Posted on 01/21/2004 11:39:19 AM PST by marron
thank you for an insightful post. I was a child during Vietnam and never understood the issue well. To me it points out the desperate need for those of us who remain here at home to fight the war on the domestic front, the intellectual and moral front...which is IMHO, the principle role of Freerepublic.
Marron, your last paragraph is as near as I get to your answer for the cynicism against hope in mom and apple pie. The following excerpt is on the same theme but in a different corner. It's Neuhaus from First Things.
Philip Rieff has died at age 83, in Philadelphia. We never met, but he would write from time to time, usually a brief note on something or the other that appeared in First Things. I forget what it was that I had written some years ago, but he responded, if memory serves, “I almost wish I could be so hopeful.” That stayed with me. I take it he thought I was a mite naïve. He had a very grim view of our cultural circumstance.He was a sociologist, but the kind of sociologist once more-frequently encountered, taking on the really big picture of the world and our place in it. With his 1959 book, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, he was recognized as a thinker to be reckoned with. It was, however, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud that made a really deep impression. The title and the phrases “therapeutic society” and “psychological man” have become part of the intellectual air we breathe.
Truth, tradition, morals, and manners have been kicked aside to make way for the dogma of dogmas: “It all comes down to me, and how I feel about me.” Rieff did not usually put matters so bluntly. His writings bristled with sometimes cranky eccentricities. His last book, published this past January and intended to be the first of four on related themes, is Sacred Order/Social Order: My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority.
I have been reading it with great interest. Reviewers say it is both difficult and rewarding. But of course. That’s Philip Rieff. We’ll be doing something with the book in First Things. The obituary in the New York Times says that he dazzled his students at the University of Pennsylvania “with multi-layered but always authoritative lectures that blended philosophy, theology, economics, history, literature, psychology, and dashes of poetry and Plato like ingredients in a sociological mulligatawny.” The last, in the event you did not know, is a Tamil soup of chicken stock sharply seasoned with pepper and curry. Great fun.
For all the intellectual panache, however, there was something more sobering about Philip Rieff, for which the right word may be prophetic. While we were preoccupied with our therapeutic games, it went largely unnoticed that our culture died some while back; the ideas, habits, and traditions that sustained and vivified it have been shattered and can’t be put back together. Culture began with renunciation and ended with the therapeutic renunciation of renunciation.
Rieff, a Jew, believed that Christianity supplied the best bet for a sustainable culture, but that’s all gone now. In a 2005 interview with the Chronicles of Higher Education, he says he does not believe that an authentic religious culture could be resurrected, no matter how hard we might try. Following Marx, Weber, and Freud, he argues that modern prosperity, cities, bureaucracy, and science have completely transformed the terrain of human experience. People who try to practice orthodox Christianity and Judaism today, he says, inevitably remain trapped in the vocabulary of therapy and self-fulfillment. “I think the orthodox are role-playing,” he says. “You believe because you think it’s good for you, not because of anything inherent in the belief. I think that the orthodox are in the miserable situation of being orthodox for therapeutic reasons.”
I’m still reading the last book, but I think Rieff is saying that it’s all over. I don’t think he’s right about that. I hope he’s not right about that. But he could be right about that. At the very least, it is a possibility to be considered when proposed by one so thoughtful as Philip Rieff. Christ never said of Western Civilization that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
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Here are pieces of an interview Rieff did with The Guardian on December 5, 2005.
It’s been three decades since your last book. Why the long silence? Rieff: “I saw no reason to publish. I’m not sure why I’m publishing now.”The interviewer notes that Rieff as a sociologist is a cross-disciplinarian and unorthodox. But he is indelibly marked by the conservative ethos that was dominant in the University of Chicago in the postwar years, producing thinkers such as Leo Strauss, Milton Friedman, Edward Shils, Allan Bloom, and Saul Bellow, who chronicles some of those days in the novel Ravelstein.What do you mean by “deathworks”? Rieff: “James Joyce mounted a deathwork against the novel and the European tradition. Picasso certainly mounted a deathwork against painting in the European tradition. So, in photography and more recently, did Robert Mapplethorpe.”
What the term “deathwork” implies, in Rieff’s analysis, is deadendedness. They are instances of artistry that perversely annihilate the possibilities of art–and with it, life. If, as Freud contended, there are two basic drives in human civilization, eros and thanatos, life and death, the current triumph of deathwork marks the triumph of thanatos.
