Second Terrace

I'll take Manhattan

Well, I don't take back my complaints about the Manhattan Declaration. 

But when the Declaration and its signers get sniggered at by a playground bully like James Carroll (who reminds me of the stalinists on top of the monkey bars at Burbank Elementary), I'll stand with them.

Sometimes sides are drawn clearly, and when the choice is between statist secularists who are pledged to expunge the image of God from man, culture and nature on one side, and on the other, Christians and non-Christians (even the naive and ill-mannered), who know that Leviathan is something to be avoided, then I'll choose them. 

I still won't sign.

No Sale

On this Black Friday, which Sears has kindly extended all weekend long, I thought I'd publicize another sale first revealed to us by the inestimable Hilaire Belloc.

Here it is, from the magisterial The Four Men:

Story of the Politician Who Sold His Soul

You must know, then, that Peter the Politician, after having sold every public honour which he could drag upon the counter and every public office and every kind of power except his own, and after he had sold his country and his friends and his father and his mother and even his children, and his self-respect of course, and all the rest of it, had nothing left to sell but his very soul. But sell that he must, for have money he must; without money no man can live the Great Life and go out to dine in the new hotels that are built out of iron and plaster, and the Lord have mercy on us all!

Well then, Peter the Politician did up his soul in a little brown paper parcel, all beautifully-sealed with sealing-wax and tied up with expensive string; for the public pay for these things where politicians are concerned.

He did up his soul, did I say, into this little parcel? I err! It was his secretary that did it up; not his unpaid secretary – his real secretary, a humble little man.

For you must know that politicians have three kinds of secretaries: the first kind, who may be called Secretarius Maximus, is a rich man's son, and his place has been paid for: he is called secretary so that he may be advanced to office, and he does nothing at all except ride about in a motor-car and come and sit by when there is any jabbering to be done for his master. Then there is the second kind of secretary, who is usually a friend's son, and may be called Secretarius Minor; he expects no advancement to a politician's future, but only some little job or other in the Civil Service after his years of labour. And his labour is this: to tell the third secretary what he has to do. Now this third secretary, who may be called Secretarius Minimus, receives the sum of thirty shillings every Saturday, and for this he must sweat and toil and be at beck and call, and go to bed late and get up early, and wear himself to a shadow, and then at forty go and be a secretary at less wages if he can get the job, or else hang himself or stand in a row for soup on the Embankment; and there is an end of him.

Well, then, I say it was this third or working secretary who had done up Peter the Politician's soul in a pretty little parcel, in brown paper paid out of the taxes, with fine red seals paid out of the taxes, and with strong, thin, and splendid string paid out of the taxes; and since the politician was very careful about his soul and it did not weigh much, he took it with him himself and set off to the Devil's office to sell it; and where that office was he knew very well, for he had spent most of his time there while he was a young man, and had served his apprenticeship in another part of the same building.

When Peter the Politician sent in his card he was received with great courtesy by the Limbo-man who kept the doors, and he was asked to sit down on a chair in a sort of little private outer room where distinguished people await the pleasure of the Head Devil.

In this little outer room there were one or two books to read about problems, especially marriage, and there were some prints upon the wall which were not well done and which the Devil had taken as a bad debt from a publisher; and there was also a calendar, but there were no Saints' Days marked on it, as you may well believe, but only the deaths of conspicuous people, and Peter the Politician did not study it.

Now when he had been sitting there for about an hour without the need of a fire, there came in a neat little tight little dressed-up-to-the-nines little Imp in buttons, who was very polite indeed, and told him how sorry His Master was to keep Peter the Politician waiting, but the fact was he was in the midst of a great deal of business. Then the little Imp went out and left Peter the Politician alone – and he waited another two hours.

At the end of this time another taller and older Imp, dressed not in buttons, but in a fine tail-coat (for he was a Tailed Imp), came in and apologised more than ever and said that His Master the Head Devil was extremely sorry to keep Peter the Politician waiting, but would he kindly send in what his business was, and he hoped it would immediately be attended to?

Then Peter the Politician answered in his short, dignified way that he had come to sell his soul.

"Of course! Of course!" said the tail-coated Imp. "Dear me! You must excuse me; we have so much to do to-day that we are really run off our hooves. Of course," he added, anxiously polite, "there is the regular office …"

"Yes, yes, I know," said Peter the Politician as impatiently as his dignity would allow. "I know all about that office, but under the circumstances and seeing that I am known here …"

"Yes, of course!" said the big Imp again, and he went our hurriedly, and Peter the Politician was kept waiting another two hours.

He hummed a little and he shuffled his feet, and he drummed with his fingers, and he began very seriously to think whether he would not go somewhere else, only he knew of no one out of Hell who wanted his soul. So he sighed at last and continued to wait with as much resignation as he could.

And after another two hours there came in a very tall, gentlemanly, and deep-voiced Major Devil, who told him how exceedingly sorry he was that His Master should have to keep him waiting, especially now they knew the nature of his business, but the pressure of work that day was really awful! And would Peter the Politician, for this once, be kind enough to send in his offer, because the Head Devil really could not come out?

So Peter the Politician said severely –

"Luckily I have brought the goods with me." And he handed the Major Devil his nice little brown paper parcel, and the Major Devil went out apologising.

Then Peter the Politician was kept waiting another two hours. At the end of it there came in a really superior Devil with his hair parted in the middle and a standup-can-turndown collar, and the accent, and everything. He sat down genially at the same table as Peter the Politician, and leant towards him and said most affably and courteously –

"My dear sir, my Master is very sorry indeed, but there has been a terrible slump in this sort of thing since August; the bottom is quite knocked out of the market, and – and – well, to tell you straight out, what we want to know is how many you have to offer?"

"How many?" said Peter the Politician, with a real annoyance unworthy of his rank.

"Yes," said the suave and really important Secretary Devil (for such he was), "the fact is, my Master says he can't quote for these singly in the present state of the market, but if you could bring in a gross …"

At this Peter the Politician got up swearing, and went out, forgetting to take his soul with him, and leaving it there on the table all tied up.

And that is why some people go about saying that he has lost his soul, for he certainly never sold it; and this should teach you that it is not easy to sell one's soul, though it is exceedingly easy to lose it or to give it away.

Manhattan Regrets

I was handed a very nice invitation a few days ago.

Someone wanted my autograph on a statement that was also signed by big Christian names in the Evangelical and Catholic worlds, and this time, the promoters sought out Orthodox signatories, even hierarchs.

That is a new thing for the impresarios – the DeMoss group – who brought us the Evangelical Manifesto and the Mitt Romney campaign.

