Greg Forster for the defense, your honor.

Following my annual tradition, I offer my Independence Day case for hopeful realism about moral consensus in America. Last year I remarked that it was time to start tempering the hope and offering concessions to the realists. This year I offer no such tempering or concessions. The key question at this moment is not how to balance hope and realism, but whether there is any place for hope.

I start by recalling the thought that inspired me in my initial Independence Day reflection:

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I defy you to show me any nation in the whole history of this world where that blind, black son of sharecroppers grows up to be Ray Charles….If it’s the good, true and beautiful you’re looking for, a country in which Ray Charles can grow up to be Ray Charles has a lot to offer.

But now it is we who are increasingly the blind ones. As I wrote while my daughter was in surgery:

American culture has a way of defying pessimistic expectations…We expect the sources of tomorrow’s strength to be the same as yesterday’s sources. But yesterday’s sources are always in decline – that’s just how it is in the fallen world. Meanwhile, in the places where we’re not looking, entrepreneurs are inventing new sources of cultural strength and vitality. The signs of decline are always right where you expect to find them; the signs of hope spring up in the last places you expect.

So while we spend all our time debating how a Supreme Court decision is going to destroy the world, we fail to notice that the Walt Disney Corporation – an organization whose power to influence American culture is, frankly, greater than that of the Supreme Court – has become a highly effective purveyor of moral edification.

I’m not pretending that we aren’t in for a rough ride. The recent decisions of the court are going to hurt a lot of people, mostly those they are intended to help. That sucks and it’s going to be hell. But that’s not the question. The question is whether the whole culture moves together in one direction, or if there are also countervailing winds – winds that might actually turn out to be more important.

If you had told me a few years ago that Disney – the great high citadel of Romantic individualism! – would conquer the whole world with a devastating attack on Romantic individualism (a movie whose moral is “love is putting other people’s needs ahead of yours”) and then conquer the whole world again just a year and a half later with yet another devastating attack on Romantic individualism (a movie whose moral I have summarized as “Joy is Life, Sadness is Wisdom”) I’d have said you were bonkers. But there it is.

The bad news is always right where you expect to find it. The good news never is.

Culture is not simple; it defies uniform categorization. And of all the complex interlocking systems that make it up, law is not the most important. Otherwise, why do seemingly “sound” judges keep going the wrong way? If the law were at the top of the culture heap, judges would not show such a pronounced tendency to, as they say, “grow in office.” We’re fools if we think the problem is individual lack of virtue on the part of the judges. They are responsible for their own choices, of course, but that can be true and yet at the same time there can also be valid systemic explanations for their choices. Or, to put it another way, we need to ask not only “did the judges fail?” but “given that judges fail, why do so many fail in this particular, specific way?” The answer is that other forces are more culturally powerful than the law.

Or consider, as we have noted several times on HT, the striking consensus that has emerged among cultural elites that divorce and illegitimacy are destroying the poor. Now, there are two ways people who believe what we believe can respond to that. One is to say, “those elites have adopted a Romantic individualist understanding of what marriage is, and until they repent from that no progress can be made; culture is simple and unitary and straightforward and it all interlocks neatly and there is never, absolutely never, any space for internal contradictions. Therefore this new consensus is of no value.” Or we can say, “here’s an opportunity we can seize upon. Without giving any ground on our principles regarding the definition of marriage, let’s work together with these elites to enact reforms that curtail divorce and illegitimacy. When they discover that these reforms are beneficial, we will then be in a much stronger position to explain to them why those reforms had the effect they had – and thus, over time, destabilize their commitment to a Romantic individualist understanding of what marriage is.”

The real problem is not that the enemies of justice and mercy are enemies of justice and mercy. The real problem is that the friends of justice and mercy are too busy cursing the darkness to seize the candle-lighting opportunities that are right in front of their noses.

I close with a reflection I offered last year in my review of Joseph Bottum’s book, which advocates despair:

Bottum himself—unconsciously, perhaps—shows us again and again why we need hope and how we can live it out…You can especially see it in his magnificent chapter on John Paul II. Bottum takes us from the days Karol Wojtyla spent in January 1945 helping clear a gigantic pile of frozen-solid human excrement out of an abandoned seminary building in Cracow, using nothing but a trowel, to his triumphant return to Poland as pope, and beyond. As Bottum emphasizes time and again, John Paul refused to accept the narrow constraints of what appeared, superficially, to be possible—because of his hope. John Paul saw the unseen layer of the world, and that is why he knew with certainty that the counsels of despair were wrong. By bearing witness to hope, he made the impossible possible.

He was willing to spend days on end chiseling human waste out of an abandoned seminary because that was what it took to prevent Soviet troops from marching in and claiming the building. His Christian hope told him that the structures of a culture will ultimately be occupied not by those who have more guns, but by those who do the hard and undignified work of clearing out the excrement. That hope did not put him to shame…

Perhaps Bottum hasn’t fully internalized his own critique of those narrow-minded sociologists of religion. Perhaps he lacks a strong enough faith to have hope. Or perhaps he just feels it’s beneath his dignity to join those of us who will spend the coming generation chiseling gigantic piles of excrement out of the abandoned buildings of American culture. But if God ever does kindle the spark of hope in Bottum’s heart, we’ve got a trowel waiting for him.