Rieff: “It is a critique intended to stop a certain way of writing. Joyce, Picasso, and Mapplethorpe are deathworkers against the kinds of psychologies that were practiced before them. And deliberately so. Their deathwork hasn’t actually stopped anyone, but I think such artists have intended, and achieved, a massive attack on the foundations of literature and art.”
What can people of goodwill do? “They can become inactivists. They’ll do less damage that way. Inactivism is the ticket.”
Rieff has been the most cross-grained of American neo-Freudians. He believes the psychoanalytic “therapeutic culture,” far from “curing” ills, has brought our world to its third, and terminal, stage. There are three successive cultures or “ideal types.” Rieff: “The first, historically, is the pagan, or pre-Christian world. The second, the Christian culture and all its varieties. And finally, the present Kulturkampf, which is the third culture.” Are we, then, in a state of barbarism? Rieff: “No, we’re not. But we’re near it because we treat the past with considerable contempt. Or nostalgia. One is as bad as the other.”
Is there any way back or around the barriers that confront us? Rieff: “I don’t know whether what I’ve called the second culture can survive as a form that is respected and practiced.” And is the third culture the end of the road? Rieff: “I don’t know. It remains to be seen.”
What is it that is so ominous about the third culture? Rieff: “It’s characterized by a certain vacuity and diffidence. The institutions which were defenders of the second world, or second culture–I think cultures are world creations–have not offered the kind of defense or support that would have been more powerful than therapeutic forces. So Christianity becomes, therapeutically, ‘Jesus is good for you.’ I find this simply pathetic.”
So are you a pessimist? Rieff: “I don’t know that I’m pessimistic. Therapies are better than nothing.”
You’re welcome. Just thought your day could use a little sunshine.
Fascinating. Thank you so much for the excerpts!
You have raised a couple of issues, Christianity as "therapy", the general assault on the culture, and the source for hope. I apologize in advance, I have a tendency to be overly long-winded.
"The Therapeutic God"
When something is true, it is true on any number of levels. People are not all at the same level in anything, they are where they are, their needs are what they are, and their ability to understand and act on that understanding simply is what it is.
When people have gotten hold of some elementary piece of truth, a piece of truth that we have perhaps moved past long ago, its tempting to dismiss them as immature. And maybe they are. But that is in fact how it works, even with you and me, a piece of truth gets past our armor, and begins to work, and over time it creates the condition for another truth to take root, and progressively over time we become fertile ground for even more.
Which portion of the truth is first able to penetrate which person varies because people vary, and the condition of their lives vary from one to another. When God gets his hook into someone, and begins to reel them in, they may be inclined to notice how far they are from one another on one issue or other, which is natural. God's mark on them is not revealed so much by where they are at a given moment, but rather the motor driving them and the direction they are bound.
Christianity as therapy, Christianity "because its good for you" is, as Rieff notes, pretty thin stuff, to settle for that is to miss the biggest part of it. I hesitate to launch any full scale attack on it, because it may be the bait on the hook for some folks, for some its the snapshot state of play in their walk toward maturity, for some its as far as they will ever go. Some people, given the opportunity to commune with the God of the Universe, would settle for knowing tonight's winning Lotto numbers. People understand God at the level they are capable of understanding, they will not often move past that until the circumstances of their lives drive them to it.
I like to think that I am different, but I'm not sure that I am all that different.
There is a certain class of non-believer, or almost-believer, who see God, or Christianity, or faith, as a "necessary fiction". They can't bring themselves to believe in God, or at least having accepted the necessity of his existence at some deep level they haven't yet been able to accept him at a conscious level, but they have come to see him as a necessary barrier against chaos, or the madness that so apparently results when people have abandoned him.
They don't believe in God, but they wish to live in a world where at least the majority of their neighbors do believe, because the alternative is so ugly.
