Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 190

civility revisited

My friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey has written a lovely defense of civility as a political virtue. Her case is essentially prudential, grounded in what should be the obvious fact that the winners of any given American political fight will still be living in the same country as the losers:

What happens when one side has won? Will the tactics employed in winning have made the victory worthwhile? Will the winners restore civility, or will they decide that the losers, having held the wrong ideas, must be dominated and forced into submission? These questions highlight the problems with political warfare within a country, just as in a marital fight or neighborhood dispute. What was said in anger and frustration will not be forgotten, and all the participants must still live together. The insults will often outlive the battle and poison the community, foreclosing the possibility of connecting in other ways.

Moreover, Corey argues, the American founders built a system that disincentivizes heatedness and extremism of passion, and rewards instead patience and collaboration:

Recognizing the universal inclination toward excessive self-interest, Alexander Hamilton pleaded for moderation (and implicitly, civility) in Federalist 1. There he lamented that political parties would likely “hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives.” Yet he knew that in politics, “as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.” Thus Hamilton and others advocated for a system in which power checked power, and no one person or branch of government could dominate opponents in this way.

To practice civility, then, is to work with the grain of the American Constitutional system.

Corey’s argument has received a rather scornful reply by Scott Yenor, but unfortunately Yenor pays no attention to what Corey wrote and devotes his time instead to constructing a straw man. Central to Yenor’s response is his claim that “civility demands that we … put the best construction on everything,” which is, he says, suicidally naïve. But Corey never claims that civility makes such a demand; nor does any other defender of civility that I know of. Civility is a set of practices, and those practices can (and if Corey is correct, should) be cultivated regardless of what the practitioner knows or guesses about the motives and character of the person on the other side of an argument.

Yenor has a long laundry list of situations in which leftists have been uncivil to conservatives — I guess he couldn’t find any examples of the reverse, though I’m sure he looked hard for them — and claims that civility “cannot provide an adequate political response in such circumstances.” If by “adequate” he means “sufficient,” then Corey doesn’t claim that either; the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions applies here. Civility can be a necessary political virtue without being the only one needful.

Yenor asserts over and over again that civility is useless or worse, but he never once addresses Corey’s arguments for its prudential usefulness, especially within the American constitutional context. If he had tried to address what she actually argued — instead of building straw men and making the utterly ad hominem suggestion that she has “excessive worry about gaining a reputation for incivility” — he might have found the case against civility harder to make than he does.

But there’s something on the other side of prudence and usefulness, at least for some of us. Let’s move towards that.

I want to return to a passage that I earlier quoted with ellipses and quote the whole of it: “civility demands that we teachers (and we Christians) put the best construction on everything.” (Again, the claim is simply false, but never mind.) So Yenor is a Christian. What consequence does that fact have for his thinking about politics? It’s hard to tell from this piece. But I think one ought to be able to discern something even in so brief an essay, if only because of its topic.

At one point he writes,

Civility is a philosophic and scholarly virtue. Still, there is a chasm between philosophy and the city. The place of civility in politics is much more circumscribed. It is pretty to think we are not at war. But if we are at war, then civility is worse than useless. It is unilateral disarmament. Civility is a philosophic and scholarly virtue. Still, there is a chasm between philosophy and the city. The place of civility in politics is much more circumscribed. It is pretty to think we are not at war. But if we are at war, then civility is worse than useless. It is unilateral disarmament. It is a lullaby that prevents us from seeing and acting as is necessary or that presumes that the conflicts are less fundamental than they are.

Insofar as civility has any role in politics whatever, then, it “is a virtue fit for small ball politics, not for civil wars, cold or hot.”

What I wonder is whether civility is a Christian virtue. That depends, as I wrote a while back, “on whether ‘civility’ is a useful shorthand proxy for a series of traits that certainly are Christian virtues: patience, forbearance, kindness, generosity, turning the other cheek, blessing those who spitefully use you, etc.” Whether civility is indeed related to those virtues — for the record, it certainly is — there seems to be no place for any of them in Yenor’s conception of politics. He certainly gives every appearance of conceiving of the sphere of politics as a realm where the writ of Jesus does not run. Jesus seems to be on the other side of the “chasm” Yenor describes.

