1865 he seemed the perfect choice for coordinating Union occupation of formerly Confederate Texas.

Granger began forwarding troops to Galveston immediately after Sheridan’s order. An advance contingent arrived on June 16th aboard the army transport Corinthian, and Granger arrived in Galveston himself on June 19th, on board the steamer Crescent with “two or three thousand” Union soldiers, and set up headquarters in the Osterman Building. It was at the Osterman Building and other points in Galveston that Granger’s soldiers read and distributed his General Orders No. 3, which (as Sheridan had directed him to do) declared in no uncertain terms that slavery was now over as a fact in Texas, as it had been legally since the Emancipation Proclamation was issued: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” Granger even took a small step beyond the ending of slavery, by declaring that the former slaves would now enjoy “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property” with their former masters, “and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.” On the other hand, Granger did not press beyond that to announce an equality of civil rights (that would not occur until the passage and ratification of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments over the next five years). He assured Galveston’s white inhabitants that “negroes fleeing from the country to this city would not be allowed to live in idleness or become a burthen to the people,” and with his characteristic brusqueness, General Orders No. 3 counseled the freedmen “to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages” and not “to collect at military posts” in any expectation of being “supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

Granger only remained in command in Galveston until August 1st, and spent the remainder of his career until his death in 1876 in otherwise routine Army assignments in the west. But celebrations of June 19th began in Galveston with “a grand turn-out and barbeque” as early as 1866, and in 1872, four black leaders in Houston—John Henry “Jack” Yates, Richard Allen, Richard Brock, and David Elias Dibble—purchased a ten-acre “Emancipation Park” that became the focus for “Juneteenth” observations. By 1902, there were “five or six barbeques given by the colored people” in Brazos County alone, despite the sniffing disapproval of disgruntled white Texans that “our carnival-like Juneteenth outings” and “burlesque parade” should be “knocked on the head and done with”—and despite the offer by the “colored people” in 1909 to “prepare a special table for their white friends … so they may have the pleasure of entertaining them.” Juneteenth became “a second Christmas” for black Texans, with “everything especially set aside for that day.”

 

At first, Juneteenth was only a Texas holiday (and not even a formal state holiday until 1979, even though cities like Austin made it a municipal holiday as early as 1946) and had to compete with fifteen other emancipation holidays observed elsewhere by black Americans. The earliest of these holidays, even before the Civil War, was August 1st, in recognition of the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies in 1834; yet another, in the District of Columbia, was (and is still) held on April 16th, to mark the signing of the District of Columbia emancipation bill by President Lincoln in 1862. Other holidays included the official ending of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, and the ratification date of the thirteenth amendment. The most prevalent, for decades, was January 1st—“Emancipation Day”—in remembrance of Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, which featured “Watch Night” church services beginning on New Year’s Eve and lasting into January 1st.

Gradually, however, Juneteenth has superseded even January 1st in importance as a black emancipation holiday. “The way it was explained to me,” recalled one black Texan, “the 19th of June wasn’t the exact day the Negro was freed,” but “that’s the day they told them that they was free,” and they “whooped and hollered and bored holes in trees with augers and stopped it up with [gun] powder and light that, and that would be their blast for the celebration.” By the 1920s, there were Juneteenth celebrations in Shreveport, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, with “a parade through the principal downtown streets … and floats showing the gradual progress of the Negro from 1865 to 1920.” Annette Gordon-Reed, a native Texan and legal historian, recalled that, “for my great-grandmother, my grandparents, and relatives in their generation, this was the celebration of the freedom of people they had actually known.”

After World War II, black migration from the rural South to northern cities carried Juneteenth celebrations with it, and black historian Peniel Joseph recalled how “Each year we would commemorate the day, often during a Sunday service and occasionally during vacation Bible school. … I imagined myself as part of the Black Texas community, which dared to believe in dreams of freedom that were once considered impossible.” Ralph Ellison’s unfinished novel, Juneteenth, captures the fiery spirit of Juneteenth celebrations when its principal character, Reverend Hickman, describes slavery as a kind of preparation for “the awe-inspiring labor of transforming God’s Word into a lantern,” a preparation that has continued because “He wants a well-tested people to work his will,” even “a new kind of human.” Opal Lee, a retired school teacher from Ft. Worth, began staging symbolic “walks” from Ft. Worth to Washington, D.C., to advocate the designation of Juneteenth as a national holiday, and in 2021, she was rewarded by the passage of a bill creating a national Juneteenth holiday.

Juneteenth has had its ups and downs as “a red-spot day on the calendar.” The foremost chronicler of black holidays, William H. Wiggins, believed that in the 1960s, interest in Juneteenth waned to the point of evaporation, only to be re-invigorated in the 1970s. The principal irony of Juneteenth, however, is that slavery was still a legal institution in the United States on June 19, 1865—if not in Texas because of the Emancipation Proclamation, then certainly in Kentucky and Delaware, where slavery would not be blotted out until the ratification of the thirteenth amendment. This would not, however, be the only irony in the history of American emancipation, and certainly not the last.

Realists Unite! New Documentary on Gender-Affirming Care Presents “Pro-Reality” Position in Response to Trans Ideology

The new documentary “No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care” criticizes transgender ideology from a self-described “liberal, west coast Democrat” perspective. Despite facing significant resistance from trans activists, it has been making an impact.

The film will be showing in select theaters across the country during a one-day AMC Theatres Special Event on Wednesday, June 21st at 4:30 and 7:30 pm. It will be available online and on DVD starting July 2nd.

Below, Joshua Pauling interviews producer Vera Lindner.

Joshua Pauling (JP): Thanks for taking the time to discuss your new documentary. It really is a powerful depiction of what is happening to people when transgender ideology takes over. I especially found the detransitioners’ stories compelling. The story you tell throughout is decidedly reasonable and anchored to reality. Kudos to you all for producing such a thorough and moving documentary on such an important and controversial topic. And much respect for being willing to say hard but true things in the documentary.

How has the response been to the film thus far?

Vera Lindner (VL): We’ve received tons of gratitude, tears, and donations. The most humbling has been the resonance the film created in suffering parents. I wept many times reading grateful, heartbreaking messages from parents. People are hungry, culturally speaking, and are embracing our film as truth and facts, and a “nuanced, compassionate, deeply researched” project.

JP: That is great to hear, and interesting that there has been an overwhelming response from parents. Parents are frequently the forgotten victims of this ideology.

How has the film been doing when it comes to numbers of views and reach?

VL: Since February 18th, the film has been viewed 40,000 times on Vimeo, after it was shut down in its first week and then reinstated due to publicity and pressure from concerned citizens. Many bootlegged copies have proliferated on Odysee, Rumble, and such, so probably 30,000 more views there as well. After we put it on Vimeo on Demand in mid-April, it’s getting purchased about 50 times a day. Our objective is the widest possible reach.

 

JP: Sad to say, I’m not surprised that it was shut down within a few days. Can you explain more about how such a thing happens? In what ways has it been blocked or throttled?

VL: Vimeo blocked it on the third day due to activists’ doing a “blitz” pressure campaign on Vimeo. Then they reinstated it, after news articles and public pressure. Our private screening event in Austin was canceled due to “blitz” pressure on the venue (300 phone calls by activists in two days). These experiences help us refine our marketing strategy.

JP: I guess that shows the power of public pressure, from either side. You know you’ve touched a nerve when the response has been both so positive as to receive countless heartfelt letters from people, and so harsh that activists want it canceled.

What do you see as next steps in turning the tide on this topic as a society? What comes after raising awareness through a documentary like this?

VL: Our objective was to focus on the medical harm and regret of experimental treatments. All studies point to the fact that regret peaks around eight to eleven years later. Yet the message of the activists toward the detransitioners is, “It didn’t work for you, you freak, but other people are happy with their medicalization.”

Our expectation is that conversations about the long-term ramifications of this medical protocol will start. We need to talk not only about how individuals are affected, but the society as a whole. Wrong-sex hormone treatment and puberty blockers lead to serious health complications that could lead to lifelong disability, chronic pain, osteoporosis, cardiac events, worsening mental health. SRSs (sex-reassignment surgeries) cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. These are not just one individual’s personal issues.

The economics of our health insurance will be impacted. The ability of these people to be contributing members of society will be impacted profoundly. The Reuters investigation from November 2022 stated that there are 18,000 U.S. children currently on puberty blockers and 122,000 kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria (and this is only via public insurance data, so likely an undercount). These all are future patients with musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, and mental illnesses for a lifetime. A hysterectomy at twenty-one can lead to early dementia, early menopause, and collapse of the pelvic floor organs.

 

I don’t yet see conversations about the long-term health implications of “gender-affirming care,” particularly in relation to how insurance, the labor force, interpersonal relationships, and future offspring will be affected. Everyone wants to be affirmed now and medicalized now. But there are lifelong implications to experimental medicine: autoimmune illnesses, cancers, etc. Sexual dysfunction and anorgasmia have real implications on dating, romantic life, and partnering up. A few people are talking about this on NSFW posts on Reddit.

JP: It’s interesting how speaking out against trans ideology and gender-affirming care creates some unlikely alliances across the political and religious spectrum. What do you see as the potentials and pitfalls of such alliances?

VL: We align with people who are pro-reality, who respect core community values such as truth and honesty, and who see the human being as a whole: body and soul. There is no metaphysical “gendered soul” separate from the body. Teaching body dissociation to kids (“born in the wrong body”) has led to a tidal wave of self-hatred, body dysmorphia, depression, anxiety, and self-harm. We are our bodies, and we are part of the biosphere. We respect nature and the body’s own intricate biochemical mechanism for self-regulation, the endocrine system. We believe that humans cannot and should not try to “play God.” We are students of history and know that radical attempts to re-engineer human society according to someone’s outrageous vision (read Martine Rothblatt’s The Apartheid of Sex) have led to enormous human cataclysms (communism, Chinese cultural revolution).

 

JP: Well, then count me a realist, too! Funny you use the term pro-reality. I’ve written similarly about the possibility of realist alliances. While this makes for some improbable pairings, there can be agreement on the importance of fact-based objective reality and the givenness of the human body.

Realists can agree that the world is an objective reality with inherent meaning, in which humans are situated as embodied, contingent beings. Such realists, whether conservative, moderate, or progressive, might have more in common with each other on understanding reality and humanity than some on their “own side” whom I call constructivists: those who see the world as a conglomeration of relative meanings, subjectively experienced by autonomous, self-determining beings, who construct their own truth and identity based on internal feelings.