This is a kind of dodge, though. If "God", or "faith" is a necessary fiction, if the world doesn't work well in its absence, it is because in the fabric of this "necessary fiction" there are truths embedded. These almost-believers may have been put off by some silliness or irrationality to which people are prone, and for sure religious people are prone to their share of silliness, not because they are religious, but because they are people; someone like Rieff or Oriana Fallaci (who describes herself as an "atheist catholic") find themselves unable to believe in God as he was explained to them, but they see that the world cannot work without him. The challenge, once you have gone this far, is to find the deeper "necessary truth" at the heart of this "necessary fiction", not to stop at the surface which may seem to be riddled with all-too-human misunderstandings of that deeper truth.
When you begin to probe, and to discern the "embedded truths", you may begin to move into the next stage of almost-belief, the understanding of the "God of the gaps", as some people call it. Again, the challenge is not to stop there, which is intellectually lazy, but to have the courage to follow it to its conclusion, to the necessary truths, to the God of necessary truth. Some people are content to stop there, having understood that God must exist, and some people will never move beyond it. But the next step, having discovered the God behind the curtain, is to learn to see him at work in the here and now, in your own life and the lives of the people around you.
Some people come to this in an instant, God reveals himself to them suddenly; probably for most its a process and people grow in their understanding over the course of their lives.
Rieff seems to have begun to see God dimly through the curtain, or at least saw the gap where God needed to be if the world were ever going to work. His pessimism, which he denies, but is palpable, is due to the fact that he saw the God-shaped gap, but didn't clearly see God. He hadn't quite made the next step, which was that if God necessarily must be there, he's there.
"Culture"
Culture is a medium for the transmission of "values". It must never be the source. Culture is important, but it is never all-important. It is the values that matter, and not the medium.
The problem for most people is that the culture is the only source they have for their connection to these deeper values. This is a problem, because "culture" doesn't only carry these values, it is an amalgam of good and bad, it is like the bottom drawer in the kitchen where everything accumulates. When we elevate "culture" from medium to source, we have no way to distinguish between good and bad, or between the core and the superficial. Indeed, one of the ways people have learned to evade the values that they reject, without having to do so openly, is to make a show of embracing the culture, like the scoundrel who wraps himself in the flag, the leftist who becomes an expert on 1920s baseball teams, the atheist who becomes a cowboy poet, by studiously embracing the surface attributes of the culture they are able to evade the most basic values we hold dear, while innoculating themselves from most criticism.
You see this when white supremists go on endlessly about "our culture", or when Mexican gangsters embrace the Virgin of Guadalupe. You see it when the openly immoral remind you that they are from the "midwest" or the "bible belt" as a symbol for a supposed wholesomeness that in the end is merely a symbol that can very obviously mean nothing.
When culture goes from being mere medium to being the source for moral values, the flaws in the amalgam become fatal flaws. The structure becomes a static one that can be attacked and subverted, like rust attacking a ship's hull. Hence the "deathworks" that Rieff refers to can strike a fatal blow, because if the culture is the source, rather than just the medium of transmission, it doesn't have the ability to repair or heal itself.
But if it is mere medium, transmitting something that is alive, then the Mapplethorpes of the world will have their moment and then be sloughed off and forgotten.
That is Rieff's problem; he see the values, again, the "necessary truths", but doesn't see that they have a living source, and so fears for their survival. And he isn't wrong, if we cut ourselves off from the living source of those truths, the flaws in the amalgam will eventually choke us and we die, as a thousand cultures have died before us.
"The source of hope"
Western Civilization, as we are discovering, is precious and fragile, and Rieff's fears for its eventual destruction are understandable. But it isn't Western Civ itself that matters, but rather the truths that it transmits. If it fails to transmit those truths, then the very thing that makes it precious has disappeared, it is of no further value, and it will die. Its offspring no longer know why "western civ" matters, because it has ceased to matter. If those truths are crowded out by the rest of the amalgam, and the work of transmitting those truths breaks down, then again it is of no value and it will pass away.
Similarly, capital "r" Religion has as its purpose to connect us with the living God. Culture that doesn't connect us to living truths, religion that doesn't connect us to the living God, are static things that eventually break down and crumble. This is not about doctrinal differences between the various sects; disagreements are normal when people are engaged in trying to understand and articulate truth. This is about the deeper truth that must underpin "religion" and "culture". God is not only the god of the clockwork driving the universe, although he is that, he is also moving in the here and now. I can't offer hope that "western civ" will survive, because western civ isn't an end in itself. The truths that it must transmit are what matter, and Truth is a very stubborn thing, it has a way of wearing away at the landscape and cutting its own channel.