I went through my checklist of "nice things manifestos/declarations/statements/charters/resolutions/affirmations ought to say." The Manhattan Declaration ( with its own .org, no less) carries a lot of good stuff:

• Bipartisan abortion is wrong
• So is the killing of human embryos for "therapeutic cloning"
• So is the promotion of assisted suicide and "voluntary" euthanasia
• It is wrong to dress these things up in the language of "liberty," "autonomy" and "choice"
• Of course, these things are just as bad as labor exploitation, sex trafficking, abandonment of the aged, racial oppression/discrimination, religious persecution "of all faiths," and "failure to take steps necessary to halt the spread of preventable diseases like AIDS"
• Christians and Christian institutions have been complicit in culture of divorce
• The redefinition of marriage to accommodate "same-sex and multiple partner relationships" is bad
• Non-marital relationships should not be treated as marriage
• Conscience clauses should be protected: no one should ever be forced to perform infanticide or geriatricide or socially-therapeutic homicide
• No one should be punished for preaching against homosexuality

Huzzah! Hooray! I agree with all of these.

Of course, there are some things missing in this Declaration – especially the things we might do that promote these activities. There is nothing about the redefinition of sexuality (i.e., "Everything and anything is okay, just as long as they're married") which has probably contributed to unwanted pregnancies. There is nothing about the dual-career frenzy that has "necessitated" abortion, sterilization, day-care centers, and the closing of the door of the home to the very aged whom the Declaration rightly says have been abandoned. Nothing was said about the roles of industrial, contractual society and scientism in the redefinition of human nature, and all nature for that matter.

Of course, there were the usual verbal constructions of what I call "Declaration-speak." There must be seminars in strategically chosen academic and neo-Christian hotspots in the writing of important statements, and in the wordsmithing of phrases like:

• "While fully acknowledging the imperfections and shortcomings …" Note the half-hearted stipulation that prefaces the immediately following counter-claim –
• "We claim the heritage …" Is it even possible to not claim a heritage? One can be untrue to it, which is far more likely.
• "Christians today are called …" Who is doing the calling? Is this the famous "divine passive"?
• "We … make the following declaration, which we sign as individuals, not on behalf of our organizations, but speaking to and from our communities …" See below on whether it is possible to do this.
• "We set forth this declaration …" How about "We declare" or "Chuck and I say" or dispense with the declarative preface phrase altogether: it is only an abstract separation from the meat of the statement.
• "… we note with sadness .." How can one be sad and just "note"?
• "We call on all officials …" What is the instrument of calling all officials? This statement?
• "We will be united and untiring …" We'll see. Institutions always get tired out or bored.
• "Our message is …" Is everything else non-message?
• "A truly prophetic Christian witness …" One thing the real prophets never did was to use this line.
• "Our concern is not confined …" Oh for the good old days when concern was confined.
• "Vast human experience confirms …" The snarky possibilities raised by this line are vast and confirming.
• "We acknowledge that there are those who are disposed …" You can always tell when homosexuality or sexuality is being talked about, because the best abstractions and ambiguities are used.
• "We further acknowledge …" So much acknowledgement. By the way, just what is "acknowledgement" anymore? A tip of the hat? An "oh, you're here"? What happens to you when you are acknowledged?
• "We understand …" Am I wrong, or are we running out of preface phrases by now?
• "As Christians, we take seriously the Biblical admonition …" Biblical admonitions, all of them, are meant for seriousness. Are there any that Christians don't take seriously?

These non-concrete, first-person plural and "greatest-common-factor" statements will insure that this Declaration will go the way of all Declarations. And there have been many. There is the already mentioned Evangelical Manifesto. There is the Evangelicals and Catholics Together statement. There are many others (check out the Ochlophobist for a recent history).

This sad history (and rather full dustbin) raises a question. Of what use is Declaration-making?

Don't get me wrong. I am not against the declarations of the Declaration. I am not even against the making of Declarations. The making of this one is surely not detrimental or injurious.

But I wonder if it is all that productive.

When such statements and temporary coalitions are made "across historic ecclesiastical boundaries," the signers always take the unsettling risk of "homogenization." That is, they take the real risk that others – who are not as well-read in the labyrinthine histories and dictionaries of the Christian world – will assume that all the signers (and the organizations that they represent) are pretty much the same, practically speaking.

It really doesn't matter that there is that nice defense clause: "we sign as individuals." Look here: if you're a signer, then the reason why the DeMoss group lobbied your signature was precisely because of your association with a judicatory or a "ministry" or a council/thinktank/lobby/PAC/university or wannabe university.

Thus, the many "cultured despisers of Christianity" (Schleiermacher's single decent phrase) are going to lump Orthodoxy together with Roman Catholicism, and with a whole dizzy array of denominations and "parachurch ministries" and even strange things called the "Alliance Defense Fund." The Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh is listed six entries down from something called "Performance Matters Associates." Metropolitan Jonah is sandwiched between Dr. J. I. Packer and Tony Perkins.

I prefer (please notice that I did not begin with "We acknowledge the desirability that") a simple response from my bishop to a specific disorder of the times, just in case Vladyka's faithful are not discerning enough. If they need told that homosexual sex is wrong, then he should say so, preferably in one sentence with good Anglo-Saxon diction. If they need told that hyper-capitalism causes pride, gluttony, lust and despondency, then yes, by all means make a statement (and he has) to the faithful.

Just please don't put out one-hundred-page statements written in mind-colloidizing committee-speak (multi-syllabic latinate constructions, passive voice, first-person-plural in the non-royal sense) with "study guides" (the bane of all Sunday Schools) and "companion DVDs" and bulletin inserts.

There is one possible good use of the Manhattan Declaration: I would like it employed as a shibboleth for the National Council of Churches. If someone (you know who you are) would stand up and wave this document at the next plenary or plenipotentiary conference or consultation of the NCC and say, "Sign this or we leave," then I will cheer. I might even sign.

Okay, that was a daydream. Now I'm awake: Will Congress read the Manhattan Declaration and repent? Some may use it – as long as the focus groups and the consultants think so – for expediency's sake, but not for long. But even them, the usual friends and fellow-travelers of the Manhattan crowd: will they repent?

Will anyone repent because of the Declaration?

Repentance, and baptism, are the only reasons why we preach, or declare, or say anything out loud.

So to the nice people that sent me the invitation, I tender my regrets. To the nice organizations on the signatory list at the end of the Declaration – especially to the six or seven with whom I am (or used to be) associated – I bid you godspeed in your latest attempt in the public square.

But this is not the way to not bow down to the iron crown.

Rain and the Word

On a rainy morning, the day after Pokrov (our celebration of the Virgin's Protective Veil over the Holy City), we are bludgeoned with the party announcements that welfare-recipient AIG (and probably other Wall Street dole-addicts) is rewarding itself with Gomorrah-bonuses for successful necromantic antics. A few blocks away, Goldman Sachs is handing out $23 billion in bonuses to itself for Christmas (I am willing to call this a sin, especially as it is money derived from indentured servants – how's that for a non-ambiguous, non-ethical-board-attenuated-and-sans-committee-studied position statement?).

One percent of America has more dough than everyone else put together.

I will resist, for now, the temptation to wax despairing on Babylonian hijinks. Alas.

But I wonder, for now, about one troubling, vexing question.

The Church tells us that the Cross and Resurrection rendered the old pagan pantheon of gods – Olympus, Valhalla, Tenochtitlan, Angkor Wat – powerless once and for all. No matter what our moonlight and crystal friends say, whilst promenading around the maypole, there is no going back to Tír na nÓg. There is, if the Christian witness is to be believed at all, only the Holy Trinity and Jesus Christ is the only Word.