I hear all the time from my fellow Christians arguments along the lines of Yenor’s: that pollitics is a hard game, that these are not ordinary times, that we are in a crisis, that desperate times require desperate measures, that, yes, trying to practice the virtues we are repeatedly commanded in Scripture to cultivate is in politics naïve and indeed indefensible — that we must do what is “necessary.”

Elizabeth Corey has made an eloquent prudential case for civility in politics, which deserves a more far more careful and attentive engagement than Yenor has given it. But prudence is not the only consideration for the Christian. If anyone lived through extraordinary circumstances, it was a a man who was rejected and scorned by his own people, then arrested, tortured, and crucified by Roman officials, but who nevertheless said of all his killers, as he hung dying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Such absolute forgiveness may be beyond our reach, but perhaps the more easily acquired virtue of civility is achievable. Indeed, I suspect that it is, and moreover is, according to a calculus Yenor disdains, necessary. 

P. S. Whenever I make this argument, or one like it, I get at least one email from a reader who reminds me that Jesus drove the moneylenders from the Temple. This event looms large in the imaginations of many Christians, so large that it displaces everything else Jesus ever did or said. Jesus may have made some casual comments about turning the other cheek and blessing those who spitefully use you, but he turned over the moneylenders’ tables so watch me kick some ass. (This is not a tendency confined to the religious right, by the. The most enthusiastic proponents of this particular hermeneutics I have ever seen are decidedly left-wing pacifists.) 

individualism

For the past hundred years or so, we have had a vast multifarious culture industry devoted to the critique of individualism. Individualism, we have been told over and over again, is the acid bath in which all previous forms of social attachment have been dissolved.

Take — as just one example among a thousand possible ones — Allan Bloom’s famous diatribe The Closing of the American Mind (1987): 

Tocqueville describes the tip of the iceberg of advanced egalitarianism when he discusses the difficulty that a man without family lands, or a family tradition for whose continuation he is responsible, will have in avoiding individualism and seeing himself as an integral part of a past and a future, rather than as an anonymous atom in a merely changing continuum. The modern economic principle that private vice makes public virtue has penetrated all aspects of daily life in such a way that there seems to be no reason to be a conscious part of civic existence.

And:

They know the truth of Tocqueville’s dictum that “in democratic societies, each citizen is habitually busy with the contemplation of a very petty object, which is himself,” a contemplation now intensified by a greater indifference to the past and the loss of a national view of the future. The only common project engaging the youthful imagination is the exploration of space, which everyone knows to be empty. The resulting inevitable individualism, endemic to our regime, has been reinforced by another unintended and unexpected development, the decline of the family, which was the intermediary between individual and society, providing quasi-natural attachments beyond the individual, that gave men and women unqualified concern for at least some others and created an entirely different relation to society from that which the isolated individual has. 

And:

The question is whether reasonings really take the place of instincts, whether arguments about the value of tradition or roots can substitute for immediate passions, whether this whole interpretation is not just a reaction unequal to the task of stemming a tide of egalitarian, calculating individualism, which the critics themselves share, and the privileges of which they would be loath to renounce.

Bloom’s diagnosis describes a now-vanished world. Has any dominant social ethos, any regnant model of the self-in-the-world, ever died as quickly as individualism has? For indeed it is gone with the wind. 

The self as monad — the self “lost in the cosmos,” as Walker Percy described it — was blown far away by the derecho of social media. What remained was not, Lord knows, an identification with humanity or even with a body of belief, but rather merger with some amorphous body of people with the same sexual orientation, or gender identity, or race, or ethnicity, or designation as a “deplorable.” Think of how many sentences now begin with “As a [fill in the blank]” — sentences spoken and written by people who do not know how to express ideas of their own but only to begin by attaching themselves to a group and claiming the authority they perceive intrinsic to that group. 

In this environment, John Danaher and Steve Petersen’s forthcoming essay “In Defence of the Hivemind Society” was inevitable. It’s an articulation in philosophical form of what has already become a felt reality, the dominant felt reality for at least a billion people.  

The question, for me, is whether this increasingly widespread abandonment of individualism in favor of group identities can be leveraged to argue on behalf of the kinds of group identities that individualism discarded, especially the ties of family and membership in religious communities. I have my doubts, but I can’t think of anything more essential for those of a conservative disposition or of Christian faith to think about. 

So long, individualism. It wasn’t all that nice knowing you. 