Those truths don't come from culture, but must be transmitted into the culture. That is our job. Our job is to discern truth and transmit truth and fight for it. When you realize what a small part of the whole we are, it can seem daunting, even hopeless, but that is due to our very limited perspective. It is ideas that shape this world, chipping away over many generations. We live our lives where the chisel meets the granite, and we do not survive the encounter intact. Thats why courage is a necessary component of faith.
"Faith"
We often mix our terms, mistaking belief for faith. They are not the same thing. Belief is not faith, belief is belief; faith is something else. Faith is the precursor to action, and it is inseparable from action.
Faith is fed by belief, not the beliefs you claim to hold, but the beliefs that actually drive you. But because faith is a component of action it also radiates a kind of courage. When you act, you reveal what it is you actually believe, and you reveal where your courage is rooted.
If you live a life of faith you necessarily must live a life of courage, a courage that itself is a product of faith, and the beliefs, the principles, the certainties that drive you.
You will notice that the religious are not always inclined to action, and the people who are inclined to act are not often religious in any apparent way. But this is only confusing if we confuse "believing" with faith, when faith must always be bonded to action or it isn't faith. It is not that faith "ought" to lead to action, but rather quite the opposite. When you act, it was your real faith that moved you to action, a faith that is rooted in your real beliefs whatever your stated beliefs may be.
Others have said that we are in a War of Civilizations, or a war for civilization. It is a war of ideas as much as a war of flesh and blood, and it is a war in which it is guaranteed that neither we nor civilization will survive unchanged. Our struggle must not be to "preserve" it unchanged, but rather to continously infuse it with the truths it must feed on if it is to be worthy of surviving. We can't do that if we derive our truths and our inspiration from the culture itself, the battery runs down because we have short circuited it. Our hope lies in recognizing that there is an ultimate truth, however imperfectly we understand it, and our role is to let it flow through us into the culture, which is to say, into our own lives, into our families, and into the piece of world God has given us to occupy and build.
We don't have to be optimistic or hopeful about the whole, we have merely to be determined about our corner of the whole. Again, not hope, but courage is the key. Act, have courage, and watch God show up.
With further apologies, this was an earlier effort to explore some of the same themes:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1010271/posts
This is good practical advice, knowing that human nature doesn't really ever know the big picture. Aristotle stuck to this view in his ethics. In contrast, St. Paul retains a connection to the whole by proxy, as a Christian. That is why he said to pray without ceasing.
This view you describe accepts that a good thing can be truly good even if it is just good in part. This means that even though we are greatly distanced from the whole because of knowing so little, we at least know that for something to be truly good in part, it must still in some way be part of the whole.
This view doesn't sit well with the exclusivist rationalizations of human experience. Really, the correct answer to questions like "what is nature?" must allow that all definition is definition in part, contingent and dependent on the whole.
The same for law. Law is law in part. Perhaps more people within Christianity will recognize the importance between the Old and New Testament as a commentary on the partiality of reason dabbling with universals.
Even for Christians, this view is extremely humiliating in a democratic-capitalist society that has benched God.
[not] where they are at a given moment, but rather the motor driving them and the direction they are bound.
This really is profound. If you know the names of any writers who hold this view today, I'd like to know.
Thanks for your response, marron. I note in passing that the insignificant "hook" at the start of your response is sublimated when attributed to God's agency while the insignificant "corner" at the end is human agency sublimated in being anchored in a living source.
Just to touch on a couple of points you raise, you wrote:
If “God” or “faith” is a necessary fiction, if the world doesn’t work well in its absence, it is because in the fabric of this “necessary fiction” there are truths embedded. These almost-believers may have been put off by some silliness or irrationality to which people are prone, and for sure religious people are prone to their share of silliness, not because they are religious, but because they are people; someone like Rieff or Oriana Fallaci (who describes herself as an “atheist catholic”) find themselves unable to believe in God as he was explained to them, but they see that the world cannot work without him. The challenge, once you have gone this far, is to find the deeper “necessary truth” at the heart of this “necessary fiction,” not to stop at the surface which may seem to be riddled with all-too-human misunderstandings of that deeper truth.It seems to me that people who say God is a “necessary fiction” know much more than they care to admit. Possibly they do not openly declare what they know because in the current cultural milieu, people who believe in God on the basis of both faith and reason are dismissed as simple-minded rubes, along with all other, more “doctrinaire” believers.