I know that's pretty offensive, but that's that in the Easter optic. There is no other god on the horizon after the cosmic cataclysm of Pascha.

This is old stuff. We know this already.

But god-making is always appealing. The wilderness of modern living makes one long for a golden calf, as opposed to the headaches and frustrations one gets from the rumbling lugubrious cloud on the Mountain.

So after Zeus and the Dagda, Odin and Quetzalcoatl and Shiva have been shown the cranial door, the modern world has been very busy at the fire, gold-plating one object -- or conceptual framework or weltanschauung or critical theory -- after another.

Not "gods" (God forbid), but certainly cognitive structures that wield divine-looking authority. Not "myths" in honest full disclosure, but certainly organizing and criticizing cultural constructs that have their own modern – but very religious-looking – categories of sacred and profane, clean and unclean, open-minded and close-minded, modern and contemptible.

Still, Pascha has given those sneaky gods, too, the pink slip. There is nothingness behind their vapor. 

And here I must admit to no little nostalgia: I would rather the old honest pagan gods than these new post-Christian ones. At least they were less bloodthirsty: the twentieth century wars were, after all, occult liturgy. Every modern battle (i.e., fought for policy or ideology instead of morals) is really an incantation.

But the new gods are the philosophies and schools, the narratives that were fashioned in the shadow of the receding Church that's been retreating back to the catacombs ever since the statecraft of 1500 and beyond. These are the attempts to stand on one's own in time and space and meaning, without any reference to Heaven.

I wonder, today, while I and our Father's House are covered by the Protective Veil, whether "Christ or Nothing" applies to just the gods of old. I wonder if it also applies to everything that functions as a golden calf. I wonder if it applies to the non-theistic theologies of Adam Smith and Marx, Rorty and Lawrence, and to the just as non-theistic fundamentalisms of Hitchens and Dawkins, along with those of Kristol, Perry and DeMint, Falwell and Osteen.

I wonder if the Paschal light not only portends the Twilight of the Gods, but also the twilight of meaning and knowledge. Take away the Word, how is any sentence possible? Take away the primal Story of the Incarnation (which is the DNA, if you will, of Time), and how can there be any narration at all?

I wonder – stupid proletariat anti-abortion creationist and agnostic-capitalist that I am – while I am told that bonuses are good for the country and that anything that Obama does is bad for Christian America – I wonder if meaning itself can stand by itself, for very long at all after it leaves the light of Pascha?

It is a sad thing that well-intentioned people like Eliot and Lasch, and good people of the earth like Berry and Hanson, really hope for the renewal of culture, or – as Lasch put it – its "redemption" and "conversion." These are Christian words: even the concept of "renewal" – in the grammar of critics – is really an idea that cannot be divorced from its familial setting in the Church. I think their hope is misplaced.

Has cultural conversion ever happened, apart from apostolicity?

Is conversion even possible when the logos of nature – both outside and inside, human and extra-human – is forgotten, despite our microscopic analysis? Is it possible when people's experience is becoming even more vicarious and less direct? When their language carries less ideas and more mere data? Like bees communicating to the hive where the pollen is to be found?

After the Word is forgotten, will sentences fall apart?

But here in the precincts of the Veil, we hope that the salt and light will continue to illumine and preserve, even in the courts of the agora. Here, apart from the cosmic muzak in the mall-flourescence, there is Sacrament and Tradition to save us from the many-headed hydra of the gnoses. There is still the Story told that keeps history intact, still enables the mind to articulate thought in complete sentences.

Still, there is Prayer to the Trinity that keeps the world turning round, even with so many who refuse to believe this is true. Even with so many who flock to a new slavery, who trade their minds for the patently modern comforts of consumption and demagoguery. Even with so many who have so much but rejoice so little.

Under the Veil, in the Holy City, the Paschal Light so shines before men.

But outside, in the rain, the sentences get shorter.

Letterman's bizarre experience

David Letterman had a bizarre experience. And it turns out that this experience has produced a bizarre one of my own: I have been forced, in my own unwilling psyche, to accept the words of Sarah Palin -- "I told you so."

First, an exegesis of Letterman's unpleasant schtick last night in which he adulterated wan jokes with squeamish self-revelations. It appears that Letterman's morality has been in arrears for the past few years, to be quite doggerel about it. He has managed not a few trysts with his female underlings.

To make matters worse, for him that is, someone at CBS who knew about the business threatened the ironic comedian with a revealing book and screenplay -- a literary/dramatic process that would unveil the number-one-in-the-time-slot raconteur as just another lounge lizard lothario. 

Unless, of course, Dave would cough up 2 million.

Can't have that of course, a beloved comedian being harassed by extortion for doing a perfectly legal thing.

So much for the sitz im leben. We've just outlined the historical setting, and thrown in the obligatory nods toward form analysis: now for the real business, the words themselves from the speaker himself.

He framed the whole unpleasantness as a "bizarre experience" that left him feeling "disturbed and menaced." Immediately we have here the rhetoric of displacement: "He went thataway!" the pickpocket points offstage and you glance away while he runs, snatched purse in hand. Never mind the adultery, the sex outside of marriage (I guess we should be thankful it was "only" heterosexual, whose disruptions have been diminished into the category of "hanky panky"). Never mind the toxin -- of which males in their frat-consciousness are customarily ignorant -- that pollutes an office environment when some underlings win connections and affections, and others do not. Never mind the theme of exploitation here -- we all got annoyed with a former President who parleyed his position into insinuations with a lowly intern: but an entertainer should be given a pass for this, shouldn't he?, because he makes us laugh late at night and doesn't really wield power, doesn't he? That framing turns out to be par for the course for such an accomplished ironicist, yes?

So now, instead of adultery as the offense (it was "consensual" after all, and this makes it all better so we can sleep easy after turning off Dave), it is rather the scary aspect of "extortion." Now, the socially-defined evil of the moment is the bad man who demanding a payoff "or else" -- the "or else" being a tell-all-to-end-all. Now, the thing that excites our pity and -- judging from the frat house laughter and applause from his signature sardonic cadence -- sympathy is the fact that Letterman has had to suffer a sequence of events that is "bizarre," that now he feels "disturbed and menaced." There was no possibility of pity and sympathy that we used to -- in the good old days -- reserve only for contrition and repentance. There was none of that. There was only the discomfiture of having fallen in the hands of wicked men.

I think Solomon somewhere said something about how the door into an adulterous bedroom leads oily and steep down into the smoky shadows, where thieves and extortioners and worse run rampant. David is now complaining that his own private Hades has the character that he had surely heard about but headed off to anyways, ignoring the warning labels on the map.

He is rightly upset now that a greasy, pimply extortioner interposed himself outside his apartment door with typewritten sheafs in his grubby hands. I am sorry he went through this: but grubby hands follow, normally, hands that roam.

So now he blames the darkness for being dark, not himself for having turned off the lights in the first place.

Enough of exegesis. Now for the Kafka-esque near-insufferable turn of events.