But I do have a related question on this point—a bit of respectful pushback, if I may.

Your pro-reality position seems to have implications beyond just the transgender question. Can one consistently oppose the extremes of gender-affirming care while upholding the rest of the LGB revolution? If our male and female bodies matter, and their inherent design and ordering toward each other mean something, then doesn’t that raise some questions about the sexual revolution more broadly?

As we see the continued deleterious effects on human flourishing unfold as thousands of years of wisdom and common sense regarding sex and sexuality are jettisoned, there are both religious and non-religious thinkers raising this question, though some go farther than others. I think, for example, of Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex, Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress, and Erika Bachiochi’s “Sex-Realist Feminism.” An enlightening panel discussion with many of these thinkers was co-hosted by Public Discourse earlier this year. When the real human body is considered, its holistic structure as male or female is clearly ordered and designed to unite with its complement.

 

How does this reality relate to the rest of the sexual revolution? If one argues that individuals should be able to express themselves sexually and fulfill their desires with no external limits beyond human desire or will, how does one justify saying that transgenderism is off-limits?

VL: I will answer the question, but I need to say that this is my personal opinion. I’m fifty-five and have worked in entertainment for more than thirty years, and in Hollywood for twenty-five years. The entertainment industry attracts LGBT people, so I’ve hired, mentored, befriended, and promoted LGBT and gender-non-conforming people every day of my career. I believe that being gay or lesbian is how these people were born. Some were affected by their circumstances, as well, but in general I believe that homosexuality is innate, inborn, and has existed for millennia. There were a handful of “classic” transsexual women as well. I have three close friends who transitioned in their late forties.

But the explosion we are seeing now is different. A 4,000-percent increase of teenage girls identifying as trans? This is unprecedented. Mostly these are autistic, traumatized, mentally ill teens who seek to belong, who wish to escape their traumatized brains and bodies, who have been bullied relentlessly (“dyke,” “fag,” “freak”) and now seek a “mark of distinction” that will elevate their social status. Instead of being offered therapy, deep understanding, and compassion for their actual traumas, they are being ushered toward testosterone, mastectomies, and hysterectomies. This is not health care. The tidal wave of regret is coming, because these adolescents were never transsexual to begin with. Many of them are lesbians or gay boys who have internalized so much homophobia and bullying that they would rather escape all of it and become someone different than deal with it.

This is what we want to address. Kids explore identities. This is a natural process of discovering who they are. Medicalizing this exploration cements this exploration they were doing when they were teens. Life is long, and one goes through many phases and many “identities.” To be “cemented” for a lifetime in the decision you made as a distressed sixteen-year-old to amputate healthy sex organs does not make sense.

JP: The rise in the rate of transgender identification is indeed stunning, as is the stark increase in the percentage of Gen-Zers who identify as LGBT. What those trends portend is a live question, as are the varied possible causes. And as you say, there is a tidal wave of regret building, from those who have been pushed toward gender transition. We will all need to make special effort to love and care for them.

You’ve been so gracious with your time. As we conclude, are there any other comments you’d like to share with our readers?

VL: Find a theater near you to attend the theatrical one-day premier on June 21st. Then the movie will become available online and via DVD on July 2nd. Watch the documentary and pass it on to all in your circles!

And ask commonsense humanistic questions:

– Can adults make decisions on behalf of kids that will forever change the path of the kids’ lives?
– Is it worth it to ruin one’s health in the name of a belief system?
– Is what you are reading in academic medical research based on evidence, or pseudo-science?
– If humans have been going through puberty for millennia, who are we to mess with that now?
– Is puberty a disease?

JP: Thank you for your work on this vital issue. I hope this documentary continues to make an impact. And realists unite!

The Peace of Parenthood

What is it like to be a parent, and what might it teach us? In my own life, questions that had once seemed abstract have quite rapidly taken the form of an immersive experience: I have eighteen-month-old twin daughters, with a third daughter on the way in October, and so perhaps I can be permitted some reflections ahead of Father’s Day that I hope will resonate with others. Parenthood is full of surprises, but I’ve been struck by how I’ve come to understand it as fundamentally peaceful.

Peace is not the first thing that people typically associate with parenting. According to a Pew survey earlier this year, most parents describe parenting as “rewarding” or “enjoyable,” but significant numbers also find it “tiring” and “stressful.” These findings reflect the cost-benefit lens through which the modern world tends to view parenthood: a generally exhausting ordeal that imposes fearful constraints and burdens, while occasionally providing moments of happiness. In many ways, our most urgent social and political challenges—declining birthrates and family formation; pervasive feelings of isolation and anxiety—are the inevitable products of a cultural fixation on the costs of parenthood.

I’m not immune to cost-benefit reasoning (especially when buying diapers for twins), but I now realize that it neglects the core truth that being a parent is essentially peaceful in nature. It is peaceful not in the contemporary sense of freedom from discord (did I mention twins?). Rather, parenting is peaceful in the deepest meaning of the term, which is when we understand, embrace, love, and find joy in one another as gift.

 

By emphasizing the peace of parenthood, we might provide a useful corrective to the prevailing cultural narrative that views the enterprise with such ambivalence. The relationship between peace and parenthood was not obvious to me before I had kids, and I think the same is true of other young people who might be pondering the questions I opened with. While familiar notions of parenting as happy, rewarding, stressful, or intense tell us something, they don’t quite capture the whole story.

Peace

In our secular age, peace is often defined in negative terms of what is lacking or missing, such as the absence or end of conflict. In this account, peace in the public realm means freedom from civil disturbance, while inside our minds it means freedom from troubling thoughts or emotions. In this latter sense, Augustine’s view that peace is “the tranquility of order” finds faint and distorted echoes in the modern emphasis on subjectivity and psychological analysis.

But there is a deeper, spiritual dimension of peace that I believe the experience of parenting helps bring more clearly into view. We might consider the Hebrew word shalom, a comprehensive term that encompasses the positive aspects of flourishing relationships, not just the absence of hostility. We might also note that in the Catholic Mass, just before congregants offer each other a sign of peace, they are reminded that Jesus said to his apostles, “Peace I leave you, my peace I give you.” Far from an instruction to withdraw into solitude, this is meant as an affirmation that true peace is a gift from God, something positive and relational that enables us to open up to each other and establish new connections.

 

This model of peace also works as a basic description of parenting. More than any other experience, being a parent opens us up to new life, and it deepens existing relationships within our families: husbands and wives grow closer, grandparents watch children become parents. It also encourages us to honor and delight in something outside ourselves. Our failure to see peace in its fullest sense as openness to the gift of God in others is, I think, related to growing cultural misgivings about parenthood. If we increasingly fail to see peace as something positive and oriented toward others, then we won’t associate it with parenthood. And to the extent that we see parenthood as daunting and isolating—as anything but peaceful—then it will be ever more difficult to encourage young people to form their own families.

Gift

Contrary to the modern focus on the costs of parenting, I have learned through being a parent that the true meaning of peace is the condition in which we understand one another as gift. Of course, there is a rich biblical tradition of viewing children as a gift, or a reward, from God. More broadly, this is related to the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic view that creation itself is a gift; not self-standing, but created ex nihilo, from nothing, in a free expression of God’s love that is impossible for us to reciprocate. In this sense, creation is a gift in itself, a gift that signals a relationship, and a gift that instantiates its recipients. Something similar is true of the parent–child bond, and this bears upon parenting in three important ways.

First, the category of gift highlights that parenting involves reciprocal exchange even within the context of a highly asymmetrical relationship. Parents give time, care, and love to their children, who are entirely dependent and seemingly unable to reciprocate. Yet parents also know that children do offer reciprocal gifts in the form of laughter, smiles, joy, and love. This kind of reciprocal exchange cannot be expressed in economic terms, but it’s a profound part of the parent–child relationship.

Second, when we define peace as understanding one another as gift, it follows that we give part of ourselves to the recipient. An Aristotelian philosopher might describe this as the cause imparting something of itself to the effect. By analogy, a father recognizes that to give part of himself to a child—to welcome, treasure, and love the child—is to imbue the child with something of his own character. It might be true that modern parents exaggerate the impact of their efforts, but I still treasure the time I share with my children precisely because its usefulness is not measurable. Time, care, and attention each mediate, and give meaning to, the parent–child relationship.

Third, the category of gift reminds us to embrace what we receive from our children. As social media feeds demonstrate, it’s all too easy to celebrate the pleasurable parts of parenting, the conveniently photogenic occasions when the trip to the beach goes perfectly according to plan. But what about the less glamorous moments? As Public Discourse writer Nathanael Blake observed: “Changing a diaper is not that difficult. Doing it in the dark at 3:30 a.m. after a few weeks of rarely sleeping for more than ninety minutes at a stretch, while being screamed at, is the hard part.” Like so many others, I’ve learned that embracing the hard parts of parenting turns out not to be so hard after all; it’s a natural function of the peace of parenthood, of finding joy in what comes to us from our children—in all its gloriously messy forms.

 

Joy

So far, I’ve suggested that peace is not just the absence of conflict, but something positive, a state when we open up to the new life for which we are responsible and which presents itself to us in its own unique way. In addition, the other aspect of peace that I’ve come to appreciate through parenting is that it is characterized by joyful relationships. In his excellent dictionary of scholastic philosophy, Bernard Wuellner defines internal peace as “the calm and joy of soul in its love of a possessed good without further intense effort or uncertainty.” As it relates to parenting, I’d add that peace is not simply an internal state, but something outward-looking, oriented toward others.

That parenting is joyful might not seem like much of a revelation. On the other hand, parents often look harried and feel panicked. Though parenting is stressful, it gives rise to joyful relationships in which we feel fundamentally at peace because we’re not afraid or distracted, no longer striving for unattainable things or preoccupied with trivial concerns. There is, as Wuellner put it, no need for “further intense effort or uncertainty.” Michael Oakeshott noted that a child’s game is joyful because it has “no ulterior purpose, no further result aimed at; . . . it is not a striving after what one has not got.” The same might be said of parenting itself, of loving and treasuring our children for who they are and not for the value or utility of what they can offer.