Yes, it’s going to suck. But the shit is not going to scrape itself off the floor of American culture.

Trowel’s waiting. Get to work or get out of the way.

I recently had a great time discussing the problem of “grumpy moralism” in a radio interview with Jerry Bowyer. A partial transcript of the interview is now up on the Forbes website:

DR. FORSTER:  I would connect it to what we were saying before about many people having overinvested in rationalism.  Because when arguments fail to work, people don’t know what to do.  If you can’t argue with somebody, you begin to see them as subhuman.  And so this sort of grumpy moralism arises from a sense of impotence — powerlessness — that ‘our argument is clearly right, but why is nobody seeing it? Look how terrible the world is becoming (when it goes the wrong way) yet why is nobody seeing it?’There’s an anger and frustration I think that –

JERRY:  I know, I’ll yell louder.

DR. FORSTER:  Yeah, yeah, that will do it.

He had some very kind words about my book:

JERRY:  Your book is “Joy for the World.”  It’s interesting, when I read it, if you were here with me, I would show you that I wrote a two-word summary of the book in the inside cover.  Two-word summary was “More singing!” with an explanation point.

DR. FORSTER:  I love it.

JERRY:  And I’m going to stick with that.

This is my view (and I affirm the protasis):

if the liberal order is fracturing whether we like it or not—then we should argue for marriage not because the Supreme Court overstepped its authority, but because marriage is true and same-sex marriage is false

(source: Liberal Limits—and Our Opportunity | Brandon McGinley | First Things)

Amen, Peter. You do realize, of course, that almost no one presently alive has ever lived in a society in which marriage is anything other than an optional (and when consummated, temporary) matter of convenience that exists for the purpose of providing tax breaks, family health insurance policies, and rules of descent? Teaching them that the particular piece of reality we call “marriage” is impervious to their efforts to redefine it requires that they first abandon the way they comprehend the world. And they really, really like how they comprehend the world. They like it so much they would sooner reduce society to rubble than desist. If you have any thoughts on how to undertake this Herculean task, with some hope it isn’t Sisyphean, I’ll look forward to them.

(source: Back to Life, Back to Reality | Hang Together)

I know of nothing I can do, here, but pray, study, teach, and advocate–I know of nothing else that would work.  When I have a chance to influence policy questions, I choose the one which best approximates what I advocate:  in results and expression, if possible; in results alone, if the expression isn’t counterproductive; in expression alone, if I can’t get results; that system leaks in the middle, but is better than advocating merely symbolic voting, quietism, or an indefinitely-removed-from-any-real-ends pragmatism.

And I plan to spend my life trying to ensure that as many as possible are hedged, sandbagged, and provisioned to last out the winter of our culture’s failure.  All the while softly hoping that I’ll be proved wrong, that there were hundreds of prophets in the next cave over, that Hercules was ready with a shim to wedge the boulder at the top.  Softly hoping, not smirking with futile optimism.

Forgive me for being too much of a poet, but I can live with relative despair to avoid absolute despair.  Faced with despair, our alienated moderns still reflexively reach for something that simulates reality, even if they have to wrap it in subjectivist gobbledygook:

Yet there remains a persistent counterimpulse, an irresistible tug toward stasis and toward those truths that, in Melville’s words, will not be comforted. At the antipode of American exuberance and optimism there is the poet’s small, still, private voice, the voice of individual conscience; the voice, for instance, of Dickinson, who, like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, mined the ideal vocabulary for investigating those shifting, penumbral states of consciousness that do, in the long run, constitute our lives. Whatever our public identities may be, whatever our official titles, our heralded or derided achievements and the statistics that accrue to us like cobwebs, this is the voice we trust. For, if despair’s temptations can be resisted, surely we become more human and compassionate, more like one another in our common predicament.

There is a pain — so utter —
It swallows substance up —
Then covers the Abyss with Trance —
So Memory can step Around — across — upon it —
As one within a Swoon —
Goes safely — where an open eye —
Would drop Him — Bone by Bone. [Emily Dickinson]

(source: The Deadly Sins/Despair – The One Unforgivable Sin – NYTimes.com)

Or, as someone alienated from faith still earlier than Joyce Carol Oates penned in persona Sancti Pauli:

As long as there are glasses that are dark—
And there are many—we see darkly through them;
All which have I conceded and set down
In words that have no shadow. What is dark
Is dark, and we may not say otherwise;
Yet what may be as dark as a lost fire
For one of us, may still be for another
A coming gleam across the gulf of ages,
And a way home from shipwreck to the shore;
And so, through pangs and ills and desperations,
There may be light for all. There shall be light.
As much as that, you know. You cannot say
This woman or that man will be the next
On whom it falls; you are not here for that.
Your ministration is to be for others
The firing of a rush that may for them
Be soon the fire itself. The few at first
Are fighting for the multitude at last;
Therefore remember what Gamaliel said
Before you, when the sick were lying down
In streets all night for Peter’s passing shadow.
Fight, and say what you feel; say more than words.
Give men to know that even their days of earth
To come are more than ages that are gone.
Say what you feel, while you have time to say it.