“not living merely for himself”

In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Tom Bertram — the feckless, selfish, wayward elder son of Sir Thomas Bertram — becomes very ill. It starts with a fever, but even after the fever diminishes he lingers on in a bad state. “They were apprehensive for his lungs.” (I was teaching the book yesterday and asked my students, “What does that sound like?”)

Near the end of the book we learn that Tom’s recovery is a source of reassurance to his father in difficult times:

There was comfort also in Tom, who gradually regained his health, without regaining the thoughtlessness and selfishness of his previous habits. He was the better for ever for his illness. He had suffered, and he had learned to think: two advantages that he had never known before; and the self-reproach arising from [his earlier bad behavior] made an impression on his mind which, at the age of six-and-twenty, with no want of sense or good companions, was durable in its happy effects. He became what he ought to be: useful to his father, steady and quiet, and not living merely for himself.

That’s what we should most hope when we hear that a thoughtless, unreflective, self-centered person has contracted a serious illness: that he learns to think; that he experiences self-reproach; that he emerges from the illness steadier, quieter, and more useful to others. We should surely pray for such an outcome.

I know there were people last night watching the debate a...

I know there were people last night watching the debate and then live-tweeting their responses — like people in the Ninth Circle of Hell who don’t think their circumstances are bad enough and try to dig a Tenth Circle with their bleeding raw fingers.

Proudhon to Marx

Lyon, 17 May 1846:

Let us seek together, if you wish, the laws of society, the manner in which these laws are realized, the process by which we shall succeed in discovering them; but, for God’s sake, after having demolished all the a priori dogmatisms, do not let us in our turn dream of indoctrinating the people; do not let us fall into the contradiction of your compatriot Martin Luther, who, having overthrown Catholic theology, at once set about, with excommunication and anathema, the foundation of a Protestant theology. For the last three centuries Germany has been mainly occupied in undoing Luther’s shoddy work; do not let us leave humanity with a similar mess to clear up as a result of our efforts. I applaud with all my heart your thought of bringing all opinions to light; let us carry on a good and loyal polemic; let us give the world an example of learned and far-sighted tolerance, but let us not, merely because we are at the head of a movement, make ourselves the leaders of a new intolerance, let us not pose as the apostles of a new religion, even if it be the religion of logic, the religion of reason. Let us gather together and encourage all protests, let us brand all exclusiveness, all mysticism; let us never regard a question as exhausted, and when we have used our last argument, let us begin again, if need be, with eloquence and irony. On that condition, I will gladly enter your association. Otherwise — no!

Emphases mine. Edmund Wilson: “The result of this incident was that Marx was to set upon Proudhon’s new book with a ferocity entirely inconsonant with the opinion of the value of Proudhon’s earlier work which he had expressed and which he was to reiterate later” (To the Finland Station, p. 154).

readings

Gary Dorrien:

Here is where Temple still matters as a theorist of guild socialism. In the early 1940s, both before and after he became Archbishop of Canterbury, Temple got very specific about how to democratize economic power. He was incredulous that modern democracies tolerated big private banks, lamented that Christian socialists turned away in the 1890s from the land issue, and proposed a new form of guild socialism. The banks, he argued, should be turned into utilities or socialized; otherwise the rich controlled the process of investment. God made the land for everyone, and society creates the unearned increment in the value of land; therefore the increment should go to society. Above all, though Temple took for granted that certain natural monopolies must be nationalized, the centerpiece of his proposal was an excess-profits tax payable in the form of shares to worker funds. These funds, over time, would gain democratic control over enterprises. Economic democracy, he argued, can be achieved gradually, peaceably, and on decentralized terms, without abolishing economic markets or making heroic demands on the political system.

Randall Kennedy:

The ultimatum complains that, in its view, past initiatives aimed at enlarging the number of faculty of color at Princeton have “failed” because in 2019–20 “among 814 faculty, there were 30 Black, 31 Latinx, and 0 Indigenous persons. That’s 7%.” According to the ultimatum, this “is not progress by any standard; it falls woefully short of U.S. demographics as estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau, which reports Black and Hispanic persons at 32% of the total population.”

The suggestion that these statistics show racial unfairness in hiring at Princeton is misleading. According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, African Americans in recent years earned only around 7 percent of all doctoral degrees. In engineering it was around 4 percent. In physics around 2 percent. Care must be taken to look for talent in places other than the familiar haunts of Ivy League searches. But even when such care is taken, the resultant catch is almost invariably quite small.

