The Soft Middle of Neocalvinist Assimilation
June 13, 2005
Prof. Koyzis, lately of these pages, has made some curious remarks. In response to my rather innocuous discussion of an article by Ray Pennings to further a point often made here, Koyzis accuses me of “turning” on my “potential allies,” or at least “those within the ranks of neocalvinism.” To this Koyzis expresses his sorrow. Spare me. I have addressed this objection previously and tire of having to repeat myself. Is this to be the rule: any criticism, no matter how valid or needed, within “the family” is not to be countenanced? I am more than happy to be a part of a united front of co-belligerency (I often praise co-belligerents, neocalvinists included, whenever I can), so long as the various belligerents are truly belligerent. I suspect, however, that many are not. And there lies the rub.
In fact, neither Koyzis nor other neocalvinist commentators have actually disagreed with the substance of my critique of Mr. Pennings. Koyzis responds: “If one is urging others on to expressing contempt for those opinions with which they disagree, then the decent thing would seem to be to stop hiding behind the mask, come out into the open and take responsibility for one’s own viewpoints.” I have never shied from taking responsibility for my viewpoints. In fact, they are expressed widely, some would no doubt suggest too widely, for all to see. As for the various masks that any of us may wear, I fail to see the relevance to the questions at hand. I am either right, or wrong.
Koyzis continues by accusing me of being “entirely too confident that the sort of incivility he proposes to unleash in the public square will not lead to a shooting war in the streets. Many abolitionists probably thought the same thing in the run-up to the American Civil War.” And then I am further characterized as seeking to “cut a great swath through the law to get at the Devil,” and as rejecting political compromise. Koyzis needs to read what I actually wrote. I can only assume that for Koyzis, a professor of political science, there are no factional fights which cannot be distilled to mere differences of opinion and resolved by liberal procedures. And further, that in Koyzis’s view, current disputes could lead to a civil war which must at all costs be avoided–a most revealing statement. It is true, I confess, that I do not think avoiding civil war is always the greatest good!
Finally, Koyzis refers to an earlier essay of his and suggests that my root and branch rejection of liberalism is, in reality, a rejection of social differentiation. Nothing could be further from the truth! In his referenced essay, Koyzis esteems the hoary tomes of Herman Doyeweerd over the established view that “feudalism” never existed. He makes the argument for liberal, urbanized, modern nation states as the best of all possible worlds, with more ‘differentiation’ and diffusion of autonomous ‘spheres’ than ever before. I submit that this is false. It was strong centralized monarchies and the Reformation’s disruption of an existing differentiation of church and state that yielded far less differentiated polities in which we may see the emergence of the modern welfare state. Via the violent reactions to this state of affairs–the conflicted fusion of church and state and in some cases its unsatisfactory handling of poverty–we arrived at the detente of procedural liberalism where all conflicts are reduced to deciding whose individual rights shall prevail. By this logic individual liberty progressively wrecks, via its own “liberation,” custom and community, destroying the remanants of the once richly variegated social differentiation of European civilization. On the outcomes and some of the causes we agree, but it appears Koyzis has a polemical need to throw away the “middle ages.” Why we might ask? But that is a question for another day.
This is The Soft Middle of Neocalvinist Assimilation in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: “Whiggish” Histories and Historians | Next: What I Am Reading | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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