(source: Three taverns : a book of poems / by Edwin Arlington Robinson [electronic text])

What would I do, but educate and advocate, and build and share with my neighbors?  What else is there to be done, when “trust in princes” and faith in the tenuous consensus of the Founding has been so thoroughly given the Pharoah’s-plague treatment by an entirely natural, yet wholly unnatural, swarm of locusts over the past many, many years (go back at least to Reconstruction)?

I know Greg will writhe at this vocabulary, but I can think of no honest alternative.

And if the result is rubble, well, then I will build with rubble.  It has been done before.

But this is why I speak of the self-destruction of classical liberalism by its anti-realist fecklessness in the face of those who have learned how to rig the language-game in their favor as the entrance of a new Dark Age.  Because whether it is comfortable and materially prosperous for a while, or whether our spiritual indigence is manifested rapidly, the dominant modes of thought and living in our culture promise darkness and poverty, narrowing and alienation, on a scale properly called cataclysmic.  (should it actually be Apocalyptic, well, Laudate Deo!)

Reality does have a way of asserting itself.

I’m going to mention this post again, because in light of a stray (and on its own terms quite sensible) remark in an interview with Chicago’s new Archbishop Cupich [ https://www.facebook.com/news.va.en/posts/957325920998092 ] and other comments I’ve seen, it seems relevant.

There are several word/thing relationships that we really MUST distinguish (not sever, sunder, separate, or believe to be exclusive–but observe that the terms do not refer to precisely the same thing in precisely the same way). Let me just enumerate as briefly as I can manage:

1. marriage per se, or “natural marriage”
2. marriage of the baptized, or “sacramental marriage”
3. civil recognition of marriage
4. ecclesial recognition of marriage

Each of these deals with either a state of affairs (1 & 2, a describable, observable, intelligible, verifiable condition) or an official notice that such a state of affairs exists, needed in order to adjudicate its consequents (3 & 4, instruments whose meaning is wholly contingent on acknowledgement of a state of affairs).

In dealing with these, we potentially encounter a whole realm of “other” terms, as well, terms which describe states of notification or transition or discovery with regard to #1-4: attempted marriage, putative marriage, nullity, “annulment,” marriage license, divorce, “remarriage,” etc.

What happens to people deeply confused by the radical nominalism that undergirds our entire system of Constitutional laws and classical liberal presuppositions about politics–that is, my fellow children of the Enlightenment (made children of dubious legitimacy by the discovery that we are also Heirs of God in Christ Jesus)–is that we confuse arguing about how to settle arguments about words about things with the actual constitution of things. We barely even notice that we have quit believing we can know things, know them good and well, without our knowing being subject to renegotiation by clever wordsmiths.

I spent over a decade of my life working hard to be a card-carrying post-structuralist literary critic/theorist while also arguing that «il n’y a pas de hors-texte» opened modernity to Biblicist interpretation of divine revelation. I do know well how profoundly we are ensorcelled by our own spelling of words, friends.

But it is quite impossible that any real state of affairs–in a community, in a family, in a nation-state, in a communion–should meaningfully persist across generations merely by continuous renegotiation of words.

We must–it is utterly essential that we do this–return to an understanding in which our language (including our legal language, and especially including our “science” of humanity, which has been so badly vitiated by the separation of the reality from the data) is subordinate to reality, serves our understanding of reality, and therefore can only carry authority to the extent that its claims are demonstrably about reality.

In such an understanding of reality, a cleverly construed counterexample to one register of a word’s meaning would not justify erasure of that word’s connection to the reality which is always, intrinsically, greater than the word. Where such an understanding of reality is institutionalized, nihilism is not permitted to win; it is prevented, with authority backed by power, from doing so. Only such an understanding preserves human life and provides for the flourishing of those who, body and breath, have “become a living soul” and may, by becoming “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh,” cause others to do the same.

And so, I apologize to those whose critiques of post-structuralist hermeneutics I scoffed at when I, like some who read me now, mistakenly believed that I could see the trajectory better than they. Their vantage was superior, and what I have said above is deeply dependent on the words of others.

But it really does come to this: a state of affairs exists; that state of affairs has consequences; those consequences implicate civil society and ecclesial communion; and the only just way to acknowledge that state of affairs and adjudicate those consequences is one which preserves the essential distinctions between one sort of thing–a marriage, that is, a potentially fecund, indissoluble, voluntary bond between a man and a woman–and whatever other sorts of things you might like to arrange.

It is this distinction, and not any larger “religious” versus “secular” distinction, which is really at issue, here. It is not a question of whose will is to be imposed, though our incoherent politics makes it so, but of what really *is* and whether we plan to compel each other to lie about it.

And it is the situation of this question at present as “you must all lie, or you will be treated as beyond-the-pale, as those who have no claim on justice while you persist in these views” to which the faithful have no choice but to vigorously and vehemently object, and which we are obligated to use all just means to resist, reverse, undermine, and nullify.

Or, as I said in the linked post:   Continue reading →