You remember, some months ago, when Sarah Palin worried, in her deft dialect and singular patois, about David ever being around her daughter? And I was one of the many who guffawed?

I hear "I told you so" in that clipped-vowel Fargo-esque english-language-grinder accent of the ex-vice-presidential candidate, and I say "yes you did."

But life will go on. Nielson assures us that millions of people tonight will eschew prayers and icon, even connubial relations, in favor of Dave (and other ironicists), waiting for their displacement-prophecies and self-caressing lyrics, to lullabye them into meaningless dreams of leftover passions -- a common bizarre experience for a fragmented, disaffected soul.

It's hard to sleep, to rest, nowadays. What's demanded these days is a narcotic to bring on narcosis, since the sleep of good work, grief and joy, is so hard (notice how many sleep clinics there are?). What's wanted is a nightly, fanciful dose of ironic anaphora that repeats, in vain caressing repetition, the invocations of a chuckling world without sin -- sinless because, you know, camouflaged in shadow.

Goodnight moon. Goodnight Dave.

Nighty night.

Snare roll, thump and cymbal.

Yet

A friend of mine and I had lunch the other day. He told me that Obama had to go. I said it didn't matter. He said that the country was descending into a Nanny State, and that we were being turned into a socialistic society. I said he should have noticed this a long time ago, when the last twenty Administrations were in power.

Conservatives like T. S. Eliot critiqued the Nanny State for engendering a culture of boredom. He, in particular, hoped that the existence of "classes" actually structured or ordered society to provide meaning: an existence that is more than "hollow."He was, of course, incorrect.

To be sure, Eliot could not have imagined that virtual reality – in its present near-total extent – could have ever been so possible. Much less he did not know that such is not only possible, but so widespread. It is now the rule.

The post-industrial society has made fools of conservatives (I speak as one). With its ubiquitous and polluted fog of virtual reality – which eclipses reality, or direct experience of creation – conservatives who would still like to use the historic language of reality are left speechless. God knows there are too many shrill and bumpkin voices who fly the conservative banner, but are really boorish right-wingers.

It turns out that the right wing is not conservative at all. They do not conserve: it goes without saying that they are not interested in conserving the environment; but neither are they interested in conserving quiet community, decent agriculture, home industry and Christian sexuality. They are not really interested in conserving or perpetuating the virtues nested in the Beatitudes – especially meekness.

You may add, rightly, that the left wing cares not a whit for these things, and I am inclined to agree. The liberal movement has ever fought the Church and her moral witness: listen, if you've a mind to, to the cacophony of media slander against the "Thou Shalt Not's" of the Church. The left wing cannot tolerate, even in their vaunted multi-cultural sensitivity, the Church's insistence that one must not engage in physical or psychic sex outside the nuptial union; that one must not participate in the homosexual sub-culture; that one must not join or abet armed revolution or rebellion; that one must not speak or act in the customs of either Sodom or Gomorrah.

I may add, just as rightly, that the right wing also disapproves of certain "Thou Shalt Not's" – interdicts that are as Traditional as the ones just listed above. The right wing cannot abide being told that Church is not something you can invent out of marketing questionnaires; that virtue has little to do with value; that goodness and beauty have an inverse relationship with consumerism and comfort; that the virtue of protecting family and land should not be confused with the protecting of wealth and privilege – the protection of which is cowardice.

I am all for reactionarianism (if that is a word) – but one must have a Tradition one uses as a criterion with which to react. Ask a Tea-Partier what is important to him or her, and they will say nothing really Traditional. "Expedient," yes, and surely so: the politics of Tea-Partying & Townhall-Whining (e.g., no taxes, yes guns, no aliens, yes drilling, no GM workers, yes rich bankers) is much like the histrionic arguments of James Carville and Mary Matalin over dinner at home.

But is there any reference to "Tradition" as the nexus of moral imagination? As a force for the ordering of mind against the hegemony of world and shadow? As a culture for the harmony of the soul with Heaven, against the epidemic toxin of passion?

No. There is no one who succeeds or leads in politics who cares dearly for the permanent things and Tradition. There is no one who conserves Nature and Human Nature.

The main reason for this, I fear, is that post-industrial society has rendered the conservative critique trite at best, and probably idiotic. (Although I take issue with being called a "village idiot" together with my fundamentalist friends – with whom I join in solidarity at the abusive expectoration of Franky Schaefer.) The old myths of bootstrap and fishing now sound cloyingly stupid: the poor who are becoming poorer and more indentured will not be helped by Amway or Horatio Alger stories. It is not enough, nor was it ever enough, to tell the poor as a class to just get a job.

In this moment – however one wants to describe it, and whatever one wants to call it – the old prescriptions do not work. We would like all the poor people to work instead of taking a dole. We write books and hope that the poor will read them, so that they will raise themselves up by their own bootstraps – a physical feat, if taken literally, whose very impossibility underlines the mythical role this expression fulfills in the cult "rugged individuality." Then there is the old saw "give him a fish, and he's hungry again … teach him to fish, and he feeds himself." That, too, is a myth that cannot be realized until the poor gets just as much welfare (and socialistic intervention) as do the rich: one cannot fish when he is starving, or worried about sheltering himself or his children.

We have forgotten that the Gospel ethic demands feeding the poor: it is silent about the business of turning the poor into capitalists so that they can care for themselves and release us from the Gospel burden.

Regionalists and phobics (like me) who hate Leviathan worry about the growing and menacing pale of the State. But we are not brave enough to consider the strong possibility that the post-industrial world, inbreathing virtual reality, is predicated upon a State that is both humanitarian and totalitarian.

And that predication means, simply (and appallingly), that such a State is here to stay, no matter how many guns we tote to tea parties, no matter how many signs are waved – misspelt – by angry flabby short-panted white-sock-and-rockported Tommy-Bahama-shirted social security and medicare pensioners.

We always knew that "Tea-Partiers" -- a group who would be happier as hobbits in Bywater -- are generally unaware of their historic and occultic surroundings. That is made cringingly clear by so many signs depicting Obama as Hitler (comment from Jesse Owens on this one?), and by those that equate Nazism with Socialism.

But what we should consider is just how unaware we non-Tea-Whiners are. We who hold our nose (rightly) at the off-scourings of Dreck TV and Il Magnifico radio-rooter-rants – we like to read Kirk and Eliot and romance our sentiments with agrarian and regionalist lyrics. 

We are troubled, however, by apocalyptic visions. We do not like to disturb our Amish reveries: we push away unbidden suspicions that prophets like Berry may hold mainly for Arcadia (and not anywhere else), or only for little clusters like the insular community in M. Night Shyamalan's Village.

In an age where world hunger lurks monstrous around tomorrow, and coastlines likely will be sinking, can agriculture really abandon the legacy of Norman Borlaug?

Can conservatives really hope for social renewal? Can they intelligently hold fast to the dream of cultural triumph? The very substance of thought has changed. And that fact alone has rendered much conservative thinking wretchedly obsolete.

