Larison v. Bottum
Just to draw your attention to some of the best, yet least heralded blogging going on in the world today - I would like to point my beloved readers to Daniel Larison who has gone on an amazing tear into the writings of First Things editor Joseph Bottum- on the Death Penalty, the "New Fusionism" and T.S. Eliot.
The funny thing is that I provoked him into this flurry of dissent.
Regarding Mr. Bottum's recent article on the "New Fusionism" I have my own thoughts which I hope to have published in ink on paper. However I will borrow heavily on Mr. Larison's work particularly in this section:
Only servants of revolution believe that America is "for" something, as if it had no other value if it could not be turned to realise some ideological fantasy. America is a historically and culturally constituted reality, whose purpose, if we must speak of it, is known only to God and ordained by Him. She is not an abstraction or the embodiment of a Creed, nor is she is the repository of any ideology in particular. The time may come, indeed it is already upon us, when the quaint liberal faith of eighteenth century notions and its various even more gross perversions will begin to fade away, taking with it the ideological "content" of the terrible simplifiers, and there will still be an America that will be part of a continuity with our earliest history. What the culture of that America will be depends on whether anything of the old traditions will be preserved and transmitted to posterity, and whether our memory of America will outlast that of the people who destroyed so much of her constitutional and Christian heritage. - Daniel Larison
As usual Mr. Larison writes with a cogency few posses. If someone published Mr. Larison in print regularly the enemies of civilization would have much to fear. Do enjoy the rest- all the links are provided under the references.
Posted on 8/10/2005 12:10 AM
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Michael Brendan Dougherty
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Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Politics
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4 Comments
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8 References
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References allow you to track sources for this article, as well as articles that were written in response to this article.
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Source: Christians and the Death Penaltyn 1981, on the campus of Cornell University, Michael Ross murdered a young woman named Dzung Ngoc Tu. Over the next year, he raped and killed Tammy Williams, Paula Perrera, and Debra Smith Taylor. In 1983, he added Robin Stavinsky. On Easter Sunday in 1984, he abducted, sexually assaulted, and strangled Leslie Shelley and April Brunais, both just fourteen years old, after he caught them walking along a Connecticut road. Two months later, he raped and killed another Connecticut girl, the seventee -
Source: The New FusionismSocial conservatives, fiscal conservatives, libertarians, agrarians, communitarians, foreign-policy hawks--who can figure them out? Neocons and theocons and paleocons, to say nothing of soccer-mom Republicans, country-club Republicans, and just plain, garden-variety Republicans: If you read much political commentary, it must seem as though there are more ways to sort conservatives in America than there are actual conservatives to be sorted.
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Source: Christians and the Death Penaltyetting aside the schizophrenic and bizarre attitude of different First Things' editors towards the legitimacy of the state's use of violence (aggressive war OK, capital punishment less so), one might say that Mr. Bottum's article cries out for a response. Michael Dougherty of Surfeited with Dainties drew my attention to the article, suggesting that I might be moved to write a lengthy response. Actually, there is not much worth addressing, since most of the article is not so much a statement of
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A few things should be cleared up. In the Orthodox Church, as among Catholics, the Fathers do not 'endorse' capital punishment, partly because almost all Fathers of the Church have not lived in societies where the usage of capital punishment was ever seriously questioned on moral or any other grounds, so that it was especially incumbent on them to try to alleviate the harshness of a law that would undoubtedly be too brutal. Most never saw a world where the taking of innocent life could be treate
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nstead of "new fusionism," I might suggest the moniker: "unholy alliance." But that might be all together too angry and 'neoconfederate'. I am grateful that Mr. Bottum could at least admit that his brand of "conservatism" hasn't much to do with anything that went by that name in the past. There is not much point in trying to explain to someone at First Things why remaining true to the older conservatism of the New Conservatives, the Old Right, a panoply of great American and European figures bef
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Source: Defining Away ConservatismCaught up as I was in my 'neoconfederate' anger (what's wrong with being neo-Confederate anyway? it's a lot better than being neo-Jacobin!), I neglected to point out one of the more glaring bits of nonsense about American conservatism that Mr. Bottum has provided his audience. The irony was lost on Mr. Bottum that he and his crowd have done a good deal to confuse a "murderous" ideology of nationalism with admirable patriotism, corrupting many hitherto fairly decent Americans with their poison of
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Source: What T.S. Eliot Almost BelievedWhat passes in the human heart is known to God alone, and the private spiritual life of T. S. Eliot may have been rich and full. But Eliot's publicly presented spirituality-the spirituality in the Four Quartets, Murder in the Cathedral, and The Rock-seems merely weak and strange. Not all spirituality is exuberant or bright, of course. There exists a real spirituality, like John Henry Newman's, that spends itself in the mad, dry attempt to make our inexact words say the exact things of faith exac
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Source: Eliot and FaithWhat strikes the reader at once about Mr. Bottum's article is the ever so post-modern (ironic) penchant for demystifying and discrediting respected figures, and what could be more iconoclastic than belittling the spiritual vision of the 20th century English-language poet most noted for his Christian spiritual vision? Many real and pretend conservatives feel the need to develop a 'clever' or slightly 'subversive' take on some notable figure or event in the past, as if eccentricity and idiosyncrac
Reader Comments (4)
I think American conservatives put too much stock in our "constitutional heritage." Lest we forget, this was the document that gave us "freedom of religion" and "separation of church and state," concepts which ushered in our becoming a pluralistic society (as well as one plagued by Islamic terror). It was a document that grew in no small part out of the minds of Freemansons and freethinkers. In its original form (i.e., absent the incoporation doctrine, the "wall of separation" ruling, and the citizenship clause) there is little or nothing about the constitution to which a Christian might object. It is not, however, the Bible, nor, in spite of what men like Peroutka would like to believe, is it deeply rooted in the Bible.