Today it often seems that parenting is seen in the same way that some historians have viewed history: just one thing after another. One more obstacle to overcome; one more fire to put out. But my own experience has taught me not only that peace is (perhaps surprisingly) central to parenting, but that parenting itself offers us a positive vision of peace to inhabit—the opportunity to embrace, love, and find joy in one another as gift.

Cormac McCarthy and the Possibility of Faith

Cormac McCarthy, who passed away today, ranks among the most important writers of fiction American society has ever produced. There is ample agreement on this point.

When it comes to interpreting the meaning of his work, though, there is much less consensus.

McCarthy handled big themes in his work, and that is true in his most recent novels: The Passenger and Stella Maris. These two books form a single narrative of siblings Alicia and Bobby Western’s extraordinary lives. We find here meditations on meaning and meaninglessness, human knowledge, death, spirituality, and the nature of the material world. Truth and beauty, reason and faith, love and sex: it’s all here. Mingled with these themes is obsessively detailed description of machines and contraptions of all sorts (especially guns and cars)—another perennial McCarthy interest.

Many critics read McCarthy’s novels the way they do so many other art forms: devoid of the possibility of hope, transcendence, and a living God. But this often glosses over the genuinely conflicted character of the art. The Passenger and Stella Maris offer more than just an artistic representation of reality’s inescapable brutality. They forcefully struggle with the greatest questions of human existence. Like any good work of art, these books don’t allow any reader—religious, atheist, materialist, Christian—to walk away feeling perfectly comfortable in their understanding of the world.

 

The Passenger’s plot involves a plane crash with a missing corpse, and one of the main characters, Bobby, is pursued by shadowy and sinister figures who seem to suggest he played a role in that body’s disappearance. But this plot serves as a frame on which McCarthy hangs his reflections on deeper questions. The mystery of the plane crash is never resolved, and readers are left wondering if this is McCarthy’s way of suggesting that the world’s meaning is elusive and ultimately nonexistent. But, as is always the case with McCarthy’s books, put too much stock in tidy conclusions and you will be disappointed.

Slate’s Laura Miller interprets these novels as many other readers will. She wonders why McCarthy would have bothered this late in life to write two more books with a view of life as “brutal and meaningless.”

These books do contain brutality, and meaninglessness haunts their pages. But they offer much more than the total bleakness that professional critics often perceive in them. To be fair, Alicia Western, whose account of reality is detailed in Stella Maris, provides evidence to support Miller’s reading. She is a solipsist who, when a young girl, read George Berkeley on the physiology of vision and concluded that the world existed only in her youthful head. Alicia often appears unrelentingly pessimistic. She has a disturbing—and incestuous—obsession with her brother.

Yet McCarthy gives Alicia much more complexity than most of the critics have noted. She fiercely struggles with the fallen aspects of her character. A first-rate violinist, she lovingly describes music as sacred. She especially admires Bach, and she knows what (or Who) motivated the great German composer’s music. When she describes having spent her inheritance on a rare Amati violin, she recalls weeping when she played it for the first time. Tears come also when she recalls her pure bliss at the sound of Bach’s Chaconne emerging from her violin. The instrument must have originated in the mind of God, she insinuates, so perfect is its construction.

Amid this discourse on music, Alicia tells Cohen, her psychologist and interlocutor through the entirety of Stella Maris, what she believes to be “the one indispensable gift”: faith.

This question of faith is powerfully demonstrated in Alicia’s account of her father’s final days. This man, a resolute materialist throughout his life, developed cancer almost certainly because of his work with radioactive material in developing the atomic bomb. He was told by physicians in the United States that there was no chance of recovery. His materialism gave him no resources for contending with his mortality, and so he embarks on a futile search to extend his life with alternative treatment in Mexico. He asks his son to accompany him, but Bobby refuses—a decision he regrets for the rest of his life.

How do McCarthy’s characters respond to mortality? Eternal life is “unlikely,” Alicia tells Cohen, yet the “probability is not zero.” In the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal formalized the rationality of religious belief in just these terms. Given the non-zero probability of God’s existence, one follows reason in betting on the infinite gain (eternal life with God) from a life of belief against the limited benefits (unrestricted pleasures during a finite existence) from a life of disbelief.

 

McCarthy is too clever a writer to have Alicia straightforwardly take up Pascal’s wager. Instead, he puts into her mouth these words: “[I]t may even be that in the end all problems are spiritual problems. … The spiritual nature of reality has been the principal preoccupation of mankind since forever and it’s not going away anytime soon. The notion that everything is just stuff doesn’t seem to do it for us.”

Cohen asks if that’s true for her. She responds: “That’s the rub, isn’t it?”

We don’t learn from Alicia her answer to that question, but her reflection on the incompleteness of science and mathematics and their compatibility with faith suggests much. Acceptance of some version of God is, she relates, “a lot more common among mathematicians than is generally supposed.” Kurt Gödel, the figure in math she most admires, “became something akin to a Deist. … [He] never says outright that there is a covenant to which all of mathematics subscribes but you get a clear sense that the hope is there. I know the allure. Some shimmering palimpsest of eternal abidement.”

McCarthy critiques Alicia’s coldly logical worldview (which eventually leads her to self-destruction) through a character she calls the “Thalidomide Kid.” He appears to exist only in her mind, though, inexplicably, the Kid visits Alicia’s brother Bobby after her death to reveal to him her final verdict of the world: “She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.” (The missing apostrophes are an element of McCarthy’s style.)

The Kid’s name, Thalidomide, is a drug that was briefly considered a miracle cure in the West during the mid-twentieth century. It eliminated the nausea accompanying pregnancy, one of the oldest maladies of human existence but one that actually helps ensure the health of both child and mother. Thalidomide’s safety in pregnancy was not evaluated during the drug’s testing. Scientists thereby failed to discover the catastrophic birth defects it produced in human infants. The Kid’s complicated character, which includes evident concern for Alicia’s well-being despite his caustic personality, might be explained as her emotional core, the more intuitively aware part of herself, speaking back subconsciously to her rational self, which, like Thalidomide, promised balm and delivered misery.

Alicia herself labors toward the complex understanding of the world represented by the Kid, who shows an awareness of the limits of logic and reason. She sees intelligence—defined as mastery of mathematics, the purest form of knowledge—as bestowing a certain superiority over others. Yet she also knows that it “is a basic component of evil.” The unintelligent are typically understood as harmless, while ingeniousness is often associated with the diabolical: “What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.” Throughout the books, the Manhattan Project on which their father worked is recognized by both Alicia and Bobby as the moral equivalent to eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Alicia’s perspective on religious faith doesn’t arrive in full view until the conclusion of The Passenger, when her brother Bobby makes the most profound discoveries on this topic.

After her suicide, he goes to see Alicia’s friend Jeffrey in Stella Maris, the psychiatric hospital where Alicia had admitted herself. Her friend tells Bobby that he had asked her how she could believe in the Kid but not in Jesus. “Everyone is born with the faculty to see the miraculous. You have to choose not to,” he tells Bobby. Jeffrey reveals that Alicia had noted an odd discolor in the eye of another woman in the institution and told doctors, who detected a cancer and saved her life by removing the eye. Subsequently, however, the woman grew depressed and took her own life. Bobby realizes that the death of this woman, whom Alicia had intended to save, led his sister to her own demise. The name of this suffering woman was Mary, and she and Alicia were housed in an institution bearing the Latin name “Star of the Sea.” This is an ancient title for the Mother of God, which originated in a transcription error linked to an etymology of the Hebrew name for Mary. The title designates the Virgin Mother’s protection of sailors and others who travel at sea.

Through the novel’s symbolic language, Alicia is thus connected intimately with the Madonna, who comforts her suffering child and suffers herself. Alicia’s mathematical genius cannot extinguish her emotional need to alleviate the pain of others (Mary of Stella Maris who suffered eye cancer), and after her troubled life’s voyage she seeks healing in the bosom of the Mother (Stella Maris hospital). That she takes her own life is no certain indication she is lost. There is more than enough evidence of her grappling toward a spiritual solution to suffering, enough to suggest that she hoped she might yet find solace.

At the end of The Passenger, Bobby lives in a lighthouse in Spain, looking over the sea that is protected by Stella Maris. He meets an unnamed individual. This could be the ghost of his deceased friend John Sheddan, who left a deathbed letter bidding Bobby in unabashed Christian language to “Be of good cheer.” The friend asks Bobby what he’s doing there, which leads to this exchange:

I live in a windmill. I light candles for the dead and I’m trying to learn how to pray.

What do you pray for?

I don’t pray for anything. I just pray.

Why does he pray? Perhaps for the good reason that his grandmother, Granellen, told him to. Granellen might be overlooked by readers, especially those determined to find no hope in these works. She represents the rootedness in the traditional world that McCarthy has described in detail elsewhere, for example, in Sheriff Bell’s wife Loretta of No Country for Old Men.

“Do you believe in God, Bobby?” Granellen asks. “I don’t know, Granellen. … The best I can say is that I think he and I have pretty much the same opinions.” She advises him: “You have to believe that there is good in the world. I’m goin to say that you have to believe that the work of your hands will bring it into your life.”

Bobby has by the end of the two novels suffered much loss. He didn’t save his sister from her demons. He comprehends the legacy he inherited from his father, who helped bring an unprecedented destructive power into the world.

But McCarthy has given us reason to believe that this is not the whole tale. These books hint that we might do well, when we face what Alicia named as “the horror beneath the surface of the world,” to emulate the practice of our ancestors. For they trusted that there would always be protection from that horror, so long as we do not lose faith. Alicia’s commitment to compassion and Bobby’s prayerful penitence give the reader reason to suspect that McCarthy did not shut the door on God before his life ended.

A Glimpse into a Post-Christian Future: Public Support for Killing the Poor and Disabled

I find the term “medical aid in dying” (MAID) deeply pernicious. It is not only an assault on human dignity (which it implicitly claims to defend), but it also employs a rhetorical sleight of hand. The term conjures up an image of someone who is already dying of a painful and terrible disease, and the aid they receive seems good and possibly even heroic. So I will switch from the misleading term “medical aid in dying” and now speak of “physician-assisted killing,” or PAK.

These misleading ideas associated with MAID have taken a firm hold of the Canadian imagination. According to a poll from Research Co., a representative sample of Canadians were asked the following question: “At this point, only an adult with a grievous and irremediable medical condition can seek medical assistance in dying in Canada. Do you agree or disagree with allowing adults in Canada to seek medical assistance in dying because of the following reasons?”