The reasons behind the small numbers are familiar and heart-breaking. They include a legacy of deprivation in education, housing, employment, and health care, not to mention increased vulnerability to crime and incarceration. The perpetuation of injuries from past discrimination as well as the imposition of new wrongs cut like scythes into the ranks of racial minorities, cruelly winnowing the number who are even in the running to teach at Princeton.

The racial demographics of its faculty does not reflect a situation in which the university is putting a thumb on the scale against racial-minority candidates. To the contrary, the university is rightly putting a thumb on the scale in favor of racial-minority candidates. That the numbers remain small reflects the terrible social problems that hinder so many racial minorities before they even have a fighting chance to enter into the elite competitions from which Princeton selects its instructors. The ultimatum denies or minimizes this pipeline problem.

Peter Brown:

Many of Ambrose’s contemporaries were quietly convinced that the ills of Roman society had a supernatural origin. Many of the sharpest critics of their age were not Christians; they were pagans. For them, bad times had begun with the “national apostasy” of Constantine. The rampant avarice denounced by pagan authors was thought to go hand in hand with the spoliation of the temples and the abandonment of the old religion.

Ambrose had to answer such views. He did so by subtly secularizing the contemporary discourse on decline. He turned what many thinking persons considered a religious crisis into a crisis of social relations. We moderns tend to applaud Ambrose for the perspicacity of his diagnosis of the weaknesses of Roman society. But pagans such as Symmachus would have regarded Ambrose’s criticisms of society as mere whistling in the dark. Symmachus knew why things had gone wrong. The moment that the first fruits of the fields of Italy that had fed the Vestal Virgins for 1,200 years were withdrawn (in 382), the link between the land and the gods was broken.

two thoughts

David French: “In the contest between the rights of a woman to sleep peacefully in her own home and for her boyfriend to defend it against violent entry and the right of the state to make a violent entry, the law should prefer the homeowner. No, that doesn’t mean removing from police the ability to defend themselves. It means dramatically restricting their ability to make a violent entry in the first instance. It means revitalizing the Fourth Amendment, and reviving its importance in our constitutional republic.”

Radley Balko: “We could prevent the next Breonna Taylor. We could ban forced entry raids to serve drug warrants. We could hold judges accountable for signing warrants that don’t pass constitutional muster. We could demand that police officers wear body cameras during these raids to hold them accountable, and that they be adequately punished when they fail to activate them. We could do a lot to make sure there are no more Breonna Taylors. The question is whether we want to.”

David Jones, “The Terrace” (1929)

David Jones, “The Terrace” (1929)

bundles

I wonder how long before Substack starts offering discounts for subscriptions to bundles of thematically-related newsletters? They could be called, just spitballing here, magazines.

shy

Geoffrey Skelley:

If “shy” Trump voters were a thing, for example, you might expect a difference in how respondents reply to surveys conducted via telephone versus those anonymously submitted online — the idea being that social desirability bias is less likely to kick in when a respondent is dealing with a faceless computer instead of a real person. However, as Morning Consult’s new 2,400-respondent study shows, Trump performed about the same against Joe Biden, regardless of whether the pollster interviewed respondents by phone or online.

Note that this point holds only if people believe that “surveys … anonymously submitted online” actually remain anonymous. And I know a number of people who don’t believe that — yes, people who plan to vote for Trump but who will only say so to those whom they wholly trust, because they certainly do not trust the anonymity of online surveys and are terrified at the social consequences if their support for Orange Man becomes known. I couldn’t tell you how many of them there are around the country; maybe not a statistically significant number. But I know some. 

I’ve heard Nate Silver make a version of this claim also, usually pointing to the apparent lack of such Shy Trump Voters in 2016. But the intensity of hatred for Trump has ramped up since then, so I’m not convinced that 2016 is a reliable guide. You can see why anyone working for FiveThirtyEight would be skeptical of the existence of STVs: If people don’t trust anonymous polls and either avoid them or lie, then the FiveThirtyEight model is in trouble. But it’s noteworthy that reluctance to believe in STVs leads Silver et al. to neglect what is after all a pretty obvious question about anonymous polling and surveying.