And yet it seems clear that even science has come to the point where the idea of God in some sense is becoming undeniably topical. Certainly neo-Darwinism has been engaged in a pitched battle against any idea of a divine intelligence or divine order operative in life and the universe for most of the past 100 years. Many neo-Darwiwnists seemingly refuse to see that the universe has a hierarchical structure, preferring to reduce or level all of being to one ontological level, the material. Such folks constantly remind us that “We don’t need God.”
Ultimately, it seems clear to me this is a losing argument. It is increasingly being undermined by science itself. To show why this is so, let me just post an excerpt from George Gilder’s “Evolution and Me,” which appeared in the July 17, 2006 edition of National Review:
After 100 years or so of attempted philosophical leveling, however, it turns out the universe is stubbornly hierarchical. It is a top-down “nested hierarchy,” in which the higher levels command more degrees of freedom than the levels below them, which they use and constrain. Thus, the higher levels can neither eclipse the lower levels nor be reduced to them. Resisted at every step across the range of reductive sciences, this realization is now inexorable. We know now that no accumulation of knowledge about chemistry and physics will yield the slightest insight into the origins of life or the processes of computation or the sources of consciousness or the nature of intelligence or the causes of economic growth. As the famed chemist Michael Polanyi pointed out in 1961, all these fields depend on chemical and physical processes, but are not defined by them. Operating farther up the hierarchy, biological macrosystems such as brains, minds, human beings, businesses, societies, and economies consist of intelligent agents that harness chemical and physical laws to higher purposes but are not reducible to lower entities or explicable by them.On a second point you raise —Materialism generally and Darwinian reductionism, specifically, comprise thoughts that deny thought, and contradict themselves. As British biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote in 1927, “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true … and hence I have no reason for supposing by brain to be composed of atoms.” Nobel-laureate biologist Max Delbruck (who was trained as a physicist) described the contradiction in an amusing epigram when he said that the neuroscientist’s effort to explain the brain as mere meat or matter “reminds me of nothing so much as Baron Munchausen’s attempt to extract himself from a swamp by pulling on his own hair.” … the paradox of the self-denying mind tends to stultify every field of knowledge and art that it touches and threatens to diminish this golden age of technology into a dark age of scientistic reductionism and, following in its trail, artistic and philosophical nihilism.
…[I]ntelligent design is merely a way of asserting a hierarchical cosmos. The writings of the leading exponents of the concept, such as the formidably learned Stephen Meyer and William Dembski … steer clear of any assumption that the intelligence manifestly present in the universe is necessarily supernatural. The intelligence of human beings offers an “existence proof” of the possibility of intelligence and creativity fully within nature. The idea that there is no other intelligence in the universe in any other form is certainly less plausible than the idea that intelligence is part of the natural world and arises in many different ways….
All explorers on the frontiers of nature ultimately must confront the futility of banishing faith from science. From physics and neural science to psychology and sociology, from mathematics to economics, every scientific belief combines faith and facts in an inextricable weave. Climbing the epistemic hierarchy, all pursuers of truth necessarily reach a point where they cannot prove their most crucial assumptions.
The hierarchical hypothesis itself, however, can be proven. Kurt Godel, perhaps the preeminent mathematician of the 20th century and Einstein’s close colleague, accomplished the proof in 1931. He demonstrated in essence that every logical system, including mathematics, is dependent on premises that it cannot prove and that cannot be demonstrated within the system itself, or be reduced to it. Refuting the confident claims of Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert that it would be possible to subdue all mathematics to a mechanical unfolding of the rules of symbolic logic, Godel’s proof was a climactic moment in modern thought….
[snip]
Throughout the history of human thought, it has been convenient and inspirational to designate the summit of the hierarchy as God. While it is not necessary for science to use this term, it is important for scientists to grasp the hierarchical reality it signifies. Transcending its materialist trap, science must look up from the ever dimmer reaches of its Darwinian pit and cast its imagination toward the word and its sources: idea and meaning, mind and mystery, the will and the way. It must eschew reductionism — except as a methodological tool — and adopt an aspirational imagination. Though this new aim may seem blinding at first, it is ultimately redemptive because it is the only way that science can ever hope to solve the grand challenges before it, such as gravity, entanglement, quantum computing, times, space, mass, and mind. Accepting hierarchy, the explorer embarks on an adventure that leads to an ever deeper understanding of life and consciousness, cosmos and creation.