When asked about “Disability,” a full 50 percent of Canadians agreed that someone should be able to seek PAK. When breaking down the results by age groups, one might expect to find that younger folks, more attuned as they are to the nefarious effects of structural coercion, would be less likely to support PAK in the case of disability. But the opposite turned out to be the case: for 18- to 34-year-olds, support actually jumped ten points to 60 percent. In other words, 6 in 10 of young Canadians support PAK as a response to disability.

What about poverty? A lower number of Canadians—27 percent—think of it as a reason someone should be able to pursue PAK. But once again the numbers for young people are remarkable and disturbing: 41 percent of Canadians aged 18 to 34 believe it can be a legitimate reason to request PAK.

How did Canada get here? Is the United States headed down this same path? If so, how can Americans reverse course?

PAK in America vs. Canada

As families and local communities have frayed, we no longer have a ready-to-hand idea of what a good death might be apart from PAK. The dying process has been outsourced to massive, impersonal housing projects that build sterile nursing homes underwritten by vulture capitalists who discovered they can get rich on our inability to deal with death. So, to the extent that PAK gives both the dying and their families an alternative to the horror show of dying alone (except for maybe the company of a robot) in totally inadequate “care homes,” it becomes quite attractive, and pro-lifers face a serious challenge in resisting it.

Effective resistance to PAK in America has focused largely on slippery slope arguments that emphasize what happens after you open the door to this practice. If those with terminal illness can seek death, why not those with disabilities, or those suffering from severe mental illnesses? PAK opponents, in other words, are focusing on things that invoke discomfort and even anger. But will this be enough in the long run?

 

Nothing has bolstered this strategy for PAK opponents in the United States more than pointing to what is happening in Canada, whose program has expanded in ways that invoke less a slippery slope, and more a free fall accelerating at 9.8 meters per second squared. Consider that it was only five short years ago that Canada legalized PAK. And as we’ve seen, the law has recently enabled killing the poor and the disabled precisely because they are poor and disabled.

This gold-standard reporting from The New Atlantis earlier this year clearly demonstrates the extent of the horrors of Canada’s program. The program trains those who administer death to expect patients who “choose” PAK due to lacking the support they need. In a kicker that is difficult to get out of one’s mind, the article explains the message that Canada sends to its vulnerable populations:

Just a few years ago they would have been textbook candidates for what a just society would say: Your life has value. In Canada today they hear something else: Your death will be beautiful.

But what kinds of situations are we talking about? In what kinds of cases are the powers that be in Canada telling people that they might be better off dead? Well, how about a veteran who asked for PTSD treatment? Or another veteran who asked that a wheelchair ramp be built into her home? Though neither was dying, in both cases they were asked if PAK would be a better option for them.

In another case, a woman with very severe chemical sensitivities “chose” PAK after she was denied public housing that wouldn’t trigger those sensitivities. Or how about a 63-year-old man who had been waiting for spinal fusion surgery for eighteen years, and bearing terrible pain during that time, saying “I am fed opioids and left to kill myself.” He requested PAK and was approved. And then there was the 44-year-old woman with a degenerative disease who, after being denied home healthcare, decided to be as direct as she could about what actually killed her:

Ultimately it was not a genetic disease that took me out, it was a system. There is desperate need for change. That is the sickness that causes so much suffering. Vulnerable people need help to survive. I could have had more time if I had more help.

The Toronto Star, the largest and most progressive newspaper in Canada, described the move toward these practices as “Hunger Games style social Darwinism.”

PAK and Post-Christianity

Opponents of PAK in the United States have pointed to the dystopia to the north of us, and so far their strategy seems successful: even in many blue states (especially out east), PAK is not legal. Yet why has Canada gone so far with PAK? Returning to the polling figures cited at the beginning of this essay, what are we to make of these numbers in a progressive country that has adopted a position so antithetical to how Americans understand social justice?

 

One reason is that progressivism in the United States has retained aspects of its Christian inheritance—with its focus on nonviolence, inherent and inalienable human dignity, and preference for the most vulnerable. Progressivism in secular Canada, especially among young Canadians, is by now far removed from these commitments. Thus, in Canada, killing the most vulnerable human beings comports well with a society that values giving individuals what they ask for (autonomy), and a just distribution of resources (equity) in ways that allow the most people to derive the greatest benefit from them (utilitarianism).

It doesn’t take a genius to point out the tensions here: equity very often conflicts with utility calculations, and the poor and disabled are some of the least autonomous human beings in our communities. But that doesn’t stop the secular state, and even secular academic bioethicists in both Canada and the United States, from attempting to muddle their way through with these incoherent values in play.

The fact that increased cultural distance from Christianity may have helped pave the way for Canada’s PAK regime is further suggested by what’s happened—and what has not happened—in the much more religious United States. While Oregon and Washington (two of the least Christian states) have had legal PAK for decades, it has only recently become legal in states like California and New Jersey. And despite the best efforts of groups like Compassion and Choices (formerly the Hemlock Society), PAK is still illegal in most of the country—including in deep blue states like New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, as noted earlier.

The arguments that have won the day in deep blue USA are—you guessed it—about the slippery slope of such laws and the effect that they will have on the poor and disabled. Unsurprisingly, the most effective advocates against such laws are disability rights advocates (and especially disabled people themselves) who point to the disturbing data about why people seek PAK. When physical pain doesn’t even make the top five reasons people in Oregon request PAK—but fear of loss of autonomy, fear of loss of enjoyable activities, and fear of being a burden on others do make the top five—this sends a very clear message to the disabled: it’s reasonable that someone like you would want to kill yourself. And in Canada, they take the next step: we think someone like you might want to take advantage of the legal right to kill yourself.

Going on Offense

Happily, disability rights activists are still winning the day, again, even in deep blue places on the east coast. But playing a strictly defensive game of knocking down legalization attempts—especially as the United States secularizes and becomes more like Canada—seems like an untenable strategy for protecting the most vulnerable from this deadly violence. Locking in the dignity and radical equality of all human beings will require more. In short, it is time to go on offense.

A broad and diverse coalition of folks is doing exactly that: seeking to make PAK unconstitutional and therefore permanently off the books in this country. The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition in the United States recently reported on a lawsuit filed in the State of California by the United Spinal Association, Not Dead Yet, Institute for Patients’ Rights, Communities Actively Living Independent and Free, Lonnie VanHook, and Ingrid Tischer. These plaintiffs are all organizations with members who have disabilities, individual persons with disabilities, and/or organizations that advocate for persons with disabilities.

The lawsuit has the goal of reaching the Supreme Court and overturning California’s law protecting physician-assisted killing. They argue that this law is unconstitutional because it treats suicidal persons with disabilities (which according to the Americans with Disabilities Act includes those with a terminal disease) differently from other kinds of suicidal persons. If the suicidal person does not have a disability, then the state of California protects her and restricts her ability to kill herself. But if the person has a disability, then California has a special set of discriminatory rules that imply that her life is worth less and (like Canada) even refuses care and supportive services in favor of steering her toward her death. This, the plaintiffs argue, is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection and Due Process clauses.

In my view, this a brilliant strategy on multiple levels, aligning “conservative” pro-life human dignity concerns with “progressive” disability rights concerns in a way (to this non-lawyer’s mind, at least) that makes a powerful legal, moral, and rhetorical case against legalized PAK. Again, it is long past time for us to go on offense in this battle. And the horror show we see unfolding with our secular neighbors to the north indicates just how much is at stake if we lose.

Charles Taylor, Psychological Selfhood, and Disenchantment

This essay is part of Public Discourse’s Who’s Who series, which introduces and critically engages with important thinkers who are often referenced in political and cultural debates, but whose ideas might not be widely known or understood. The series previously considered the life and work of Hannah Arendt, Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Maritain, Michael Oakeshott, Charles De Koninck, and Harry V. Jaffa and Allan Bloom.

Every year I teach a class on the collapse of Christianity in western society, asking the question why it was so easy to believe in God in the year 1500 and yet so difficult today. And in helping students to answer that question, my most useful guide has been Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. Indeed, the question itself is drawn from one of his major works, A Secular Age.

Taylor is a remarkable philosopher. He has made significant contributions to studies of Hegel, the importance of language, and the nature of politics. He has also developed theories of selfhood, of which Sources of the Self and its successor, A Secular Age, form a stunning tour de force. In addition, Taylor has also been active politically, helping to found New Left Review and standing for election in Canada as a candidate of the New Democratic Party on three separate occasions. Even though he’s a man of the left, those of a more conservative bent have much to learn from him.

Given the wide-ranging nature of Taylor’s philosophical interests, an introductory essay such as this must be highly selective. Yet there is a theme that ties Taylor’s work together, from Hegel to his interest in language: philosophical anthropology. This subject investigates the question: what is it that makes human beings and their social existence distinctive? This question is central to his arguments in Sources of the Self and A Secular Age as he investigates how individuals imagine themselves.

The Failure of the Popular Narrative

Perhaps the most common explanation of religious decline in western society is that religious belief is now obsolete thanks to the growth of scientific knowledge. This account views religion as a means of control over nature that, in the wake of scientific and technological developments, has lost its importance. Thus, where once the farmer prayed for rain, now we have irrigation. Where once the villager at the foot of the volcano engaged in sacred rites to placate the volcano god, now we understand that seismology, not animal sacrifice, is a better predictor of eruption. Sometimes this is called the subtraction narrative: it accounts for the modern world by seeing it as what is left after religion has been removed or replaced by science.

This is in many ways the classic Enlightenment account of secularization, found variously in Kant’s notion of enlightenment as humanity reaching adulthood, Freud’s critique of religion as infantile, and Darwin’s proclamation of evolution. Taylor’s concern, however, is that it is too simplistic an account for it never asks a very important question: why does science come to have such authority that it is able to displace religion? The point is profound. Most people in the West do not believe in the authority of science because they are deeply read in scientific matters. Rather, they live in a world where science is intuitively plausible, just as five hundred years ago people lived in a world where religion was intuitively plausible. The question of the replacement of the latter with the former cannot therefore be answered simply with reference to science. The question of how and why science has been granted such authority is the real issue, and one that the standard narrative assumes rather than explains.

