The Long View 2007-07-11: Let's Pick on First Things
Under editor Rusty Reno, First Things has posted a slate of articles recently about the post-liberal future, which in some ways could be seen as a change from the pro-democracy stance First Things took under Father Neuhaus. However, there was the famous End of Democracy issue in 1996 that caused half of the editorial board to resign in protest, and then this from Fr. Neuhaus in 2007, as he reconsidered his support for the Iraq War:
The claim that we are imposing our values, says the president, "is refuted by the fact that every time people are given a choice, they choose freedom." It is by no means evident that the people of Iraq, for instance, who bravely turned out in the millions to participate in elections, were choosing freedom. It is more likely they were voting for the dominance of their tribe against other tribes determined to dominate them. It would seem that freedom, as the liberal-democratic tradition construes freedom, is in fact un-Islamic.
In the past, and at present, liberal democracy is not the only alternative to "tyranny." There have been and there are today relatively benign forms of monarchy or oligarchy, also in Islamic countries...There is another vocabulary of "justice" and "respect" that can advance the same goals but has a more positive resonance in Islamic countries.
John J. Reilly noted that this, plus a number of other arguments that appeared about the same time, have an “autumnal chill”, by which he means not when the leaves fall, but rather the period in Oswald Spengler’s model of history when a society reaches its final form. Nothing much changes, but this is usually the period that produces the most distinctive art by which any given civilization is remembered.
I was thinking of this because I read Robert Gordon’s classic paper, IS U.S. ECONOMIC GROWTH OVER? FALTERING INNOVATION CONFRONTS THE SIX HEADWINDS. One of the key things I learned from John is that the slow loss of dynamism societies such as ours experience is a feature, not a bug.
Let's Pick on First Things
I was appalled by the treatment that the press gave Summorum Pontificum in the first days after its release. Aside from accounts of the bare facts of the document (if you want a Tridentine Mass and a priest to say it, you can have one), most "reporting" seemed to be taken from a press release from the ADL, claiming that "the Latin Mass" is antisemitic. We know by now that the ADL does this kind of thing not from any particular antipathy to Catholicism, but as a fundraising device. Still, it rankled.
What rankled still more (at least to me, who perhaps spends too much time reading news-aggregation websites) was that the Vatican was making no effort to keep control of the story. Quite the opposite: it issued the document in the summer, on a Saturday afternoon, without a press conference. Then Pope Benedict gave his followers the holy high sign and left for a long vacation at Castle Gandolfo. The Vatican was trying to bury the document as a news event.
In retrospect, I see that this was a very canny move. The Catholic liturgical establishment does not support wider use of the Latin Mass, to put it mildly. The Vatican could not look for wide support from the local diocesan bureaucracies. If the Vatican had opened a media battle to promote Summorum Pontificum, the Vatican would have lost. Neither would a media battle have been consistent with the document's contents or intent. The document is an announcement of a return to a policy of organic development. Revolutionary rhetoric would have defeated the purpose.
Nonetheless, the document was long expected and widely anticipated, so that people who are expected to comment on this sort of thing were obligated to comment. Not least of these is Fr. Richard John Neuhaus at First Things. His analysis of the document earlier this week noted some points that had escaped me, such as the fact that Benedict refers to the Latin Mass at issue here as "the Missal of John XXIII." It's perfectly true; the Latin Mass that is being revived is the version that the great 20th-century patron of reform edited and issued.
RJN was not pleased with much of the press reaction, either:
As I say, the ADL reaction is a mix of bellicosity and ignorance. The 1962 Missal does not say what Mr. Foxman says it says. And, if he had read Benedict’s apostolic letter before attacking it, he would know that it explicitly says that the Missal of 1970 will be used exclusively in the Triduum of Holy Week, which of course includes Good Friday. An apology is in order but I fear it is not to be expected from an organization that is prone to making reckless and publicity-grabbing statements. It is a sadness.
Actually, I am not sure that the motu proprio itself settles the matter of the Good Friday liturgy:
Art. 2. In Masses celebrated without the people, any priest of Latin rite, whether secular or religious, can use the Roman Missal published by Pope Blessed John XXIII in 1962 or the Roman Missal promulgated by the Supreme Pontiff Paul VI in 1970, on any day except in the Sacred Triduum. For celebration in accordance with one or the other Missal, a priest does not require any permission, neither from the Apostolic See nor his own Ordinary.
I think this relates only to private Masses, not to public Masses at ordinary parishes, much less to Masses offered at entities that have already received special permission to employ the Tridentine use exclusively. On the other hand, I would expect that the general supervisory authority of the local bishop would extend to demanding the Novus Ordo on Good Friday.