Others have said that we are in a War of Civilizations, or a war for civilization. It is a war of ideas as much as a war of flesh and blood, and it is a war in which it is guaranteed that neither we nor civilization will survive unchanged. Our struggle must not be to “preserve” it unchanged, but rather to continuously infuse it with the truths it must feed on if it is to be worthy of surviving. We can’t do that if we derive our truths and our inspiration from the culture itself, the battery runs down because we have short-circuited it. Our hope lies in recognizing that there is an ultimate truth, however imperfectly we understand it, and our role is to let it flow through us into the culture, which is to say, into our own lives, into our families, and into the piece of world God has given us to occupy and build.—the idea of hierarchy is implicit. It is an ancient insight that no society, no culture, no civilization can be any better that the “human material” that composes it. In short, the good order of the individual soul is paramount; and I do not see how any good order can arise without reference to divine Truth. As the great American philosopher and psychologist, William James, put it:We don’t have to be optimistic or hopeful about the whole, we have merely to be determined about our corner of the whole. Again, not hope, but courage is the key. Act, have courage, and watch God show up.
We and God have business with each other, and in opening ourselves to his influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled. The universe … takes a turn genuinely for the worse or for the better in proportion as each one of us fulfills or evades God’s demands.I completely agree with your statement, “Our [civilizational] struggle must not be to ‘preserve’ it unchanged, but rather to continuously infuse it with the truths it must feed on if it is to be worthy of surviving.” [Just had to add the bolds!]
And also this one:
“We don’t have to be optimistic or hopeful about the whole, we have merely to be determined about our corner of the whole. Again, not hope, but courage is the key.”
I figure if I stay a faithful worker to our Lord in the little vineyard He has given me to tend for Him, doing His Will as best as I can in my life, then I can leave “the rest of the issue” to Him. His Truth will ever prevail — there is nothing man can do to set it aside; and if man continues to try, chances are he will only succeed in destroying himself and anything else that comes under his influence.
Thank you so very much for your beautiful, elegant essay marron!
Did you ever show it to him?
It is clear that you've looked more deeply into the history and the intentionally obscured facts of the time as well as defining the meanings of 'war' to people from different poles.
Thanks for the accurate chronology from Ike to Tricky Dick, General Eisenhower and I both thank you. But, unless I missed it in the first reading, there is more to the 'worthy of high office' theme.
LBJ provided (unwillingly) a bridge between "President as Commander & Chief" and "President as prisoner". I think Johnson was blind sided within his own party and his limitations led him to concentrate on a very narrow home front while misreading and misstating virtually everything in VN. Nixon was running backwards from day one - retreating from forces at home while trying to find a means to "fix" an ideological war by relativist political means. He lost on both counts, deservedly or otherwise.
No one between Kennedy and Reagan was capable of concentrating on the real issues rather than on social and political pressures at home.
We'll never know how the Quagmire Presidents might have done with support from the media, academia, the bureaucracy, and those in between who accepted what they saw on TV as gospel. (And who are still telling me "I wish..." or "I would have..." over thirty years later)
Maybe more critically, we'll never know what would have happened if the command structure of that time had not been based on political ambitions and subservience. (Their ranks are only now departing from comfy second careers in the defense industry and I saw little improvement over the intervening years).
George Bush is in the same position today as were they, except the left wants to frame the entire "Goes in / Gets out" story within his two terms. I'd like to hope that your essay will be read by many outside of FR and that it might go part of the way to allowing an admittedly flawed president to carry on, and an admittedly better prepared military to carry on as well.
PS: Note to the earlier poster who asserted that, absent some means of fact checking, the "old vet's" stories should be discounted...
I did one in country and two off shore (not in the navy) and you not only can't verify most of it - I'm not talking about most of it. All veterans are selective in what they tell others, even other vets. Some embellish, some discount, some only tell the jokes, most are silent much of the time.
Finally, I don't know about mom or apple pie but I do know that it has been about twenty years since I spoke with anyone from my High School, and that was a chance encounter in a restaurant.