 

The Social Imaginary

In light of this, Taylor points to what he calls the social imaginary. The phrase is somewhat inelegant, using the adjective “imaginary” as a noun. Yet the concept is important. The social imaginary is the set of beliefs and practices that reflect and reinforce the intuitions of a given culture or society. Saluting the flag, celebrating July Fourth as a holiday, and believing in the wisdom embodied in the U.S. Constitution would be three examples of things that have traditionally informed the American social imaginary. Few people ask why they do or believe these things; they are simply intuitive to those who belong to the culture of the United States and provide the framework or the lens through which the nation and its relationship to its citizens and to other nations are understood. Families too have their ritual, rhythms, and assumptions that inform how their members understand themselves and relate to others.

Thus, for Taylor, the question of how religion moves from being the default intuition of the members of a society to being optional or even marginal is a question of how the social imaginary has been transformed. The shift to scientific supremacy is a matter of the imagination, not of the blunt facts of science intruding upon us.

The Disenchantment of the World

Central to this transformation is what Taylor (borrowing from Max Weber) calls disenchantment. While the medieval world was enchanted, the modern world in which we dwell is disenchanted. A naïve response to this might be that our world too is full of interest in the supernatural—not simply in terms of traditional religious commitments, where church, synagogue, temple, and mosque continue to find a place in the lives of many people—but also in the plethora of other spiritualities, from yoga to tarot cards. Do these things not prove that we still live in an enchanted age?

Such an objection carries some weight with those who wish to read “disenchanted” as connoting the wholesale rejection of religion or mystery, but it does not really address what Taylor is pointing to. A disenchanted age is not necessarily characterized by complete repudiation of the supernatural. Rather, it is characterized by a fundamental shift in the function of the supernatural. And a world where we now have a choice of enchantments, so to speak, is a world that is differently enchanted—and arguably disenchanted—because the supernatural no longer stands in the same relation to the world as it once did.

A couple of examples help clarify Taylor’s point. Take a traditional Catholic who believes in the ecumenical creeds. In so doing, he believes the same thing that Christians committed to those creeds have believed throughout the centuries. But there is a difference: today’s Catholic cannot believe them in the same way as, say, a Catholic in 1500. This is because today’s Catholic chooses to believe them, and that in the face of a cultural default that does not do so. The Catholic in 1500 really had no choice and, in believing, reflected the cultural intuitions and dispositions of his day. On this level, such faith represents something different today.

 

As a second example, imagine being a Christian believer in 1500 and waking up one morning to find that one does not believe in God any more. Everything fundamentally changes at that point. Up until then, you believed that the only thing keeping the universe in order, the only thing that guaranteed that the sun would rise each morning, was the existence of God. To cease believing in him is therefore virtually impossible and, if done, requires a fundamental rethinking of everything.

Today, doubt among religious believers and even complete loss of faith are rarely accompanied by a deep existential crisis about the entire universe, even if they precipitate a certain localized angst about relationships or personal mortality. This is because even religious believers are accustomed to living in a world that seems to operate effectively for believer and unbeliever alike. For example, experience teaches that antibiotics are a more reliable form of medical treatment than prayer alone. One can, of course, see antibiotics as a gift of God and an answer to prayer, but one does not need to do so. Nor does their efficacy depend on that belief. Our world is thus at least much less enchanted than that of 1500, even if individual groups maintain certain supernatural beliefs.

The Buffered Self

At the heart of this disenchantment for Taylor is not the traditional science-versus-religion narrative we noted at the start. Rather, he sees the key as being a transformation in the way in which the self is understood. By self he understands not merely the awareness individuals might have of themselves as individual self-consciousnesses. For Taylor, selfhood is how people understand themselves as individuals in connection to the world around them, and what they see as the nature of being a human person. The contrast between the Middle Ages and today is one that Taylor characterizes as between the porous self and the buffered self.

The porous self is one that does not draw a sharp boundary between the inner and the outer, between the psychological and the material, between the physical world and the spiritual. The buffered self is the self that does make a clear distinction between these things. And it is the rise of the latter that connects to the disenchantment of our current age.

The distinction is important but also complex. Indeed, both Sources of the Self and A Secular Age spend significant time exploring the distinction, and any summary runs the risk of oversimplification. Nonetheless, a couple of examples can again illuminate Taylor’s argument.

One example he uses himself is that of depression. In medieval times, depression—or melancholy as it was called—was connected to the notion of black bile. Today, we connect it to physiological issues such as a hormonal imbalance. One might be tempted to say that the difference between the two is thus simply one of depth of scientific knowledge: we now know that black bile does not exist, but both medievals and moderns see that a physiological cause for psychological dysfunction is in play. But this would be to misunderstand the difference between the two. While we moderns see hormonal imbalance as causing depression, the medieval mind sees black bile as being itself the melancholy. In other words, we distinguish the self—a psychological entity—from the physical, which acts on the real “us” as an external force; the medieval sees the self as in the grip of the physical and inseparable from it or, better still, permeable by it.

 

A second example is that of the relationship between the supernatural and the natural world. For the medieval mind, the spiritual or supernatural boundary was a physical presence in the natural world: religious relics possessed an intrinsic power, for instance. Thus, when the king touched the one suffering from scrofula, the power of the physical touch healed the illness because the king, by virtue of his status as king, possessed supernatural healing powers. Likewise, when a fragment of the true cross was adored, the pilgrim was blessed. On the negative side, goblins, demons, and even the devil himself were physical realities within the material word. The physical world carried a powerful authority that extended to the spiritual and determined the nature of the self. But we moderns do not live in such a world. Ours is a world of immanence, not transcendence, explicable in terms of itself and where the supernatural does not plausibly blend with the natural. Even Christians who may well believe in a personal devil will typically not imagine him as a discrete physical presence in a particular place, but rather as a supernatural influence that cannot be specifically localized.

The displacement of the porous self with the buffered self is a long story, but with the crisis of the papacy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and with the Reformation of the sixteenth, the nature and stability of external authority started to become more and more equivocal. Add to this changes in technology, above all the printing press (with the correlative rise in literacy and then private reading), and economies (with the move from dependence on the land and the seasons to production and trade).

These changes meant the old external framework for identity and a sense of self started to weaken and then plunge into constant flux. The material world became less authoritative. The result was that there was an inward move, so that identity and security came to be found more in the individual psychological sphere than in the given external world. Montaigne gave a literary focus to the first person as Descartes did the same from a philosophical perspective.

The exploration of the inner space became critical. And as this happened, so the porous self gave way to the buffered self. Such a self will tilt toward finding science, for example, an increasingly plausible way of understanding the universe, not because it understands the elaborate arguments, but because the scientific way of looking at the world—as material that in itself possesses no intrinsic spiritual significance—resonates with the intuitions of the buffered self. The really important things for the individual are psychological. The material world is a separate sphere.

There is far more to Taylor’s philosophical analysis of modernity than can ever be covered in the space of this article. But above all is the central key to his thinking: to understand our world, we need to understand how human beings intuitively relate to that world. That requires understanding the changes in the notion of selfhood that have taken place over the last five hundred years. Only then will we come to a better understanding of why religion and religious people find themselves in such a highly contested position in our culture.

Image credit: Makhanets – Own work. Previously published here.

Apostles of Life: Remarks on Receiving the Evangelium Vitae Medal

Evangelium Vitae: the gospel of life. What is that gospel—that good news?

It is the good news—the very good news—that each and every member of the human family, as a creature fashioned in the image and likeness of the divine Creator and Ruler of all, is the bearer of profound, inherent, and equal dignity.

It is the astonishing news that, in the human family, everyone’s life is inestimably precious; there are no inferiors and no superiors in essential worth and basic rights.

It is, of course, true that people are different and, indeed, unequal in myriad ways. People are far from alike or equal in strength, intelligence, beauty, skill, dexterity, deftness, wit, and charm, as well as in wealth, power, influence, and social status. But the gospel of life relativizes all those differences and inequalities.

As creatures made in the image and likeness of God, every member of the human family is entitled to be treated with dignity and have his or her fundamental rights—beginning with the most fundamental and foundational of all rights, the right to life—honored, irrespective of such things as race, sex, and ethnicity, to be sure, but also irrespective of age, size, location, stage of development, or condition of dependence.

As children of the common Father, in whose image we are made, we human beings are a family. We are quite literally, and not merely metaphorically, brothers and sisters. Our bonds are familial bonds; our obligations to each other, familial obligations.

Injustices—above all, the unjust taking of human life—are not and can never be “none of our business,” for we are, again literally and not merely metaphorically, “our brother’s keeper.” And so our obligations—and let me be clear, our duties as a matter of justice to others—are not confined to not unjustly taking life. They extend to protecting others from those who would unjustly take their lives. When we fail in those duties, we commit injustices against those to whom the duties are owed.

Today, in the case of the precious child in the womb, justice demands not only that we refrain from taking his or her life, or directly cooperating in his or her destruction; justice requires that we, especially in our role as citizens, protect our unborn brothers and sisters and resist those who would expose them to the lethal violence of abortion. It is our fundamental duty in justice to demand that they—and everyone else—be afforded the full and equal protection of the laws. Those holding public office and exercising political power who sin against unborn babies, by exposing them to violent attack, commit a grave injustice. This injustice is intensified, not mitigated, when they claim to be people of faith and rationalize their wrongdoing by averring that they are simply declining to impose their religious beliefs on others.

 

The very same principles require that we reach out in love and compassion to the precious mothers of unborn children—mothers who sometimes are indeed in gravely difficult, dangerous, even dire situations; mothers who are often under intense pressure from boyfriends, husbands, parents or other relatives, or employers—intense pressure to, in those shockingly callous but all too familiar words, “get rid of it.” Our motto—“Love them both”—is more than a slogan. It is more than a pledge. It is not something “beyond the call of duty.” It is our duty. And it is a duty that the pro-life movement, contrary to the vile slanders of the pro-abortion movement and the chorus that echoes its talking points in the media, has been fulfilling for the more than five decades of its existence.

Can our movement do still more? Should we do more? Yes and yes. We can. We should. And we will. What we will never do is offer our beloved sisters the ghoulish pseudo-compassion of the abortionist’s knife. We will offer, instead, the healing balm of genuine compassion, compassion born of love, compassion that offers, not a quick and easy, but deadly, “solution,” but rather an open-ended, open-hearted, self-sacrificial commitment. We have done this for fifty years. We will continue to do it.