Despite the lullabye croonings of Internet cheerleaders like Vincent Rossmeier, our mode of communication has profoundly affected the quality of our ability to think, and the quality of the things we think about. When our thinking is forced by events to stretch beyond routine and the usual events of our week, we usually fall apart at the first onset of any disruptive passion. Moreover, the things we think about usually do not follow the solid lines of goodness and beauty: rather, they are overpopulated by demotic urges, menial demands for comfort and a denial of Time in favor of the Moment.

I would like to say, with Eliot, that we are surely the Hollow Men. But unlike Eliot, I have to remember that Hollow Men themselves are unable to say such a thing. By definition. They look in the mirror and do not recognize the face.

The Wasteland is like water to a fish: so ubiquitous, so invisible, that the fish is unaware of its vast and profound presence. We are fish.

Liberals cannot ever know this, to be sure. Their hope is ever in mortal princes, despite their incessant and perennial disappointment. They would rather believe in Benthamite doctrines than in the simple Law of God: but dealing with God means accepting the status of "sinner," and no self-respecting liberal will ever put up with that.

Right-wingers are hopelessly unable to learn this, because they are Philistine. They are not village idiots (it is more idiotic to say so). They simply do not care about things that should be cared for. They need to grow up out of their prurient addictions but they never will.

Conservatives should know this, but they have been ambushed by industrialism and the gas cloud of virtual reality. They should have discerned the spirit of antichrist. They were busy looking for him in the ecumenical movement, in heresies and other religions, in foreign nations. But wherever they looked in other times and places, he was there at their back creeping in.

The humanitarian, totalitarian State is here. It is only secondarily mediated by the Government. It is directly mediated by the media and marketplace, which has combined into one environment – and this environment has entered not only our home and hearth, but has interposed itself in the midst of our consciousness. There are very few thoughts these days that proceed unaccompanied by phosphorescence and pixilation.

Our problem is not the Nanny State. It is, rather, the Nanny Marketplace, whose commercials are broadcast these days on the dark side of our foreheads.

That is why I tell you not to worry so much about Obama or his Republican predecessors and successors: they are, to a man, impotent at stemming the tide (even if they cared). The conservative mistake in the last hundred years is that they were too political, and boorishly so. They cared more for elections than for stories, for art and poetry. They insinuated political contests into religion, of all things, and wondered why God discredited them at every turn. They abandoned philosophizing and turned instead to Philistine sarcasm (think of Buckley here).

They have willingly joined the Gadarene rush down over the cliff and into the briny sea.

The foe of real conservatism is the spirit of antichrist. The substance of real conservatism, as the inheritor and steward of permanent things, is of course orthodox Christianity. I say this with dread, as I worry that orthodoxy, in its American manifestation, is distinctly unready to confront this malevolent spirit. God is cleaning His House for sure, and His broom is sweeping many bureaucratic corners. Leadership in a time of trial and unease must be leadership that has attained apatheia, that can discern and test the spirits, that is practiced in the fight against passion and demonic insinuation. (This lack is the single reason why there is no correction of Orthodox jurisdictional miasma, and why so much Orthodox administration is in turmoil.)

There is not enough of this spiritual fight and test today. The darksome spirit is trying to cover and confuse the permanent things. He has set up billboards all over the interstate highways of our speeding minds, billboards that hide the hollowness with plastic and charming self-esteem … billboards that hide the waste and what lies foreboding on the horizon.

Mortal princes will never look beyond the billboards. Spiritual princes should, but have not.

Yet.

Regrets for Bushy Run this Saturday

Yesterday I got invited to a tea party at Bushy Run Battlefield on Saturday.

I will be missing it.

I will miss the Christian Lawyer remarking on Cap and Trade.

I will miss the CEO of the Eagle Forum denouncing health care.

I will miss a representative from Firearm Owners Against Crime orating on the Second Amendment, the President of the Lincoln Institute opining on the Economy, and a man from the Bushy Run Heritage Society talking about Saving Bushy Run Battlefield.

I will miss a Minister rhetorizing on Christianity vs Islam.

I will miss a Retired Naval Lieutenant Commander (no less) with the first name Smoky offering Patriotic Remarks.

The redcoats were the heroes back in 1763 when Colonel Henry Bouquet led a column to relieve the besieged garrison at Fort Pitt: that is why there will be no representations from the Delaware, Shawnee, Mingo and Huron nations.

It is a pleasant attractive place, the battlefield, before it was closed last month by a state running out of money.

The pleasantness is odd, though, with that distant gold gleam of heavy memory: 

of red blood spilled about two hundred and fifty Augusts ago, fifty redcoats and "an unknown number of confederacy casualties, including two prominent Delaware chieftains."

(The Indians are usually counted indeterminately, not having been blessed with Arabic numerals.)

The park is closed now, but the wind still blows pleasantness over the stains that have now sunk deep under the superficialities of thought, the gold though distant still gleams, but as late afternoon sun.

Doubtless, the crowds this Saturday will stand above the deep sinking,

and congratulate themselves for thought and sing Proud to be an American whilst muttering under curled palms teenager secrets about secession, like a glossy playboy consulted furtively at bob jones.

I will miss the housewives bearing arms this Saturday, and the lawyers bewailing the feds and evangelicals standing up against healthcare and ministers warning suburbanites about muezzins.

I will miss them, congregating on a closed battlefield.

I will miss them missing the blood and the point entirely.

Jaki and the wilderness

The Benedictine priest and renown physicist Stanley Jaki reposed in the Lord last April (2009).

I honor him especially for his afflicting all Theories of Everything (TOE's) and Grand Unification Theories (GUT's) with that especially cranky invention of Kurt Gödel, the "incompleteness theorem." Fr./Dr. Jaki used this theorem like a crowbar: and as I think that TOE/GUT's lie as the organizing myth of the current ethos, the good Benedictine physicist did the Gideon stomp on this age's fetish idols like no one else.

(I don't know if Jaki knew anything about Paul Elmer More. He would be happy to know that More, almost a century ago in Harvard, contended that any comprehensive explanation of the workings of life and the world -- i.e., "monism" -- amount to error. In his nice article on More, Prof. Brian Domitrovic points out Rousseauianism and Darwinism as two examples of "monism.")

Recently, I dredged up one of his prophetic essays in which he ventured out of the jungle of physics and onto the plain. On the cusp of 9/11, when the world was still thinking about Y2K and Clinton's peccadilloes (what halcyon days those were), Stanley Jaki wrote a jeremiad entitled "A Thousand Years from Now" (which can be read in its entirety here).

Here are some of my gleanings. Jaki's words are in italics. My snarky comments are enclosed, fittingly, in parentheses:

It became the mark of modern times to glory in turning things inside out and applaud those who claim that it is better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.

(I think Jaki was referring to Rousseau here. This is not a hard guess, as most negative references about libertine secular humanism end up at Rousseau's nudist self. He is also referring to Irving Babbitt's distinction between Burke's moral imagination and Rousseau's idyllic imagination, which Babbitt and Eliot suggest is always prone toward totalitarianism of either the Marxist or fascist sort.)

(Oh, and by the way, just in case you haven't noticed: the media is populated only with fake somebodies, and has no interest – by definition – in real nobodies.)