Thanks for your work and please excuse me if I'm preaching.
Thank you for your comment. I particularly appreciate your reference to “quagmire presidents” and president-as-prisoner. It is something I had half-noticed but never quite articulated, but I believe it is on the mark. Presidents spend most of their time responding to domestic political pressures and irrelevancies that drown out the real issues of the day.
"Well, look, if that's the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven't done. We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven't done. Those of us who care about Darfur don't think it would be a good idea."My response to that was reply #8:
It's perfectly true, as Obama points out, that we (Republicans or Democrats) haven't undertaken to use military force to prevent/stop every genocide in Africa. That is a fact.And that put me in mind of this thread, so I linked my reply to this thread. Upon reflection, I reread this thread - and was struck by the fact that I had not pinged you all to it. So I'm doing so now. It is a long article - but it is a keeper.It is more than a little different, however, to say that we should therefore not factor the possibility of a genocide as a result of our military decision into our decision to pull the military out of a space it currently occupies. And that is doubly so in consideration of the fact that people in Iraq have staked their reputations and their own and their families' lives on the reliability of the US.
The single most objectionable thing about Democrats is their willingness to ask for the trust of people, and then to betray that trust. Which is nowhere more amply and objectionably illustrated than by the Kennedy/Johnson policy of enmeshing our military in Vietnam, and the Kerry/(Ted) Kennedy policy of betrayal of everyone who trusted that committment in Southeast Asia - our own servicemen not excepted.
Thanks, going to check it out now.
Thank you for including me - I wouldn’t have missed this one for anything!
BTTT
Marron, I am at work so I cannot read this, but it looks like a great post...I was pinged to it by Conservatism is Compassion...
Will read later.
He has it backwards. To a man the founders believed that it was morality that enabled limited government, as Leviticus 25 and 26 make very clear.
He has it backwards. To a man the founders believed that it was morality that enabled limited government, as Leviticus 25 and 26 make very clear.The founders were all believers. Their notion of liberty was not a rejection of morality; on the contrary, they believed that liberty was a basic requirement for morality.
I think marron's point is similar to that of What's So Great about America (Paperback) by Dinesh D'Souza. Namely, that if you aren't free to disobey a moral rule, you deserve no credit for obeying it.We have a lot of temptation to sin in this country, and I confess that I am not without my failures to resist on every point at all times. In Saudi Arabia, as D'Souza points out, women dress modestly but they have no realistic freedom to do anything else, considering what the morality police there do to anyone who violates their code. So that if you would see women exercising the virtue of modesty, you will see the outward form in Saudi Arabia and will often see the opposite in America, in its outward manifestation. But there is no scope in Saudi Arabia for the voluntary exercise of modesty - so, from the perspective of voluntary virtue, modesty does not exist in Saudi Arabia in the way that it occasionally exists among some American women.
Then D'Souza joins Marron with the cart before the horse as far as the opinion of the founders is concerned:
Marron: The founders were all believers. Their notion of liberty was not a rejection of morality; on the contrary, they believed that liberty was a basic requirement for morality.
Me: He has it backwards. To a man the founders believed that it was morality that enabled limited government, as Leviticus 25 and 26 make very clear.
Now, let's take a look at what the founders said:
We've staked the whole future of American civilization not on the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us . . . to Govern ourselves according to the commandments of God. The future and success of America is not in this Constitution, but in the laws of God upon which this Constitution is founded. - James Madison
Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. - George Washington, June 8, 1783
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. - President John Adams, Oct. 11, 1798
Quod erat demonstratum.We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.
I agree with your quotes, but not with your conclusion. The founders believed that morality was necessary for liberty. That does not prove that liberty is not necessary for morality, if liberty and morality are actually the same thing. And I think that that has to be considered.
In the piece I made the point that liberty is a necessary condition for morality, in the absence of liberty you simply aren’t a moral agent.
But I agree that morality is a necessary condition for liberty, absolutely, without doubt. In the absence of a critical mass of moral men and women, liberty ceases to be possible.
They are, as you say, almost two sides of a single coin. Maybe there is no “almost” about it. They are two sides of a single coin. To choose to be moral is to exert a most basic act of freedom against an unfree world. Liberty itself is born naturally out of the society of free and moral men and women.
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