 

The Pro-Life Movement, before and after Roe

My own mother recruited me into the pro-life movement when I was a young teenager. This was before the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. Our movement formed in response to legislative efforts to weaken the protection of unborn children in states like Colorado, California, and New York. Those efforts were the work of a new movement that viewed abortion as the solution to two types of problems, the personal problems of women whose pregnancies were undesired and unwelcome, and the social problem of poor—and let’s not hide this fact—often minority children being born, children who, the pro-abortion movement said, would end up on the welfare rolls at taxpayer expense. The pro-abortion movement was further animated by the liberationist ethic, especially the sexual liberationist ethic, of the 1960s, and the belief—a ridiculous belief, as it turned out, but one widely held by elites at the time—that a so-called “population bomb” was on the verge of creating massive worldwide famines in which hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions, of people would die.

The pro-abortion movement claimed, knowingly falsely, that abortion needed to be legalized because tens of thousands of women each year in the United States were dying as a result of illegal, so-called “back alley” abortions. I repeat, and emphasize, that the pro-abortion movement made this claim while knowing it was false. We know that they knew, because the late Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a founder and leader of the movement, and himself a prominent abortionist, later in his life embraced the pro-life cause and revealed to the public that he and his colleagues knew the claims they made about death rates from illegal abortions were untrue—indeed, wildly untrue—when they made them. Nathanson also revealed that the movement he helped to found and lead, deliberately appealed to and stoked anti-Catholic prejudice to advance their cause, portraying opposition to abortion as nothing more than a reflection of Catholic dogma, and making the Catholic Church and faithful Catholic people out to be villains, who would rob others of their basic liberties, by imposing on them with the force of law their essentially sectarian religious precepts.

On the afternoon of Monday, January 22, 1973, I finished classes in the early afternoon and drove across town from my high school to join some women from my mother’s pro-life group in working a table at the West Virginia University student center, known as the Mountain Lair. As we were handing out our literature, a student walking past our table said to us, “Hey, there’s been a big decision from the Supreme Court on your issue.” “What is it?” we anxiously asked. “I don’t know” he said, “but it’s been on the news.” Well, we scurried off to find a radio—there being no internet or quick source of breaking news in those days. Then we waited for the hour, because there were no all-news channels; news was delivered “every hour on the hour.” We held out the hope that perhaps it was a big pro-life victory. But it was, of course, the very reverse of that. A constitutional atrocity and a moral catastrophe: Roe v. Wade.

To say that we were stunned would be the understatement of the century. After all, even non-lawyers knew that there was nothing in the text, logic, structure, or historical understanding of the Constitution that could provide a basis for the Court to declare a right to abortion, much less the sweeping right that was proclaimed in Roe v. Wade. It was clearly an illegitimate decision—in the words of dissenting Justice Byron White, an “exercise of raw judicial power.” On that day, our little group in West Virginia, like pro-lifers all across the country, vowed: “This will not stand.” We committed ourselves—our lives—to the project of overturning Roe. We didn’t know if it would be a five-year project, a ten-year project, or a twenty-year project. None of us, I suspect, thought that it would be a project that would take forty-nine years, five months, and two days. But we were determined to work as hard as we could for as long as it would take, even knowing that success in overturning Roe would only enable us to begin the next project—working through the mechanisms prescribed by the Constitution to secure for children in the womb actual legal protections, a project that would require us to persuade our fellow citizens to fulfill America’s promise of liberty and justice for all by bringing the unborn under the mantle of the law’s protection.

 

That, of course, is the challenge we face today. It is a challenge made even more difficult by the nearly fifty-year reign of Roe v. Wade. That is because, as Aristotle observed long ago, the law is, among other things, a teacher, a giver of moral instruction, a former of consciences. For forty-nine years, five months, and two days, our law taught a gross moral untruth. It taught generations of our people that the choice to destroy a child in utero is a basic liberty—indeed, a fundamental right. It taught that that the child himself or herself is as nothing—a blob of tissue, a meaningless mass, a mere object, a piece of property, rather than a person with dignity and a right to life. That is a false lesson that it is our job to help people to unlearn. And that will take effort … and time. We will, as Ryan Anderson, who leads the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., has recently pointed out in an excellent Wall Street Journal essay, need to go step by step, moving forward with determination and with prudence toward our goal of an America where every child is protected by law and welcomed in life. Victory will not come all at once, but each legislative achievement will plant the seeds of the next one.

A Dozen Pro-Life Heroes

I’m keenly aware that this is the first awarding of the Evangelium Vitae medal since the overturning of Roe v. Wade—an achievement that many people, those sympathetic to our cause as well as those unsympathetic to it, thought was not possible. After all, our opponents had everything going for them: power, money, prestige, control of the leading institutions of education, culture, philanthropy, entertainment, the economy, and, of course, the news media. We had, and have, none of those things. And yet, the reversal of Roe was made possible because pro-life people all over the country, people like my mother, never lost faith, never gave themselves permission to give up. Even in the face of devastating disappointments and betrayals, such as the grievous 1992 decision of the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, they kept hope alive and soldiered on.

It is on their behalf that I accept the Evangelium Vitae medal. I am not worthy of such recognition. They are. And I would like this evening to mention just a few heroes of our movement who did not live to see Roe fall, though they worked their hearts out to bring down that dishonorable decision. I hope that you will always regard them as the true recipients of the 2023 Evangelium Vitae medal. A complete list would include many more names than I will be able to mention and briefly profile. By no means am I diminishing the contributions of heroes I do not mention. But I would like to say a word about some of my personal pro-life heroes, people I knew and in some cases had the privilege of working closely with.

Dr. Mildred Jefferson was the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and the first woman to graduate in surgery from Harvard. She worked tirelessly to defend unborn babies and, after Roe was handed down, to overturn it. She was an implacable foe of the dehumanization of anyone, anywhere. She served three times as President of the National Right to Life Committee. She was my friend. I drew inspiration from her.

Congressman Henry Hyde labored tirelessly, year in and year out, to protect unborn babies and overturn Roe. He was our champion in the fight to ensure that taxpayer dollars were not used by the federal government to fund elective abortions. He too was my friend, and I had the honor of working with him on many occasions.

Mrs. Nellie Gray was the indomitable, unstoppable founder and leader of the annual March for Life. It is simply impossible to exaggerate the role of the March, and thus the importance of Nellie’s work, in keeping the flame of hope burning in the pro-life movement. Nellie was the living embodiment of our movement’s determination to prevail, no matter the cost, no matter the sacrifices, no matter how long it took. The March was for Nellie quite literally a labor of love. And she taught all of us in the movement to see our work in precisely that way. Love for babies. Love for mothers. Love as the answer to the violence of abortion.

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus was a mentor and one of my dearest friends in the world. As a young Lutheran pastor, he had been a leader in the anti–Vietnam War movement and in the civil rights movement, where he marched literally arm-in-arm with Rev. Martin Luther King. A gifted thinker and a brilliant speaker and writer, he was poised to become America’s next great religious public intellectual, the successor to Reinhold Niebuhr. But then the liberal establishment opted, tragically, to embrace abortion. Pastor Neuhaus had to choose whether to make himself acceptable to the cultural, educational, and economic elite—an elite that would, if he yielded on the question of abortion, confer upon him the highest forms of status, recognition, and worldly honors—or stand with unborn babies and their mothers. For Neuhaus, it was an easy choice, and required not even a moment’s deliberation. He became our movement’s intellectual and, in many ways, its spiritual leader. His vow, that we will “never weary, never rest” until all our nation’s children are protected in law and welcomed in life, became our rallying cry.

Governor Robert P. Casey, the last of the great pro-life Democrats, was one of the most principled men I ever had the honor to know. I had the privilege of working with him as an advisor and speechwriter on pro-life issues. When he was told, by no less than James Carville, who was running his campaign for Governor of Pennsylvania in 1986, that unless he “softened” his opposition to abortion he would lose, he simply responded, “then I will lose.” He won. Then, after pushing major pro-life legislation through the Pennsylvania legislature, he won again in 1990—this time over a pro-abortion Republican opponent and by a landslide of historic proportions. Governor Casey showed other pro-life politicians that leaders lead, and that by proclaiming and defending pro-life principles, pro-life candidates can win elections despite polling suggesting that the pro-life position is a “political loser.” Pro-life politicians need to be reminded of that message today.

Notre Dame’s own Professor Charlie Rice was one of the intellectual architects and leaders of the pro-life movement. A Marine lieutenant colonel and a legal scholar, he taught generations of Notre Dame law students—and lots of us who were not formally his students—how to make the legal case against Roe and for the child in the womb. He brought together reason and passion in a way I found remarkable and inspiring. He knew how to be tough in making an argument without being a bully. That’s because he was genuinely devoted to the truth, and in that way was a truly exemplary scholar and teacher.

Mr. Joe Scheidler, whom I had the honor of meeting on one or two occasions, was an advertising executive who took our nonviolent movement to the streets in the way that Martin Luther King took the civil rights movement to the streets. The New York Times, an organ that is scarcely sympathetic to the pro-life cause, acknowledged Mr. Scheidler’s effectiveness, noting that he “became a leading figure in the anti-abortion movement by marrying media savvy with confrontational tactics.” That, indeed, he did. A graduate of Notre Dame, Scheidler was known not only for his willingness to be confrontational, but also for his ability to be in dialogue and even friendship with abortion advocates, such as Bill Baird. His pro-life convictions were born of love, a love so great that it would not only prompt him to bear enormous personal risks and make profound sacrifices on behalf of the babies, but also enable him to regard even his most determined adversaries as friends to be loved and cherished, not enemies to be hated and destroyed. For Mr. Scheidler, no one was beyond redemption.

Germain Gabriel Grisez was my intellectual godfather. His 1970 book Abortion: The Myths, the Realities, and the Arguments remains one of the greatest works of scholarship on the subject ever produced. Were the expression of truth by itself capable of resolving disputed questions, the debate over abortion would have ended in a grand pro-life victory three years before Roe v. Wade was decided. In our world, though, truth, even when stated plainly and defended decisively, can be obscured, or ignored, and shunted aside. Still, Grisez’s work enabled the pro-life movement to proceed with profound confidence in the intellectual integrity and soundness of its convictions—and this was no small thing. To this day, it is in many ways unsurpassed.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, in 1994, literally petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States in an amicus curiae brief to “reverse Roe v. Wade and declare the unalienable right to life of the unborn child.” Due to the kindness of my friend, pro-life attorney Harold Cassidy, I had the honor to be Mother’s lawyer as lead counsel (what is known as “counsel of record”) on the brief—a brief whose principal draftsman was not me, but was rather my beloved friend William Porth, with whom I worked.