Furthermore, if we attempt to define our identity around the constitution, we will have become exactly what Larison has admonished against: "an abstraction or the embodiment of a Creed."
Constitutional republicanism and chartered rights are fundamental to the American political tradition, and it would do severe violence to the political organism if we were to ignore those things in any political vision we might put forward. Obviously, if we were to pin our hopes on any restoration of constitutional government as being a sort of panacea for all other ills we would be fools, but that is not what I am suggesting. Neither am I suggesting that it is some divinely inspired document, or a font of wisdom or a somehow intrinsically Christian document, all of which are silly, idolatrous and generally confused claims. I am suggesting, at the very least, that we convey to our descendants our understanding of our political tradition to keep alive a commitment to a proper, limited constitutional republicanism, just as we would try to keep alive any other tradition that we consider vital to who we are as a people and what has made our civilisation what it is (thus also aiding in understanding why that civilisation failed and how the edifice might be built better). Our identity is not defined by our constitutional heritage, but that heritage is a part of our history and thus part of who we have been. That seems to me to be intrinsically worth preserving, both for the edification it can provide and the cautionary lessons it offers.
If we object to freedom of religion and 'separation', we can hardly pin them on the Framers. There is no such thing as 'separation of church and state', not even on the federal level, and I don't see how we can hold the Framers responsible for gross and willful abuses of judges and politicians who lived decades or centuries later. It is exactly the original form of the Constitution to which I am referring. Obviously, various usurpations over the last 140 years hardly count towards our "heritage," when they are an affront to that heritage.
Freedom of religion, as the Framers would have understood it, was an established and expected right of Englishmen dating back to the Act of Toleration under James II, and we can find various precedents for such toleration in some form dating back to earlier in the Reformation period. If we regard freedom of religion as largely pernicious, as I do, that is a flaw of English and German culture that long predates our settlements.
There must have been some misunderstanding, if Mr. Moses believes I was advocating defining our identity around the Constitution. That was precisely the point of distinguishing between the "quaint liberal" vision of the late 18th century and the living, historical reality of America as a particular place with its own people. American identity cannot be pigeonholed by any political position or ideology, as it is inevitably far richer and more interesting than tired, lame invocations of liberty. It would be an understanding of our identity that does not shun our European roots, nor belittle our 170 years of history under monarchy nor banish from memory men such as the Loyalists, who were in many respects better patriots and Americans than the patriot rebels. The Loyalists also were committed to their constitutional heritage, which means that there was and always is a way to see that heritage in ways that are not necessarily subversive, impious or tending towards pluralism and godlessness.
I do think that some people tend to oversimplify things, though. It is hard to denounce the French Revolution without having at least some skepticism at the assumptions that drove our own. The men who founded this country were infected with some of the same thoughts that displayed themselves so terrifyingly in the Reign of Terror. Liberalism crept in far more slowly in the United States than it did in France, but it is a mistake to think that we were not just as vulnerable. We've not descended into a large-scale Reign of Terror (yet), we might never do so, but we have been kiling ourselves off in sneakier ways.
I couldn't agree more with Mr. Moses about the Revolution. That is part of the reason why I became so interested in the Loyalists, their ideas and their mistreatment. They represented a solidly conservative force in this country, and one of the foundational acts of our republic was to cast them out. For all the legitimate observations that the rebellion was a "conservative revolution," there is no denying that the flaws in early republican liberalism are the same false assumptions about society and human nature that were simply taken to their dreadful, logical conclusions by the Jacobins et al.