The explosive rise of the stock market allows the media to lull the public into thinking that millennium is around the corner as the new millennium begins. This new age, as any other age, will have its own ethos as well as its ethics, because ethics are merely the reflection of ethos, or the climate of thought. The ethos keeps revealing its shallowness because pragmatism can have no depths.

(Please note that Jaki wrote this in 2001, when Wall Street was still being celebrated as the secular temple of salvation. Please note, too, that Jaki says something rotten about pragmatism – something with which I fully agree, even while taking into consideration the considerable weight of William James. James is wrong. Bentham is wrong.)

Conservatives … would be hard pressed if asked what exactly they want to conserve. The comfort of the mere status quo? The pleasure of seeing one's children thinking no differently from their grandparents? … The stability of banking rules? The supple rigidity of political power brokering that favors the conservatives? Or something deeper? Of course, there are conservatives who know better. But only a few of them dare to call a spade a spade and when they do they all too often put their feet in their mouths. This they do when they identify conservatism with politics, and, horribile dictu, with capitalism.

(Gee, I wonder who Jaki had in mind here? Let's read further --)

As to capitalism, conservatives, like anyone else, love to conserve their holdings. … For note a few conservatives … the accumulation of money, or the art of capitalism, must be acceptable only when hemmed in by strict moral guidelines set forth in the great social Encyclicals. Some Catholic advocates of capitalism have now thrown those guidelines overboard to such an extent as to create some strange perspectives indeed.

(Ahhh, it must be tough to be a neocon catholic, or at least one who actually listens to his metaphysical feedback loop. What is Bottum doing with the likes of Novak and Wiegel, who are turning into the rightist philistines that Mssrs. Chesterton, Belloc, Eliot, Lewis and Tolkien and all of the Agrarians and Romanides despaired of? Maybe "turning into" is the wrong term here.)

According to John Locke the purpose of the political state was to secure the unhindered accumulation of private holdings.

(This doesn't seem to square with the minimalist theory of state described in the Epistle to the Romans, or the Pastoral Epistle to Timothy; or even with the maximalist theory described in Paradiso. Maybe it's a new idea. Maybe it's even non-Christian, and if it is, then that fact adds an unpleasant metallic taste to the civil religion stew that's been brewing since Falwell's "Moral Majority" and that gloop of historiography, The Light and the Glory.)

Tools do not connote their proper use.

(This is a real scientist who said this, not a bioethicist, who usually brews – in his alchemical kitchen – intellectualized rationalizations of profit-making procedures that require human vivisection if you just look at it directly, but you never get the chance because you're too busy reading through the bioethical 5-inch binder notebooks in the hotel convention center. The bad-science/hyper-technology ethos in which we live and move and have our being has no place for explicit "proper use" – it's that "implicit" propriety that now obtains and that is hidden away from view at the behest of those who change the meaning of words. I wonder, just wonder, if "Christian bio-ethics" would be necessary at all if Christians were more faithful about capitalism.)

There was not a word in [the Wall Street Journal] presentation, "How Christianity Created Capitalism," about the late-medieval agonies over whether usury was no longer present when modest interest was taken on the loan or of the keen awareness at that time of the blunt dictum of Saint Jerome (no small mind, to be sure, and a saint at that) that merchants live in a permanent state of sin.

(I bet you've never read that quote of Jerome's in First Things, or Touchstone.)

For if there is an epitome of the perversity of the modern age, it is the coining of the acronym GAY. It was coined not so much to remove the legal strictures on strictly private homosexual acts, as to launch a moral crusade on behalf of homosexual fusions. GAY stands for "Good as You," that is, for the claim that living in homosexual unions is as good morally as living in "straight" marriages. In this crusade there came to a head what has been the chief aim of the modern age from its inception. The latter is to be located in the Renaissance, which aimed at the rebirth of that paganism that found in Christianity its sole real challenge and antagonist. The truth about the Renaissance has for long been an open secret, but recently Christians have become rather secretive about it. It took no small courage on Etienne Gilson's part to put, two generations ago, the matter bluntly: "The Renaissance marks the opening of an era in which man will profess to be satisfied with the state of fallen nature."

(Jaki must be forgiven here for his small error. The Renaissance was not the "rebirth" of paganism, for paganism cannot exist again after the Resurrection. What really happened in the Renaissance (despite the fairy tales in your high school "social studies" texts) was the murder of the Byzantine cultural commonwealth, and the lesser culture of western Christendom – a murder that took about five centuries to complete. Conservatives are aware of this: the Right Wing is not, as both "Wings" -- by definition -- usually get nauseated by self-awareness.)

Believers are under increased pressure to rethink their lifestyle, to take it for just one of the alternative lifestyles … any naïve Tom, Dick or Harry can be demolished in his inarticulate faith if he is ruined in his moral stance and integrity. Nothing comes so naturally to fallen man as to construct a set of perverse dogmas on behalf of moral perversity. The easiest means is to change the vocabulary.

(I'm okay with that.)

… such is the modern age in which man takes perverse pleasure in his fallen condition, by taking it for the height of his evolution.

(Jaki is complaining here about Einstein in particular. He wondered why no one noticed, when Time magazine elected the Relativist "the Person of the Century," that Einstein was quite the lothario, or casanova – I can't decide which. Apparently, Einstein enjoyed the company of scores of women in the interstitial spaces between his chalk talks. No one said anything, even the media who today rightly excoriates Republican – and sometimes Democrat –legislators and governors for their moral pipsqueakeries. I guess if you're smart, you're allowed to be "wicked," especially since we no longer use that word for "evil," but reserve it instead to connote some gaseous and pimply meaning like "really cool.")

(Oh, and by the way: has it ever occurred to any evolutionist that -- were their fantasies to ever work out -- we might get displaced by higher organisms someday, and it might not be the pleasant LSD trip rhapsodized by Teilhard? More likely is the nightmare of Lewis' Abolition of Man, where there is a constant devolutionary pressure to lapse into materialistic totalitarianism, dictator or no.)

[There is a] basis for a very measured optimism about the future: a thousand years from now there will still be room for opportunity to rejoin the war for a culture which is steeped in true cult and not in the cultivation of the self. Without true cult, culture is a mere counterfeit, a mere frill of increasingly decivilized civilizations that are at each other's throats.

(I think it was Coleridge who once quipped that "There is no culture without a cult." At the basis of every culture – a self-aware society with an ethos – there is a cult, no matter how squalid. We may be living in the first civilization that rejects the very nature of culture, if only to maximalize the revolution of "self-cultivation" and the sub-bestial enslavement to the Will. Note that Jaki's optimism – which is a hard thing to muster for a true conservative, as must needs be – lay only in "room for opportunity." I think, with my patron Saint John Chrysostomos, that the Last Day will be a thousand years hence at least, even so Maranatha. So I hope for opportunities to be apprehended, but I think the wilderness and the mountain, and the sea, are our place in time.)

Man will have cults because he cannot live without them. Cults will, unfortunately, clash. Unless the West wants to deny its very nature, it is most important for its survival to know which cult to cultivate. No tree has ever been known to flourish once it was uprooted, a truth valid even a thousand years from now and beyond.