Dr. Hymie Gordon was a deeply observant Jew, the son of a rabbi in South Africa, who came to the United States to make his career in medicine, first at Johns Hopkins and then at the Mayo Clinic, where he established a pioneering program in medical genetics. Known as “the father of fetology,” Dr. Gordon was a profound believer in the sanctity of human life, and a physician and teacher who dedicated himself to the Hippocratic oath and the principles of Hippocratic medicine. He was appalled by the decision of medical school after medical school to remove from the oath its express prohibition on physicians inducing abortions. When medicine, as a profession, began heading down the wrong path, he spoke as a prophet—an Elijah, a Jeremiah—reminding his colleagues that the presence of a human being from conception forward was an established scientific fact, not a matter of metaphysical speculation or religious dogma, and calling out academic medicine for compromising its most basic values and abandoning its vocation to heal the sick and infirm and preserve human life.

John Cardinal O’Connor, the late Archbishop of New York, above all others, stood up to those politicians who, while professing to be “personally opposed” to abortion, supported its legal permission and even its public funding, ostensibly on the ground that to do otherwise would be to impose their religion on other people, in violation of the Constitution. This argument was absurd on its face, since the science of human embryogenesis and intrauterine development is clear, and unanimous, and has been for more than fifty years. It was never—I repeat, never—made in good faith, not by Mario Cuomo or Geraldine Ferraro in Cardinal O’Connor’s time, not by Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or anyone else today. At a time when many religious leaders, for whatever reasons, were unwilling to call these people out for their bad faith and manifest injustice toward the most defenseless and vulnerable members of the human community, Cardinal O’Connor publicly confronted them and held them to account.

Nat Hentoff (who, as it happens, wrote a splendid, appreciative biography of Cardinal O’Connor), was the jazz music critic for the Village Voice newspaper, as well as its leading writer on civil liberties. He was an atheist, an old-school liberal, and a longstanding member and board member of the ACLU. Initially, he was fully onboard with abortion “reform.” But then he learned about “Baby Doe,” an infant diagnosed with a cognitive disability who was left by the parents and hospital staff to die. Outraged, he made a national issue of the Baby Doe case, only to find that his fellow liberals were all for abandoning the baby. If abortion was okay, they reasoned, what could be wrong with the infanticide of an infant whose life allegedly “wasn’t worth living’”? My friend Nat was shocked and scandalized by their reaction, and it made him think. If infanticide is not okay, how can elective abortion be okay? A man of unflinching intellectual honesty and moral integrity, he suddenly found himself in a place he never imagined being. He was a convert to the pro-life cause, and a passionate defender of the lives of all children, especially those most vulnerable—the unborn and disabled newborns. He wore his excommunication from the ACLU—which came, as you can imagine, in short order—as a badge of honor.

The Battle Ahead

Well, there you are. A dozen pro-life heroes, twelve apostles of life—from the atheist liberal Nat Hentoff to the Catholic saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta. We in the pro-life movement owe each of them an enormous debt of gratitude and we can and should continue to draw inspiration and strength from their work and witness.

 

And we will need that inspiration and strength, because, as I suggested a moment ago, now we face an even more daunting challenge than reversing Roe v. Wade. With Roe gone we are finally on the field of battle, but powerful forces are arrayed against us.

Nevertheless, “with malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.” It will be hard. We will have moments of disappointment. We will experience setbacks and, alas, betrayals. But we will not lose heart. We will not lose faith. We will not abandon hope. For we know that “He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat. He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat. Oh, be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant my feet, for God is marching on!” And under His hand of blessing, trusting that He will never leave unaided those who in a righteous cause call upon His help, we shall overcome.

These remarks were delivered at the University of Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture on April 29, 2023.

Who Is Vladimir Putin?

When, in 2001, George W. Bush looked Vladimir Putin in the eye, he found him “very straightforward and trustworthy.” Nearly two decades later, the former president amended his account, saying that Russian oil riches had “changed” Putin. Another possibility does not seem to have occurred to Bush. Perhaps, in 2001, he looked into the eyes of someone consummately well-trained at dissimulation.

One might make a strong case that deep insight into Putin’s character requires profound knowledge of the social system from which he emerged, that is, the totalitarian police-state that was the USSR. In Gaila Ackerman and Stéphane Courtois’s 2022 Le Livre noir de Vladimir Poutine (which translated is “The Black Book of Vladimir Putin”), we find a considerable quantity of such insight.

This book, a collection of essays from scholarly experts on Russia and the former Soviet Union, comes at an especially important moment, as many on the religious right have become enamored of Putin’s supposedly Christian leadership of Russia. The Black Book of Vladimir Putin hews close to the facts and shows that any pretense to reality cannot deny that Putin’s regime is brutal, deceitful, corrupt, and unworthy of even mild admiration.

 

Putin: Homo Sovieticus

One of the two co-editors, Stéphane Courtois, is perhaps the world’s foremost historian of the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet communism. He is the main editor of the international bestseller, the title of which is played on in this current book, The Black Book of Communism. He is also the author of perhaps the finest biography of Lenin produced to date.

One of the central contributions Courtois has made to our understanding of Soviet society is the breathtaking scale of its moral corruption and the human costs that were a consequence of that condition. The Black Book details the gruesome quantitative data representing athe tens of millions of innocent human beings the Soviet machine-plowed into the ground.

This scholarly expertise makes Courtois an extraordinary analyst of Putin. The several chapters in this book that he authors or co-authors with co-editor Galia Ackerman are full of brilliant insights into the complicated business of understanding Putin, based on studying the forces that produced him. In Courtois’s view, the Russian strongman must be understood as an example of “Homo sovieticus,” a political personality irrevocably formed by his decade-and-a-half career, begun as a young man, in the stupendously brutal and amoral bureaucracy of the KGB.

The Soviet regime is formally gone, but the legacy of its formidable security apparatus lives on. There was never a “decommunization” process in the wake of the USSR’s collapse. The vast majority of those who had participated in its structures and atrocities escaped punishment, and many of them created political careers in the post-communist era. One sees this with clarity in people like Putin who were deeply marked by their socialization within that apparatus. One of the Ackerman/Courtois chapters is aptly titled “The KGB returns to power,” and another “Vladimir Putin’s headlong rush to the past.”

 

Putin’s post-Soviet political career accelerated markedly in the wake of his response, during his first stint as prime minister, to the bombings of several Russian apartment buildings in September 1999. The bombings were attributed by the Russian regime to the same Chechen Islamist forces that had invaded Dagestan in August, but the latter never claimed responsibility. An independent investigatory commission was created, but the Russian regime refused to cooperate with it. Several of its members were subsequently assassinated. Alexander Litvinenko, an agent with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the post-Soviet incarnation of the KGB (which was suspected by some critics of the government’s statement on the bombings as the real agents behind them), defected to the UK and wrote a book detailing the FSB’s responsibility. He was subsequently fatally poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 administered in a cup of tea. British intelligence sources determined that Putin’s fingerprints were almost certainly all over Litvinenko’s assassination.

Months after the bombings and a subsequent land invasion of Chechen territory, Putin rode the wave of horror and nationalist emotion to the Russian presidency for the first time. This was the series of events that provided the crucial backdrop for Putin’s rise to political power.

Putin’s Neo-Imperialism

The Black Book of Vladimir Putin works through much of the history of Putin’s aggression toward former Soviet republics. Putin has worked assiduously and ruthlessly to bring them into subordinate relations with Russia. Such efforts have included the overt subversion of political process in those countries, the crushing of political movements inside them hostile to his administration, and outright war, occupation, and annexation. Ukraine is merely the latest example of the neo-imperialism of the Putin regime, which is closely modeled on the expansionism of the Stalin years. Putin’s use of a friendly dictatorial regime in Belarus to arrange the delivery of tactical nuclear weapons to a country with an almost 700-mile border with Ukraine is but the latest example of Putin’s merciless and militaristic politics with respect to his neighbors.

In addition to Courtois’s formidable contributions, the volume offers many useful chapters on Putin’s imperialist ambition. Two chapters by Andrei Kozovoi, a historian of Russia at the University of Lille, expand on his insights into the secret police history and mentality of Putin. Mairbek Vatchagaev, a Chechen historian who was a member of the Chechen republic that fell during the Second Chechen War, provides an insider’s account of Putin’s successful effort to install Ramzan Khadyrov, a hardline despot sympathetic to the Russian regime, as political chief in Chechnya. The entire history of Putin’s action in the region is reasonably understood as an effort to reassemble the political monolith that was the former Soviet Union, the fracturing of which Putin described as “a major humanitarian tragedy” and the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century.

The Orthodox Church: Putin’s Ally

Antoine Arjakovsky, a French-born historian of Crimean ancestry, contributes a revealing chapter on the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in providing crucial cultural support to the Putin regime. Patriarch Kirill gets much attention here. Many know of the scandal of the disappearing $30,000 watch on Kirill’s wrist, but Arjakovsky gives many more troubling examples of the moral compromise of a church hierarchy that has been solidly propagandizing for the Putin regime for years now. Kirill’s aggressive support of the war in Ukraine, and his framing of it in “metaphysical” terms, is deeply morally troubling. This is especially so given a leader in Moscow who flippantly speaks of nuclear exchange with the West, in an apocalyptic language of religious martyrdom that previously was heard only from Islamist suicide bombers. Kirill’s aggressive mobilization of the “Moscow as Third Rome” ideology provides more ground for the church’s warm relationship with the Putin regime.

Arjakovsky also discusses the Mitrokhine archive, which consists of notes compiled by Vassily Mitrokhine, a former KGB archivist who defected to the United Kingdom. These documents provide information on the re-creation of the Moscow Patriarchate under Stalin in 1943 and on the dictator’s efforts to exert control over the church. It was the NKVD, and later the KGB, that controlled the nominations to leadership positions in the church hierarchy and formulated plans to use the church’s relations with international religious and peace organizations for Soviet espionage.