RJN was not available for clarification, either: having posted the above at the First Things blog, he immediately left for a long conference in Poland.
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Meanwhile, back in meatspace, there is an article in the current (August/September) issue of First Things by Harvey Mansfield entitled "How to Understand Politics." The gist of it is that modern political theory lacks a category for thumos, the "spirited" element in the model of the human personality familiar to us from Plato. If I understand correctly, the article's thesis is that we are missing something if we do not know that history is moved not just by need, or the desire for justice, or even by rational self-interest, but also by ambition.
There are two sentences in the article that are worth remembering:
You can tell who is in charge of a society by noticing who is allowed to get angry and for what cause, rather than by trying to gauge how much each group has.
To complain of an injustice is an implicit claim to rule.
These statements are not facts, but truths. Their opposites would not be falsehoods, but other truths.
* * *
America, Islam, and a Somewhat More Peaceful World is the name of (yet another!) article in the current First Things by Fr. Neuhaus (yet again!). RJN was never an uncritical admirer of President Bush's Wilsonianism. In this piece, more in sorrow than in anger, he seems to part company entirely:
The claim that we are imposing our values, says the president, "is refuted by the fact that every time people are given a choice, they choose freedom." It is by no means evident that the people of Iraq, for instance, who bravely turned out in the millions to participate in elections, were choosing freedom. It is more likely they were voting for the dominance of their tribe against other tribes determined to dominate them. It would seem that freedom, as the liberal-democratic tradition construes freedom, is in fact un-Islamic.
In the past, and at present, liberal democracy is not the only alternative to "tyranny." There have been and there are today relatively benign forms of monarchy or oligarchy, also in Islamic countries...There is another vocabulary of "justice" and "respect" that can advance the same goals but has a more positive resonance in Islamic countries.
Maybe. Wilsonianism as a project for world order is based on the Kantian notion that perpetual peace would be possible only in a world of liberal republics. Kant linked perpetual peace with the liberal republic because the political system of the latter was by definition "transparent": governments could not declare war in secret or pay for them without public support. However, Kant did not quite equate "liberal republic" with "democracy." In Kant's terminology, the Prussian constitutional monarchy was (or could be) a "liberal republic."
Still, I for one sense an autumnal chill from this logic. The reasoning is disturbing for the same reason that Pat Buchanan's argument that America should have remained neutral in the 20th-century world wars is disturbing. As I said in my review of A Republic, Not an Empire:
Whatever else would have happened had Germany won the First World War, one thing that would surely have happened is that America would have become an anachronism. The Great Republic, which Buchanan is so eager to preserve, would have been merely the chief specimen of a class of political society that had been tried and found wanting. That was certainly how the elite circles in Germany saw the war, as a contest between the liberal democracies of the West and the Hegelian state as embodied in Germany. That was also how people in France and England saw it.
At the risk of repeating myself: if democracy is not necessary universally, then it is not, in principle, necessary in America, either. The organizers of the European Union seem willing, even eager, to create a liberal republic that would not be a democracy in more than a ceremonial sense. (I sometimes also get this impression from the leading voices in American constitutional jurisprudence.) The problem with the political theory behind this project is that it overlooks precisely the factor that Harvey Mansfield made in the article cited above: the role of thumos in history. The post-democratic liberal republic, and even more so an international system built in its image, is less likely to lead to Patrick Kennon's parousia of the bureaucrats than it is to Caesarism. I am not a great fan of Leo Strauss, but forgive me for quoting from my review of On Tyranny:
Voegelin defines that as a post-constitutional situation in which a return to republican government is no longer possible. That makes it unlike tyranny, which could and did alternate with various forms of constitutional government. In reply, Strauss says that Caesarism is a kind of legitimate monarchy. It may sometimes be the best that a society can do. Here is Strauss's explanation for why classical philosophy did not address the issue:
“The true distinction between Caesarism and tyranny is too subtle for ordinary practical use. It is better for the people to remain ignorant of that distinction and to regard the potential Caesar as a potential tyrant. No harm can come from this theoretical error, which becomes a practical truth if the people have the mettle to act upon it. No harm can come from the political identification of Caesarism and tyranny: Caesars can take care of themselves.”
Actually, in the critical generation of Roman history, the people had no trouble in distinguishing between tyranny and Caesarism: they chose the latter.
* * *
I would pursue these reflections in greater detail, but I am about to take off for the Jersey Shore.
Copyright © 2007 by John J. Reilly
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