(Here is Jaki's obligatory optimism for the West. The problem here is that the cult cultivated by the West is not the Orthodox Christian cult at all. It is the cult of self, and this is predominate in rightist circles and left. The West, in all likelihood, has been uprooted from Christianity once and for all. Civil religion will remain and entertain the tens of thousands, for sure. But the cult of Being and Becoming, of Truth and Trinity, of Atonement Sacrifice and the One Liturgy: that will go back to the byways and the meek, back to its mystical agrarian vocation: The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.)

A foolish gambol

Some days ago I submitted a comment to a left-leaning site. It was busy, as were so many others, analyzing the 18 year long captivity of a young woman and her abuse by a known offender.

My motives were suspect, mainly because I've been lobbing a majority of my dyspeptic barbs at the Right for numerous misbehaviors. The harrumphing that a "woman in a wheelchair has more rights than me" comes, still, to mind.

So I ventured out into the wingnut side of the left – we live, now, in an ambidextrous Philistia: that is, Philistines on the right and the left.

I suggested in the comment box that one of the reasons why we have sexual offenders is because of the heightened prevalence of pornography and lust-arousing stimuli in the media "cloud" of consciousness.

I closed my eyes, said "Lord have mercy," then I hit the "submit" button.

Within moments came the cascade of responses. Despite my assurances to the contrary, I was told that I was one of "those idiotic fundamentalists." My intelligence was cast into severe doubt. I was diagnosed with psychosis and/or a pervasive developmental disorder. I was informed that I was suffering from something sexual that was repressed, probably (of course) homophobia. I was confronted with a number of statements that began with that catchy phrase "how dare you!" – as in, how dare I doubt the universal radical application of the freedom of speech? Or, how dare I doubt the secularized provenance of sexual liberation in this culture – a liberation that frees all human life to express itself sexually?

In my callower, braver days, I would have pointed out, with no small sardonic glee, that the sexual offender that we are all happy to damn and torture with various arrangements of two-by-fours was only expressing himself sexually, freely, and who were we to impose our values on him?

But that was when I was callow, and was more sanguine about the possibilities of civil discourse in Hyde Park. Too, the riposte that an offender should be able to molest "unmolested" in a secular environment is really not a fair argument. I stipulate this, and withdraw my uncharitable, unmentioned response.

But in all of this, I was struck once again by the energy harnessed in the defense of lust in general, and of unregulated sexual activity in particular.

I am wondering these days where all this nasty energy is coming from. I have always wondered, in the old days of my practice, how some depressed people got so angry at their spouse and children, right after they had told me that they had no energy to do anything except watch TV. Now, I wonder why Republicans are so furiously energetic against healthcare reform: I never saw so much energy channeled by them against abortion or gay marriage. I wonder where bioethicists get the funding and the chutzpah to keep demanding human sacrifice for their embryonic material, despite the well-established fact that adult skin cells can do the job just as well. I wonder why birther-death-panelists can dress up a black president as Hitler when they never would have done such a thing with a white liberal president. I wonder, too, why evolutionists don't bat an eye when they associate the religious education done by parents with child abuse.

It is a false energy, this degenerate psychic energy of passion. It is the very substance of the demonic.

I have two edifying quotes for my perusal, and maybe for yours, if you, as perplexed, need a guide.

The first one is about lust in particular and passion in general. It is from the Apophthegmata (this must be pronounced in the exact sonorous but chuckling way that Bishop Kallistos says it):

One story tells of Satan holding court, receiving the adoration of his demonic lieutenants and inquiring into their recent exploits. The first of the demons to approach the throne reports that he has caused riots, wars and much bloodshed; but when he reveals that it took him a month to do so, Satan has him chastised. A second demon tells how he has raised storms at sea and sunk ships, sending many men to their deaths; but, on learning that it took him 20 days, Satan also punishes him severely. A third demon relates how he sowed discord at a wedding, resulting in the death of the bridegroom; but, as this took him ten days, he too is scourged for his idleness. A fourth demon then reports that for 40 years he tormented a single monk of the desert, before finally succeeding in making the hermit have a lustful thought in the night. On hearing this, Satan rises from his throne to kiss his servant; then he places his own crown on the demon's head, and commands the latter to sit beside him on the throne, proclaiming: 'You have performed a brave and mighty deed!' (as cited in D. B. Hart's A Story of Christianity).

A very interesting story, if you don't mind the Miltonic flavor: Satan has neither crown nor throne, you know, and he is certainly not "in charge." The story does underscore a truth: history begins in the nous, as a noetic phenomenon first, then as emergent action.

Heidegger complained that the mystery of being was shrunk into rationalistic notions, finally turning us moderns into the self-conscious constructs we are (or think ourselves to be) today. I think that we are declining even further into the gross extreme of that vision, where we are denaturing ourselves into coruscating quanta of passions – passions with less and less possible objects (i.e., no satisfaction). What remains is an ever-shrinking and gnostic approach toward the Self-as-the-One. And as the devil has no throne, the self is certainly not the One.

A condition, I must point out, very much like Hades.

Here is a morose consideration: as we gambol toward the final whimper, we may finally construct a consciousness-cloud in which the reality of Creation will be completely sidelined, and true human nature will be successfully avoided except in hiccups and nightmares.

On that twilit day of the Last Men, the world will have finally finished the great movement of western civilization, a movement which began in the Renaissance. Etienne Gilson once noted, courageously, that "The Renaissance marks the opening of an era in which man will profess to be satisfied with the state of fallen nature" (The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy).

On that day, it is my private contention – as theologumenon, mind you – that no one will notice when they die, because they have practiced it so long and so well already. They simply won't know the difference.

But I digress.

Here is one more remark for edification, and it is another pointy little bad-moodedness of Hart's. This one comes from his remarkable essay, "Christ and Nothing," which ought to be read and memorized by just about everyone (except those it upsets already):

Modern persons will never find rest for their restless hearts without Christ, for modern culture is nothing but the wasteland from which the gods have departed, and so this restlessness has become its own deity; and, deprived of the shelter of the sacred and the consoling myths of [pagan] sacrifice, the modern person must wander or drift, vainly attempting one or another accommodation with death, never escaping anxiety or ennui, and driven as a result to a ceaseless labor of distraction, or acquisition, or willful idiocy. And, where it works its sublimest magic, our culture of empty spectacle can so stupefy the intellect as to blind it to its own disquiet, and induce a spiritual torpor more deplorable than mere despair (p. 19, cited in In the Aftermath).

Both sides of the cultural wars and the political wars are languishing in this stupor.

Everyone wants their freedom of passion. One wants his freedom from the psychic helmet of morality, the other his liberation from social chains of charity. Both sides are fully engaged in culture wars: and both are waging war on culture.

We have the evangel, but we are not in Jerusalem or Athens, certainly not Rome. We are in Philistia, where the vapid Moloch is god now (and it may not even matter whether he is entity or construct), and torpor is the ethos.

Leonine fade

Unsurprisingly, I am thinking a lot about liberalism with the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy. He was the great, and last, post-World War II "liberal lion."