This book offers a healthy corrective for the portion of the American right that’s become frustrated with liberalism and has turned to Putin’s Russia as a viable alternative—many of whom believe truly amazing things about Putin and the society over which he rules. The idea that Russia is a profoundly authentic Christian state is roundly debunked by straightforward social facts. What kind of Christian social utopia has the massive violent crime, murder, suicide, alcoholism, abortion, and divorce rates of Russia? None of this is consistent with a society in which Orthodox Christian culture and belief are deeply entrenched and practiced. On the contrary, it is all quite consistent with the low levels of real practical religiosity in Russia reported in reliable survey data. Research on how Russians behave in religious terms shows that they are in fact not entirely unlike Americans. That is, survey responses show high levels of religious belief, and much lower numbers of church attendance at services. Indeed, Americans have significantly higher levels of regular church attendance. This is evidence that those eager to emulate Russia are hard pressed to explain, when they can even be bothered to acknowledge its existence.

Limits of Liberal Critiques of Putin

Many, though not all, of the contributors to the book are evidently liberal democrats in their politics, and this has significant consequences on a few topics. Complicated aspects of the cultural and political debates between liberals, national conservatives, and religious traditionalists simply disappear under this lens. The fierce cultural struggle over, for example, the sexual political revolution of modernity is often caricatured in these pages as the illegitimate reactionary effort to destroy the pure and wholly positive sexual freedom of the ever-expanding LGBTQI+ community. Co-editor Ackerman, for example, in the chapter “A pseudo-conservative society that walks backwards,” presents as obvious atrocities the Putin regime’s support for the biological family, natalist policies, the reestablishment of sex-segregated primary and secondary education, and the reintroduction of school uniforms. She also cheers the efforts of George Soros’s Open Society to move the Russian cultural thermometer closer to the temperature of the Western democracies. But one scarcely needs to be pro-Putin to find that some of the things his regime advocates are not wholly inconsistent with reasonable cultural conservatism, as articulated by many sources outside Putin’s Russia.

 

Another example that shows up in several of the chapters is the facile way in which Russian nationalist and conservative philosophers with large and complicated bodies of writing behind them, such as Alexander Dugin and Ivan Ilyin, are flatly characterized as “fascists” and “Nazis” without any systematic effort to show how the entire body of their work would justify such a classification. Dugin’s idiotic online pronouncements on the Ukrainian War (“The Ukrainians should be killed, killed, killed. No more discussions.”) are mobilized by several different chapter authors as a definitive reason to dismiss everything he has ever thought or written. But both Dugin and Ilyin have produced some work nuanced enough to require a more intellectually serious critique than this crude effort to demonize. So while the book’s collection of data offers a strong repudiation of Putin’s regime, its dismissals of Russia’s social conservatism on liberal grounds are less persuasive.

Dealing with Putin

Even with its shortcomings, how can Courtois’s and Ackerman’s volume guide America’s response to the most pressing matter regarding Russia today, the war in Ukraine? As modern wars often are, the Russia–Ukraine affair is complicated, especially in its international implications. There is evidence of strong bipartisan American disapproval of Russia in the wake of the Ukrainian invasion. However, distinctions along partisan lines emerge over the practical question of what the United States should do. On the American right, this dispute is particularly rancorous. In the most recent Claremont Review of Books, Mark Helprin and Michael Anton argue the positions from the right on, respectively, the necessity to vigorously defend Ukraine and the wisdom of American refusal to get strongly entangled in the conflict.

It goes without saying that crucial to any responsible position in this debate is understanding the character of Vladimir Putin and the nature of his regime. The Ackerman–Courtois volume will not definitively put an end to these debates, but it does dispel any illusions that Putin’s leadership is anything more morally sophisticated than an effort to resurrect the spirit of Soviet Russia.

Fidelity to Place

Editor’s Note: This essay is the third in a symposium that, in recognition of Fidelity Month, reflects on the importance of fidelity to God, our families, and our country. You can watch a recording of Public Discourse’s recent webinar on Fidelity Month here. 

As Aristotle held, human beings are by nature political or social and are ordered to community of necessarily limited size—the appropriate size being that of a polis. We come together to achieve certain ends essential to our flourishing, of which the act of being together is itself an important part. When we sense—and it most often indeed will be just a vague sense—that the communities to which we belong no longer support us in our flourishing, then we will naturally, perhaps without even knowing what we intend, redirect our attentions elsewhere.

This is exactly what many of us have begun to do. In his 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert D. Putnam documents the ever-increasing solitude, loneliness, withdrawal, and alienation of Americans from their long traditions of communal life. Rod Dreher recommends reconnecting with one another by turning to small communities in The Benedict Option. Still, our society has made a general choice along the lines Putnam describes in favor of withdrawal, on the part of modern Americans (and modern Westerners more generally), from community. The social map, even as these new, intentional communities that Dreher describes come into being, persists in its general trend toward fragmentation and alienation.

What is missing from modern life is fidelity—and not just fidelity in general, but fidelity to those things that are given us and that we can never, at least fully, choose for ourselves. By this I mean our places of birth—our block, our neighborhood, our village, our state—and the families and communities into which we were born.

Filiation and Affiliation

The late Edward Said was known for his distinction between filiation and affiliation. Filiative relations are those that come to us naturally, those that are givens of our birth and into which we are born. Affiliative relations are those we purposefully forge. In Putnam’s America, most people withdraw increasingly into solitude—into mere loneliness. But, as Said suggested, are not many of our chosen affiliations acts of withdrawal in themselves? Are they not retreats from filiative associations into affiliative ones—with an emphasis on the word “retreats”?

They certainly are. But is there anything wrong with that?

Many years ago, I heard a lecture at Notre Dame by a former student of Alasdair MacIntyre’s. He alluded to MacIntyre’s mordant suggestion that being patriotic in regard to the United States of America was a bit like pledging one’s love to the phone company. We need to belong to smaller scale communities, said this former student; he did not want to belong to a great country, he did not want to belong to the masses of a cosmopolis, but to a polis. And then, he gestured out the window at the gorgeous campus all about us, and concluded, “I want to belong to a polis like Notre Dame.”

 

While I shared this man’s love of that university, I could not help but notice that—despite its abundant acreage, its own post office and ZIP code, its power plant, basilica, and even the great farmlands the students once tilled to raise food for their dining halls—despite all this, I say, a university can never constitute a polis. This is so not merely because its population consists largely of unmarried young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. Rather, a university, like a monastery and a bowling team, is affiliative down to its bones. This student had effectively endorsed Dreher’s proposal on MacIntyre’s terms, but he had also shown the necessary weakness of that proposal.

Affiliation is often a tragic necessity, a chosen alternative but a reluctant one, after filiation fails. Any good human life will contain chosen attachments and, most likely, many of them. What I want to defend is not filiation against affiliation but rather the relative superiority of filiation to affiliation and, furthermore, the intrinsic dependence of all affiliations on those natural attachments that Said called filiations. Those communal attachments that are given to us are greater than those we choose, and those we choose, great though they may be, depend for their quality on the priority of our given attachments. I distinguish not between good and bad, but between root and vine.

Unchosen Bonds

For this reason, fidelity to place, to the community of one’s birth, is not merely one virtue among others, but a foundational and formative source of our character. We first learn to be faithful husbands and wives from the unchosen example we witness of our own parents. We first learn to be faithful citizens as we explore the small postage stamp of terrain that we did not choose to go to, but simply awakened to with our first dawn of consciousness. Our care for our towns and cities is rooted in the upkeep of our homes.

Finite creatures that we are, these first unchosen relationships form all future ones. Their failings often mar us; their successes help us to flourish. Although it can only ever be a rule of thumb, one might think twice before allowing a young man who has been a lousy son to become one’s husband. Is it more or less likely that the young woman enrolled at Our Lady’s University will be a good citizen of that temporary “polis” if she arrives there hating the place she comes from?

 

Fidelity to our first, natural communities is more than just a temporary schoolhouse for our future affiliations. A kind of fidelity is possible in those communities that is generally not available otherwise. When one knows a place and accepts it as given rather than chosen, its faults and weaknesses become not an occasion for leaving but for recommitment, forbearance, and reform. We are less likely to feel we have wasted our efforts in service of our natural filiations—bonds that were given with our birth and so have the strength of nature behind them.

The small communities recommended in The Benedict Option are real and beautiful communities, but they are marred as well. They have intrinsic in them the memory of prior communal failures, which can tempt their members to believe that what has been freely chosen can be just as freely and easily unchosen. Actual Benedictine congregations, of course, require of their monks a vow of stability. In a monastery, statues of the Virgin and Child always depict Mary seated—a sign by which she tells us “I am not going anywhere.” Vows can overcome some of the weaknesses built into choice. But, even here, those religious who first loved their natural community will have proportionately stronger vows.

Return to Roots

Over the years, as I have admired Robert George from afar, I have first appreciated his uncompromising commitment to God and to the everlasting country so frequently on display in his fidelity to his conscience. I have always especially treasured this anecdote David Brooks relates about George, in his essay “The Organization Kid”:

George described a moment when he and a colleague were urging their students not to commit plagiarism. The honor code goes against it, George told them; the Internet makes it easier to plagiarize, but also much easier for faculty members to catch plagiarists. Besides, he concluded, God will see you doing evil.

Little less have I appreciated his fidelity to his West Virginia roots, whether suggested by his occasional tributes to the life of his father or his accomplished banjo playing. One can sense that George, the Princeton professor, is a better Princeton Tiger for having first been a good West Virginia Mountaineer.

 

I believe it thus, at any rate. When two years ago I had the opportunity to move back to my region of birth, Michigan, I had been waiting a dozen years and jumped without reservation. I knew, when growing up, the trials and failings of the place, but also was able to see its goodness through and despite those failings. I could be a faithful citizen not only because I loved the place with good reason, but because I could love it even when the reasons were not so good.

Perhaps in an age such as ours, the withdrawal from the failing, dominant institutions of society, and the attempt to build up smaller, intentional ones, may seem the best available option. I would suggest, however, that there is something even richer in the “unoptioned” and the “optionless.” Fidelity to the places and communities of our birth is an irreplaceable good, one that may beget other kinds of goods, but for which there can be no adequate substitute. Learn to be faithful to what was first given to you, even when the roots are sick and the prospects seem dreary.