As for the man, I despair, of course, his pro-choice attitude which led him to support abortion-on-demand and the unrestricted range of lifestyle choices, many of which violate the Christian ethos. It was men like Kennedy, after all, who consciously equated the true dignity of the civil rights campaign for blacks and latinos (and other ethnicities) with the shameful self-manufactured "liberation" and "consciousness-raising" groups like gays and radical feminists.

We still suffer from this 60's obfuscation, as well as the now-cultural endorsement of clinical infanticide.

However, there is much I honor of this man. You will not find here a raving denunciation of this legislator, annunciations of his death with more than just a little schadenfreude. I find such raving -- which you've undoubtedly heard or seen -- to be fundamentally impious and maniacal.

Not only is this scurrilous crowing over Kennedy (Ted and all his brothers, no less) impious, it is also ignorant. We are all, in America, Christian or non-Christian, Orthodox or not, Republican or Democrat, Neo-con or Neo-liberal, more the beneficiaries of a liberal legacy than we would care to admit. We count on Medicare and Social Security in our retirement planning. We are vaguely comforted by the presence of Medicaid and welfare systems to keep the impoverished from getting too desperate (history tells scary stories about letting the poor sink too far down). Some of us complain about civil rights campaigns for various minorities: but we are the first in line to demand the rights of our groups when we perceive that these rights are infringed.

Yes, you heard it here first: the Second Amendment agenda is not conservative at all (it probably is, nonetheless, "right wing"). It is essentially a matter of radical "individual rights," which is quite the essence of liberalism. That remark might sound confusing – but it is confusing only in the wretchedly confused culture of self-serving and deliberate "forgetfulness" that prevails in today's inescapable political soapbox derby. Time was, in Europe of the 19^th century, that "conservatism" regularly meant the conservation of the old order, where vocation and status were given much more precedent than contractual or corporate advantages. "Conservatism" meant regulation of the burgeoning commercial and industrial interests that threatened to lay waste to city and country. "Liberalism" was the movement against all traces of the ancient regime, the place of aristocracy and the Church. It may seem odd to our ears, but it was under the "liberal" flag that the corporate and radical capitalist battle-cry of "laissez faire" was first hollered. Business interests wanted protection from State intervention: State intervention in the economy is an old, old thing, and one might even call it "traditional."

I will not stretch the meaning of terms too thinly to suggest that Senator Kennedy was "conservative" because he legislated gun controls (although that could be said, reasonably, in most of the world). But my point is served. We draw from the deposit of a long history of liberalism – a liberalism with which Orthodox does not completely disagree. Indeed, there is much in what is usually meant by "liberalism" that Orthodox endorses.

Orthodoxy does not impose a system of government and cannot do so, no matter what some restorationists would like to believe. It does, however, harbor long memories of its singular (and never to be repeated) tenure in the millennial Byzantine Empire (and several centuries in Kiev, Muscovy and other states). The Byzantine society – whose "humanism" was unprecedented in the entire world – was full of governmental intrusion into the economic sphere. There was taxation, and at times it was heavy: and often, these funds were earmarked for public works (e.g., publically-funded art. There was bureaucracy galore (why do you think we use the term "Byzantine" as we do?) – but it was a complex administrative structure that sustained a complex system. People who thumb their noses at bureaucracy for being bureaucratic usually have not a clue as to what government really needs to do. This is usually the problem with ill-bred critiques that cry against abstractions like "big government" or the "nanny state."

We need to be careful in using terms that find most of their meaning in the sophomoric food fight between the right and left wings (both sides, and not just the extremities anymore, are efficiently described with the suffix "-nut"). That which is "nanny" or "welfare" – to use two bogey examples – is often of a Christian character and an even more explicit Christian pedigree. "Safety nets" for the poor – even the foolish, undeserving poor – are actually residue from centuries of ecclesial witness in the Christian East and West. I can trace the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King straight back to the evangelical abolitionist movement, just as I can follow cultural lines from the best of the Agrarian movement to the Presbyterian pieties of Southern landowners (I should note here that much of the egregious wickedness of the slavery economy can be laid squarely at the feet of Eli Whitney's cotton gin, an industrial apparatus, I might add). I would not be surprised to find the root of universal education (no, not secularized education – that is a different thing entirely) also in the Byzantine Empire, where the village priest was often expected to teach the village youth basic literacy and grammar.

Yes, I am biased toward the Byzantine society. It has had no equal, not even the "high Middle Ages," about which Belloc and GK rhapsodize. And what we hold as the great achievements of that society – let alone its military and artistic skill – is its humane-ness … even what we sloppily and inaccurately call its "liberalism."

I think, to do some service to the memory of Senator Ted Kennedy, that we should look carefully at what we mean by "liberal" when we apply it to him. We should dispose, quickly, of the liberalism of radical individual rights. It is one thing to insist that every one has equal protection under the law (and, I would add, an assurance of minimal human needs). But it is another thing to condone and reward individual decisions that are immoral.

We should look at the "liberalism" of humane-ness that remains, by itself. I do not mean here the usual Limbaugh diatribe against "big government" interference in your potential for wealth-achievement or wealth-protection. You may suggest that state interventions in the economy represent an inevitable trend toward totalitarianism. This is the view of Friedman, von Mises and Hayek. I am not so sure. We live in a hyper-industrialist age where corporate capitalism has joined with state socialism: there already is a certain kind of totalitarianism that is alive and well in the virtualistic world, and it is abominably unclean and dedicated to the maximal intercourse of passions. I do not agree with my neo-con friends that Liberal state-run intrusion into economics is the bugbear that achieved this morale collapse. That bugbear is cultural decadence, which has been in the works from the beginning of the modern West in the 16^th century, and has been fed by hands Left and Right.

What I do mean are things that seem humane, like welfare, health care, the postal service, social security. I know there are those on the Right who contend vigorously that it only seems that way, but the reality – even the motive – is sinister.

I do not agree. There is no systemic sinister motive in American liberalism. It may be naïve, even stupid at times (and certainly it is this when it lurches into mob-driven insanity). I would say the same thing about the Right Wing: naïve, even stupid at times, too much given to the rule of angry torch-bearing villagers.

My political feelings tend toward regionalists and agrarians, although I suspect that they are no good at governing in the world as it really is. I think the same about all politicians who run primarily as Christians (even, and especially, as Orthodox Christians): I suspect them, too, of being no good at governing in this long season of contretemps. The complexity of resources and needs, and the revolutionary change of culture, are presenting a maelstrohm of near-chaos in front of any who would pilot the titanic ship of state these day: the old terms of right and left only serve to exacerbate a darkness that is already tangible.

Senator Edward Kennedy was a remarkable man who tried to be Catholic, even a pious Catholic, it seems, at the end of his days.

I will not judge him. I will pray for him. I will assume, with charity, that he prayed sincerely and received the solemn and joyful Unction.

I honor his attempt to make his country a good place. I opposed many of his ideas and continue to oppose them.

But there are many of his ideas I honor, and I thank God for.

And that is, after all, what we ask for.

(cue Copland, Symphony No. 3)